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Earth Science

World Heading Into 'Uncharted Territory of Destruction,' Says Climate Report 294

The world's chances of avoiding the worst ravages of climate breakdown are diminishing rapidly, as we enter "uncharted territory of destruction" through our failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions and take the actions needed to stave off catastrophe, leading scientists have said. From a report: Despite intensifying warnings in recent years, governments and businesses have not been changing fast enough, according to the United in Science report published on Tuesday. The consequences are already being seen in increasingly extreme weather around the world, and we are in danger of provoking "tipping points" in the climate system that will mean more rapid and in some cases irreversible shifts.

Recent flooding in Pakistan, which the country's climate minister claimed had covered a third of the country in water, is the latest example of extreme weather that is devastating swathes of the globe. The heatwave across Europe including the UK this summer, prolonged drought in China, a megadrought in the US and near-famine conditions in parts of Africa also reflect increasingly prevalent extremes of weather. The secretary general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, said: "There is nothing natural about the new scale of these disasters. They are the price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction. This year's United in Science report shows climate impacts heading into uncharted territory of destruction."
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World Heading Into 'Uncharted Territory of Destruction,' Says Climate Report

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  • Something needs to save us from the constant whining about the end of the world.

  • How many private jets were flown by dignitaries to herald the evils of carbon emissions?
    • Re:Private Jets (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @12:47PM (#62878109)

      At this point the collective hot air of everyone pointing this hypocrisy out raise temps 1C.

      Like we get it, you're not wrong, the wealthy in the world are hypocritical dirtbags but the people who always point this out also refuse to raise taxes or do anything to disrupt the wealthy and their lifestyle and insist that their money is beyond reproach.

      • Like we get it, you're not wrong, the wealthy in the world are hypocritical dirtbags but the people who always point this out also refuse to raise taxes or do anything to disrupt the wealthy and their lifestyle and insist that their money is beyond reproach.
        Sir, do yourself a favor and watch the devil speech in "a Man for All Seasons," only replace devil with rich person. And then realize that once we start taking all rich people's money we probably won't stop there, and we can all be equal in our misery.
        • That's great that a movie exists and is good and that it makes a point but it has little to do with the economic and political reality of wealth inqueality and sensible taxation policies in a modern economy.

          Quotes are nice and all to talk about but we are talking about policy here and honestly it feels like a distraction from the real issue to bring up what is essentially fuction as a response.

      • I want to ask you something, so lets say you tax everyone into whatever oblivion that is to your liking, imagine that it changes nothing at all from point of view of the climate control on this planet, so what then? Will you be the first to demand that everyone now starts working for the government directly, so that one huge government is placed on top of everything to decide what every single individual human should be doing, how they should be working, where, how they should be spending whatever is left

        • Holy slippery slope Batman.

          How about we just move the tax brackets that were in place in the 1970's, adjust the capital gains rate to a more reasonable rate closer to the income tax rate and implement some redistributive efforts and go from there.

          I am also not exactly looking for a one to one tax rate to environmental outcomes, don't be so quick to motte-and-bailey me.

          Beyond the taxes primarily I would be tickled pink if we moved to a sane multi-payer universal healthcare system and maybe some sort of feder

  • by nucrash ( 549705 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @12:39PM (#62878079)

    I can't wait to talk to my kid some day about Climate Change.

    Sorry kiddo. We had a great planet but some people fucked it all up because not wrecking it would cut into their profit margins.

    • I'm Gen X and that's exactly the conversation my parents had with me in the 1980s.

      It's not all about you, kiddo.

  • Sounds like they're conflating weather and climate.

  • by bb_matt ( 5705262 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @12:59PM (#62878165)

    I'm usually a glass half-full kinda guy, but it seems completely clear to me that humanity ain't gonna get out of this climate bind in a hurry.

    I guess the most ridiculous and shocking aspect, is how the fuck anthropogenically induced climate change was denied for so long.
    We've had decades to sort this out - FFS, scientists working for "big oil" warned their bosses of the potential outcome nearly 5 decades ago.

    Guess what, they were right.

    The general consensus now, finally, is that it's real, it's happening ... and there's nothing we can do but adapt. ... and pray that tipping points don't send the climate right off the charts, to "hot house earth" - because that is game over for human civilisation.

    Meanwhile, the planet just absorbs it and changes - "been there, seen that, got the t-shirt".

    No matter how bad things get - even complete nuclear annihilation of 99% of life - earth will rebound.
    Sure, it may take a few hundred thousand years and more, but it will.

    In the meantime, within anyone under 70's lifetime, profound changes are unfolding that will require rapid adaptation.

    We kinda know the story - seen enough disaster movies, read enough sci-fi - the first step is a rapid decline in food production.
    If global harvests fail in multiple regions, for 2 or 3 years in a row, for the poorest, that equals starvation.
    Clearly, when faced with that prospect, humans tend to migrate.

