• MrsDoyle@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I have a friend with two daughters in their late teens, early 20s. I asked him the other day how they felt about climate change. He said they believed it was happening, but they don’t think it’s nearly as bad as “the media makes out”. He added, “You know, we went through the Cold War and fear of nuclear annihilation and that didn’t happen, so…” We were interrupted then so I didn’t get to yell at him. But I think a lot of people think that way. Pffft, probably won’t happen, news orgs exaggerating for clicks, someone will fix it etc etc. While shrugging at all the floods and fires and storms happening around the globe, and booking a cheap flight to Malaga. It’s exasperating!

    • Yeather@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      -asks friend about opinion on topic

      -friend gives somewhat reasonable if wrong opinion

      -gets mad he didn’t have the chance to “yell at him”

      Sounds like a shit friend move.

  • redballooon@lemm.ee
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    2 years ago

    There’s too much red in this picture. They really should use another baseline. If red would start only at 40 Degree Celsius, the globe would look much more welcoming.

    Look, I’m just trying to give productive feedback.

  • veng@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    It’s strange - in the UK we’re usually getting toasty this time of year too, but we’ve had unusually mild weather despite many other parts of the world experiencing record temperatures. Feels like the mildest summer we’ve had in about 10 years.

    • megasin1@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      This might be because we’re in an ill niño weather event. This brings hot coast to the southern hemisphere particularly South America. And it means the North is cooler particularly north Europe and Canada. This will flip back and forth over the years

  • Chozo@kbin.social
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    2 years ago

    Have you ever had a friend or relative who was just in such poor health, who you basically expected to keel over and die any day now? If so, you probably know what I mean when you eventually just accept that the person you once knew is already dead, and all that’s left is a husk that’s just riding out the last bit of momentum they’ve got until they fade away. And then when they finally do die, it doesn’t even hurt, because you’ve already had time to grieve and process your emotions in advance.

    That’s kinda how I feel about the earth these days. I feel like the earth is on hospice care, and at that point that we’re just making it as comfortable as we can for it to die.

    Maybe that’s a little melodramatic. But it really does just feel hopeless these days.

    • spicystraw@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      If it’s any consolation. Earth, as in the spinning ball of dirt, will be just fine for many more millions of years. Humans, and other animal species, on the other hand are not going to be fine if the trend continuous.

      Dunno, I find it kind of consoling in a meloncolic kind of way.

    • Arotrios@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      I feel you. I don’t think it’s hopeless, but I do think we’re in for a rough ride. That being said, I actually have a lot of faith in the upcoming generation. I think that if they get angry enough, they have the potential to arrest what’s happening and even turn it around given how well they work together. Greta gets a lot of hate, but hell, I haven’t seen someone make as successful a series of environmental stands since Julia Butterfly. If her generation keeps showing that fire, I think there’s still hope for humans to live in harmony with the earth.

      • SolarNialamide@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        As much as I also have hope in the next generation, there isn’t a damn thing we can do anymore. If every single human being disappeared right now, the earth would continue warming and experiencing climate change for 100s more years, because of the feedback loops we have set in motion and the fact that the ocean is still dampening some effects, but won’t be able to for long. Our only hope to avert complete disaster, collapse of society and maybe even the extinction of humanity is if we find a way to start pulling massive amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere ASAP. Carbon neutrality isn’t enough, we need to be carbon negative. If zoomers can get that done, in time, then they’re a whole other fucking class of human. I hope they do, but I think the odds are against them and all of us.

      • Mog_fanatic@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Yeah I feel like this is just like when the body gets a fever to get rid of a sickness. The earth is just getting a little fever to get rid of our dumbasses real quick. Then it will go right back to normal and be completely fine.

  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 years ago

    Some reuters reporting here.

    Including…

    Prolonged bouts of high temperatures in China have challenged power grids and crops, and concerns are mounting of a possible repeat of last year’s drought, the most severe in 60 years.

    China is no stranger to dramatic swings in temperatures across the seasons but the swings are getting wider.

    On Jan. 22, temperatures in Mohe, a city in northeastern Heilongjiang province, plunged to minus 53C, according to the local weather bureau, smashing China’s previous all-time low of minus 52.3C set in 1969.

    Since then, the heaviest rains in a decade have hit central China, ravaging wheat fields in an area known as the country’s granary.

    These few sentences really capture the horror of “climate change”, that so many people overlook. Yes “average global temp” might increase by 1 degree celsius, but the really immediately terrifying part is changes to large weather patterns that provide a foundation to gargantuan food production industries.

