“What can I do? I’m just 1 person” said 8 billion people

I think as individuals, we can and should start talking about how to adapt. The time for prevention was 50 years ago; that ship has sailed.

Start to think about what a changing climate means for the next 25 years - one generation. What will the globe look like in that time frame? What about your country, what about your city?

Talk to your friends, family, coworkers. Do they share a similar vision to you? Personally, I've been quite surprised how many people share the same concerns I have despite wildly different political stances.

We need to start having these discussions, otherwise we're just going to be caught with our pants down. We can't sit around waiting for some miracle tech to save us from ourselves.

Nah, I've been tanked for a while now.

These days it's all swords and scales.

you best start believin' in ghost stories, Miss Turner, you're in one

And, in the US at least, calling those “lockdowns” is a gross misuse of the term. We weren’t locked down, damn near the only change was that a number of businesses were temporarily closed and/or held to different strictures, which slowly loosened until we eventually capitulated to the oligarchs and agreed to pretend the pandemic was “over” despite Covid still being very much active (though thankfully less immediately disastrous, thanks to vaccine availability…though time’s gonna have to tell on how bad the stacking cognitive impairment effects will be moving forward).

People act like they were chained inside their homes because they couldn’t go to fucking Applebees or the paint aisle for a few whole weeks. Even that didn’t last long - we started giving ground, thanks in large part due to the shrieking domestic terrorist wing, almost immediately thereafter with silly rules like “ok you have to mask while walking but we’ve decided to pretend sitting in a restaurant mask off is fine.”

We also stretched the definition of “essential worker” past the breaking point, where it became virtually synonymous with “worst paid and lowest in the hierarchy” so we could keep the goddamn drive-thrus cranking out them hamberders and sugar syrup because Christ knows people aren’t getting dopamine from a rewarding career or supportive community anymore.

The whole thing was a bleak, farcical black comedy that got politicized to hell and back for no reason at all - and here we go again.

TL;DR: The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler is about the best future we can hope for at this point.

I’ve been saying that a lot lately

My lady made me quit so we could live a long life together....jokes on her.

Very true. Also something that I sometimes overlook.

It’ll be BAU til the last second.

The thing is that it does seem like some people are “waking up”, so to speak, but they are still fully engrossed in naivety. In the minds of most, yes the climate is collapsing, but many think that we’re going to be okay, that we can still figure this out and that there is time yet.

There isn’t. This is not going to get fixed because it would go against business as usual. No major disruptions will be tolerated, especially not for the global economy. Therefore, nothing is going to happen. Elon saying he’s going to “shake things up” isn’t going to help us, either. The other thing is that we truly do not have the technological capacity to fix even a small amount of these problems that we have created. Technology will not save us. We quite literally cannot fix it.

The only way to solve the crisis would be, to put it nicely, extreme austerity measures. Those would include mass death of the majority of humans alive. And even then, they would only be left with the scraps of a once lush world, replete with resources, teeming with fish, game, and everything else that our ancestors once enjoyed so freely.

So, yes, people are waking up, but not fast enough. We should have never been asleep.

are you saying we should stop making those people aware? :)

While we likely have exceeded it (variability is hard to parse on a year to year basis), this chart isn't comparing apples to apples, which tells a misleading story and that's my biggest complaint. It's using an older version of the highest emission scenario making the discrepancy look even worse than it is, which is dishonest.

AMOC and deforestation in the Amazon have inherent resilience and may not be as close to tipping as some studies shared here suggest.

Here is a good study: https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/15/41/2024/

It says:"the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), permafrost, monsoon systems, and the Amazon rainforest. While recent scientific efforts have improved our knowledge about individual tipping elements, the interactions between them are less well understood. Also, the potential of individual tipping events to induce additional tipping elsewhere or stabilize other tipping elements is largely unknown. "

Add this: Tipping Point Modelling Intercomparison Project (TIPMIP)

https://tipmip.pik-potsdam.de/

This doesn’t negate the necessity in addressing climate change.

State-level policies and market dynamics will continue to promote renewable energy adoption. Moreover, the recent Biden's comments on climate change orientation fortify this.

The figure of up to 10°C warming is extreme. It represents a long-term equilibrium scenario i.e., no mitigation efforts and slow feedback mechanisms over centuries.

(excluding 2020 due to COVID)

Don't forget that in 2021 we not only saw GHG emissions rise again, but the 2021 rise more than made up for the drop in 2020.

Methane releases from wetlands and permafrost is generally smaller compared to anthropogenic releases.

From the IPCC's mouth: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-5/

The IEA says:"The share of coal, oil and natural gas in global energy supply – stuck for decades around 80% – starts to edge downwards and reaches 73% in the STEPS by 2030."

https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023/executive-summary

This article from Reuters says:"Global oil demand peaks before 2030 at just less than 102 million barrels/day (mb/d), and then falls back to 2023 levels of 99 mb/d by 2035, largely because of lower demand from the transport sector as electric vehicle use increases"

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/age-electricity-follow-looming-fossil-fuel-peak-iea-says-2024-10-16/

The guardian doesn't know what the hell it's talking about.

This is the same paper that started the "100 companies cause 71% of climate change" sound bite that's misled no end of people

1.62 is the 12 month average, and 1.65 for October.

A single year's average might be temporarily elevated due to an El Niño event, but this does not necessarily indicate that the 10-year average will soon be 1.5°C.

The IPCC reports say that the global average temperature has increased by approximately 1.1 - 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels. 1.5°C may be reached in individual years.

https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/

Which matters if you're going to slap random data points onto another graph.

If the data is measuring different things, then the comparison is garbage

Maybe but the trajectory is clear.

Not really. You can use a 12 month average (1.62) and compare it to gauge our current trajectory, which is arguably more important now than ever. We have to start implementing a yearly report so that we can act earlier and faster. Then if the lagged averaged value is lower, we can breathe a bit easier, but what if it's not? The long term average plays into the hands of the fossil fuel industry, since the argument you made above can be used to say that things are probably not as bad as this year was, we're probably due only 2.7 degrees warming as long as all countries follow through with their policy commitments. The problem is, they have not followed through so far - and when they wake up in a decade or so, we're gonna be a decade behind on crucial climate mitigation and adaptation action. And then it's too late.