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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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So if this milestone is a death sentence, does that mean it’s time to give up?
These temperatures will kill people. They will cause crop failures. The death, hunger, and hardship will cause people to leave their homes to come to more habitable regions.
But there will still be habitable regions for generations still to come. A lot has been lost, and more will be before we fix what we broke, but plenty can still be saved as long as we don't just give up
So it’s inaccurate to say that it’s a death sentence?
I wonder if there’s any loss of trust that results from saying false things?
There are people alive today who will witness entire countries disappearing beneath the ocean, so it's not wrong to describe the climate crisis as a death sentence of sorts.
It's difficult to explain how dire things have already gotten and how much worse they will keep getting while still acknowledge that even worse outcomes can still be averted.
The death of some land I guess?
I mean, being able to articulate your argument is a key point of determining whether it's a position worth defending right?
I think you should get really concrete about what exactly's going wrong and how it weighs against other things happening in the world. Like with COVID we've got numbers. With obesity and crack we've got numbers. With tsunamis we have numbers. And they're pretty well-defined (despite some controversy in attributing deaths to covid).
What are the numbers with regard to climate change? I think it's much harder to define a climate change death, or a climate change life disruption, than it is to define a heart attack death, or a crack addiction.
I feel like that would be easier if we clearly defined it. Like "5 million people have lost their homes to rising sea levels, but if we slow it down we can prevent another 2 billion from losing theirs".
It's not that hard to conceive when you get it defined clearly.
So would you say morale is a really important factor in our global warming response?
Maybe these scientists should stop talking about hopelessness and death sentences and start talking about challenges and hardship.
I disagree.
People need to be angry. We're being murdered and we must defend ourselves.
So you have all the moral justification of a person fighting for his life here? That's a pretty significant level of moral authority to wield.
Yes.
I won't die quietly.
I mean, pretty much anything goes then right? Like, if I crush a puppy's skull with my foot it's a horrible thing to do. But if that was the only way I could avoid dying people would understand.
So basically being in fear of your life means "I get to do anything to anyone and it's justifiable"
Well, no, I'm not that greedy for life. After a certain point it's not worth it and I'll just make it quick and painless. Life isn't always preferable to death, I'd need to be able to live with myself afterwards!
Damn I am. I’ll rip the belly out of a live kitten if it’s truly the only way to live. I’ve been afraid for my life before and I never blame anyone for doing what it takes to survive.
What I take issue with is the level of certainty that such an abstract, complex thing is the same class of threat as someone firing a gun at you or a lion charging you.
Elevating long chains of logical reasoning, and not applying a mitigating layer of uncertainty to each step to reflect the possibility of mistakes or misinterpretations, so that full-on motivation comes out the other end, strikes me as unwise.
You're treating the threat as something abstract, like there aren't specific people who are to blame for destroying the world. As if it's no one's fault, so violence falls on anyone in the name of survival. Even puppies and kittens lol
I think we have to treat climate change as the same class of threat as someone shooting at us, and that means identifying the shooters and .. "disarming" them.
But is abstracted away. That’s what abstract means. You think some specific person is out there endangering your life. If they are about to murder you, then I’d support you literally killing them. I’m for self defense. I just think it needs to be a clear and present danger to be justified.
There are specific people who are, together, responsible. The oil execs that chose to cover up the truth about global warming, the meat industry execs who did the same, the hucksters that sell the lie of carbon sequestration and ethanol fuel and hydrogen fuel as solutions, the investors that continue to pump money into oil exploration projects, and the politicians that have stopped any meaningful progress from happening. There are, in fact, individual people that we can point to and say "they are the problem" - it's not abstract.
We have enemies and they're killing us.
What about me? I drive a car, have a carbon footprint, etc.
How is my own (and your) responsibility for global warming different than theirs?
And don’t say “they profit off it”. You and I both profit off it too. We live in a veritable heaven compared to those in pre-industrial times. We inherited and enjoy enormous wealth that can be traced to the burning of fossil fuels.
Our contribution is miniscule compared to our enemies, and we only contribute what we have to because they sabotaged all alternatives! They killed public transportation, they made neighborhoods and cities unwalkable, they turned cyclists (like me!) into 2nd class citizens of the road, and more.
I'd sell my car if I could. I can't and it's their fuckin fault!
We are not the same as them. They are the enemy and they must be stopped before they kill us all.
But is our contribution minuscule compared to theirs? Like let’s say one man sells (an equal amount of) gasoline to a thousand people. Is that one man now contributing 1000x more to greenhouse gas emissions than any one of those people?
Does a given unit of carbon emission get counted multiple times at each step of the production chain from extraction to emission?
Like if 1 lb of carbon is extracted as crude oil, and then that 1 lb is involved in say five monetary transactions, with the processing followed by the eventual consumption and release into the atmosphere, does each person in that chain now have a carbon footprint that increases by one pound?
But that's not all he's doing!
He then takes the revenue from selling gasoline and uses it to bribe politicians and hire lobbyists and invest in more oil refining/exploration; he's making the problem even worse.
Meanwhile, the people he sells the gasoline to don't have any real choice but to buy it. They need to work to live, and they can't get to work without gas because Mr. Gasoline destroyed public transportation infrastructure.
