Thread by @ClimateHuman

This is NOT the "new normal." In fact it's far worse.

Climate breakdown is a ramp we're on which will get continuously more catastrophic the more fossil fuel we burn and the more forest we kill.

This is just the beginning. I am genuinely, deeply sorry. I don't make the rules.

No matter how bad things get it will ALWAYS make sense to do everything we can to stop it, at every scale from individual to community to national to international.

Climate breakdown isn't a binary, on or off. Neither is ecological breakdown.

This gorgeous Earth is incredibly precious and unique in the known universe. The known universe, by the way, is generally not exactly friendly to human life. We all walk on a very cool spaceship.

Essentially 100% of actual climate scientists agree that global heating is happening, it's caused by humans (mainly fossil fuel burning and deforestation), and it's costing us dearly in lives and dollars. The tiny number who don't have yet to present compelling evidence.

Those who claim humans will go extinct have not presented any evidence. But while this claim is unlikely, why is it even necessary to inspire action? Isn't an existential risk to human civilization & the world's great ecosystems, and the accompanying suffering enough?

We will not all suddenly die in 2030. This is the year when the IPCC special report on 1.5°C of warming recommends we are about halfway to zero global emissions relative to 2010 levels for a 50/50 chance of staying under 1.5°C. Many of us find this recommendation "conservative."

To have any chance of making the 2030 deadline we need to start NOW. Every day we wait makes success less likely.

Indeed, we've procrastinated for so long that what should have been a pretty easy transformation is now... well, no words for the scale of challenge.

We need a massive climate mobilization. We need "all of the above." We need everyone doing all they can. We need billions of climate activists. We need a Green New Deal. Climate justice isn't an ideological hanger-on it's necessary for a rapid response.

A carbon fee & dividend would be one helpful piece of the massive climate mobilization, accelerating investment toward transition and away from status quo.

The dividend part isn't optional. It's what makes the carbon fee just and sustainable.

Carbon offsets take us in the wrong direction. They help maintain the status quo. They deactivate people who would likely otherwise be change makers, allowing them to continue high carbon activities that they would likely otherwise balk against.

Flying less and otherwise burning less fossil fuel to be "individual action." It is primarily a powerful form of speech arguing that climate breakdown is indeed urgent. Raising public urgency is necessary for systems change in democracies.

30 years of tepid diplomacy and climate marches hasn't worked. At all. We're still following a 2.2% per year exponential increase in global emissions.

With our lives at risk and those in power doing nothing, nonviolent civil disobedience is the rational course of action.

Mobilization requires no new fossil fuel infrastructure. It also means that we will have to accept some changes to our lifestyles - we'll have to see energy as precious, pay somewhat more for it, use somewhat less of it. The main change for the global rich will likely be flying

The rich and rich countries will have to ramp down much faster than the poor not just for climate justice reasons but also simply because they use so much more fossil fuel (duh)

Tipping points. Amazon to savannah, loss of the great ice sheets, AMOC destabilization, permafrost C release... We don't know when or exactly how we'll cross them. They lurk uncertainly in the future. The more we emit, the close we get.

Increased atmospheric CO2 and the global heating it causes are effectively permanent on human timescales. Negative emissions technologies do not exist at scale, may never exist at scale, and it's a form of intergenerational genocide to assume our children will magically do it.

OK there are comments on a few misconceptions I **still** see around climate breakdown... listed as fast as I could type. To me these things are obvious, so I find them difficult to say. Let alone to say over and over again.