Report Suggests 'High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End' in 2050 - Sensationalist Headlines

I work in environmental science and I can tell you that the climate issue is absolutely a result of human actions on the planet. We know for a fact that is the case and the 'climate cycle' stuff is something that takes place over centuries and is not an ample explanation for the rapid increase in global temperature and climate shift that is projected. Does stuff like volcanic activity contribute to climate change? Yeah very slightly but it's absolutely not the main reason and it's so little that it's not even worth worrying about. Moreso we can't exactly stop volcanoes even if they were a major cause (which again, they are not) , we can stop our own actions and reduce our own impact.

How many fucking times am I gonna have to repeat myself on this? Why do you think those multinationals make up the bulk of global emissions, genius? Because fucking everybody either directly buys from them or use services that rely on these industries. Going "I'm not responsible for those emissions, the other 99,9% of the population are" is fucking retarded, especially when you're most probably among the worst in the world when it comes to personal emissions. Dirty industries don't pollute for fun, they do because there is a demand for it, and a huge one at that. Yes, they share a big part of responsibility for not investing more on R&D to reduce their footprint, but even that can only go so far and the bulk of their emissions will remain as long as consumers still need their services. This whole "70% of emissions come from 100 companies" is the fucking worst. Rather than conclude from it that pollution is centralised in a few key industries, and that we need to move away from those both as consumers and legislatively, the takeaway for irresponsible morons is that they can wash their hands of all responsibility and stop giving a shit while at the same time bankrolling the very companies they complain about through their consumption choices.

3: get into politics and force companies to pollute less, with drastic and near bankruptcy-inducing penalties for failing to reduce their emissions Get that innovation going

Once again. It is not about humanity perishing. It is about the pain and the suffer that billions will also through. And actually are going through right now.

As a man in environmental sciences I can tell you that shit is indeed fucked and it's all our fault. It is very un-cash and I hate looking at the reality of it every day. Natural process climate change theory is a baseless meme tier thought train. It's gonna be an interesting time to see the collapse of living standards. I personally think humans are like roaches and will survive easily, just at the cost of living standards

Yeah but we're in a cooling cycle and the Milankovitch cycle works over the span several thousands of years. It doesn't explain the sudden increases in average temperature that we've been measuring and predicting. I'm fairly sure the thousands of scientists warning about climate change has taken that into consideration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3PzYU1N7A TL;DW: Nope.

How do I get this across to my friends in family without looking like an asshat? Where do I need to draw the line when communicating how important this is, and how much dread it gives me every day? My parents were born in the 60's, and when I've tried talking to them they just say they've been hearing these sorts of reports for years. When I think about this I can't help but feel like I need to get violent about it. As if that were the most effective thing I could do. I don't want to do that. Fuck, they're Christian too. So am I. What in the everliving FUCK happened to taking care of what we've been given? Y'know, stewardship? This place and experience is a gift, why are people so okay with letting people destroy it?

1) We've past the peak of this most recent Milankovitch cycle, anthropogenic climate change is being so extensive that it actually is completely beating the natural cooling because of how much of a net positive in temperature it is. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/326/5950/248/F4.large.jpg 2) Carbon dioxide is heavily tied toward global temperatures, as is methane. When did this spike occur? http://assets.climatecentral.org/images/made/5_2_13_news_andrew_co2800000yrs_1050_591_s_c1_c_c.jpg Specifically at the time of civilization, but let's look closer: https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/paleo_CO2_2017_620.gif Even closer: https://static.skepticalscience.com/images/co2_10000_years.gif Even closer still: http://www.co2science.org/subject/other/figures/lawdome.jpg Note that in 220 years, it went from about 285ppm to over 405ppm now. Notice the beginning of that blip is about 75% between the 1600s and 1800s? That coincides directly with the Industrial Revolution, from the 1760s to the 1820s, when the population of the entire world was only three-quarters-of-a-billion. Notice that section that starts peaking about one-fourth of the way between 1800 and 2000, roughly beween 1830 and 1870? That coincides with the evolution of railways into commercial fare. In 1830, the first passenger train opened in Britain and the first American railway started service as well. Notice how it then peaks in acceleration in the 1950s? That's when automobiles started being deemed affordable to the average citizen, and over 40 million vehicles were then made within a span of 10 years within America alone. Does this seem like a coincidence? If it still does, know this: it is natural for methane to be lower than carbon dioxide on Earth, what have CO2 and Methane levels changed, as of recently? https://d32ogoqmya1dw8.cloudfront.net/images/clean/literacy/climate/concentrations_greenhouse_gases_atm.jpg Note that methane is 30 times more capable of retaining heat than carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide is 10 times more capable than methane, or 300 times as much as CO2! In effect, within a span of only 200 years, we've increased the atmosphere's absorption capacity by roughly 800% compared to just the natural CO2 level of the 1500s when considering the spike in methane and nitrous oxide. Considering all of these factors, it can be concluded that it is not the Milankovitch cycle that is responsible for these changes in temperature.

