this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 122 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Oh I don't know, could have something to do with the whole climate change disaster the collective scientific community has been warning about for literally decades now

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 years ago (5 children)

The sad part is, no matter how bad things will get, the same people will keep denying climate change. Even as their shoes melt into the pavement.

Looking at the past, I don't have any hope for meaningful change.
Just last year or so we've had people on their literal death beads denying corona is real.

[–] CapitalismsRefugee 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Last night my dad was talking about this "liberal propaganda" about the "supposed climate crisis" talking about the movie Don't Look Up. Fuck it pissed me off, I don't know how to respond to that. Conservatives aren't in reality, every fact that disagrees with their backwards fantasy is just some kind of liberal conspiracy that "wise" men would never bother considering.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's really messed up how the world can be reduced to binary opinions.

By definition, liberals think more freely and are willing to entertain new ideas. With that of course comes that some of those ideas turn out to be counter productive or straight up bad. Ideally, this is when real liberals acknowledge this and shift to something else.

Conservatives on the other hand see this as a sign of weakness and misguidedness, so they take a stance rooted in what they "know" to be true. When that knowledge turns out to be false, they can't simply pivot because that would make them the same as liberals.

Not to mention, sticking to your guns is so much easier than admitting you were wrong and starting from zero again.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

There will be denial forever, but watch out now for the new propaganda trend, "it's too late to do anything". It feels woke and tends to be anticorporate in flavour, but it leads to the same end as denialism.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I agree that the “it’s too late to do anything” mentality is just as bad as doing nothing, but at the same time I recognize that the scientific consensus is more and more leaning towards "it really is too late to do anything" in the short term at least.

Certain gears have been set in motion that we truly cannot stop, but there are also other things that we can prevent if we act now.

I just don't know where the line between the two lies.

The next 50 years or so are set in stone, of that I'm certain.
But after that, who knows whether the changes we make today will affect the climate in a meaningful way. One can only hope.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Looking at the past, I don't have any hope for meaningful change.
Just last year or so we've had people on their literal death beads denying corona is real.

You're not even wrong. Even when people weren't denying the reality of the situation, so many still refused to do any of the measures designed to stop it, then blamed everyone else around them.

It wad a depressing time to see how rabid and divided people are that somehow the existence of a virus that was literally killing millions of people, and leaving even more crippled existed or not became a political game.

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[–] HandOfDoom 80 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)
We drive our cars and planes
And burn the fossil fuels
We ignore the scientists
And call them climate fools

We chop down all the forests
And fill the seas with trash
We melt the polar ice caps
And watch the glaciers crash

We suffer and we will die
From the heat as we get older
But hey, at least we created a lot of value
For our dear shareholders
[–] vita_man 7 points 2 years ago

Beautiful and sad. Reminds me of u/poemforyoursprog

[–] WhiteHawk 51 points 2 years ago (2 children)
[–] Aceticon 46 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Just to add to this, Climate Change itself is a lot more than mere Global Warming - since weather is mathematically a Chaotic System, the extra energy retained in the system due to greenhouse gases not only increases the average temperature but also makes extreme weather (not just of the high temperature kind) more likely to happen, hence things like for example many and strong storms in a short-time frame which were the kind of combination that used to happen every couple of decades now happenning every couple of years.

Hence why over the last decade we've seen extreme weather events a lot more and more often.

The high temperature related records broken now (due to the combination with El Niño) are but a subset of the weather record-breaking that's been happenning in the last couple of years.

[–] A_Random_Idiot 14 points 1 year ago

A lot of people think climate change is just heat and desertification.

And its not.

its more akin to a shot of nitrous in your car engine. It will take the normal systems and ramp them up to a realm not normally feasible. Hot weather will get hotter. Hot weather will reach further to places it never did before in summer. Cold weather will get colder. Cold weather will reach further into areas it never did before in in winter. Storms will be more intense. Hurricanes larger. Tornados more prevalent.

But we can't do anything because the rich and their bought politicians would rather stay the course to continue to extract every last ounce of profit from the planet, then ride out the storm on the high seas on their high end expensive mega yachts.

[–] Something_Complex 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] emptyother 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

#4MoreYearsAndTheRemainingRichPeopleWeHaventEatenLeavesEarthOnARocket

[–] A_Random_Idiot 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They'll never survive, unless they take hundreds of poors with them to support them. Cause all their money wont mean shit on mars, when they have to shit in a bag and live in a inflated tent that will kill them all if it tears.

[–] emptyother 3 points 1 year ago

Would be ironic then that what kills them is a lack of longterm thinking.

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[–] FleaCatcher 48 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Sounds like a tipping point to me, but I am not smart.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago

“Gradually, then suddenly.”

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Well tentative take I saw from a climate scientist (in the news I think) was that it might be a flickering of a tipping point. The idea being that complex systems can temporarily look like a new state that they're close to tipping into but not quite there yet. If true, it would mean that we're closer to some tipping point than we thought or would like and this is a kind of prelude.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Because we're governed by a large group of people who rely on fossil fuel countries and companies for campaign cash and the rest are more concerned with owning the libs than doing anything useful.

