Do we still feel the bad fallout of global heating will hit Generation Greta, not us Boomers? Is our mind still fogged by tales of 2050 and 2100, far off, geographically and time-wise?
I know, mine used to be. Is yours still? Take this poll, and maybe another at the end of the🧵
It was exactly 2 years ago, when I first realised that it's deep the sh* is we're in.
16 sober climate scientists wrote that rapid, wide-spread transformation and individual BEHAVIOUR change is required.
Behaviour change? Isn't it enough to switch to RE? That made me dig deeper
So I learned a bit about carbon cycle, read a small book, started to follow cli-sci on twitter, read a few papers...
you all know the drill. Abstraction, abstraction, abstraction... It's a safe space and I need it once in a while.
Haven't read SR15, as in line by line. More like aimlessly grazing or searching for a particular term, reading a few pages...
about shfting climate zones,, incomplete biome moves, CO2 budgets, effects on humans etc.
What gripped my imagination most tho were the "Storylines":
My translation attempt: myworldwidewindow.wordpress.com/2019/08/18/sto…
(Btw: a "big economy"like Germany where people's vote matters a LOT...It is here that the climate saboteur Dr Merkel and her party set the tone since 2005! And we have no official translation to German of all of @IPCC_CH reports??)
So anyway. Ofc, I developed a climate compassion with beings, suffering from my ignorance (Boomer👋) and our continued Western apathy. I knew soon that we must reduce MUCH faster to mitigate it. But somehow, in my mind, the suffering stayed outside my personal probable experience
Little did I know: the climate change fallout had already reached our shores and had caused suffering here, in Germany. #Luebcke
I didn't connect the dots. I wasn't able yet to connect dots towards the near-term future. So compassion stayed with polar bears, Bangladesh or "Greta"
I wasn't able to connect the dots. It was merely my compassion with "far-away suffering" in terms of geography and time, which brought me to activism.
How then can less compassionate people agree to immediate, swift, decisive action?
Not by tales of polar bears or 2100🤷♀️
I realised: we need to convince others of near-term fallout on their very own comfy lives
- or we won't create majorities for what is truly necessary (and that doesn't end at merely swapping FF with RE!)
Luckily -or sadly-the near-term fallout on our own societies and lives is real. It can be described, and evidence-based, too. One just needs to really LOOK and clear the mind of the foggy 2050 / 2100 or economists' €narratives€
We must look and describe it quickly to create majorities for what is truly necessary.
The description must come from scientists, from historians, social psychologists, political and military or "security" scientists. And they must write in our daily newspapers @ScientistsX, ..
evidence based in our daily papers, ie not a blog or unknown/untrusted media outlet. Maybe as a dialogue between climate scientists and historians. Or for example, a political historian translates these numbers here
Barbarism wd have no end this time.
Ppl not directly affected by the likely socio-political change: do they WANT to live like ze Nazi Germans -forever? They'd always know: their looking away causes suffering & horror. My gramp's soul split and withered...
Swift action can stave off SOME of the suffering and ensuing climate flight.
But knowing likely socio-political fallout means, WE can set the tone in this topic💪, swiftly prepare our housing capacity, our culture & citizens for refugees AND prepare ppl in originating countries.
Preparing future refugees & receiving societies is part of adaption to climate change. So we need to read about possible Hitlers in newspapers from [climate] scientists with white-coat-authority. It's not enough if Luisa talks about it in EU or if I do, as a no-name. @ScientistsX
(Don't worry about costs or labour market. WE define what paid work is. [Also, boomers start their retirement] Anyway, we have enough to do in the next 20yrs. So much in fact that manpower is one of the bottlenecks for being quick enough for 6 revolutions:
Near-term fallout of climate change are likely Hitlers in EU & US. But we can swing that fate around with realism and non-racist adaption strategies💪
Another is unrest from rising food prices in EU/US. Yes🤷♀️
(Rahmstorf mentions synchronous crop failure🇺🇸🇷🇺🇪🇺in his new article)
When jetstream causes floods/draughts in all 3 breadbaskets - like already in 2018 🇪🇺🇷🇺🇺🇸, what is going to happen when the national stores run empty? We import from other regions. But we're ~1bn ppl. So it'll be a lot of imports. Enough? Or hunger & unrests in exporting regions?
And that's not a question for "2050/2100", guys and gals. More like 2025/2030.
