How to say Marx was right without saying “Marx was right”.
Let’s be clear about something; climate scientists almost universally agree that there is no such thing as “winning” or “losing” the fight against climate change (Suzuki, for the record, is a zoologist, not a climate scientist). This isn’t a game, there’s no referee, and no one gets a trophy at the end.
The battle against climate change is about mitigating harm. The worse we do, the more harm there will be. But there is never a point where it is “too late”. The car is going to crash, but the sooner you hit the brakes, the less damaging the impact will be. Everything we do to push the needle will save lives. There is never a point where we get to throw up our hands and succumb to the comforting fantasy that it’s “too late” to change anything.
I have a lot of respect for Suzuki, and I don’t blame him for feeling defeated with everything that’s happening, but spreading this kind of message is, dangerous, damaging, and flies entirely in the face of the science.
Back before George W Bush directed NASA to call it climate change, it was called global warming, and you can definitely win against that - by stopping the earth from warming. That’s unwinnable due to feedback loops that have now begun.
Does not remotely address my point. We can always - always - work to reduce the harm caused by climate change.
The point where the harm could be reduced to “none” is decades past us. If that’s the point where you give up then fuck off. Climate change is actively causing harm as we speak, and it is still worth fighting. We can still make life better for ourselves and future generations.
The notion that climate change is some kind of runaway engine that will continue amok without any further human input is nonsense. Yes, I’m aware of ideas like “Permafrost methane bombs” and I’ve also done enough research to be aware that only a small fringe of climate scientists actually support those ideas. They’re flashy and exciting and get big press, but they are not widely accepted climate science.
What climate science shows is that the climate actually responds faster to reductions in CO2 than our older models predicted. That means that debacarbonization can have real and meaningful positive impacts beyond what we previously thought possible.
There is real damage already done, and there is damage that we cannot undo, but there is never a point where the problem goes beyond our input. The climate fight is always worth fighting.
“Too late” implies civilization collapse to me. That’s pretty much guaranteed once the warming we’re locked into happens.
Suzuki is and always was just a mouthpiece for corporate masters. Controlled opposition to steer public opinion. He is not and never will be a climatologist. His message is one of defeat because his backers want us to give up.
Suzuki can kiss my white ass.
Sort of? I don’t think he mentioned tipping points anywhere in there, it was pretty non-specific and ranty, but if we’ve passed a tipping point it becomes less a matter of applying a brake and more of actively causing massive climate change in the other direction. Failing that, the warming trend and other shifts will stop when the Earth reaches a new balance and no sooner.
Nobody really knows where those tipping points are. The Paris thresholds were our expert’s best guesses for a “safe” amount of warming.
Even if we do pass some kind of “tipping point” (and you need to understand that every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem), we can still mitigate the damage. There is never a point where fighting climate change becomes worthless. The less we do now, the greater the damage will be in the future. That’s all there is to it. Tipping points are just a way of illustrating that.
every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem
That is completely, utterly wrong. Climate scientists are talking about the physical concept of the tipping point, which is observed in nature and also comes out of their models. In climate, it’s the point at which reversing a change that originally happened over decades would take thousands of years. For example, this has been the huge concern with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which plays a large role in the climate of western Europe: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2791639/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation
Especially read the sections about Stability and vulnerability, Effects of an AMOC slowdown, and Effects of an AMOC shutdown.
My point is, tipping points are absolutely not an arbitrary thing. They are very solid predictions based on the physics of the climate. We don’t necessarily understand exactly how close we are, even though we’re observing some effects of being close to them, but the impacts of crossing them will make climate change even worse and hence the alarm.
Edit: If anyone reads these links and your eyes glaze over and you don’t understand of word of what’s written, then you need the humility to listen and accept what climate scientists have been trying to tell you. Some of the smartest people on the planet have been working on this for decades.
If that’s what we’re meaning when we talk about “tipping points”, yes, they exist. But as you yourself said, “We don’t necessarily understand exactly how close we are.” The idea that passing some arbitrary line like “1.5 degrees” is a point of no return is unscientific nonsense, and that’s what the vast majority of people mean when they say “tipping points.”
And the point is, none of that changes the need to keep working towards improvement. Every fraction of a degree less the planet heats will make a difference. Even as monumental climate changes occur, those changes can be lessened, their impact reduced, by any amount that we decarbonise the atmosphere.
If you’re under the impression that I’m arguing against climate change being real in any way shape or form, or that I’m arguing against it being utterly catastrophic, you’ve missed my point so badly that you might as well be reading it in a different language. My point is very, very simple; there is never a point where we get to give up.