    I live in Western Australia. It’s a large state perhaps 3 times the size of texas, but it’s very arid and mostly desert aside from the south west corner in which there’s a “belt” of land with appropriate conditions for cropping in which 18 million tonnes of grain is grown each year, of which 90% is exported. Suppose this year the state receives 30% less rain, then next year 30% more. Suppose that halves production this year, and washes away some of the dry top soil next year. Hell, we might even receive more rain but just a few hundred kilometers from where it usually is.

    Point is, even a mild interruption to established weather patterns is going to have a huge and detrimental impact on human agriculture. It’s terrifying really.

    • Bernie Ecclestoned@sh.itjust.works
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      2 years ago

      China is massive though, Mohe is further north than Mongolia, it’s 2,200 km north of Beijing.

      It’s nowhere near the central wheat fields so it’s not really comparable

      • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 years ago

        I’m not saying the agricultural circumstances are comparable.

        I’m saying that it’s the changes to weather patterns, hot or cold wet or dry, that are scary.

        “It was hotter” is IMO a bit of a distraction, because no one really knows what that means in practical terms.

        Like in the linked Reuters article, the higher than usual rainfall could well be more problematic than the higher maximum temp.

    • IHeartBadCode@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      For those wondering, one degree celsius increase means every kilogram of air has at least increased by 1°C. The specific heat of air is about 1158 J/(kg*C). Now that might not seem like a lot of energy, in fact 4g (one teaspoon) of sugar has 68,000 J of chemical energy.

      The thing is, you might have noticed, there’s a lot of air around us. About 5.14 x 10^(18) kg of air. So when you take a pretty normal number and multiply it by an insanely huge number, you get an insanely huge number. That’s about 5 exajoules of energy. That is the total energy consumption of the US in 2021 for four million years. Or in sugar terms, equal to the energy of sugar if you converted a little over half of the Earth’s entire mass into sugar.

      We hit that additional amount of energy in our atmosphere in 2017.

      • CitizenKong@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        And we’re gleefully adding thermic energy to this constantly at a rate of about four Hiroshima bombs every second.

      • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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        2 years ago

        The air increasing by 1⁰C isn’t too crazy.

        The ocean increasing by 1⁰C is an insane nightmare. Do you know how massive a heat sink the ocean is? For it to change, even by 1⁰, is terrifying.

    • Aussiemandeus @lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      But as an Australian myself i believe the government will ensure we’re all fed and not leave us to starve. Especially not in the Northern Territory where we can’t grow fuck all. /s (do we do that here)

      • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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        2 years ago

        When Westralia seceeds you territorians should come with.

        We shall hoard our wealth of grain and hydrogen and watch the world burn.

  • outrageousmatter@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    Man, that must be hell, it’s literally death valley temperature since they were the same temperature this week. Kinda ironic how death valley name was because the dudes who were stuck finally left saying “goodbye death valley”, and in the future it’ll literally become death.

  • zombuey@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    I know china wants to out do us on everything but fuck China maybe don’t reach for the stars on that specific metric.

    • Uphillbothways@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      The world is three miles of bad road
      Walking down the street
      Will I never meet her?
      She’s a real woman-child
      Oh, my kiss breath turpentine

      … I am smitten…

    • lamlamlam@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Voting matters, but unfortunately it appears to be an incredibly sub-optimal solution for dealing with climate change for the following reasons:

      • Just because you can vote, doesn’t mean that the option you need is even on the menu. It often isn’t.
      • Through hard work you can get the option on the menu, but that doesn’t mean your politician won’t do “deals” after they are in power.
      • Lobbyists get access to politicians 24/7 and have a lot of influence, you have one vote every 4 years;
      • Even if politicians do what you want, it is unlikely that your country by itself will make a difference, this is a global problem.

      Meanwhile we are all fucked. It is likely too late already for preventing severe climate change. Our only hope now is geoengineering. The USA and EU are already considering blocking the sun.

      The people who (rightly) have a sense of urgency about this are taking more radical action. They are blocking roads and throwing soup at famous paintings. These are desperate acts that seem rational in the face of the horror that we should strive to avoid, but the majority opinion of our species seems to be that these people are “too radical” and that common folks just trying to get by should not be inconvenienced, and that these radical eco-terrorists should be thrown in a cage.

      To be honest, I’m not sure that our species deserves to survive.

      • jerdle_lemmy@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        No, they’re not rational in the face of anything. They’re stupid virtue-signalling that does nothing to reduce climate change. The only way they could possibly be rational is that they get people talking about them, but climate change is not some little-known issue. The entire world has been screaming about it for the past 20 years. If you haven’t been listening, some cunt with soup isn’t going to change that.