Does it matter if our imports cause hunger & unrests in exporting regions? We've got to hear from scientists how it falls back on us, too: unrests are a risk for geopolitical "order"and supply chains.
And every unrest anywhere bears the risk of right-wing influence or powergrab. Why should it concern you if you're climate-aware but right-ish yourself?
Rightwingers ditch climate policy🔥🔥Or cause "conservatives" to ditch climate policies to gain back voters. Eg
🇺🇸🇮🇳🇧🇷🇭🇺🇵🇱🇩🇪🇬🇧
("Conservatives" need to read about that particular fallout in newspapers - from scientists. So conservative voters might draw a red line where climate policy is concerned, and no longer accept diluting / discarding climate policy as their self-narrative or in election campaigns)
Poll at the end of the🧵:
did reading about it change your awareness wrt near-term socio-political fallout of AGW on your very own life?
Can you ask social scientists to write evidence-based newspaper articles wrt near-term fallout on *our* lives?
Write about it in the comments✏️
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
@MarvinTBaumann @ClimateDad77 I get your psych. thinking. But. Sit down and sketch a project plan with milestones and deadlines for keeping tech-civilisation afloat. Don't forget culture change toward solidarity: You'll find that only today's decision makers in econ & politics still ⏩
@MarvinTBaumann @ClimateDad77 can change our trajectory on time=in budget. With "today's decision makers" I really mean today's. So it doesn't matter a lot if non-decision-makers get depressed [by the truth]. It's not in their hands anymore, anyway. Covid saw to that. (That's how close we are to deadlines!)⏩
@MarvinTBaumann @ClimateDad77 On the other hand: realizing the truth in the big likelihood of a total crash soon frees up resources for also realizing what can be done today to help crash survivors. It's not the "end of the world" when tech-civilisation ends. People & rural communities can prepare but need⏩
Even renaissance societies relied on extraction, international trade and specialisation.
But rekindled societies after the collapse only have non-useful know-how at first, resulting in caveman-level of useful sophistication
– *and* again rely on fossil and wood fuel for even the most basic tasks.
I agree with Robert Harris' "Second Sleep" where only population outside metropolitan areas survive the famine and violence. How could we today help the survivors to rekindle a *sustainable* organisation?
Which cultures r likely to rekindle societal organisation beyond tribes? IMO non-urban S-America. How to bolster those future attempts today, paper knowledge caches? How to curate that knowledge for its likely usefulness? "When there's no pharma industry: medicine for dummies"...
The soft-sci troubadours sing about degrowth and doughnuts. Ballads of soft "transitions" to utopia. Risk awareness can't grow because these ballads are about a far-away time, not heeding the requirements of today's breeched planetary boundaries/budget.
I spent lotsa time deciphering the climate of the Pliocene or MIS11 and listening to ballads of "transitions" to utopia.
Assuming that this surely was what I need to know.
But neither physicists nor troubadours cover what would have raised my risk-awareness to reality-levels.
Intriguing.
A long drought prevailed AD 500ff in East Mediterranean & Arab Peninsula. Might've been in more regions but these I know of.
The 1st plague epidemic from rat fleas began in Kush/Egypt 541-549 and culled MENA & Europe.
Long droughts cause (death, war and) migration..
Did (the aftermath of) the drought fuel epidemic spread? Likely. Drought weakens states, workers flee, wars ensue, armies carry🪲everywhere.
Did Kush experience drought, too? Was the (onset of the) pandemic even caused by rats' or human behaviour that was influenced by drought?
What human or rat behaviour would trigger rat fleas to jump and infect humans?
I'd imagine you need lots of rats to increase the chances of a few infected fleas to jump. These rats need food and also be brave enough to run around in the immediate vicinity of humans.
Hm.
Intriguing is that Chile's citizens turned out to be the most risk-aware in this international Facebook survey. Of its 19mio citizens, 1094 took part in the survey and 60-70% know they'll be harmed personally by climate change.
This is the level of awareness we need!
The survey was conducted in Mar-Apr 2022, ~6 months after election and 1 month after inauguration of new left govt. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Chil…
I don't know anything of the talking points during their election. The only thing I know is, they now have a cli-sci as new EP secretary.
It might be that election campaigns were based on climate by all candidates and that this has in turn heightened the climate-awareness and the so important risk-awareness so much so that 60-70% rightly assume personal harm from climate change.
2 more awareness-factors could be