No matter what happens, every effort to reduce the damage to our climate will save lives. Things can always be worse, and because things can always be worse it ontologically follows that things can always be better, even when the definition of "better’ is “fewer people die.”
The fight isn’t lost or won. Get those concepts out of your mind. Suzuki - as brilliant as he may be - is an idiot for invoking them like this. He’s speaking about a very limited, very specific piece of the fight, but he should have understood that the public would take his words entirely out of context. The people who want to poison and destroy our planet for profit are, right now, actively pushing the propaganda that the battle against climate change is over. They are wrong, and they are lying. The battle against climate change is a battle to reduce harm, and you can always reduce harm, now matter how great the scale of the eventual harm may be.
I think it helps to look at other problems caused by fossil fuel use. Higher CO2 concentrations make breathing air worse. Ocean acidification kills fish etc.
I think the bigger impact is thinking about changing weather patterns long term leading to new and larger deserts in the centres of continents and regular, massive storms on the coasts. That’s a changing climate beyond “everybody is a few degrees hotter” that is implied by global warming. CO2 isn’t going to effect breathing, but does cause acidification.
(and you need to understand that every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem)
every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem
The +1.5C threshold is a somewhat arbitrary line designed around tipping points. The tipping points themselves are not imaginary/arbitrary. Forest fire spread increase. Methane defrosting. Polar melting path certainty. All of these increase GHGs and warming. Hurricane intensity+drought+intense rainfall events destroying property values is somewhat of an economic tipping point starting to affect some right now.
In your car crash analogy, we are now past the point where hitting the brakes will help. The car will be irrepairably destroyed and all passengers will be killed.
This is flat out wrong. In fact, the more co2 is emitted, the more extreme the consequences are. The change from 0->1 degree of global warming barely registers. The change from 3->4 degrees is catastrophical, for example.
Thus, the warmer it gets, the more worth it is to fight against it, as each small win contributes more to the bottom line than in the beginning.
Just put ice in the airbags.
That’s why it’s an analogy, and not reality.
There is no point where hitting the brakes will not help. We can always reduce the amount of harm done.
This seems like the “comforting fantasy” to me. Or a terrible analogy.
The comforting fantasy is the idea that we can throw up our hands and say “We lost.”
Losing is easy. It demands nothing from us. Losing has no call to action. If we’ve lost, then there’s no fight left to be fought.
The reality is that the fight is always worth fighting. And that sucks, because it means we never get to give up. We never get to say “It’s over”, and stop caring. Caring is a lot harder.
In not an appropriate analogy. We are not just the people in the car, we are the whole neighborhood.
Even if the people in the car cannot prevent a crash by braking, they can still prevent further damage to people and property by braking as much as possible while within their means.
Yeah, it’s more about the people in the car taking their foot off the gas so they don’t get going fast enough to crash through multiple houses and burn the whole neighborhood down. Still worth doing even if we’re well past the point of hitting the brakes preventing any damage.
We haven’t taken our foot off the gas and legislators are stopping us from even touching the brake pedal.
I think we’re past the point of the car hitting the wall even if we brake, and the damage ruining your day. We’re not past the point that braking will save lives or even make the car unrepairable.
It was the climate scientists that agreed +1.5 degrees was the threshold we shouldn’t cross, and yes, it’s too late.
It’s not too late to make things worse by giving up! /s
Canada (and the world) will burn. You think migrants are a problem now? Wait until millions of people have no choice but to go north and the water wars start.
O damn, almost forgot about the water wars. Those were brutal. Before those people genuinely believed there was nothing bigger than a World War. The fools. Like if you’re still here in 2125.
The water wars will start far sooner than that
Pakistan and India, Egypt and Ethiopia. Various states in the southwest are looking to pop off when the civil war starts up. Water wars are starting NOW.
the spice must flow!
@asg101 I agree we’ve lost the opportunity and will have to “hunker down”. But hearing it from David Suzuki is…hard.
Fuck that. It’s never lost, it’s just that we are constantly heading towards worse outcomes.
If we as humanity start taking it seriously tomorrow, it would still be a victory over only starting in a decade.
It’s not lost, it’s just getting worse, and that should make people want to fight.
saying that the fight is lost is just creating more disengagement and hopelessness.
I like the saying “The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best is today.” Because it is almost universally true about any long term goal.
You are using the broadest possible definition of “lost.”
Lost as in no more human civilization. It doesn’t matter when you start doing stuff, that future is coming. We could maybe slow it at this point, but not much else and even that is up for debate with all the tipping points being reached. They will have a far greater effect on the climate than anything that we do now.
Human civilization is bound to die at some point. If we give up now it will just happen faster and with more suffering. If we fight we will still improve things, maybe not everything will be okay, but when has it ever been?
