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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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The memes of the climate
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The climate of the memes of the climate!
Planet is on fire!
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Will*
The difference between will and could here is intention and cynicism somewhat acts as climate doomerism, the child of climate action denial. Cynicism is giving control to Shell and Aramco.
Not OP, but I don't think the reply can be interpreted as cynicism. Even if we were to stop GHG emissions entirely tomorrow things would continue to get worse for a while, since the cycles in nature that those gases go through are quite long. And we are not in fact stopping all GHG emissions tomorrow. Stating facts is not per se cynical.
I’d like to see that data - if we magically stopped emitting excess carbon tomorrow, what would global warming look like and when.
I’m sure it’s counter-productive though. Both those who don’t want to face reality and those giving up in the face of reality are likely to seize on it
I don't have sources at hand so this is off the top of my head, but IIRC stabilising carbon levels in the atmosphere would leave us with as an additional increase of 0.5-1°C over the next hundred years. Current anthropogenic emissions are roughly 10 Gigatons of carbon per year (GtC/a), while natural carbon sinks take up roughly 5 GtC/a. This means we would have to cut emissions in half to reach that point. Even if we were to magically get to a rather unlikely zero emissions, so 0 GtC/a, the carbon that is already in the atmosphere only gets sequestered at a rate of 5 GtC/a still, so it would take some time to return to pre-industrial concentration levels. Further warming would stop relatively fast, but it wouldn't reverse the damage that has already occurred due to the warming so far. Many ecosystems would still fail because their equilibrium has already been irrecoverably disrupted and they are just limping along in a proverbial death spiral. Which is the problem with reducing the question to climate effects. So even if we had this magical carbon switch, which we sadly don't, things are all but guaranteed to get worse for a good while there.
I don't view it that way. The way I see it, every time we remind people of how fucked we are, we bring the public one step closer to codifying ecoterrorism into law.