This has been a doozy of a year. And it’s the best year so far blah blah. So how are you all coping? Does it hit anyone else like a bolt of lightning that probably I - we - won’t die of old age?
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I bike as much as possible instead of driving and lobby my local government for zoning reform.
Incredibly based, same here.
You’re a hero
Solar panels to run the aircon.
Just have to hope no storm blows the house down.
Would like an electric car but it’s out of my financial reach at this time, so keep the old car repaired and running.
I’m a silly goose with young kids and I’ve been head-in-the-sand trying to deal with my own survival. Once I had an iota of stability, I started to let the outside world in again and often wish I hadn’t.
I estimate I live in a place least likely to be dramatically affected by climate change, early on. It’s not like I’m in Florida and can’t afford to insure my home any longer because of hurricane risk. It’s not like I’m likely to be one of the 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050.
So I try to take little steps to get prepared for something I never thought I’d need to be prepared for. We’re growing more and more of our own food, we’re expanding our water/food stores and storage. We plan to get a solar system soon (so we’re the 1/10 that makes it through an extended grid outage), while global supply chains still function.
I’ve started a little (20TB) apocalypse library, full of illustrated guides, youtube videos, books, and resources.
My biggest stumbling block is starting community. I generally don’t like people and as you’ve seen in this thread, most people don’t take climate change seriously.
And, as someone else said… weed and time in nature.
Does it hit anyone else like a bolt of lightning that probably I - we - won’t die of old age?
Wait, do you actually believe this?
Yes. I am friends with ecological scientists, biologists, soil scientists, ornithologists, and other various environmental researchers. The rest of my natural life would be ~40-50 years. We probably have 10-20 at most. Remember, the heating is exponential and delayed, and we’ve also exceeded several other planetary boundaries. Our governments are decades too late. We are literally already in the middle of an extinction event.
Even if everyone TODAY stopped burning all fossil fuels, we’d still have to sequester millions of tons of carbon in 10-20 years with no infrastructure for it. To do this will release more greenhouse gases. Amd we still have to address the 9 other planetary boundaries we’ve crossed including ocean acidification, soil destruction, and pollution.
The absolute best shot we have is to deflect a percentage of the sun’s rays from ever reaching earth with some kind of space blanket or shield. Likely we will just inject sulfur into the atmosphere with unknown consequences.
That you don’t realize how bad it is, is the sadder thing. We have seriously failed in educating people about science. Chemical reactions need specific energy requirements to work, which means specific temperatures. It’s a big deal to our very cells themselves that the planet is getting hotter. And again, that is only 1 planetary boundary and we have crossed others.
You can literally see footage online of people’s housing falling into the ocean, and their property wasn’t oceanfront when they bought it. You can look u0 articles about billions of sea life boiling alive off the oregon coast and baby eagles flinging themselves from their nests to die due to heat. You can see the recent article about Dubai being beyond the wet bulb temp for humans to survive. That’s not normal, ya’ll. None of this is normal.
But whatever, it’s too late. Enjoy your remaining years as much as you can, and don’t forget you can always starve yourself to death for free if you don’t have a bullet. Good luck everyone.
This is doommongering nonsense.
I’m no climate change denier at all, but the idea that the planet is basically going to be unliveable in 10-20 years is ludicrous.
Even the most pessimistic of scientists don’t believe that.
AMOC collapse could happen as soon as 2025.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189
Scientists have been forced to give “optimistic” findings relating to climate change for decades because we were told not to scaremonger. We were told no one would believe us. Well, no one believed us anyway (see: you) and now our conservative estimates are turning out to be wildly too conservative. It is exponentially getting worse and we didn’t consider numerous cascading events like the methane bubbles in the arctic permafrost.
We are literally already in the middle of a sixth extinction event relating to passing 6-8 of 9-10 planetary boundaries. It’s not doomerism, it’s literally reality. Measurably and empirically happening.
Likely we will just inject sulfur into the atmosphere with unknown consequences.
Kind of the only hope we have left at this point. One which I’m desperately holding onto.
Articles about insect populations being decimated by something like 70%… They are the ones most vulnerable to climate change, and they’re all dying. How people can see that and not understand is mind boggling.
