Here’s what you can do in the next 5 minutes to stop your Stage 3 Lung Cancer!
That’s pretty much the same thing this headline is saying. We are deep in it now, maybe not the absolute worst case it could be, but definitely not good. And 12 months is not nearly enough time to deal with the problem, so much so that it’s laughable to even suggest it could be. The only solution will be long, hard, expensive, and require a LOT of pain and sacrifice. Plus, there’s no guarantees it will even work. It may just be too late at this point.
The difference is that extracting and burning fossil fuel is a human action, and we have the power to decide not to. Social change like this often takes the form of people getting unhappy, and not much changing until it reaches a communal tipping point and people start changing things all at once.
We’ve already fucked it up. How can you save something thats already broke? Every fucking climate change article is always full of hopes and dreams yet we’re not doing shit. They’re talking about scifi carbon capture now but our consumerism society remains unchanged.
When you’re driving straight at a wall at highway speeds and are 50m away you can still press the brake pedal, but it’s already too late. Our foot barely started lifting from the throttle.
How bad things get is literally a matter of degree.
We can’t achieve no impact, but temperatures will stabilize fairly quickly once we stop adding CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Getting there isn’t something that happens overnight; in the best case, it looks like a 20-year phaseout of fossil fuels and end to deforestation.
But the damage we’ll cause during those 20 years will destroy most of the ecosystem and our food supply chain. I have a feeling that the biggest reason behind stopping emissions will be our demise.
There will be some damage, but probably not end-of-civilization kind of damage if we actually cut emissions by a few percent of current emissions each year
The climat’ll be fine. It’s the humans that need the savin’! Save the humans!
And the path to that is stabilizing temperatures