Tired of feeling hopeless about climate change? Take a look at these charts.
Tired of feeling hopeless about climate change? Take a look at these charts.
Bending climate-data red lines in a more positive direction will take “stubborn optimism” and fast action.
Hate to be a party pooper, but for me, failed attempts at trumpeting optimism are often the most pessimistic and depressing things for me.
I’m all for gritty stubbornness and all that, but a lot of these charts looked clearly like trivial “we’re doing our best!” defensiveness to me. Starting with EV sales (which I presume are mostly cars but that could be wrong) didn’t help. And the final yearly CO2 emissions doesn’t look promising either.
Getting people to act makes a lot of sense. But “back in my day” that was done by talking about the actual viable solutions on offer and telling people they can demand better by demanding these solutions. A vague “hey look the system is kinda working” statement strikes me as depressingly vacuous.
Am I off base here?
EV sales stats in this article do appear to be electric car sales, even though electric-assist bicycles make up the bulk of electric vehicle sales.
I'd say that they're pointing out that some of the things we are doing are starting to succeed in a meaningful way. That's a big deal, even if we haven't gotten to the point of bending the curve of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
even if we haven’t gotten to the point of bending the curve of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Nothing else matters. This is the bottom line, period, full stop. We've had promises and technological developments and "positive trends" for decades now, and CO2 emissions have just continued going up and up and up. All the while, our governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of trillions of dollars, approve record numbers of oil and gas drilling permits on public lands, and don't take any meaningful action to address climate change. I don't want to hear any more of this garbage about how we're "starting to succeed." We're like thirty years behind where we should be.
The article didn't start bad. But then the author didn't get the right conclusion.
Yes, the current climate data are devastating. Yes, there is also development in some (mostly rich) countries. But to put this into perspective: while the rate of GHG emmissions need to drop faster than they did 2020 during the pandemic, they are just stagnating in developed countries while rising in developing countries. Globally carbon emissions are still rising.
The reality is: the climate is changing faster than anticipated and the transition away from fossil fuels is nowhere near fast enough. We need to stop emitting GHG basically yesterday. Instead we bury the 1.5 °C target and hope for carbon sinks to help us get to net zero. Both natural sinks as also artificial sinks. Artificial sinks are still extremely expensive and ineffective while the remaining natural carbon sinks get destroyed and turn into carbon emitters.
What would need to happen is a massive effort through all society in every country. That would also mean for first world countries to not only forgive debts of poor countries, but also at least help financing poor countries transition.
The majority of people are just starting to take climate change seriously and the threat is still underestimated by most.
No, this is not the time for stubborn optimism. This is the time for worry. This is the time for anger. This is the time to reject pledges and promises by governments and demand actual action and legislative change. Being optimistic won't help us change.
Same content on archive.ph.
We’ll likely not be able to stave off the worst effects of climate change, hell, we’re just beginning to feel its effects now, but we will likely survive and adapt to it (or we’ll just die, whatever). Life on Earth won’t likely be the same as what we we’ve been used to. Many animal species will likely die off though, so hopefully somebody somewhere has built an arc or a DNA storage vault or whatever so we can try to repopulate the world later on.
The current climate data are not 'devastating' they are just wrong, cherry picked and over emphasised. If you have any interest in how the basic science has been ignored check out this recent paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/11/9/179 For those who do not want to read the entire article, here is the abstract:
A statistical analysis was applied to Northern Hemisphere land surface temperatures (1850–2018) to try to identify the main drivers of the observed warming since the mid-19th century. Two different temperature estimates were considered—a rural and urban blend (that matches almost exactly with most current estimates) and a rural-only estimate. The rural and urban blend indicates a long-term warming of 0.89 °C/century since 1850, while the rural-only indicates 0.55 °C/century. This contradicts a common assumption that current thermometer-based global temperature indices are relatively unaffected by urban warming biases. Three main climatic drivers were considered, following the approaches adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s recent 6th Assessment Report (AR6): two natural forcings (solar and volcanic) and the composite “all anthropogenic forcings combined” time series recommended by IPCC AR6. The volcanic time series was that recommended by IPCC AR6. Two alternative solar forcing datasets were contrasted. One was the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) time series that was recommended by IPCC AR6. The other TSI time series was apparently overlooked by IPCC AR6. It was found that altering the temperature estimate and/or the choice of solar forcing dataset resulted in very different conclusions as to the primary drivers of the observed warming. Our analysis focused on the Northern Hemispheric land component of global surface temperatures since this is the most data-rich component. It reveals that important challenges remain for the broader detection and attribution problem of global warming: (1) urbanization bias remains a substantial problem for the global land temperature data; (2) it is still unclear which (if any) of the many TSI time series in the literature are accurate estimates of past TSI; (3) the scientific community is not yet in a position to confidently establish whether the warming since 1850 is mostly human-caused, mostly natural, or some combination. Suggestions for how these scientific challenges might be resolved are offered.
Head author: Willie Soon
From 2005 to 2015, Soon had received over $1.2 million from the fossil fuel industry, while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his work.
I also have my reservations about the publisher