Two basic concepts in climate I want the public to know:
1 Trend. If something gets worse every day, after some time it becomes unbearable and systems break.
2 Irreversibility. Humans can't "clean up" climate breakdown or ecosystem and biodiversity loss.
1 Trend. If something gets worse every day, after some time it becomes unbearable and systems break.
2 Irreversibility. Humans can't "clean up" climate breakdown or ecosystem and biodiversity loss.
That we're on an escalator should be very obvious, but I still see articles on "navigating change" and the phrase "new normal" pop up enough that I'm not sure it is. Even prominent scientists until recently used the phrase "new normal," probably because it makes a good soundbite.
Until we stop the drivers of the escalator, it will keep taking us up into hotter and hotter temperatures, which are driving all the awful impacts we're seeing. The main driver is simple: extracting and burning fossil fuel. Animal agriculture is a major contributor (~15%) as well
That the damage we're doing is irreversible is less obvious. Ecomodernists and techno-optimists work hard to make the public think "no problem, we can just suck the carbon out of the air later" or "geoengineering will fix our problems."
In my opinion both carbon capture & geoengineering are unlikely to ever happen in a useful way. Even if they could, I can't think of anything more irresponsible than burning fossil fuel now and saying to our kids "now you clean up the planetary mess."
Setting aside such techno-magic, much of our carbon emissions will stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and severe global heating could last hundreds if not thousands of years. And biodiversity loss will not recover for millions of years.
