For Scandinavians and Brits especially, though others can participate in this poll, do you know what AMOC is and what it's collapse will mean?A spoiler is that a growing number of experts believe it's either already collapsed or about to collapse
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@Shivviness I do, but I'm in the northeast USA. It would have some pretty severe effects for us, but not as bad as you northern Europeans
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Why aren't our leaders, bought pigs though they are, paying more attention to this?
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@Shivviness @SallyStrange Because they put money & power before everything, because they don’t believe it will affect them because they can leave at a moments notice.
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Soon these absolute, venal idiots will realise that they've poisoned everything and there aren't any climate safe havens
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@Shivviness @SallyStrange Yep.
Fools like Trump & Farage (to name 2 of the biggest venal idiots) think that we can tech our way out of this, but the tech & knowledge we need for that will not be available to anyone currently alive.
Geo-engineering will be tried, but because we have an imperfect understanding of how our climate really works it will fail - spectacularly!
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We're likely on same page.
Where do you see us, both as a species and here locally in the UK, in twenty years' time?
Geoengineering is all we have left. There is no other viable option. And all geoengineering will do is buy us some time, which we likely won't use wisely -
@Shivviness @SallyStrange 20 years time we will be looking back at 10 years before when geoengineering is tried large scale for the 1st time.
There will be much bemoaning the results & regretting that we didn’t understand the climate better. It will be named storms every other week, extremes of temperature, droughts & floods annually.
Think the future looks grim now, wait until we try large scale geo-engineering. Remember about the butterfly flapping its wings , imagine what a butterfly 100ft tall flapping its wings will do.
Actually given the presence of big money in the UK I suspect that, so long as it hasn’t moved to Asia or elsewhere, we will be doing better than one might expect. Rich people tend to protect their interests. Life will be awful for the rest of us like, but not as awful as it might be.
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When I consider geoengineering, I think of this news story regarding bat populations and infant mortality.
As you say, a giant hypotheical butterfly flapping its wings could down the line wreak untold chaos
Collapse of bat populations increased infant mortality rate, study finds
When insect-eating bats died, farmers increased pesticide use—leading to more than 1,000 infant deaths
University of Chicago News (news.uchicago.edu)
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@Shivviness @SallyStrange Exactly.
Also money always wins - even with an anti-capability revolution (which will fuel climate change btw , think about before denying it) money will always come first, that is human nature. Down thru the centuries from the time humans first created city states. Remember that the written word was created by … accountants.
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@MAJ1 @Shivviness It's possible that an anticapitalist revolution would temporarily raise emissions. It's still true that capitalism is the biggest obstacle to ending emissions.
That aside, please do not tell me that human nature is something that you are not. Are you better than most people? I'm not. The only true "human nature" is: adaptable, creative, plastic, endlessly inventive. It's trivially easy to observe millions of people putting family, art, ideals, and many other things before money.
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@SallyStrange @Shivviness I merely base my opinion of human nature on historical precedence, we might change, that is a possibility, but history tells us that it is a faint possibility.
Me no, I’m probably much worse than most people. I have no illusions about that.
Anyway we can come back to this in 20 years & see who came closest.
I’m away to write my diary, which is actually going to be positive for once!
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@MAJ1 @Shivviness What history? The history that begins only after 95% of human existence has been skipped over? That history?
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An argument can be made that humans have been destroying this planet for the entirety of our 300k year existence
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@MAJ1 @Shivviness @SallyStrange
Go for it
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@Shivviness @SallyStrange @MAJ1
Here's a rad article about how humanity were / are good stewards of nature, but colonialism came and messed it all up."People have shaped most of terrestrial nature for at least 12,000 years"
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023483118"The current biodiversity crisis can seldom be explained by the loss of uninhabited wildlands, resulting instead from the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of the biodiverse cultural landscapes long shaped and sustained by prior societies. Recognizing this deep cultural connection with biodiversity will therefore be essential to resolve the crisis."
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@HeavenlyPossum @MAJ1 @SallyStrange
Humans tend to subjugate nature, e.g. obliterating megafauna and, since the invention of agriculture, growing monocrops to the detriment of biodiversity. Capitalism merely supercharged our ability to destroy everything
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@Shivviness @HeavenlyPossum @MAJ1 @SallyStrange We didn't even invent monocrops until the eighteenth century, so I'm going to call 'false' on that. Even then, most farms continued to be mixed farms practising crop rotation -- with fallow -- until the mid twentieth century. The modern practice of continuously cropping the same crop on the same land only became possible with the widespread availability of artificial fertiliser.
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@simon_brooke @HeavenlyPossum @MAJ1 @SallyStrange
You're right regarding monocrops.
I was trying to get at the point that agriculture of any kind exacts a cost on the environment -
@Shivviness @HeavenlyPossum @MAJ1 @SallyStrange Well, that's false, too. Organic farming demonstrably increases topsoil depth and sustains biodiversity. Whether that's a greater increase of topsoil depth than allowing the land to revert to forest (where forest would naturally grow, but the whole of the UK is naturally forest) is more debatable, I admit.
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@simon_brooke @HeavenlyPossum @MAJ1 @SallyStrange
You're suggesting that an organically farmed piece of land is more biodiverse than were we to just leave it to return to nature?
