Microblog Memes

People of every generation were told it doesn't matter and that it won't be a problem. With the advent of social media and associated algorithms, the village idiots are loud, organised and getting others to bark at the moon with them.

Younger generations are ignoring it as well. They're busy blaming past generations, while they themselves are some of the biggest contributors to our current climate crisis.

This is my boomer dad whenever he complains about it being extremely hot in the summer, cold in the winter, too much rain, etc. Always responds well it won't last too long and that's just nature, nothing we can do about it because it has a mind of its own.

My parents believe we’re in the end times and god will return any day now. They were mentally ill from the get go. They are pure evil and don’t see the evil they are.

Go figure they’re also extremely obese and mostly immobile. They are sloths and glutens. They never took care of themselves and believe bullshit snake oil salesmen over their own children’s advice.

You can’t reason with the evil that is these fundamental cultists.

Fortunately for them, I flushed my kids.

Not to be that person, but my parents are completely incapable of comprehending this.

Not intellectually, but pragmatically and philosophically. They're like 60 years old, and even if it affects them in their lifetime, they'll be "dead in 20 years".

And on a low level, they're kind of right because most ordinary people aren't to blame for this, so shaming "parents" makes no sense.

Shame the international petroleum conglomerates, plastic producers, shipping, etc. You know, the actual emitters in the billions of gigatons.

Your parents ignored this

I've been hearing about climate change consistently since the 1980s. Multiple iterations of liberal (and moderate conservative) politician have campaigned on a variety of (free market) mechanisms for capping or curbing carbon emissions. We even had a huge surge in R&D for green energy alternatives and electrification - first in the 70s and then again during the gas cost explosion of the 00s - that is (thank fucking god) finally paying off.

So I won't say they "ignored this". I will say that we had a very wealthy, very influential minority entrenched within the political class that profited enormously from fossil fuel extraction and deliberately suppressed decades of prior efforts to reduce emissions, both domestically and globally.

The Boomers weren't blind to climate change. They weren't even apathetic. They were outmatched, outplayed, and outspent. Much like with slavery in the 1800s and women's liberation in the 1900s and human rights in the 2000s, this is a fight that liberals have spent a lot of time losing. What wins they achieved felt significant in the moment, but remained dwarfed by the stubborn intractability of their wealthy, reactionary opposition.

The scary thing is, this graph is probably far too conservative.

Evidence is now emerging that indicates that warming has accelerated dramatically in the last 2-3 years. As in, we may see more warming in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 50, with +3℃ happening just after 2035, and +4℃ happening by some time around 2040 to 2050.

You know what happens around +4℃? The extinction of all megafauna - animals larger than 45kg. Like humans. The entire ⅓ of the planet between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn will experience lethally high wet bulb temperatures across all regions for at least several weeks out of every year, rendering it permanently uninhabitable for the 4+ Billion people that currently live there. India is currently flirting with that reality.

And with that heating inertia, 2100 may see +8℃ temps, which essentially means ice-free poles year round (once things calm down), with palm trees and alligators at the North Pole. Of course, by that time chaotic weather and resource exhaustion will have killed off all remaining humans.

And the lovely thing about “moving parts” is that they all have this little thing called inertia… the faster they move, the further they go. And +8℃ is very close to the +12-15℃ that a Venus Scenario would be triggered by.

Past warming events have been “similar” in that they have gotten just as warm, but they took hundreds of thousands of years to get to the same place, allowing entire continent-wide ecosystems to quite literally migrate across thousands of kilometers to adapt. Our changes are happening in less than 0.01% of that time scale, giving ecosystems no time at all in which to react. So our biosphere will get slaughtered along with us, and will be unable to compensate in time.

And with the biosphere becoming overwhelmed by rapid changes, there goes the “friction” that could do something about that “inertia”.

And the worst part is, we still haven’t moved off of the worst-case-possible “business as usual” path. We are swan-diving into the worst possible future. Thanks to billionaires addicted to fat profit margins and who control all of the processes, we are utterly failing to generate the change needed to save ourselves, with CO2e production - purely human sources, excluding the feedback loops in nature!! - CONTINUING TO ACCELERATE.

Fun times. I just might live long enough to see humanity go extinct.

Finally, this is the first time I saw this graph that DIDN'T use logarithmic scale for time - which makes this sharp spike look "natural".

Sam Altman (OpenAI) is a Millennial. So is Zuckerberg. LLMs are one of the big energy sinks right now, reaching 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026 and the current rate of use is doubling every year. For comparison, total global commercial (excluding industrial and transportation, so, office buildings - lights, AC, computers) energy use is 50,000 TWh.

It's still being ignored. Boomers are out of the work force (if not politics), and Gen X is just starting to retire. Between Millenials and Gen Z, they hold 32% of the voting power in the US, the same as Boomers. And Gen Z is only just entering voting age, at 8%.

Half the voting population is under 50 and global temperatures keep increasing. There's every indication sticking your head in the sand is a cross-generational behavior.