As a man from southeast asia, i say goodbye to yall, I don't have a good feeling about the upcoming semester...

At this point I'm kind of hoping the AMOC shuts down for a bit:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2595629-satellites-show-some-of-the-strongest-evidence-the-amoc-is-weakening/

"The crucial Atlantic current system that brings warmth to Europe has slowed 14 per cent in 30 years, according to an analysis of how much heat the ocean is releasing to the atmosphere"

Get the popcorn it's gonna be fun!

Holy fuck.

I think we're all scared for the future. Make what life we have left as good as possible for as many people as we can affect.

Life will recover with other forms when we're gone.

If you're not good at collective action, just blow up oil and gas infrastructure, power plants, etc

We are passed a habitable and comfortable zone for a diverse world. Its gone.

Governments allowed power companies, automakers, and petrochemical companies and now big tech corporations to trash an entire planet. We sped to our ruin starting in the late 19th century. When Edison turned on a power plant and tried to hide the smoke and tar from inspectors. In 150 years through greed and avarice. Gone.

When humans learned about the damage, we basically swept it under the rug.When corporate labs found out about it, they buried the lead, bribed, and attacked any alternative. The evidence is there and it's quite damning. Not only to companies like Exxon who knew, but to anyone claiming money and power are good. That things like moral ambition or affective altruism justify actions. New veneers for a rotten age.

I am, sadly, convinced it won't start to incite action - real change -until its really bad. The political and educational climate is not supportive.

Tragically, we almost got there. We had a template with the Ozone solution. Even a pretty shit company had an alternative product. CFCs were widely regarded as a bad move and people believed the scientists. You don't hear about the hole in the Ozone and of you're young enough, you probably have no idea it was a problem. Alf, the stupid fuzzy alien TV sitcom, even had an episode calling a CEO to ask him to get rid of CFCs. And we did it. Politics, advocacy, and even business for its own gains of course, did it. And we were almost there as early as the Carter era with climate change. Alas, solar on the white house roof is the perfect symbol for our potential change. You can look up what transpired.

Kyoto and Paris were great. Renewables were coming. The Petrol States (especially KSA and Qatar) killed it all because the people in charge of our governments were, frankly, cowards unwilling to fight back. Unwilling to hold other nations, companies, and voices who were lying.

Someone, somewhere, can start to heal this. But it'll take a worldwide political revoltution to stop the bleeding. Frankly, again, we can't convince people the earth is round right now so I'm not optimistic.

This is a chaotic system with a lot of contributing factors and creating correlation from causation would be difficult to impossible, but I wonder how much AI datacenters are contributing to this. Thermal pollution is actually a huge deal, and if take into account the amount of thermal energy put out by, say, global air travel, than global temperature deltas should be much greater than they are. Datacenters have been proven to be quite efficient at creating thermal pollution, so it stands to reason that creating more thermal pollution could be responsible for much of the temperature delta.

This also holds a bit of hope for us: not all of global warming is caused by green house gases (yes, most of it is, but not all), but rather some of it is simply caused by thermal pollution from burning fuels or even using electric heaters. Because of this, climate change is likely, to some extent, partially reversible if only by stopping the mass-scale dumping of thermal energy into the atmosphere. Again, it's realistically impossible to draw causation from the data, but "rebellions are built on hope."

Communist Revolution. Get that ass out the chair.

Literally, the moral and logical answer to your question is to lead a bloody revolution and end this by force tomorrow to prevent absolutely as much poison from leaking out as possible. Not because it will save human lives necessarily (although I think the rates of death from such a revolution as compared to a few decades of worsening conditions before we get to the same point of lowered emissions is just about a wash), but because it could possibly save some measure of biodiversity which will allow for the POSSIBILITY of humans continuing as a species in some randomly calmer areas among the chaos.

That being said, I have been thinking that for a long time and haven't worked myself up to trying it. Dying painfully is kind of scary, even if you don't like living.

Yes, it is too late to stop it.

But every 0.1 degrees makes a difference. So if you care, efforts are still worthwhile. There is no hope for civilization to survive as we know it, but the less we emit the better chance something liveable is waiting on the other side.

In short, you, me and everyone alive today and their kids and their grandkids and probably more....are absolutely fucked. We have to try to care about people who won't be alive for 100 years yet. But that's still worth it.

gonna read blessed is the flame again. Cant believe the AnNihil's were right all along 😥

For one, we're going to need a bigger chart.

This year, Nino surface temperature (index basis) has spent about double the time over 29C as all previous years combined. It is now over 30C (big record) during what is a seasonally low period. Over 3.5C seasonal average.

Right now I'm building a knowledge base to hopefully create processes to enzymatically catalyze chemical reactions. Most importantly reactions that incorporate CO2 into sugars and nitrogens into amino acids (and atmospheric nitrogen into, well, not atmospheric nitrogen). If successful we wouldn't have to rely on increasingly unstable/extinct environmental systems for nutrition and materials because we could create nutrients and other plant-based stuff in some sort bio-reactor-like machine.

It's difficult because mostly I just want to walk into the sea as I often think it's mostly too late for any sort of intervention.

If you live in California or other areas where this will cause high flood risk, it could be worth doing some planning in case you need to evacuate. In my area at least, the models are showing some terrifying possibilities for how much rain we could get. Also talk to your neighbors and see if they need support or if they can cooperate with you in providing assistance tool others in the event that something like this happens.

In terms of the bigger picture I truly don't know... everything we've tried so far has failed. I guess anything you can do to throw sand in the gears of the planet destroying machine makes things a little better in the future. But the next couple decades are probably already baked in to be a bit rough at this point.

Usually I'd hold out hope some brilliant people can figure out teraforming or some way to reverse this. Except in this world some company would buy the patent and destroy it or something. I still have some hope, but its buried under so much cynicism.