Is There Still Time to Be Hopeful About the Climate?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/is-there-still-time-to-be-hopeful-about-the-climate

by GeraldKutney

25 comments

  4. The article is pay walled and doesn’t say anything interesting before it cuts out.

    So let me offer a nuanced take: Depends what you are hoping for. 

  5. I haven’t read the article.

    But my take is I generally really dislike how absolutist talk about climate change and its impacts are.

    People tend to say the options are “we can stop climate change” or “it’s all over, we’re all doomed”

    In reality the impacts of climate change are a spectrum and how you think about having hope is also more nuanced than just “we are screwed” or “we will be fine”. 

    From my perspective and understanding…

    We should not have hope that we will stop some devastating and horrible impacts of climate change. That’s already happening and will very likely continue to get worse for some time.

    That being said, I think we absolutely should have hope that we can and will do things which will limit how terrible things will get. Will things get bad? Yes, they will get horrible. Many people are going to be displaced and die.

    Are we going to go extinct? No. In fact I don’t think we would be close to that.

    Are we going to limit worst case scenarios? I have hope we will. 

    TLDR

    Hope for a better future even if that future will still be some level of really bad.

  6. Sure. We have a few years to hope all we want. Doesn’t change anything, but we can hope and wish all day. Kinda like prayer.

  7. Elizabeth Kolbert is the New Yorker’s climate hawk. With no disrespect to the author, I’ll take the temperature from her. It’s hot and we need to be more bothered.

  10. Almost 20 years ago, The History Channel had a show called *Life After People*, which showed what would happen to the world if humans disappeared in a puff of smoke. It didn’t provide the mechanism for our disappearance (call it the Rapture, if you’re so inclined), but they consulted all kinds of experts on what would happen on D+1 day, D+1 week, 1 year, all the way out to thousands of years. Automated systems, infrastructure, the natural world, and more.

    A couple years ago, the NOAA calculated the CO2e as 534 ppm — 419 ppm in CO2, and the remaining 115 ppm made up of the other GHG converted to their CO2 equivalents.

    >Note: The IPCC suggests that a constant concentration of CO2 alone at 550 ppm would lead to an average increase in Earth’s temperature of ~3°C (5.4°F).

    [https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/](https://gml.noaa.gov/aggi/)

    A couple months ago, Leon Simons calculated the current CO2e at 573 ppm, well past the 550 ppm quoted above.

    If humanity did disappear today, as was the premise of the show, even 573 ppm wouldn’t be our new equilibrium. Without humanity around to contain them, wildfires would rage until they consumed all of their fuel, releasing stored carbon. Permafrost would continue to thaw, releasing more stored carbon.

    Humans aren’t going to disappear today, so you can decide for yourself if there’s still hope.

  11. It ain’t looking good, it ain’t looking good at all but we have got to continue trying even if it’s an uphill climb, a very steep uphill climb.

  13. Not me anymore.

    Also not about the hormonal disturbing an cancerous PFAS (according to a Dutch research there’s at least five times too much of that in every Dutch person).

    Not about the hormonal disturbing an cancerous microplastics (which is found in as well biological honey as in human brains – o, and all the oceans have much more then we knew).

    Not about ultra fine dust (mostly from car tyres according to recent research – the smallest particles penetrate every little bit of our bodies).

    Not about any sanety amongst so-called leaders to do something about anything. Democracy means serving the big money nowadays, not taking responsibility for the future of the land or it’s citizens.

  14. Ever since the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) issued their report:

    https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/04/04/ipcc-ar6-wgiii-pressrelease/#:~:text=The%20next%20few%20years%20are,by%20a%20quarter%20by%202030

    I have been acutely aware that what we do within the next **5 years** will affect the whole planet, not just the US.

    We missed the 2025 target. Our fossil fuel reliance has not gone down fast enough. We need to ramp it up. Yes, we have 5 more years to get it right, to secure the future for our children and grandchildren.

    Make no mistake, reduction now will *slow* the effects of GLOBAL WARMING (the original name, changed because it was deemed too scary) but it will probably not change the devastation for many years to come. The healing of our planet will take decades, but only if we ACT.

    As David Bowie quipped, “Five years – that’s all we’ve got.” I can’t help but hear his plaintive cries, vocal tones which express my utter anguish.
    https://youtu.be/8gPSGrpIlkc?si=Er6dRLooc-HlxvV9

  16. Not anymore. I don’t have any faith that the humans in charge currently, will do anything meaningful to secure our survival or that of our pale blue dot. 🔵
    I guess the last thing we did collectively good, was the healing of the ozone layer. But I think that’s even being undone now….

  17. The answer is No. Nothing is just going to miraculously hit the brakes anytime soon in fact with every company wanting their own A.I. and billionaires jetting around….energy consumption is getting worse exponentially 

  18. It was likely improbable that a planet with 8 billion people that in general want food, shelter, and energy were ever going to get it in a sustainable fashion.

  20. Bro, the answer is no. The answer to this question was no 10 plus years ago. I’ve been vegetarian for 12 years and I’ve been installing solar for 10 years. My motto has been think pessimistically act optimistically. we are living during a mass extinction event, but we may be able to prevent some extinctions from happening.

  21. Not until the effects are so catastrophic that the current oligarchs are either overthrown or retreat into their private bunkers to live out the rest of their lives in luxury while the rest burn.

  22. It depends on your definitions. There were plenty of people living in starvation conditions decades ago. So there will be more people living in starvation conditions. People died from heat in the past, like in 2003 when almost 15,000 people died in France. There will be more people dying from heat.

    Pre-historic humans may have passed through an evolutionary bottleneck around a million years ago, with only about 1000 individuals for a period of more than 100,000 years. Climate change might not bring that drastic of a situation. [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487)

  23. It appears a bunch of people here did not read the article:

    Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and climate advocate, does not identify as an optimist. Even so, she is the author of a book called “What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures.” When I asked her about the 1.5-degree target, she told me, “Some people feel like, if you exceed it, it’s all over, and you can just give up.” But the difference between a narrow miss and a big one, she went on, could be hundreds of millions of lives. It could mean whether or not the places you love continue to exist. At well below two degrees, coral reefs struggle to survive; at two degrees, they may simply go extinct. “All I can really come up with is, like, Don’t be a quitter! Why are we giving up on the future of life on Earth so easily?” Johnson said. “Where is our tenacity? Where is our fortitude? We can do hard things.” 

  24. In today’s political climate, the best I can offer is nuclear winter.

  25. Hope *for what?* There’s no serious hope at this point that climate change isn’t gonna have catastrophic consequences. There’s absolutely hope that we can mitigate climate change to the point that it doesn’t cause the complete collapse of human civilization.

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