Ground temperatures across great swathes of the ice sheets of Antarctica have soared an average of 10C above normal over the past month, in what has been described as a near record heatwave.
While temperatures remain below zero on the polar land mass, which is shrouded in darkness at this time of year, the depths of southern hemisphere winter, temperatures have reportedly reached 28C above expectations on some days.
The globe has experienced 12 months of record warmth, with temperatures consistently exceeding the 1.5C rise above preindustrial levels that has been touted as the limit to avoiding the worst of climate breakdown.
Most of human history has been strife. It’s what made us. It’s all the safety and warmth and food always around, and systems that are supposed to make justice and progress because that’s the right thing to do, that are highly atypical.
It still means we are condemning the next generations to a world where we selfishly destroyed all that comfort.
Oh I wasn’t saying it as a good thing. The destruction of the safe and stable earth we grew up in, more or less on purpose for profit, will probably be the greatest crime and tragedy ever to exist in human history. I was just saying that, grimly enough, going through the kind of dangerous life that’s coming soon is in our programming too.
It just would have been better if we could have kept the paradise. 😢 But maybe this is how we learn.
The problem is that yes, historically humanity has learned (at least temporarily) when it induced a crisis.
The big difference between climate change and other catastrophies like the world wars is that it’s irreversible. We can rebuild cities, countries even within few generations. We absolutely cannot rebuild earth after we fucked up the climate.
Even if we learn from this it will be too late to apply the learnings. This one isn’t a case of “fucking around and finding out”.
Yeah
And we already consumed most of the easily available resources, and used them to build up the infrastructure that we’re currently using to get the hard to reach stuff. So that means not only is the loss of our comfortable place going to be permanent on any conceivable human historical timescale, but if we lose the current industrial base, then we probably won’t be able to develop another one in another geologic age, however much time goes by, if the species survives on our changed and shattered world.
If we lose what we have today, it will slip down and away and escape from our grasp, probably forever.
It definitely feels like humanity might have peaked and we’re just around to see it all falter
Most of human history is unrepresentative of our species, by about 96%.
Your “strife” is atypical and ends with extinction.
I agree.
In the 70s everyone thought there would be a nuclear apocalypse.
A few decades before that children were born intended to be used as free labour for subsistence agriculture.
Yes climate change is a threat unlike any we’ve ever faced, yes its getting worse quicker than we thought, and yes population reduction is one way to mitigate it… but I don’t think that makes it wrong to have a child.