The planet’s average temperature hit 17.23 degrees Celsius on Thursday, surpassing the 17.18C record set on Tuesday and equalled on Wednesday.
Reminds me of a story I read about how if you had a can of food and bacteria got into it, and every day the bacteria doubled in size, and somehow this bacteria had conversations with itself with all of the other bacterias in the can about how long the food would last.
How long would it be before everything ran out?
At some point, the smart bacteria would stand up and say, “Hey, my fellow Amoebas, we’ve used 1/4 of all of the food in the can! If we’re not careful and if we don’t manage our resources we will run out of food!”
And the politician bacteria would say, “Don’t worry, everyone, we have 3 times as much food as we’ve ever used in all the months of our existence still in the can!”
And the bacteria was fruitful, and multiplied.
And when they hit the halfway mark the next day, the smart bacteria would stand up and say, “Hey my fellow Amoebas, we’ve used half of all of the food in the can! If we’re not careful and if we don’t manage our resources we will run out of food!”
And the bacteria politicians would say, “Everyone! Don’t worry! We still have as much food left as we have used in our entire existence to this point!”
And the bacteria was fruitful, and multiplied.
And then another day passed, and all of the bacteria died.
There’s also a good example of exponential change described using a doubling drop of water in The Power of Compounding
Meh.
It’s doubling each step.
If course it’s at
1/(2^n)of the final volume atnsteps before the final step.- At half of its final volume one step before the end
- a quarter of its final volume two steps before the end
- an eighth of its final volume three steps before the end
- a sixteenth of it’s final volume four steps before the end
Mathematically it’s obvious and straightforward but the point is that it’s not intuitive from a typical person’s subjective perspective. It’s easy to underestimate or dismiss the rate of change until a situation becomes unmanageable.
I used to worry about this a lot, I still do but I used to too.
Joking aside, it’s a shit show that us plebians can’t really do anything about but I still try. I’ve driven a hybrid for the last 6 years, I have a smart thermostat to try to save energy, I try to eat less meat more often. I recycle a lot more than most. I even make my own bread and nut milks and many other things which is not only cheaper and healthier (and WAY more delicious) but requires less transport related greenhouse gas emissions than buying premade breads and nut milks. Nut milk is especially better than dairy milk in that matter.
Oh yeah! And yesterday I picked up 10 large trash bags of litter:
Amazing work! I would also like to note that the biggest contributors to the problem are corporations. Individuals couldn’t out pollute corporations if they tried.
btw note that the carbon footprint of one person’s lifetime is equiv to 1 second of worldwide factory emissions (source: kurzgesagt), so it’s not a necessity to do some of the things you’re doing, but i would recommend that everyone in the world do some farming, even if it’s a small garden of radishes or smth, or tomatoes on a windowsill
also this is only tangentially related, but i still drink cow milk, because: -A it tastes good
-B I am allergic to all nut milks
-C soy milk sounds like crap, soy is already in basically everything (rip the few people who are allergic to it), so i wouldn’t want to consume more of it
btw note that the carbon footprint of one person’s lifetime is equiv to 1 second of worldwide factory emissions (source: kurzgesagt)
I love kurzgesagt but this comparison is… it’s like two abstractions multiplied.
A: if we know cow milk is bad for the planet and bad for the animal, and we use “but I prefer it!” as an excuse, couldn’t we apply that to everything? Sexual assault? “It feels good!”. Theft? “I like having stuff!”
B: (in order of ease and taste) Oat milk, rice milk, flax milk, hemp milk
C: Soy milk… “sounds like crap”? We might be at the end of carnivore arguments. You know cow milk literally has faeces in it, right? The fact “soy is in everything” being used to not have it is also not logical. Water is in everything.
Cow milk has faeces in it?
It doesn’t. Unless you live in US. US food is full of shit no matter what you eat, lol.
No it does not.
It’s like saying municipal water has shit in it if it is treated water. Yeah it did once…. That’s why we have filtering and sterilizing technologies.
If milk had cow shit in it people would constantly be getting sick from it it.
That said, dairy farming is pretty horrific in many ways. It’s good to cut down on dairy consumption as much as is tolerable for each person.
It’s like saying municipal water has shit in it if it is treated water.
Water? Awful stuff, don’t drink it. Fish fuck in it.
The poop in cow milk is referring to the bacteria in unpasteurized milk if I’m interpreting it correctly (or it could be waste from cells in the cow’s blood, since cow milk starts out as cow blood iirc)
I’m not going to go point by point because I think it’s not productive to act as if this kind of argument has only two sides. When we talk about subjects in a persuasive fashion, where we’re trying to win someone over to our side, it frequently has the opposite effect, entrenching is into our already polarized views.
We need to concern ourselves with moral relativism to make appropriate decisions. In an ethical sense, I believe sexual assault of a human is at least an order of magnitude worse than milking a cow. But that opinion comes largely from the fact that I’m a human and I’m not a cow.