I'm actually in the process of that now, but with very tiny steps. I got my trees from becoming a member of the Arbor Day Foundation. $10 donation = 10 free trees, plus a catalog of other trees you can purchase. About a 5th of my original 10 trees didn't survive, but the rest are growing well Buy Trees and Learn About Trees Come join my gardening thread. There's a lot of knowledgeable people about plant care and growing vegetables in there https://forum.facepunch.com/general/bkonz/Gardening-Hobby-Thread-For-growing-vegetables-flowers-fruits-houseplants-and-more/7/#postcwyxts

To be honest, I don't think anything can be done about the human impact of climate change without large restructurings of society and/or immense regulatory statues on corporations, which would probably beget the former. Even in the latter case, the regulations wouldn't be global without some sort of one world government, so it would be very easy for corporations to shift their operations elsewhere and just deforest the Amazon or whatever. Individualist climate responsibility is a paradox. Any changes that would make any impact at all on the issue would be largely society-wide, which means that their behavior wouldn't be exceptional in the first place. Good luck sourcing all of the stuff you consume ethically, btw. It's just not realistic.

Any individual change makes an impact though. Just because it's small in comparison to the rest (no shit, very few people make actions that drastically effect everyone else) doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If climate change ends up killing over a billion people, but your actions reduced global emissions by around a billionth, then you've saved at least a life. It's a rough approximation but the point is that it's far from a pointless act.

I don't really think this is how that works. Climate change doesn't operate on that granular of a scale. Sourcing organic produce or starting a garden isn't going to make the planet 0.000001 degrees cooler or make the seas rise 0.000001 less of a centimeter.

Reducing your carbon footprint amounts to as much less CO2 in the air. The lesser the CO2 concentration, the lesser the temperature increase. Unless you can point to threshold effects that effectively cancel out those reductions then this is more or less how it works. Yeah the amount of deaths probably doesn't scale linearly but in aggregate, even the current limp dick resolutions have somewhat of an effect on mitigating climate change compared to doing nothing. This reduction most certainly saves lives, even if it doesn't save enough, and everybody that contributes to that reduction shares a proportional part of praise for that. If your personal reduction is significant enough, then yeah, you can probably say you saved at least a life.

You realize that society-wide changes is in practice, millions of individual changes, right? And none of them will ever happen overnight. It will always be and always have to be, a gradual change of individuals one at a time. You're acting as if "society" is a whole, solid thing when in fact it is comprised of millions of individuals.