There’s also the biosphere to think about. Even in we go, it doesn’t mean that all life has to go with us
We kill 80 billion land animals per year for factory farming and we’ve caused almost 2 species of animal per year, every year, to go completely extinct over the last 500 years.
We are going to destroy almost all life on this planet.
Even if we intentionally released as much co2 as we could all life on earth is not at risk. Remember that there’s a fair amount of life that is virtually unchanged since the paleozoic period when all that co2 was in the air. Beyond that there’s stuff that hangs out in volcanic vents, rapidly evolving life that can adapt even to rapid change, bacteria, molds, mosses and algae. And who knows maybe there’s even a small adaptable mammal or 2 that gets out and evolves enough for a second attempt at sapience.
Don’t get me wrong the climate disaster is truly a unique and devastating extinction event, but humans are not so powerful as to leave the earth a completely lifeless rock.
So this is the meagre hope I cling to now. I guess it’ll have to do.
Exactly. Fuck the humans, at this point I just want as much as else possible to be saved.
I suppose it wasn’t clear in my comment but I’m not advocating for doing nothing. Just to have realistic expectations about what is possible. If you sell everyone on reversing everything, and then fail, it will breed discontent further than being honest. That’s all.
But we’re not starting tomorrow. It’s not that we’re clueless, we know what to do and why, but we don’t.
Luigis for billionaires would be a great start.
We have started to reduce how much worse we make it, and a fair bit of progress has been made there in some countries, UK carbon emissions are less than half what they were per capita several decades ago.
When I was young we had a fireplace and would often burn coal in winter. Now I have a heat pump to warm my entire house by extracting thermal energy from the atmosphere.
We are light years a head of where we were a century ago. And I hope in a few decades it will be true about today.
the focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because they are based around humans. They’re designed to guide humans, but we’ve left out the foundation of our existence, which is nature, clean air, pure water, rich soil, food, and sunlight. That’s the foundation of the way we live and, when we construct legal, economic and political systems, they have to be built around protecting those very things, but they’re not.
Powerful truth!
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I gave up a long time ago. The last time we really did anything about an issue like this was lead in gasoline. 50+ years of knowing we had to change. I wonder if maybe the wealthy elites know whats coming. I wonder if this new rise in facism is partially an answer to the fact that there won’t be enough of anything to go around. That is why they want us having babies. for soliders. I hope they have some spark of humanity and let people self terminate but I bet you would need money for it.
Just wanted to add that maybe the last thing that we did for the environment and that really worked was for acid rain in 1991. At least where I live.
A few years before that there was the Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs and helped to heal the hole in the ozone layer. I think.
But yeah, I don’t remember anything of the sort recently,
Where I live people are replacing furnaces with heat pumps, if enough do it could make a minuscule effect.
What about ozone layer?
I’m pretty sure that’s what the grab for Ukraine and Trump’s stated intent to annex Greenland is about. Both of those have the potential to become food security sources after significant global heating. I’m also pretty sure that’s why authoritarians are seizing control of govt (and by extension that govts security services) because there won’t be enough to go around and they’re going to need soldiers to keep the hungry people away from their billionaire breadbaskets.
Genuinely seen conspiracy theorists say “they removed lead paint to that they can control you with 5g”
If we still had lead gasoline, people would say you can pry it out of their cold dead hands
We do still have leaded petrol. All piston engined aircraft are still burning fuel with added lead.
what possible reason could there be in self termination when there is a good fight to be fought (against the oppressors)
If you gave up a long time ago, then why did you bother to write that comment? Clearly you haven’t given up.
Has been for ages. It’s now question of how bad, and we are still making it worse.
I’m sick of this WE, im not a billionaire pumping more Co2 per day with my yacht fleet than a town of people do in their life. I’m sick of being blamed for this shit, when all my conservation is undone in a minute by a corporation. I refuse to take equal blame any longer
Good point. I try my best, but even if like 90 % of the population tried harder, it would barely offset the billionaire companies killing our planet.
They’re the problem, always has been that way.
I think it’s time to stop them.
The best we can do for the planet is toss a few billionaires into a volcano as a sacrifice to earth
I’m down.
Now that’s some carbon sequestration
This simply isn’t correct. While the billionaires yacht fleet and jet setting make them have insane carbon footprints individually, it is their business practices that actually register in terms of contributing significant chunks of the carbon budget for humanity. Bezo’s jets and yachts pale in comparison to Amazons delivery fleet and manufacturing all that junk. It’s counterproductive to focus on their personal emissions, when it’s the interaction of their businesses, government, and consumers that are burning the earth. We have 2 levers on that problem.