The insect population part really is staggering, huh? I remember how disgusting my grandma’s station wagon got in the 90s traveling. Now I pretty much never really “need” to clean my windows off from bug guts. Usually dust.
I think we should put up a metal blanket in space. Tbh all the space junk and satellites are already doing that a little
What do you expect your manner of death will be in 10-20 years?
Hard to say. It could be from a power grid failure during a weather event. It could be from an earthquake (increased seismic activity due to climate change). It could be from a freak storm or mudslide. Could be from supply chain collapse and starvation. Could be from supply chain collapse/social collapse and lack of medical care. Could be bird flu or any number of novel diseases occurring due to climate change.
That’s why i suggested a magic 8 ball ;)
AMOC collapse could happen as soon as 2025 so my 20 years was extremely optimistic btw
I’m mostly just staying inside this time of year. I personally likely will not die of climate change as I’m privileged enough to be able to keep moving when I need, but I probably will die from micro plastic induced cancer.
Where did you get the idea that you’re not going to die of old age?
Depends on the rapidity of the onset of the negative effects of climate change. If it’s slow, we’re gonna lose a lot of people, but we’ll be able to preserve some form of civilization. The worst affected will be the usual poorer people and those who can’t geographically escape the heat for whatever reason.
Worst scenario is rapid onset that disrupts the global network of food, energy, manufacturing, medicines, materials, etc. that literally keep everything working. If that goes tits up in an uncontrolled way just plan on losing a very significant chunk of the world’s population very fast. At a certain tipping point we also lose the people that know how to make things work. Modern society works because we have the ability to free some people from manual labor and subsistence existence to take on highly specialized learning. From fixing the grid, to doctors, to IT specialists, to the academics that teach these specialists. Lose enough of them and you lose the knowledge of how to do anything that makes modern civilization work.
So it all depends on your views if you think you’ll make it to old age. Do you think the world will collapse quickly or will it be a controlled descent? It certainly doesn’t look like we’re going to solve a damn thing regarding anthropogenic climate change, much less reverse anything, and we’re already stuck facing the damaging climate changes we started.
If it’s slow, we’re gonna lose a lot of people, but we’ll be able to preserve some form of civilization.
Assuming this is the best case scenario, are you willing to make a prediction about number of deaths by a certain year?
The reason I ask is because I think climate change alarmism is an unscientific, nonfalsifiable system of beliefs that don’t match reality.
And part of that is that people never make solid predictions. They resist it. Are you willing to make a solid prediction with an actual timeline on it, given this is your best case scenario?
It certainly doesn’t look like we’re going to solve a damn thing regarding anthropogenic climate change, much less reverse anything, and we’re already stuck facing the damaging climate changes we started.
Yeah we’re definitely not going to reverse climate change.
As far as I can tell, the main disrupting effects of climate change are going to be higher sea levels. So lots of people will have to move, or protect their cities with dikes.
There will be more farmland than before, given the effects of CO2 on plant growth.
I don’t see any scenario where it leads to a collapse of civilization.
Hah, you’re ridiculous.
We can’t even predict the weather yet you want me to give you timelines for climate change impact and entire geopolitical and worldwide logistical systems. Not even supercomputers can predict that.
Congrats on your manufactured, pseudo-intellectual “gotcha”. Why don’t you go learn about chaotic systems and the study of anthropogenic climate change and make your own predictions…
Oh, and for the record, if we’re all cheering about redrawn beachfront property being the worst of it in a century I’ll eat my hat. If I’m right, well…you’ll probably be hungry enough to eat yours.
Youre a certifiable idiot.
Warmer seas = more energy in the seas = bigger storms, bigger droughts etc. that’s what we’re seeing already and will be getting worse in the near term. Sea levels - we don’t know enough about the deep structure of Antarctica to put a timeline on. Recent discoveries have shortened thinking as there was liquid water in areas we didn’t expect.
100mg Fluvoxamine and 5-10mg Diazepam a day seems to be working for me.
I’ve been doing occasional psilocybin and hedonism and that’s been pretty good so far
I really wanna try psilocybin. Like so much I’m thinking about growing it myself, just for one time, ego-shattering trip to break this cycle.