If we want to sway someone’s opinion, I think we should focus less on absolutes and more on quantities. We should meet people where they are. Maybe instead of driving home all the disturbingly true reasons we should never milk or even breed cattle, we should use those same arguments to highlight the absurdly destructive impact of doing those things at the scale which we are.
If half of society has a burger and a milkshake once a month, there is a significant environmental impact on milking those cows and raising those cattle to be slaughtered, as well as a very real moral cost. There is also some emotional benefit to the human of consuming fats and proteins from those sources. And both positive and negative nutritional effects as well.
It’s already difficult to compare costs and benefits from such wildly different categories when it’s just one burger a month. Humans are emotional beings and even a well-reasoned argument may not trump the emotional feeling one gets from a hamburger and a shake.
But consider the changing of factors if those same people go from one beef product and one dairy product a month to one every other day. Or even more frequent. How much more land it takes, how much more suffering the livestock go through in conditions designed for maximum profit and minimum concern for moral costs. The additional methane production, the deforestation, the added risk of heart attacks. All the bad parts multiplied wholesale, while the good parts all experience diminishing returns.
If you take one of those semi-daily beef and dairy consumers, and give them a hard line, where any consumption of beef or dairy is unacceptable, is that going to generate a positive or a negative effect on the system as a whole? Some may be convinced to quit consuming, but I feel their difference will be swallowed by those who feel called out in such a way that they would rather consume even more out of principle than face the hard truth that their lifestyle is wrong. It’s easy for humans to build walls of cognitive dissonance, where we know what we’re doing is harmful, but we make excuses for ourselves to avoid facing that reality.
If you want the masses to face their collective reality, we need to meet people where they are. Maybe burgers and milkshakes will always be part of your life. But there are alternatives that can be a different part of a life rich in variety. If someone currently eats a burger every other day, maybe they can strive for once a week. And if that goes well, once a month. And then, once they have a greater familiarity with the culinary variety that’s possible, they may start to forget to eat that meal entirely.
We should remember that we’re all just people. We don’t need to be on different sides. You don’t need to be wrong and neither do I. We’re just earthly passengers connecting electronically in a wide cosmos. Our lives are all so different and yet uncannily familiar. So we’ll get more mileage out of sharing our experiences than prescribing them to others. Because if we feel we’re being talked down to, we’ll decide we’ve already picked a side. But if we’re just sharing, then we’re all on the same endless side. In that spirit, none of what I’m saying is meant to invalidate anything you’ve said. Only add to it.
And just to add, I don’t mind if there’s a bit of feces in my milk. It looks perfectly white, so I imagine it’s in low enough quantity that it’s not a health risk after pasteurization, and as far as I know, the quantity is also low enough that it doesn’t effect taste. But I think cows should have good lives even at the expense of productivity, and milking should be a voluntary behavior, perhaps in exchange for appropriate compensation, rather than something that’s forced on them. Just my two cents (plus about a buck fifty).
You’re on point. That’s why Reduce is the first of the three R’s. I was educated to the horrors of dairy farming a couple years ago and just stopped buying milk completely, switching to nut milk then finally oat milk. But I still eat cheese and yogurt. I stopped eating steak every other week but I still have one a few times a year. And since it’s so infrequent, I don’t mind buying the really nice cuts. So it became quality over quantity.
It doesn’t have to be a binary choice. You can still enjoy the tasty things. But a reduction in volume and frequency will still have a big impact if enough people do it.
I’m not going to argue against anything you’ve said, I’m not going to try to fact check it, & I believe to be largely correct.
I also think its irrelevant.
In the next few years (couple of decades) we are going to see increased wildfire burning of the boreal forests in the global north which is going to release (what I believe is technically called) “a catastrophe fuck-ton” of gasses into the atmosphere. We’ve tipped over the tipping point.
About the wildfires, they aren’t just caused by heatwaves, but also indiscriminate firefighting. If you stop fires in a forest over and over, the amount of flammable material keeps increasing due to new plants growing, and if there’s a lot of flammable material, and the same amount of water as before, things are overall drier, and would also create a bigger fire should one ignite.
And no, I don’t have a peer-reviewed study/source concerning this; I just used reasoning to construct this argument.
What a chad you are
Bro you’re doing more than most of us, thank you.
But yeah, our carbon footprint is minuscule in comparison to corporate footprints. We need them to fucking play ball.
What’s more profitable: Exceptional profits for 30 years until civilization collapses, or sustainable profits forever?
All I could think about when reading this post is corporate footprints. It’s great for us to all do our part, but sadly the corporations not doing their part is screwing everybody. We need more regulations on them, idc what product they’re making or how much profit they’d like or even how many people whine about not receiving that product it needs to stop.
Honestly, corporate footprints is all that needs to be thought about when thinking about climate change.