You’re right. I was thinking more about the individuals responsible capture and refining of fossil fuels.
But the pretty ubiquitous use of Amazon delivery does greatly contribute a lot. Didn’t really think about it in that aspect. Thanks for pointing that out.
Well, one way in which we can help fight against climate change is by not eating meat or dairy products.
For anyone curious about the subject, there’s some good science backing that up, though the links I’m providing are lazy DDG searches, so if anyone wants to do it, they can probably find better sources out there with more information.
Going vegan, or at least mostly vegan, is the way to go. Can start with going vegetarian and at least swapping out meat sources. Alternative vegan protein sources
With that being said, I do not practice what I preach. I should, though.
Again though, I do all these things and it doesn’t matter cause my entire life’s output of CO2 is being put out by one guy in an hour. I’m turning off lights and corporate buildings are running all the lights and AC 24/7
If the majority of people did, it actually would make a massive difference. This whole “but billionaires” and “but corporations” is just being used as an excuse to do absolutely nothing by far too many people.
All of those people doing nothing are why we are in this mess.
The actual problem is democratic oligarchism/zionism/neocon warmongering/US colonialism. Protecting establishment is easily supported when higher priorities than human sustainability can be manufactured. The more miserable you are made, the less you care about “higher level Maslow hierarchy needs” at political level.
The best way to reduce all the excess manufacturing for livestock is by not buying it their products. If it’s all about ROI for them, give them a reason to reduce their manufacturing with your purchasing power.
The best way to reduce all the excess manufacturing for livestock is by not buying it their products.
has that ever worked?
A lot of people in western countries are living unsustainable lifestyles. Yes we need to target the billionaires too, but that alone won’t solve it. Also stop buying their shit. Actually, just stop buying shit in the first place as that is a large part of the problem.
And we’re gonna increasingly train more AI, mine more crypto, open more coal mines, industrially kill more animals, fight more wars.
Lol yup, trump also went all in on climate denial. Definitely fucked.
Giving up is exactly where the “too late” come from, quitter shouldn’t be leading climate advocacy.
I mean…the next steps involves lots of fire and death…so…that’s not going to save the environment either but it will certainly send a message.
Thanks to big corporations effectively owning governments and big politicians the world over, things aren’t bound to get better anytime soon, because “the economy”. Fuck that shit
And thank the Saudis too. Guess where the previous conference on phasing out fossil fuel, but agreed to slow down the process, was held.
I think he’s right, but he’s also a real asshole and lives in a mansion in Vancouver and likely creates more environmental damage than the average human
If I had mansion money I would buy land to live in a self built mud hut.
Most everyone who’s even slightly well off in north America creates significantly more environmental damage than the average human
Yep, Trump just put all our climate mitigation funds into big oil. We’re cooked.
And Trunp is bringing back coal too. Fucked doesn’t even describe it.
Saying we have failed is the easiest thing to say.
Because its true?
Barely anything had been done these past decades and the result is that boat loads of people now believe conspiracy crap over the actual truth that climate change will milk us all
I fully expect that even less will be done in the next years so yeah, were screwed
Fight for climate change is not lost, it’s still actively being fought by scientists, entrepreneurs, content creators, journalists and activists all over the planet.
Oil companies like this narrative of lost. It was always, don’t worry we still have time until now when it’s leaning towards “whoopsie too late”. It’s not too late, we are not all going to die because of climate change.
Right now climate change is on track to be horrible for large parts of the world but there’s plenty more we can fuck up beyond that.
There is also the potential for climate solutions. We have been driving things in one direction by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There are ways to do the opposite rapidly, just not as easy. Solar/Wind/Nuclear powered carbon sequestration and ocean fertilization are possible if all else is lost.
Happy to discuss realistic impactful solutions rather than just cycling doomerism with anyone interested.
I mean, that’s the thing. We all know there are solutions. But governments and billionaires at this point have to make the solutions happen, and they have no interest in many places. Hell, they’re actively working on behalf of climate change and environmental destruction in the US just to own the Libs and to the cheers of the rabid troglodyte portion of its populace. You don’t just have to contend with getting the facts to people, you have to contend with being but one voice amid all the antifacts that everyone is bombarded daily on every topic.
I know I’m a doomer, but sans an effective virus that takes out 80% of the population and mostly targets anyone right of center and all of the billionaires, I don’t think we have this one in us.
I suggest actually doing something about it then. Direct your frustration towards something productive. Take the risk because if we don’t then no one will.
Here’s why your comment is horseshit:
The cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) technology dropped by 81% since 2009, and wind and battery costs have also plummeted. By 2017, most new power-generating capacity added worldwide came from renewables, not fossil fuels.