[–] GoofSchmoofer 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Yep. Nothing changes because the people that have the power to make the changes don't want to. The system as it is right now works for them. So why the hell would they want to change that? And most of them won't be around to see the devastation so there is another level of apathy to all of it.

We can't get out from underneath this monster it's too late for that. But I hope that we can start putting people into power that are genuinely concerned about this climate crisis and start the true (massive) step to moving us off the path to total uninhabitability

[–] vita_man 37 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Climate change? Global warming?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Politicians and billionaires:

[–] sorenant 22 points 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago (1 children)

But I need my lifted pickup truck To hAUl ThInGS. How can I go grocery shopping without a vehicle the size of a minibus? And how would other people know how strong and wealthy I am if I were to walk, ride a bike or use transit? I need a big metal box around me to protect my insecurity.

[–] orclev 21 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

While I certainly don't want to defend the kind of asshats that insist on doing something as stupid and obnoxious as "rolling coal" I do need to point out that large swaths of the US are currently not setup in such a way that you can realistically get around without a vehicle of some kind. Massive work on public transit plus a fundamental urban planning design change needs to take place before walking, biking, or public transit is a viable way to get from point A to point B.

So until those changes are made, yes most Americans will need a electric or ICE vehicle. It doesn't need to be an inefficient pollution spewing behemoth, but it does need to be something. Really though aside from people intentionally modifying their vehicles to be less efficient and more polluting modern cars are pretty efficient and clean.

The primary vehicle contributor to both global warming and pollution isn't even cars though, it's ships by a landslide. It isn't even remotely close. Cruise ships and particularly the giant container ships used to move goods internationally are hugely inefficient and polluting with just one ship putting out in a single day the equivalent of multiple cars worth of pollution for an entire year.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

The primary vehicle contributor to both global warming and pollution isn’t even cars though, it’s ships by a landslide. It isn’t even remotely close. Cruise ships and particularly the giant container ships used to move goods internationally are hugely inefficient and polluting with just one ship putting out in a single day the equivalent of multiple cars worth of pollution for an entire year.

Bullshit.

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Road transportation: 11.9%

Shipping: 1.7%

Ocean liners are very dirty yes but they're actually very efficient compared to cars and trucks precisely because they're so massive. They move a huge amount of goods. Put the same amount of goods on trucks and you get an order of magnitude more emissions.

Oh and electricity and heating create almost twice as much ghg emissions as transportation. Which is why supporting renewables is the single most important thing anyone can do for the environment.

[–] orclev 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Not sure how you square those numbers with reports like this then: https://www.businessinsider.com/cruise-ship-air-pollution-carnival-cars-europe-study-2023-6

That wasn't the actual report I was thinking about, but its been a number of years since I saw that original report which looked at pollution of shipping vessels vs. pollution of US automobiles and found that an overwhelming majority of the pollution came from the ships.

The good news such as it is is that as pointed out in that article regulations have improved in 2020 and it's already showing reductions in ship pollution.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

The article that you reference is mainly about sulphur oxide. I'm not sure how you make the leap from that to CO2. Also Business Insider is owned by the very pro oil & gas Springer who in turn is partially owned by KKR. I would say not the most credible source when it comes to environmental information.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Conflating GHG with "pollution" is a classic obfuscation tactic. They're not the same.

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[–] coldv 21 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Didn't a couple of years ago scientist warned that we have past the point of no return?

[–] ShakyPerception 25 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There is a scene in the TV show Newsroom (with Jeff Daniels) where he (the news show anchor) is interviewing a climate scientist about the climate change situation. Everything the scientist says eludes to the fact that we are completely screwed. That everything we are trying would have been great things to start doing 20+ years ago. At this point we have already passed the point of recovery.

It was aired in like 2015, and I think of it every time someone talks about this, and what a surprise this whole thing is.

[–] Miian 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I thought the delivery of that scene was fantastic. They did such a great job with it.

Here's a link for those who've never seen it. https://youtu.be/pNYp6oc37ds

[–] TransientPunk 4 points 2 years ago

That was great! Thank you for sharing

[–] Elferrerito 4 points 2 years ago

I had never seen this, thanks for sharing

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 years ago

We probably are but it's also very important to remember that were not past the point of no survival. The trend for oil propaganda has been to go from "climate change is fake" to "it's real but it's too late to do anything". It's too late to go back, but it's not too late to act. Don't forget that.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago

there are many "points of no return". the first irrevocable damage was done when we started burning coal hundreds of years ago, and every year we pass new points after which the earth will be forever changed. that doesn't mean all life is screwed, or humanity will die out. it does mean that things are going to get a lot worse, and the degree to which they're going to get worse is increasing every day we don't address the issue.

the one thing climate scientists DO NOT want you to think is that we are doomed and that it is hopeless. things are bad, and getting worse, but the actions we take DO MATTER.

~~burn down an oil refinery (in minecraft)~~

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago

Fucked around to increase shareholder value.

[–] abessman 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] NycterVyvver 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Sometimes I feel like I'm on the "Lord of the Flies" island; we've ignored the scientists and now the whole place is burning down.

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[–] nomadjoanne 4 points 1 year ago

I mean, it's summer In the northern hemisphere... That's where most of the land on earth is

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