Sure, or even if you want to just microdose your first time, it’s super worth it. It’s pretty fun imo
My issue is trying to get my hands on it. I’m hopeful the up-and-coming trials of this, ketamine, and the like prove overwhelmingly successful, and quickly. I’m drowning in my own to-do list!
It grows wild on the Oregon coast along the beach grass basically as soon as it rains in the fall (maybe give it a week or two of rain) throughout winter. It is decriminalized here in Oregon so not illegal for me to tell you this, either :)
You can also legally order spore kits, which I recommend for a beginner, if you’re growing yourself.
Thank you for the information. I may try my hand at growing it if I’m feeling brave this fall!
I’m mostly very curious how this all plays out. I’m also a bit worried, but there’s not much I can do about that anyway, so whatever.
I wish I could travel a thousand years into the future and read all the history books.
I think these are very interesting times (and as we all know, it sucks to live in interesting times) with all the innovations and political desicions. Even the failures and missed opportunities. It’s all very interesting.
I’ve been keeping my mind busy, learning actionable skills and survival stuff. I am learning foraging, growing food, I’ve made a real decision to not reserve my happiness for retirement, as that day isn’t guaranteed but today is. I convert the worry into little reminders about how today is the most important time to do the thing. I live immediacy and radical self reliance. I recycle, upcycle, reuse, buy second hand, adopt, occasionally dumpster dive, and reduce my negative impact on the planet. I donate to charities that help people in crisis, so more people can enjoy today while they have it. Also, instead of anxious, I get high.
The Earth has been much hotter than the worst-case scenario for anthropogenic climate change. (It used to be rainforests-at-the-North-pole hot.) Climate change isn’t going to kill you unless you’re both extremely poor (by global standards, not by first-world standards) and unlucky, although it may significantly reduce your quality of life as resources are redirected to mitigation. Where do these “mass death everywhere” ideas come from? They’re not a product of the scientific consensus.
As for me: it seems like the climate where I live is getting warmer. There has been much less snow recently than there was when I was a kid; it’s convenient but unsettling. The summers are getting hotter too, although the difference isn’t as dramatic. I’d like to move to somewhere further north, or maybe a place like coastal California which is without temperature extremes, but I would want to do that even if the climate wasn’t changing.
The earth has never heated this rapidly before. And it’s not just heat, but other planetary boundaries as well being crossed.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
That climate change is killing bigger multicellular organisms isn’t debatable, we are in an extinction event that was made significantly worse by bird flu. If we lived outside, we’d be dying too. And soon, our power grids will start failing even more, just like Texas.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/09/human-driven-mass-extinction-eliminating-entire-genera
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/05/29/thousands-seabirds-starved-death-bering-sea-scientists-see-fingerprint-climate-change/ (^Bird deaths from 2019, before bird flu started decimating them too)
Where do these “mass death everywhere” ideas come from?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
The problem isn’t that it’s going to be warmer. The problem is that it’s getting warmer so quickly that populations won’t be able to adapt. Ecological collapse is absolutely on the table here. There is no real debate in the scientific community about this, just deceptive propaganda that’s disguised as ‘conflicting science’ but is simply a smoke screen to keep people ignoring the problem.
Humans have drastically altered ecology permanently anyways, during fruits and vegetables into near monocrops and changing them within just a few decades, it’s pretty clear that can be done for temperature changes. Though yeah of course temperature changing changes ecology, but why assume that change will be disastrous collapse
Because higher temperatures aren’t the problem, the rate of change is. I assume the worst because we’ve seen it before in the fossil record. The best comparison is the Triassic-Permian extinction. Rapid change in temperatures led to global ecological collapse and the death of 85% of all life on earth. Now, during the Triassic-Permian extinction CO2 levels rose from 400 ppm to ~2500 ppm over the course of ~50,000 years, with an estimated rate of change of around .05 ppm per year. We’re starting out lower at 280 ppm before the industrial revolution, but we’ve already hit 420, and we’re now adding about 2.5 ppm every year, with that number increasing every year. So we’re currently experiencing warming that’s 50 times faster than the most devastating extinction event in Earth’s history.
