https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/29/china-wind-solar-power-global-renewable-energy-leader

Not a China shill but I’m pretty sure they see the connection and have been investing heavily in renewables.

Bit of a stretch to say that they are “most affected by it” when there are pacific islands that are going to be sinking off the map pretty soon.

You might want to look into what China is doing. They definitely see their connection to emissions and are definitely doing something about it.

In the US there are a bunch (all Democrats) who reject oil company executive and lobbyist money

i had the same thought: NPR did a story on alaskan pipelayers & plumbers that were starting to experience the effects of climate change on the soil about 15-is years ago and then revisited them again about 5-ish years ago. in the first set of interviews from 15 years ago, a big majority refused to attribute the issues that they were experiencing to climate change and in the second set 5 years ago, they nearly unanimously refused to attribute the issues to climate change.

climate change is now politics and any and all politics will be denied if you want it bad enough

Now you work to change the rules of society so that we can stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and limit the amount of additional warming we see.

At the risk of sounding doomerish, nothing will change until it’s too late or there’s a revolution and heads roll.

Well they projected it to take a few decades… a few decades ago

To my knowledge, there had been an understanding that scientists were being fairly conservative with their statements of how bad things were going to get, and how fast it was going to happen.

I know of two primary drivers for this (which I am somewhat oversimplifying for brevity):

1. Scientists really didn’t want to get it wrong by saying X will definitely happen by year Y, and then be wrong, thus giving ammunition to climate deniers and vested interests running counter-PR such as oil companies.

2. Scientists didn’t want to paint a picture of unstoppable, inevitable doom that no person could possibly imagine a way for them to fix, or contribute towards fixing, thus leading to the mindset of ‘if there’s no way to stop it why even try?’.

Emissions haven’t been constant over those few decades; fossil fuel burning has been rising about 3% each year, so that half the cumulative CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution have happened since the early 1980s.. That’s what took us from “predicted change” to “crisis” now instead of at some earlier time.

That’s the whole point. They’re surprised that it’s happening so fast. The acceleration at which things are happening has gone far beyond anything they predicted. My local area hit 40°C a couple of days ago, the highest recorded temperature on record since we started taking temperatures. We’ve had constant temperatures in the high 30s for the past 2 weeks. I can’t remember temperatures this high and I’m almost in my fifth decade on our little blue dot. The icebergs that we see every year failed to show up this year because of the large amount of melt happening in the Arctic, something I can’t remember seeing in my lifetime. I know what I’m saying is all anecdotal but there’s also plenty of evidence supporting global atmospheric warming that’s backed up by scientific data.

the climate changes greatly improve the likelyhood of extreme events, going from once in a million years to once every few years.

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I bet you they are as surprised as you are…

Nothing gets me more depressed than climate crisis these days tbh…

When I was a freshman in college (2004), the concern was that we were careening towards a cliff and that the “must stop” number was to keep the global average temperature increase below 1 degree Celsius, and that if we were able to reverse course we’d still feel those effects well into the following 2-3 decades.

We went over the cliff, officially, in 2020. Everything now is about mitigating the damage we are already going to cause. It’s going to get worse and the bad news is going to continue being met with openings like “I’m not a climate denier, but…”

This is what happens when the developed world spends 150 years rejecting the most advanced scientific theory for fear that if the working class gets hold of it they’ll have a revolution.

The theory being dialectical materialism. It’s unsurprising that China, one of the five states explicitly led by DiaMat, have been acting as fast as possible to wean off fossils.

The speed at which things are changing – and this year’s changes won’t be the last – makes perfect sense to dialectical materialists. The transformation of quantity into quality is built into this worldview. What’s hard to predict is when a quantitative change will become a transformative leap in quality. The fact of the leap is not in question, however.

Meanwhile, in most of the rest of the world, most participants in the debate are still operating under the illusion that change is linear. For people who think that things will just get a bit worse every year, what’s a little distracting war in the grand scheme of things, and what does it matter if a pandemic is left to run free?

Life is cheap and there will always be a little more time in the schedule – to get ‘back to normal’ – before we tackle emissions properly, think the decision-makers. Except it’s precious and there is no spare time. Unless westerners get their act together and challenge imperialism, we better hope that dedollarisation leads to demilitarisation so people can concentrate on healing the world. Otherwise, we’ll be looking back at this year’s weather with the starry eyes of nostalgia.

A good hardy “Our expectations were low, but holy fuck” and “we told you so” as we ride this planet into a slow hellish oblivion.

There were a lot of different models, including some that were really close to the timelines we see now. All of those depended on different amounts of emissions, and if humanity took this seriously as soon as it was discovered the rate of change would be wildly different.

But there were very little significant changes to curb the emission rate, so we’re currently following the path of some of the worst predictive models. They still existed, just weren’t publicized as much as those that counted on some more reasonable approaches.

the planet has been melting for some time.

“Really fuck us” is a subjective definition. We are getting fucked now, but it will get worse. A lot worse.