    Migration is soon going to reach epic proportions, which in turn will result in regional conflict - war.

    How quickly will this all happen?

    Who knows - the best climate scientists agree, at least behind the scenes, we've squandered any chance of a soft landing.
    What is considerably alarming is changes that were predicted to happen decades from now, are already happening.

    The most "out there" scientists, the "glass half full" types, are giving us literally two decades before civilisation collapse.

    How can that possibly be true? How can it possibly happen? We're safe, right? We're modern? We've got tech?

    Back to food again - the global breadbaskets - you can't move those in a hurry - starvation and conflict due to that, will cause the collapse of our current civilisation.

    Good luck, fellow humans. We're in for a wild ride.

    • It is more or less retrospectively the same as the whole 'smoking causes cancer' except, once they put public smoking restrictions in place, it is pretty easy to avoid significant contamination from smokers. Not so with the environment. The stressors it is creating are already being exploited by authoritarians, I'm not sure where it will end up. The richest countries may well have the resources to shoulder through much of it, although depending on how things get allocated you'll end up with either a lowe
      • by bb_matt ( 5705262 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @01:48PM (#62878443)

        It is more or less retrospectively the same as the whole 'smoking causes cancer' except, once they put public smoking restrictions in place, it is pretty easy to avoid significant contamination from smokers. Not so with the environment. The stressors it is creating are already being exploited by authoritarians, I'm not sure where it will end up. The richest countries may well have the resources to shoulder through much of it, although depending on how things get allocated you'll end up with either a lower standard of living or else a brutal oligarchy. We've seen where the latter gets you with Russia ever striving for complete demographic collapse.

        Succinct reply - there is no escape when it comes to biosphere change/collapse(?)

        It's really a case of crisis piled on top of crisis - as is ever the human condition - with that extra fun part "no escape".

        I'll take a lower standard of living any day of the week, yet it seems clear that brutal oligarchy will rapidly rise as the food runs out.
        We're already seeing a shift toward the far right and we're already seeing what happens when resources are scarce.
        It's almost as if the pandemic was a "practice exercise" for the coming storm.
        Yet, if you read more deeply into climate change one of the predicted outcomes is indeed pandemics - a warming earth, humans ever closer to nature as it collapses.

        That "practice exercise" of the pandemic showed all of us both the best and the worst of humankind.
        The "great toilet roll shortage" of 2020, whilst somewhat funny, was a little tiny blip of what we face - there was plenty of "loo roll", it's just that the media panicked everyone - and they went on a panic buy splurge.

        Imagine that splurge with basic food staples, like wheat or rice. Not so much you can't wipe your bottom, more that you can't feed your stomach.
        Queues outside supermarkets, fights breaking out, governments under pressure sending in the military to calm things down - but just exacerbating the situation.

        We're about to witness the terrible fragility of "just in time" (JIT) economics - heck, we already are.

        JIT made things cheaper, but the result of that, is less storage of ... everything. Food, fuel, electronics - whatever.

        Fun times.

    • This planet will only give an advance civilization one chance with easy to access fossil fuels. To use a new energy source you need it to return about 7 times as much energy as you put into harnessing it. So we burned wood in most of the world until fairly recently even though we knew about coal because with low industrialization coal doesn't give you the return you need. All the easy to extract coal is now gone, same with the oil and the conditions to create easily accessible deposits are likely not goi
    • by J-1000 ( 869558 )

      The general consensus now, finally, is that it's real, it's happening

      We'll know there's a consensus when Fox News and Newsmax begin warning about climate change and the urgent need to fix it.

    • Meanwhile, the planet just absorbs it and changes - "been there, seen that, got the t-shirt".

      Humanity owes our present rule of the land to the K-T extinction. A geologic boundary marked by iridium enrichment around the globe.

      Perhaps it will be the descendants of the cephalopods that will owe their rule to the Anthropocene extinction. An event marked geologically by a thin sediment of microplastics and PFAS's.

  • If we bury our heads deep enough, plug our ears and scream loud enough, eventually the mean old scientists will listen to us!
  • send ManBearPig to moscow!

  • I've got 20kg of popcorn, 10 litres of coconut oil, 4kg of salt, and a really good lidded camping pot.

    Let the spectacle commence.

  • We got NFTs!

    So that's okay, right?

  • But the large mammals are f*cked.

    Pack your shit, folks--we're goin' away.

    [With apologies to George Carlin.]

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Most of the mammals are probably fine too. There's one that depends on reliable weather for extremely optimized agriculture that supports an outrageous population in incredible luxury. That one is going to have some bad times.

      Actually, the other mammals will probably come out ahead.

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