Certainly, there appear to be threshold effects. As far as I'm aware, things like water levels rising to a particular point are going to be dependent on that threshold of sea level being breached in high population density areas. Thresholds being breached for ice sheet melting will invariably cause that same flooding. Certain crops, plants, and other wildlife is going to have a threshold of acceptable climate conditions that are a matter of less than a degree. According to this study, the cooling effect of stratocumulus clouds could vanish in an instant, increasing global temperatures by a massive increment. The worst part is, each of these tipping points can create an ecological domino effect where they cascade into one another into increasing catastrophe. Deforestation can lead to the loss of species indigenous to a region, which can lead to negative impacts on the land and other neighboring species that may rely on those species to survive, etc. The environment is an interwoven system of inter-dependent systems and life, and when you throw these systems off with otherwise small changes (like the introduction of an invasive species, for instance), everything gets fucked to shit. The point you've brought up is precisely the problem. Most of the impactful effects of climate change are dictated by these "tipping points". And I can almost guarantee you that a good number of these thresholds will be crossed regardless of what you as an individual do. These are the sorts of effects that take large-scale change to really do anything about, and as long as our consumption remains unsustainable and reckless Capitalism is the law of the land, I doubt that will change.

And? As long as one of these thresholds, that would've been crossed in a scenario of complete inaction, isn't crossed thanks to some amount of reduction in carbon emissions (which is rather likely), then that's as much of a temperature increase that's been averted, and a corresponding amount of deaths avoided. Thus, individuals can be personally responsible for saving lives depending on their proportional contribution to averting this threshold. The whole "you as an individual can't do anything to mitigate those effects" is just manufactured bullshit.

Social change is hardly a settled science, but a good deal of it in our history has been revolutionary, not incremental. For a lot of our greatest advancements and changes in societal structure and thinking, society HAS acted - and changed - as a 'whole', in response to revolutions, both political and technological. I think the closest corollary to the change that would need to occur in regards to Climate Change would be the sanitary revolution, both in medicine and in larger society, but even that has been the result of large findings and changes in technology to make daily sanitary needs more convenient and accessible. On the other side of the coin, though, it has taken centuries for us to get to where we are now in the sanitation of society, and even now we are not nearly close enough to where we need to be globally. Billions lack access to proper sanitation and clean drinking water. Isn't the argument that these changes must and will happen in slow increments of individuals only a further damnation of our species in regards to Climate Change? How can we possibly hope to get to where we need to be if that were the case? There has never, not once, been a time in human history where individuals have steered the course of such rapid and revolutionary upheaval and action. Again, if its taken thousands of years to get to our current point in sanitation, even with hundreds of years to act on sufficient knowledge of what had to be done to get to an acceptable standard (and failing on a global scale), then what chance to we have to act on something far more nebulous, sweeping, and significant?

I'll just make a seed-shooting cannon and drive around the country spreading trees and carbon-absorbing shrubs and weeds, then Any unused land is fair game

I disagree that it's "rather likely" that one of these thresholds will/wont be crossed as the result of individuals. I think the emissions of corporations alone are more than enough to trigger those consequences. This is a claim I think neither of us will be able to substantiate, though. In regards to impactful individual actions - these are mostly as follows - Not having an additional child (58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent emission reductions per year) Living car-free (2.4 tonnes CO2) Avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight (1.6 tonnes) Eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tonnes) (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report) Let's address them 1 by 1. 1. Perfectly reasonable and something more families should be doing. 1 child is plenty, 2 is the maximum anyone should consider. Plausible that this one can be stigmatized enough in western culture to be brought down somewhat, along with natural factors like those seen in Japan and throughout the world, but this is going to be particularly difficult to tackle in developing nations. 2. Simply not reasonable whatsoever by any stretch of the imagination. Massive changes to infrastructure would be needed, which is not in any of our control. Next. 3. Somewhat reasonable, but again, air flight is a necessity for a lot of people, especially for those that require it for work. Not something I see as being impacted much by individual action. Next. 4. This one is by far the most reasonable out of all 4 options to be affected by our own actions, and even then, making everyone a vegetarian/vegan is no easy task. I think it's more plausible that we adopt synthetic meat alternatives before we get people to give up meat on a significant scale. Eating less red meat though is definitely something I see as important to emphasize in our culture and it seems to be what people are picking up on the most. In short, given our society and psychology, I don't see significant individual action as all that practical. The most you can do by far is having less kids, the rest is ultimately not all that significant. Adopting a plant-based diet for 50 years of your life is still less emissions than the impact of having one kid in a year. If everyone in the US adopted a plant based diet for 50 years of their lives, it still wouldn't amount to half of what these 100 corporations emit every year. I suppose if you're down with the idea that eating green a few days a week will save someones life then that's fine, I suppose, but I can't really see it as all that substantiated and more or less sounds like wishful thinking. The impact will be catastrophic regardless, and more than enough people will be displaced and die given projections and threshold effects. If this report is to believed, the impact will be *so* catastrophic that human civilization as we know it will end. Do you honestly think that an outlook that catastrophic could be mitigated by the actions of conscientious individuals?