A comprehensive review of 1,500 climate policy measures across 41 countries found 63 cases of successful policies, each leading to an average emission reduction of 19%. The most effective policies combined tax and price incentives with regulations and subsidies.
Although global greenhouse gas emissions reached record highs in the 2010s, the rate of growth has slowed, in part due to climate policies and the adoption of cleaner technologies.
The Montreal Protocol (1987) successfully phased out ozone-depleting substances, demonstrating that coordinated global action can work. This agreement also had climate benefits, as many of the banned substances were potent greenhouse gases.
And here is why your comment is horseshit:
Yeah, the ozone issue was handled marvelously but the much bigger CO2 issue has been treated like… Well, just plain not. The Paris climate accords were a joke and still just about all countries wiped their ass with it.
Solar being so super cheap now is awesome! Just that, you know, the US is working hard to kill anything that is not coal and oil, and most countries have been increasing CO2 emissions, not decreasing them. We multiple times passed points of “holy shit this is a no return” and do you remember everyone aiming for an insane 1.5 degree increase? Pepperidge farm remembers… We just keep pushing the acceptable temperature increase up because economy baby!
So yeah, politicians world wide don’t give a shit, we went multiple times over the line and still no one with power gives a shit. This “then you do something” is also a bullshit argument because here I am, literally right now separating paper and plastic but i know the plastic goes straight into some dump anyway because again, politicians don’t give a shit, and rich assholes keep flying big jets for fun…
It’s exhausting, and yeah, we’re fucked as a species
This is as far as I read “And here is why your comment is horseshit:”
Doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.
How to say Marx was right without saying “Marx was right”.
Hard disagree, this is a liberal doing the usual thing. As John Bellamy Foster elaborates on in his articles and books, the fight against climate change isn’t lost, it’s been abandoned by the ruling class of imperial core countries. Look up some of his stuff on Monthly Review the ecological rift is a very important concept that never appears in the kind of discourse you’re posting
So, how long do we have left?
No one knows, many humans and other species are already dying from climate change today. Get used to hearing the phrase “It is happening much faster than expected.” from now on.
Guess people better start updating their plans then. No point in starting a family and having kids when they’ll just die to climate change.
People are doing that. Fertility rates are way below replacement rates. Now billionaires are freaking out that their customer base and work force is shrinking.
And the solution is of course outlawing abortions, instead of keeping the planet in a habitable state.
Others have already tried banning abortions and it was a total failure, but ideology says it’s a great idea so there they go again.
I am way ahead of you.
I’m curious if we will hit a correctional point when most of life dies off and civilization can restart. I’m picturing some fallout/metro kind of shit where people need to love underground for centuries.
“Collapse is a process, not an event.” It’s very likely we’ll be extinct by the end of the century. There will be all manner of hell from now until then. Our population of over 8 billion is only possible because of a highly complex global web of systems. Complex systems are fragile. Once dominos start falling, people will start starving very quickly.
Its entirely possible that 99% of humanity dies but I don’t really buy into us going extinct. People have an inate drive to survive and even if things are genuinely horrible I don’t see them just giving up. Unless there is literally no food/potable water I think the planet is stuck with some form of humanity until the planet is uninhabitable. Remember there are still dinosaurs around today, they just look different.
This guy says climate change mitigation will be a blip on the radar of economic growth:
Hooooly shit, that man is a sociopath. It’s no wonder we’re barrelling into 5°C with people like him driving the world’s economy.
He’s done the classic trader thing:
- Classify everything based on its financial value
- Ignore the real-world implications of things that don’t fit his models
- Take it as a given that markets will always behave the same way regardless of point 2.
This guy has no fucking clue about human beings and does not give a single shit about human beings. His opinion can be safely discarded
I would say under ten years if we are talking about staying in “life as we know it.” Global food supplies are at risk. We are going to see mass die offs in large portions of the ocean. AMOC and the Jet stream will continue to wobble around causing mayhem. Coastale areas will become eroded and huge portions of the infrastructure will become unfixable as the disasters come too frequently for any real, long term repairs to remain.
Think about that term, tipping piont. Tipping does not imply a gentle decent.
The typical Lemming will be poorer but fine, unless it triggers other human disasters like a nuclear exchange. The lower classes of Bangladesh, less so, and 95%+ of coral reefs are fucked.
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I didn’t know 13 year olds used Lemmy.
My mom is a pile of ashes in an urn. Doubt she could do anything to sea levels.
that’s a loaded and optimistic question. With the way the world is going currently being taken out by climate change and only climate change is awfully optimistic. I think that would be the best case scenario at this point.
