A new study has confirmed that the Gulf Stream, a crucial ocean current that helps regulate climate and sea levels, is weakening. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades. This slowdown has significant implications for the world’s climate, and scientists are concerned that it may be a sign of further weakening to come.
Just looked it up on Wikipedia and “Hurricane Katrina displaced over one million people from the central Gulf coast to elsewhere across the United States, becoming the largest diaspora in the history of the United States.”
Having a million Americans lose their homes wasn’t enough to even move the needle on climate action. Same way that over a million Americans died of COVID and many people still claim it’s a “hoax”. I’m convinced that the propaganda is just too much to ever overcome.
I really, really, really want to be proven wrong - but I think you could literally have entire nations be made uninhabitable, and rather than welcoming refuges and making policy changes to avoid climate disaster, we’ll find a way to bury our heads in the sand and complain about immigrants taking our jobs.
Every time I read these articles I just keep waiting for all the other people to finally catch on to how fucked we are and a critical mass of people to actually do something meaningful. Still waiting.
As a result I was feeling frustrated and scared. But now I have come to bitterly accept we are probably going to kill ourselves off (mostly or completely) after mass suffering. At best, I figure whoever is left goes insane because 99% of all species will have gone extinct and the earth will have become a barren, silent, cheerless wasteland.
Hopefully we have exploited natural resources to a degree where it will be out of reach for the next sentient species. They won’t find pip or gold or other minerals just lying around so maybe they will remain primitive and low population.
There isn’t enough time for another sentient species to evolve after this extinction. This is it.
It’s so crazy at my job where we do infrastructure stuff. We know it’s getting worse. Areas are flooding that should not be flooding, rolling blackouts/greyouts are becoming more common, stuff is overheating that didn’t overheat in the past.
Head of engineering keeps pushing us to think about this stuff. Build in more cooling, make stuff waterproof that shouldn’t have to be. I don’t know how bad it is going to get but I do know that I will be working up to the end.