Ground temperatures across great swathes of the ice sheets of Antarctica have soared an average of 10C above normal over the past month, in what has been described as a near record heatwave.
While temperatures remain below zero on the polar land mass, which is shrouded in darkness at this time of year, the depths of southern hemisphere winter, temperatures have reportedly reached 28C above expectations on some days.
The globe has experienced 12 months of record warmth, with temperatures consistently exceeding the 1.5C rise above preindustrial levels that has been touted as the limit to avoiding the worst of climate breakdown.
The problem is that yes, historically humanity has learned (at least temporarily) when it induced a crisis.
The big difference between climate change and other catastrophies like the world wars is that it’s irreversible. We can rebuild cities, countries even within few generations. We absolutely cannot rebuild earth after we fucked up the climate.
Even if we learn from this it will be too late to apply the learnings. This one isn’t a case of “fucking around and finding out”.
Yeah
And we already consumed most of the easily available resources, and used them to build up the infrastructure that we’re currently using to get the hard to reach stuff. So that means not only is the loss of our comfortable place going to be permanent on any conceivable human historical timescale, but if we lose the current industrial base, then we probably won’t be able to develop another one in another geologic age, however much time goes by, if the species survives on our changed and shattered world.
If we lose what we have today, it will slip down and away and escape from our grasp, probably forever.
It definitely feels like humanity might have peaked and we’re just around to see it all falter