Should take a look at this https://www.reddit.com/r/GuerrillaGardening/

pushing the responsibility of change onto the individual instead of the corporations is very much the message that's being manufactured though. think of how many articles from mainstream news outlets you can find that mention how individuals can make their own little impact on the environment while never mentioning how all your efforts would be greatly eclipsed by the emissions produced from corporations. it makes way more sense to approach this problem from the top down instead of blaming billions of individuals and nebulous market demands. especially since climate change isn't something where you can afford to wait for billions of people to incrementally adjust their living habits. the government has to step in and regulate these corporations if we want to see any changes in any sort of reasonable time frame.

Why not both? Do your own part but also become politically active and demand changes top down. This isn't an either-or situation, this is a situation where everything counts.

I think most people do, but a lot of the reasonably impactful lifestyle changes aren't realistic to expect out of everyone for a multitude of reasons. I have Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) (yes I know), so being a vegetarian/vegan isn't really an option for me. I have dietary deficiencies to begin with that I'm only really just now getting a handle on. And that's in regards to the most realistic option to take in the first place. I'm certainly not going to be able to stop flying or driving anytime soon.

Corporations pump shit into the air to make things people buy. If a great many people quit buying their shit knowing what its causing, corporations will change their attitude. This is how individuals are changing their living attitudes and lifestyles to slow climate change on an individual level.

There are a multitude of reasons as to why our society at large, governments and all, are powerless to stop corporations. Lets be honest, here, most people aren't going to grasp the immediate effects of democratically elected official's policies. Furthermore, those "immediate effects" are hardly going to exist in that capacity in the first place. We live in a global economy. Regulations here are going to do nothing to change breaches of those regulations abroad. We've already seen this with labor, why would it be any different for sustainability? The long and short is that as long as companies with no accountability are producing with the chief incentive of profit, things will not get better. And accountability will not exist so long as the world is splintered in a web of individual sets of regulatory bodies with no accountability to one another. Unfortunately, this isn't so much a capitalism problem per se as much at is a markets problem, and the insufficient regulation of those markets. And, again, without a one-world government, I dont really see how one would go about making those regulations sufficient, as companies could just set up shop where they're already paying children pennies to make their shoes.

you can't wait until whatever indefinite time frame it takes for billions of people to eventually make enough substantial lifestyle changes to hurt the companies though. this is a worldwide problem, we don't have much time, and there's also still people that haven't even agreed climate change is real and even actively try to discourage talking about it.

Unfortunately, unless an overwhelming majority of people willingly choose to make that sacrifice, it's just not going to happen just on a mass-individual scale. It's practically impossible to try and organize even an eighth of the people on the planet to take action against the 1% to have even a minor impact. Those of us who care are doing our part to reduce our carbon footprint, but unless a major miracle happens: We're still fucked.

Such as? Most of the products people buy that are contributing the most to the CO2 issue are petroleum products, and there really isn't any way to ethically source your gasoline. Most of the other sources of emissions amount to industry and power, which aren't consumer products. The biggest example of something you might be able to source more ethically is your food, if you ate a plant based diet, and grew everything yourself. But if you think corporations are going to change all that much about what they're doing in terms of agriculture and food production without regulatory action, then you're certainly more optimistic than I am.

Whatever helps you keep a clear conscience as you support practices that are environmentally unsustainable I guess.