Even this article, despite repeating over and over how we have already crossed the “it’s too late” thresholds, ends with a call to action, as if we can still do something about it.
And as long as we go with their mendacious flow, hundreds of millions, and then billions will die well before “Net Zero by 2050” or “our great grandkids’ future” arrive. Because we are out of time. And we need to get to work immediately. There are a million things to do.
What is there to do? Let’s say we shut down fossil fuel infrastructure. What goes with it? Fertilizer production, farm equipment, transportation, refrigeration, all the requirements to sustain the lives we worry will be lost due to climate change. Let’s replace it with renewables, then. The cost in energy, production, and resources to replace the current world-wide farming, transportation, and energy infrastructure with renewables is somewhere in the high trillions of dollars and who knows how many years (decades) of time to make it happen. Of course we should still try to do it. But it’s not going to save us. The damage is already done. The patient is fatally poisoned. We could maybe stop the flow of poison, but they’ll still die. The hard pill to swallow here is there is no solution. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner and we’re going to die here. You can blame the oligarch class. They deserve it. But remember how hard it was to do even a partial shutdown during covid? The level of shutdown required to stop poisoning our planet is way more severe than that. It’s not going to happen, not willingly. Not until there is literally no way to deny what’s happening. And by then it will be far too late.
The best moment to stop was yesterday the next best moment is now.
With the current trajectory half the globe will have more than a month of deadly days. That is days where the temperature and humidity are such that humans can’t sweat so they are cooked alive. Not having enough food will be another problem in 20 years because of irregular weather. We already have frost in late spring which often kills plants and in conjunction with irregular rain patterns, leads to massiv crop failures. This will only get worse.
If we don’t address this quickly, swiftly we will not need fertilizer because it will not matter. Current climate change is already a mass extinction event such that it starts to rival the start of photosynthesis.
But we don’t do anything so it is very likely that humanity will not survive this.
yeah I feel like more doomers are getting the innaction bug. Are we gonna stop it. Nope not really. Will we survive. I guess maybe but certainly not in a way any of us would want to live. Do we want to get to horribleness faster. I sure don’t. Im going to do the best I can individually and push for the best we can do societaly and besides pushing off suffering there is also im going to go out knowing I did as much as I could right up to the end.
This chart from the article hit me in the civic-duty feels
