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Electrolight t1_j1aco3a wrote

Reply to comment by Alaishana in Changes in Earth’s orbit that favored hotter conditions may have helped trigger a rapid global warming event 56 million years ago that is considered an analogue for modern climate change by giuliomagnifico

You sound like every naysayers in 1900 who said we'd never fly. Or most of the world in 1960 that doubted humans would set foot on the moon.

The idiocy to just say, "whelp we're fucked" and bury your head in the sound is impressive. It's also no excuse.

We can tackle climate change, start culling ourselves, or let earth cull us. And I'm not sure I like the last 2.

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dopechez t1_j1bu6qb wrote

I think we can definitely do a lot to help mitigate climate change but you did oversimplify and make it seem like it would be trivial and easy to reverse it. It's an enormous problem that encompasses all aspects of human society, it's literally the single biggest challenge humanity has ever collectively faced. And our carbon capture technology is simply nowhere close to being scalable, it's effectively a gimmick for now.

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cambeiu t1_j1c3j86 wrote

COVID alone and the massive refusal of millions to wear masks, to social distance and vaccinate should give a glimpse of how difficult a coordinated global effort to curb CO2 emission would be. And in terms of collective cost and collective inconvenience, COVID is child' s play compared with what would need to be done to meaningfully reduce CO2 emissions.

The social turmoil, controversy and political toll we saw during COVID would be nothing compared to what we would see if there was serious global CO2 emission enforcement.

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dopechez t1_j1c63bw wrote

Yeah and even simple things like "have a vegetarian meal a few times per week to reduce emissions and land use" cause outrage. It's going to be extremely difficult to get people to cooperate on this problem

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The3rdGodKing t1_j1aws60 wrote

Flying is much simpler than solving climate change

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Electrolight t1_j1bdcc3 wrote

In retrospect, it may seem that way. We'll think climate change is easy 20 years after neutrality too.

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The3rdGodKing t1_j1bl4gd wrote

Are you sure, because I was planning on going to Canada?

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cricket9818 t1_j1cwm95 wrote

Except everything being said is rooted in objective facts. We don’t have the tech and governments refuse to help the process forward

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deathbystats t1_j1giu8z wrote

It has to do with timescales.

As an example, consider the world's population. It took only 70 years for the world to triple it's population (and some countries have seen a 6-fold increase in their population in that time).

There is no ethical way of exactly reversing that and reducing the population by a factor of 3 in 70 years. It will take at least 200, if not longer.

To get our carbon levels down to 1970 levels will take us much longer than 50 years. In the meantime the world will continue heating and secondary effects will kick in.

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