Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 1)

[benji]

Climate breakdown thread gets a pin

Great sign when the thread starts off with something false:

Before we begin, a gentle reminder that climate scientists back and call for disruptive action from the public and if you read their reports, you will see how increasingly radical they're becoming with their language.

Then immediately posts a graph that debunks his central claim:

Let's start with something I'm sure most of us are probably at least passively aware of.

1.5 Degrees
You have probably seen the news that in 2024 we breached the 1.5 degree of warming climate target that we had collectively agreed to try and avoid.


You can see more clearly in the second image that not only did we breach it, we were over the limit for almost the entire year.

This graph shows it's clearly an outlier year versus every other year ever but the one before and so much of one that you should not take it as any meaningful information. Look at the fucking gap between the second half of the year and every year ever before! Yet this is the crux of the rest of the entire post.

Then it ends by admitting it's all propaganda and not actually anything to do with nature or science or physics:

I'm aware I haven't even begun to talk about this in relation to the realities of politics or class/wealth yet, the fires in LA or the floods in Valencia, as well as many other things such as the media, technology and overshoot in both it's definitions. The food industry, ocean acidification. Christ it's never ending. I will try and add things when I can so potentially much more to come depending on if/when I get round to it and how this goes I guess. Short version though is our lives and lifestyles are soon going to be changing. We might not like it, you might not want to talk about it, but Nature and physics don't give a fuck. This is just the beginning.

Call in the non-skeptics who believe any doomer propaganda they see because it confirms their self-loathing of humanity and don't give a shit about actual science or data:

I appreciate the effort you put into all this, but to be frank, if the intention was to educate people who demonize JSO, then I think you've wasted your time. The kind of people who say stuff like JSO being just as bad as climate change deniers or whatever aren't going to be swayed by facts and figures. It's more about ideology and/or denial than them misunderstanding something.

If you just wanted to put together concise details about how we're all fucked and there's no hope then I mean, you did well there I suppose lol

What can one do individually? Because this triggers my anxiety on a major level but I don't know what to do other than despair :(

I went from the desperation phase to complete dissociation somehow. Same thing with politics, maybe it's the medicine working.

What can one do individually? Because this triggers my anxiety on a major level but I don't know what to do other than despair :(

Organize your local community to look for potential issues that could be exacerbated by climate change, and to get your community as green and self-sufficient as possible.

Or if you have little to nothing to lose, direct action and sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure.

DRINK  

What can one do individually? Because this triggers my anxiety on a major level but I don't know what to do other than despair :(

For legal purposes and purposes of not ending up the subject of moderation on here - I'm not saying sabotage.

But as things start to get more dire, we'll probably see more instances of sabotage.

It's chilling when you stop and think of how drastically wildlife has dropped over the past few decades - and just in places visible to us, in human-adjacent areas. Less birds, less bugs, less everything. And thats just a prelude.

I don't think there's any political action that's really unjustified when it comes to climate change, but even if we slammed on the breaks now it's be too late. We need to start thinking in terms of preparing for an apocalypse rather than preventing it - on a personal level, community level, global level. Everything else is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

Would add confronting pension, university funds and institutional investors that have salted away money on fossil fuel-dependent industries.

That too. Honestly though, we should've been set up shop outside of the houses of these oil barons.

I spend every day feeling obscenely guilty for having kids and forcing them into this mess of a world.

Serious question. Should we still invest in our 401k then? At one point do we think all the stocks will crash?

One analogy that has always scared me and at the same time comforted me is the idea of the climate casino. Think of the climate system as dice.

Within the climate systems there is still some random chance at play---what climate change does is change the way those dice are weighted--every little bit of warming means a higher chance of heatwaves, drought, etc.

However, it doesn't just mean that warming makes things worse or more likely to be bad. It also means that whatever steps you take to keep things from getting worse means a small chance of something bad not happening.

So maybe, just maybe, the things I do to slow down the degradation is that slight difference needed to avoid certain disasters. Or at least, that's how I stay motivated to do things.

This is an incredibly stupid analogy for a complex self-regulating system.  

Sooner or later we'll all have little to nothing to lose. And I fear we're all in denial about how close that time really is.

Yep. Speaking for myself, but even though I intellectually know things are really fucking bad, I am in still in denial on many levels. It's the only way I can keep functioning without surrendering to complete and utter despair.

I've added the trigger warning back to the OP. Some top posts already, I've not read that new report on degrowth yet. Thanks for sharing Booshka.

https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/global-co2-emissions-through-time-1950-2022/

I mean if the developing countries can just keep polluting, the changes we make barely matter.

This isn't true, per capita emissions of global south countries are way less than the countries in the north, and the extraction/exploitation that the north does to the south contributes heavily to emissions and unequal exchange. The world needs climate reparations for the countries that have been ravaged by colonialism and fossil capitalism. Developing countries can build up dirty while getting renewable infrastructure online, and northern countries can reduce their emissions and resource strain while also pivoting to renewables.

The problem is the profit motive, oil and gas is more profitable than renewables, so that's where the investments are going. Corporations have to be forced to pivot their investments and production, they can't be allowed to live by the whims of the profit motive.

It's not looking good for us.

Per capita is meaningless as it's total co2 pumped into the atmosphere that matters.

The fact of the matter is, if everyone were as rich as the developed world we'd be swamped. This is just the small print that's always sidestepped.

It's literally not sidestepped, the paper I linked speaks directly on this. Not everyone from the global south needs to live like a gas guzzling Costco loving American, but more importantly, neither do Americans.

Absolutely it is sidestepped. China's per capita GDP is about 1/5 of the US, it's a middle income country , it's emmssions are already double that of the US due to its population and that's with half a decade of stagnant growth. India is the next one If it were to grow to about half as rich as China in the next 20 years, we'd be borked without major cuts elsewhere. (e.g. the developed world)

Maybe Musk and his bozos will move to Mars by then and reduce emissions, more than likely there will be revolution long before that happens.

Where does the world get all its stuff from, who makes it? It's not just their population, that's Malthusian nonsense. There are much larger and more complex systems at play for why China is emitting more than the US, even while it gets ahead of a host of renewables targets well before the rest of the world does. The per capita GDP number of China is actually a good indicator because it is around 12,000 USD and they have good human development indices, so it shows a way forward to not tie GDP with quality of life.