The fact that our entire food industry is based around genetically engineered monocultures is just another point of failure. It’s a constant game of cat and mouse to continually keep each generation of plants protected against changing diseases and pests, and because the vast majority of the seed is coming from one company, if something does adapt to overcome the engineered defenses, it’s devastating to the entire global population of that crop.
We’re going to lose a lot of diversity but hardy, fast-growing species will spread into niches formerly filled by specialists. Some models even predict that net ecological productivity will increase significantly (there does exist disagreement about this).
Look at who funded that study, and the actual contents.
According to this study - funded by the Chinese government, the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions on earth - we’ll see increased plant growth in the short term under controlled warming. Even ignoring the incredible conflict of interest, the fundamental assumption of the study is that we’ll be able to get warming under control and stick to the goals of the Paris agreement, maintaining only 2 degrees of warming by 2070. That’s absolutely absurd. We’ll be incredibly lucky to not hit 2 degrees of warming by 2040 at this rate. Besides that, they are essentially just looking at how plant growth responds to changes in temp and CO2. Of course plant productivity increases with higher temps and more available CO2, that’s not where the problems come in.
The problems occur when those hardy, fast growing species start really exploding. Cyanobacterial blooms that deoxygenate massive swaths of the ocean, killing millions of fish at a time. Population explosions of pests, contaminating food supplies and starting future pandemics. The ecosystem is complex and interconnected, things will adapt eventually, but the transition period will be catastrophic.
We are not a hardy, fast growing species. I have no doubt that people will survive, but it’s going to effect everyone, and a lot sooner than you think.
The study looks at that particular increase in temperatures but a higher increase would probably lead to even more plant growth.
I agree that that there will be disasters during the transition period (and even if there aren’t, transitioning will be very expensive). However, humans are extremely hardy and fast-growing. We’re probably the most hardy, fast-growing species of large terrestrial animal that has ever existed - right now humans and domesticated animals make up the overwhelming majority of terrestrial mammal biomass. Climate change is going to affect me, at least because I live in a large coastal city and seawalls cost a lot of money, but it is unlikely to kill me.
Temperature is not the problem. No climate scientist has ever worried that plants won’t produce well in higher temperatures. Acting like they’re ‘exploring the consequences of climate change’ is a smokescreen, it’s a way of making it seem like the fears are overblown. They’re testing a hypothesis with an obvious conclusion that’s somewhat related to global warming, while conveniently ignoring the things real scientists are actually worried about.
The fears come from the other effects of rising temperature and greenhouse gasses. Most of the real scary stuff is happening in the oceans. Things like the potential for massive amounts of algal death and the loss of potentially 60% of the oxygen creating organisms on earth. Plants are gonna grow great when oxygen levels drop to 15% and people have to wear breathing masks anytime they venture to the surface.
We are absolutely not a hardy or fast growing species. It takes years, for our children to be remotely self sufficient, and over a decade to reach sexual maturity. We have a similar growth pattern to elephants, outside of whales, we’re some of the slowest growing animals alive. We can’t survive extreme temperature swings, radiation, loss of oxygen. We’ve created things to overcome our physical mediocrity, but those things can very quickly disappear for most of the population when the infrastructure supporting global shipping and manufacturing collapses. The fact that we make up such a huge portion of mammal biomass mostly just means we’ll be a great food source for whatever bugs evolve to eat us. Keep in mind that we may be about 30% of mammal biomass, but livestock make up more than 60%. That’s not because they’re small and adaptable, it’s because they’re food.
This is a ‘transition period’ on a geologic scale. We’re talking about the next 50,000 years at best, it’s not something we’re just to ride out and things go back to normal.
We live on an ocean-going sailboat. We make our own water and electricity. We have ~25 years of membranes, filters, and most parts. While we have the means to move around to cooler climes, going further northward means more severe storms and shorter working life of everything. So there’s that consideration.
Having the escape hatch of the boat does a lot to ease the anxiety.
