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I'd guess it's largely just a consequence of the Tragedy of the Commons. My favorite example demonstrating the effect I read in Meditations on Moloch:

The Fish Farming Story

As a thought experiment, let’s consider aquaculture (fish farming) in a lake. Imagine a lake with a thousand identical fish farms owned by a thousand competing companies. Each fish farm earns a profit of $1000/month. For a while, all is well.

But each fish farm produces waste, which fouls the water in the lake. Let’s say each fish farm produces enough pollution to lower productivity in the lake by $1/month.

A thousand fish farms produce enough waste to lower productivity by $1000/month, meaning none of the fish farms are making any money. Capitalism to the rescue: someone invents a complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, the pollution ends, and the fish farms are now making a profit of $700/month – still a respectable sum.

But one farmer (let’s call him Steve) gets tired of spending the money to operate his filter. Now one fish farm worth of waste is polluting the lake, lowering productivity by $1. Steve earns $999 profit, and everyone else earns $699 profit.

Everyone else sees Steve is much more profitable than they are, because he’s not spending the maintenance costs on his filter. They disconnect their filters too.

Once four hundred people disconnect their filters, Steve is earning $600/month – less than he would be if he and everyone else had kept their filters on! And the poor virtuous filter users are only making $300. Steve goes around to everyone, saying “Wait! We all need to make a voluntary pact to use filters! Otherwise, everyone’s productivity goes down.”

Everyone agrees with him, and they all sign the Filter Pact, except one person who is sort of a jerk. Let’s call him Mike. Now everyone is back using filters again, except Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everyone else earns $699/month. Slowly, people start thinking they too should be getting big bucks like Mike, and disconnect their filter for $300 extra profit…

A self-interested person never has any incentive to use a filter. A self-interested person has some incentive to sign a pact to make everyone use a filter, but in many cases has a stronger incentive to wait for everyone else to sign such a pact but opt out himself. This can lead to an undesirable equilibrium in which no one will sign such a pact.

Until it's more profitable to do the right thing it's likely we'll continue doing nothing, if not outright exacerbating things, just so we can get ours before it's all gone.

Europe's governments are doing a pretty tight job, I feel personally. Actually a LOT of proper handling of issues. I'm surprised over the decades, honestly. I voted no to EU back then, but now I'd see it as an obvious yes, even if this or that cunt got rich in the process. It's still a sane fucking system, it's just under attack from organized trolls with nukes.

Part of the problem is that our atmosphere and oceans are shared across the planet. Stop fishing one spot? Another country will poach the fish. Stop buying oil/coal from one country and they just sell it to another.

I'm not trying to justify not doing anything. When it comes to our oceans and atmosphere we will need a global effort but localized efforts can still help and will teach us what is effective.

But, but, what about the shareholders? /s

You miss understand.

It's like saying if we double the weight of our go-kart we will go twice as fast. But instead of going twice as fast they went 50 times as fast. Then every says "that's fucking weird why did it do that?"

Every climatologist and entomologist I personally know have been low key shitting themselves for the last eight years and telling everyone they know not to have kids.

Oh the scientists know, but the billionaires are spending a lot of money to convince 40% of the population otherwise.

"They've only been tracking for decades, don't believe their lies. They just want to tax and control you. Volcanoes exist so it is impossible for carbon to even be bad. Its just a warm year, jeez people really forget the weather can have ups and downs. I wouldn't mind every winter being warm anyway"

-your local climate change denier

We'll get massive methane outgassing from Siberia before we hit that point, and once that happens we are just a few centuries away from being Venus.

No, the article clearly says the main cause is climate change.

Abraham suspects the leading cause of the trend is climate change, with some natural ocean processes that aren’t well understood playing a role, as well.

It's not one of the causes it's the leading cause. This is to say that if global warming didn't exist, the sea temperature event would also not exist.

Your comment is wrong, and you should delete it.

Typical media

Scientists: "IT'S GLOBAL WARMING!" Media: "Scientists are puzzled"

Fuck this world we've created for ourselves.

So you feel bad if republicans ignore science in regards to, let's say, Covid, but if the science doesn't fit your world view you feel okay to ignore it yourself?

A tad ~~hypocratic~~ hypocritical, no?