        • lamlamlam@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          “Virtue-signaling” is just another though-terminating cliché of the current culture wars. It implies that the action has no cost to the person and provides some social credit. These people are risking their lives, violence, prison time, etc. Everyone hates them. Nobody knows their names. They keep doing it. Your hypothesis doesn’t hold. If we all decided that we don’t give a shit about this civilization-ending event, might as well through some soup at a van Gogh painting. Why not? It won’t matter anyway.

          Even if these people were horrible “virtue-signaling” vandals, it is a microscopic problem in comparison to the real one: clime change. And yet the media focus on the former. Why? You do the math.

      • Mojojojo1993@sh.itjust.works
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        2 years ago

        I do. Others don’t. Unfortunately it will end only one way. We all know how.

        Real shame. Civilizations rose and fall. Ours was very fast

    • wishthane@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Voting is still good, but it’s the bare minimum. Not everyone has the time, but if you do, you should try to advocate publicly, and preferably in a group. Just like with unions, collective action is more effective. If I give feedback to my city individually, I’m a data point. But as part of an advocacy group, they reach out to us.

    • Bazzatron@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Agreed, at least in principle - but your statement is so reductive it really could be said about anything.

      It’s so hard to motivate people to vote, people are exhausted and finding ten minutes in the day to feel good about oneself, much less performing a (seemingly futile, thanks to those poisonous ideas you’ve mentioned) civic duty is bordering on impossible. When 1 in 15 people in the UK need drugs just to keep their desire to live one more day in check - and a good chunk of the remaining population from that statistic are barely holding on - fighting the futility for someone else is an insurmountable goal.

      I don’t know if we can afford to wait for climate to get worse for people to take action. People are dying preventable deaths, if it weren’t for the very evident effects of man made climate change being politicised or obfuscated, maybe it’d be just a warm Summer in Europe right now.

      How long can we wait for a peaceful solution to form?

      If we don’t wait - how many heads would we need on pikes next to Mortimer Buckley or Larry Fink before we start seeing positive change? When would be the tipping point for the guillotine to become the most ethical solution?

      Sorry, I’m rambling. I just feel so hopeless sometimes, and putting a X in a box 2 or 3 times a decade doesn’t do anything to make me feel like we’re making progress…!

      • ChrisLicht@lemm.ee
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        2 years ago

        “Reductive” is the exact word that popped into my head, while reading PP’s comment.

        I have come to suspect that we can look forward to continued basic survival being monetized, as VC-funded startups enter the space to disrupt breathing and skin-based evaporative cooling, and just generally making it to the next minute.

    • trainsaresexy@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      stuck fin

      But you’re not talking about the people who are already doing everything they can you’re talking about the people who aren’t, and they haven’t, and they won’t, so it is industry and government who needs to do the things for them, because they won’t. If our votes aren’t enough then there is nothing more that can be done under the current system.

        • Hup!@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          They start to lose integrity around 200⁰C or 390⁰F… we’ll be dead long before our tires randomly soften to the poi t rhey deform.

          But you’re right that friction under even slightly higher heat means they’ll wear out significantly quicker. Drivers might need to change them every 1-2 years instead of 3-5, as a hypothetical.

          • Malfeasant@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            I live in the Phoenix area. Every summer, as it starts to heat up (so like april…) you start seeing the tire debris everywhere, and the higher frequency of cars pulled over with flat tires… Heat is absolutely a factor in premature tire failure, whether or not the rubber is literally melting.

            • Hup!@lemmy.world
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              2 years ago

              I mean of course some people don’t change their tires when they’re supposed to, or continue driving on flat tires to get to move their vehicle from the place it originally went flat. So sure when not being used as designed, of course there is a bias towards rubber tearing in the triple digits instead. If you’re not an idiot driving on safety hazards it’s extremely unlikely.

        • agissilver@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          We can change the rubber formulation so the Tg shifts up or down. This is actually part of the difference in winter and summer tires.

      • scottywh@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Lettuce is a luxury food with very little nutrition and high water requirements…

        Chances are good that the majority won’t retain access to it for very long really since it will make the most sense to grow something more efficient.

        • OnlyAStarOnlyTheSea@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Potatoes. You don’t need a lot of light and they grow from the sprouts of old potatoes. They do need some water though. Same with other root vegetables like carrots and sweet potatoes. But I’ve never managed to get a sweet potato to grow. Carrots and potatoes and tomatoes grow good in the fall and winter in az. Now I’m just trying to figure out what to grow to can for the summer months.