The shifting of blame to the individual or even putting it on the individual to “help” is avoiding the real issue. And even if individuals are contributing, which I acknowledge they are but at a much lower rate of impact, then probably the best way to change individual consumption/waste is once again by abolishing capitalism which guides the production of the material reality utilized to create such individual waste in the first place.
Corporate footprints are done on our behalf, in order to manufacture the goods and services we buy.
The real problem is that “vote with your dollars” fundamentally doesn’t work because human nature is selfish and short-sighted, so regulation is necessary.
As much as I hate to say it we’re probably going to see more variations of this headline as this summer goes on.
yay.
It’s only early July. I’m not sure about the rest of y’all, but it starts getting real toasty where I am in mid Aug.
We ain’t even at the worst of it?
@Gingerlegs lol, same here.
I think it’s important to note that this also coincides with the start of what’s predicted to be a super El Nino (we’ve had a couple of those already). If the model holds true then 2024 will be even hotter than this year, and (again, if the model predictions are right) will shatter all previous records. Then come 2025 or 2026 average temperatures will settle down a bit.
The issue isn’t the seasonal or even the yearly hottest temps. It’s the overall trend that’s a concern (which is what the article is talking about), which are trending up.
Not sure if any of that made sense.
The problem is when the temps come back down, climate deniers will go “WhAt HaPpEnEd?”.
Makes sense, but the idea of a “super” El Nino is a symptom of the same problem. Super implies unusual or abnormal, and it’s only getting worse.
Well yes, the super El Nino’s are part of climate change. They are getting worse each time. All I was saying is that it’s not a straight year over year increase. It comes in waves or heaves in a periodic manner.
I thought the impact of climate change on El Nino was not really settled (notably due to the erratic nature of the ENSO), do you happen to have a source on that?
I don’t know, honestly. But these videos have some good info.
Thanks, I’ll have a look!
right so considering we’ve been seeing alarming loss of ice mass over the last couple of years and we know that has an exponential effect on climate change. We already hit the tipping point just most people didn’t realize it.
Ya probably. I’m still hoping that there’s some global mechanism that we don’t understand yet that will limit or reign in the effects. But that’s just wishful thinking.
Of course there is a limit. The question is how high it is. For instance, at high enough CO2 concentrations, the greenhouse effect doesn’t get much stronger anymore. Also, the more CO2, the faster it dissapears by eroding rocks. That happens on a geological timescale, though.
If we did something to lower temperature, I’d be very worried about the CO2 concentration’s other effect: feeling like suffocating all the time.
This is fine.
Fuck it, just spin up a few more ACs
If they’re solar powered, nothing much wrong with that.
Except the coolant.
Cool the world
🎵 Let them know it’s crispness time. 🎵
Just drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then.
When I lived in Vegas my apartment complex would regularly drop blocks of ice in the pool in the summer. Surely we can scale that shit up for the oceans, right? …Right?
Wtg! What’s the next record to crush?
I don’t know why but this summer humidity levels goes down a bit.
I’ve left windows open all year and no humidity issues. I almost always have them during the Spring and Summer other years. I’ll take it, I hate humidity.
If the temperature this summer has been warmer than normal for you, then the lower humidity could be caused by the additional heat.
Warm air will process more moisture than cooler air.
At this rate there will only be one place to escape to that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism - SPACE.
The world is ending but at least I can post about it
And get internet points, I call this an absolute W
What can we do as the little individual people that we are?
We can all do our part. That doesn’t mean the problems will be solved, but we can all do our part to implement the solution.
Discussion is important. Conservation is important. The biggest issue here isn’t really the individual; it’s society. Change can’t happen in a vacuum. The only way society will change is if, you know, it changes. i.e. people need to be willing to sacrifice short term gains for long term benefit.
If it was sexy to do less, these problems would be solved overnight.
The best you can realistically do is vote for people who care about solving the problem, and against people who ignore the problem.
And if the only ones who don’t accept
bribeslobbying from oil, gas, and coal companies are independents and third parties who have no chance of winning anything because your country’s voting system is first past the post? Then what? ~Strawberry¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Going vegan would help for sure. Less animal products consumed means less animal products produced means waay less pollution.
A lot of change needs to happen on a government-level too, of course, but that is a very tangible, easy-to-achieve goal everyone can do.
Realistically, as an individual? Nothing. I hate doom posting but i genuinely don’t think there is a single tangible change any one regular person could make.
What they don’t want you to know is that the Earth’s orbit changed and we’re swinging in closer and closer to the Sun. The vaccine was actually nanites meant to help protect us from upcoming radiation and other atmosphere changes.
That’s a fun conspiracy theory. It’s gibberish of course, but fun nonetheless.
This comment was for fun. I’m currently reading the Silo books.
Holy tinfoil hat batman!
It’s actually aluminum foil.
Gotta save that foil to protect our devices from the next big CME guys