Stop trying to flatten everything down to only the carbon footprint (a metric made by the oil industry to absolve themselves on responsibility). They used that money from selling gasoline to convince you that you are equally to blame for climate change as billionaire oil families and it's absolute nonsense.
And this is the sort of thinking someone comes to when they don't take power dynamics into account. ~Strawberry
What I’m responding to is the sort of thing that arises when people place all the blame for a problem on others without consulting their own responsibility.
You want to know about power dynamics? When I order a shirt from Amazon it arrives at my door the next day. No king of history has had the kind of power that I wield, except maybe the new King Charles.
I can speak to my network of people no matter how distant we are. That’s power. I can go 110 mph by pushing my foot to the floor. That’s power. I can see inside my own body and detect tumors before they ever exist on the surface. More power.
People these days are powerful. But it’s tempting to pretend one has no power, because we know that power comes with responsibility. When a person wants to avoid responsibility, they will craft a story of how powerless they are.
There’s nothing admirable about pretending not to have power. It’s just a way of hiding from those who might judge how you choose to use it.
Depending on who you ask it's the most important. Once people are educated they can make informed decisions themselves. Just do what you can and are willing to do and don't wait for the governing bodies to change their pace. The IPCC report actually contains solid Data on what individual behavior change is most effective, this article lists a few things https://news.sky.com/story/climate-change-what-does-the-ipcc-mean-by-choice-architecture-and-can-it-change-our-behaviour-12582739
Now we watch in horror as corporate lobbyists and their lackeys prevent such measures from being implemented at any wide scale, especially in countries and regions that produce the most pollution and still choose to keep fracking and all that. ~Strawberry
They are unlikely to actually stop any individual from becoming vegan or at least making an effort to become one. The attitude that it is to öate and we can't do anything about the catastrophe is precisely the feeling they are hoping for so we continue to consume their products. You can however at any time just stop.
Isn't the article talking about systemic solutions rather than just heavily individualized ones? ~Strawberry
You haven't?
As long as I know how to love I know I’ll stay alive.
Hell no I haven’t lost hope. But I’ve heard from climate scientists on this who assure me that this isn’t a civilization killer.
Nuclear war could be, as could AI. But global warming isn’t a matter of the survival of the civilization. It’s a matter of completely survivable hardship.
We should give up hope that things are going to be fine and it's all going to work out paintlessly.
That isn't necessarily the same as giving up hope that we'll survive and adapt.
How do we do that? How do we prevent further damage to the environment by fossil fuel companies and such? It doesn't feel like that's feasible... ~Strawberry
Fossil fuel companies are run by ordinary humans with names and addresses.
Just sayin
Keep yourself occupied and do the best you can. Informed descisions of individuals can bring more change than governments. You might not stop the oil from being sold, but if there is less demand for it, profits go down and that has great effect on the rate at which oil is pumped out of the ground.
I don't know what decisions I can make that would make any significant impact on this. I mean private jets, for example, produce more emissions than any other part of the aviation industry. If some billionaire who took private jets regularly chose to stop doing that, it'd have a much more significant impact than me eating vegan hot dogs instead of meat hot dogs. And that's not accounting for how many run massive polluters like Exxon-Mobil and actively lobby against measures to combat climate change. And this isn't some abstract, random, unchangable force of nature. They are making the choice to do these things and could easily choose to stop at literally any time they want and still have their dragon hoards afterward. But they don't. What kind of choices could I make that could have anywhere near that kind of impact? ~Strawberry
The choices of yourself influence the choices of those around you. And collectively we have much more impact on climate change than for example the private aviation industry. The following article contains a few ideas and their impact to start with. https://news.sky.com/story/climate-change-what-does-the-ipcc-mean-by-choice-architecture-and-can-it-change-our-behaviour-12582739
Don't corporations emit the most carbon and such in the world? This is a systemic problem that requires systemic solutions. ~Strawberry
I mean, the term “death sentence” does imply a lack of survival.
Not everyone sentenced to death has been executed, so it implies survival is difficult rather than impossible.
That's not really how the phrase is used colloquially. It means a person is gonna die.
It probably comes from earlier periods of history when if you heard someone pronounce a death sentence, your head was getting chopped off within a few minutes.
Okay, but this isn't the 1400s
These days people recognize a death sentence as an injustice that can be stopped.
Really?
It's an idiomatic saying.
Sure, but that's the point - a death sentence isn't certain death anymore, so saying this milestone is a death sentence is completely accurate.
Or do you think these scientists actually meant "we are all 100% going to die"?
Yes I think the scientist meant that, because that is what those words mean.
When a person says "Doing X is a death sentence" they mean it makes you die. Nobody says that skydiving is a death sentence. They say that being in a car whose locks freeze as it sinks into water is a death sentence. It's a phrase used to indicate that a situation has no outcome other than death.
Despite the fact that meaning conflicts with how the other thing referred to as a death sentence in our present society, it is nonetheless what the phrase means when used figuratively.
This is ridiculous.
Do you actually think this scientist was trying to say "there is no hope we're all going to die"?
If that's the case, the only thing left is revenge.
That's going to be a lot uglier than self defense.
You'll start to get a taste of how hell really is.
if you haven't, yet, please share your thoughts--we could use your optimism!
If you want some optimism, read How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place by Bjorn Lomburg.