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HeronSouki t1_j33yxuv wrote

Reply to comment by Iron_Baron in Depressing subreddit by CatharticFarts

We're making breakthroughs in nuclear fusion which will me an amazing source of cleaner energy

We're making incredible advancements on AI, which will speed up progress in many areas including R&D

Clean Energy, VR, AR, medical improvements, this is all part of the future

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Iron_Baron t1_j347s6a wrote

Utterly irrelevant. We could go zero green house emissions today and it wouldn't stop climate change. It's too late, the oceanic gyre effects are already destabilized and we can't unmelt Antarctica or the artic. Both poles will continue to shed/not form sea ice, further speeding up warming and desalination of the oceans, as fresh water alters ocean current cycles and destroys breeding and feeding grounds for the foundation of all life on earth, plankton.

The green house glasses already in the atmosphere (not to mention the glasses emitted by thawing permafrost that are so vast as to be incomprehensible) have passed the tipping point of irreversibility. The doesn't even touch on the methan hydrates frozen at the bottom of the sea floor all over the planet that are now melting and entering the atmosphere. There's enough down there to alter the air so much that the sky could literally catch on fire.

The species extinction rate today is 10,000% higher than Earth's historical base line. We are in a mass extinction and have lost tens, likely hundreds of thousands of entire species, forever. That doesn't count the hundreds of thousands of species so devastated by habitat loss, hunting, and poison environments that have left them with populations too small to be sustainable.

The things I've mentioned just barely scratch the surface of how screwed the planet is. I could spend all day listing what we've lost forever and what's irrecoverable. Almost all of the Gulf of Mexico is a hypoxic water desert, barren of essentially all life, where it isn't covered by the many oil spills that coat the ocean floor, invisible to us, but wrecking the sea flor for decades.

Anyone not depressed about the state of affairs is irrational or oblivious. There is no Chicken Little, this isn't being alarmist. Much of the planet is dying, if not already dead. Shop, work, and vote with that fact in mind, if were to mitigate these affects, at all.

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