Other coping mechanisms:
- fixing people’s bicycles for free and evangelizing micro-mobility
- monitoring and mapping marine health in maritime communities (kelp, fish counts, bottom conditions); yes this is “just” monitoring, but one measurement is worth 1000 opinions and hopefully helps to move the needle on getting everyone to pull together on environmental protections
- community education on aeroponics and micro-hydroponics
- community support on emergency preparedness
I’m sure I’m skipping over some of my other copium prescriptions, but those are the most salient.
Hopefully you can evolve some webs on your feet for better swimming after we all live in Water World.
This thread is ridiculous
Wow that’s amazing, do you have social media I can follow?
Our social media and blog are severely neglected, in large part because of surveillance and chokepoint capitalism (see: Cory Doctorow). But this would probably be the best entry point into our socials: https://youtube.com/@svcascadia
Yesterday I had a climate change anxiety attack. I came to the conclusion that despite wanting to have children, I shouldn’t because the earth is currently dying underneath our feet. Watching outside my window, a cat I’ve been taking care of brought her litter of kittens to take shelter under my awning, and it had me feeling very bitter, that I would never know the blissful highs and devastating lows of parenthood. All the joy and pain and love that embodies raising a child, past generations have forfeit through destructive environmental/corporate/profit-centered policies.
I was able to calm myself down, oddly enough through a few memes I saw. one of which being an old cunieform tablet that had a transcription of a man from Assyria decrying how the world was falling apart back in 1200 BC. And the second, one of Neil Degrasse Tyson saying simply, “If we can geo-engineer other planets, we can certainly fix our own.”
Made me feel a little more hopeful, that we could still prevent the worst of it, and perhaps fix what we couldn’t prevent.
Still not sure about having kids though. If I still even can, with the level of microplastic in my testes, and PFAS everywhere else.
You won’t even adopt?
If I were in a better place financially/emotionally, I ABSOLUTELY would.
Same.
It’s devastating. I want to be a mother so badly, but I know I’ll never be able to. It’s not even the fact that I’m infertile. After all I’ve been through my life has just been left too unstable. I’ve been left too unstable. I would love to adopt and raise a kid, but I know deep down I could never provide the upbringing that they deserve. I would just watch in horror as a precious child deals with the consequences of my instability.
We’ve both been afforded far too much trauma. It’s not our fault, but I’ll be damned if I make my problems someone else’s. It’s like, the one thing I don’t want to do. There are other ways to make a positive impact on the world without having children, heck, just look at Mary “Mother” Jones!
Kids are very adaptive. They will grow up in this changing world and it will be normal to them. They will grow up instinctively being able to deal with things that we will forever strugle with. Kids are amazing in finding their own solutions, even at a young age.
I think it is much more important to be financially and emotionally able to support a child. You should ask yourself if you are able to do that. You can get financial and emotional support from your environment, many people do that (“it takes a village to raise a child”), but you can’t afford a full blown mental breakdown when you have kids.
I’m not trying to convince you to have children or not, just giving my two cents. There’s probably plenty who disagree, especially in a thread like this, so feel free to ignore me.
In my head, I envision year 2084 as one where humans are isolated mostly to the poles of the Earth, the only suitable farmland left. Where life is nothing like what I would recognize, and we’re merely prolonging the inevitable migration into underground dwellings, away from the harsh barren hellscape of our own creation.
But that’s not the reality. Human beings have the remarkable ability to adapt, and change our environment to suit our needs. I know that there are people smarter than I, that will figure out how to curb, and ultimately roll back the most devastating aspects of our pollution crisis. I know that we will survive, and thrive into the future, even if it means shrinking the population down from it’s current 8 billion.
But today, I can pick any spot on the globe, and find a terrible human caused crisis there, and some conservative politician doing everything in their power to make it worse (and make money off of making it worse). And that just fucking kills me.
I just distract myself by focusing on how my life is falling apart. Occasionally I’ll distract myself from my crumbling life by stressing about how the world is burning.
I just feel like the world burning is going to become how my life is falling apart very soon
We have solar and a plug in hybrid car. I try to support small local businesses. We moved to a place with historically cooler weather above sea level. I vote in all the elections I can. I keep up with the town planning board and try to influence towards car independence. I stay hydrated, wear natural fibers, and try to buy used when I can.
