Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/07/10/even-with-climate-accord-plan.html
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And the people who scoffed at and ridiculed the idea of climate change will then turn around and cry, “Why didn’t anybody warn us?!”
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Pfft! Hah! These climate change people never take the health of the economy into account.
With profits from clean coal and tax cuts we can make our own custom ecosystem.
Of course it will be just big enough for the 1% and loyal true-believing patriots like YOU!
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Climate change denying old rich white guys with nothing to lose and everything to gain are dangerous.
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Then, of course, there is the clathrate gun hypothesis:
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For an American audience, let’s start using Fahrenheit. People here don’t get how two little degrees is a problem; they don’t realize it’s actually four. And once you’re numb to two, then even a six-degree catastrophe might not such a big deal, unless it’s understood to be eleven. By giving ourselves a 1.8x discount on the amount of global warming as we do right now, we’re more assured of becoming the classic boiled frogs.
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No, they’ll say, “thank goodness I made all that profit while I could!”
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“we’re more assured of becoming the classic boiled frogs.”
Bad example – Frogs don’t wait around to be boiled.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2006/09/the-boiled-frog-myth-stop-the-lying-now/7446/
and countless other sources.
Worth reading Michael Mann’s (the hockey stick graph guy) response to the article:
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Nah, they figure that Jesus!! will show up and take them away. Then they can watch all the heathens and poor people burn.
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Fuck it dude, let’s go bowling.
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Our fate is in our hands. How will we choose? It’s not too late. We can still act, but we have to do it now. We don’t have much time.
I doubt this is a species-ending event, but it will change our world and our civilization, and bring the pain for hundreds of millions or billions of us. Not in my lifetime, but in the lives of many already alive. They will bear the cost, but we will bear the responsibility, because the time to act is now, and has been for a couple decades.
What to do? Make sure your friends, family, and elected officials know you think this is important and we must act.
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Oh this depresses me. Not becuase it’s true (which it is) but because I had a professor telling me about clathrates and their ominous influence in 1994, you know, back when Al Gore was still Fat.
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Well, it’s almost definitely a civilization ending event. Sorry. 
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Well, their children will, anyways. This is one of the tragedies of climate change - the people most fucked will be the ones with the least amount of impact on the problem (in that it’ll be future generations, but also people living in countries that aren’t big greenhouse gas producers).
It’s not just four, though, really. It’s not going to linearly add on to current temperatures (which would be bad enough some places). It’s going to be uneven spikes (geographically and temporally), changes in weather patterns, previously stable global systems and humidity. Then you have to explain things like “wet bulb” temperatures, and how even a small increase can end up being deadly…
At this point it’s a fable useful as a metaphor rather than something people actually believe in, surely?
I hate to be a downer, but it is too late. What we’re doing now, we should have done 20 or more years ago, when it might have had a chance of stopping the 2 degree warming. At this point, best case scenario, the warming will happen (and possibly more), it’s going to get pretty nasty and it’s going to cost a lot (both financially and in human lives) to both deal with it and keep it from getting even worse. This is not a call to throw up our hands and give up and do nothing, however - if we keep going as per usual, we’re completely and totally fucked and there will be no practical way of undoing the damage.
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The biggest polluters in the world are the worlds militaries, with USA leading the pack. If you are working for Peace, you are working to save the planet. The wealthiest 10% on the planet produce HALF of the world’s carbon emissions. If you are living a modest lifestyle, and fighting against the yuppie takeover of your city, you are working to save the planet.
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I agree with that. My point is we still have a chance to bend the curve, to choose a climate change scenario out of several scenarios, some much worse than others. Yes, the best time to act was in the past, and that’s been apparent for some time to those lucky enough to encounter that information and who cared to think about it. Now there’s going to be pain, no matter what. But we can still choose a future.
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I’m glad I don’t have kids because I’d be carrying around a lot more guilt because of projections like these. Whatever scenario we’re looking at, anyone born after ~1995 is looking at a much rougher (and potentially shorter) adulthood than older people enjoyed. Young Americans are already feeling the effects of unsustainable economic policies, while the consequences of unsustainable environmental policies have yet to kick in.
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