Don't be too harsh on yourself, big corporations are the main cause of climate change. Unless we all collectively decide to give these companies a wake up call, I'm afraid there's very little you can do alone

I hate to say it, but I keep avoiding articles about climate change for this reason. I can't do it every time, obviously, but it just gives me such stress.

Really? The feeling I get when I read articles like this is a resigned feeling of "No shit, we've only been hearing warnings of this for the past 30 years. People are fucking stupid"

And the worst part is, average citizens like yourself aren't a massive burden on the environment. It's people like Elon Musk flying personal jets across the world for dinner, who are actively contributing to the death of the planet.

IIRC, a weatherman started doing this

Nah, I prefer the title without units. It allows me to imagine the oceans boiling, which would just cement Florida as being literal hell.

We? No. We'll just be uncomfortable. Our kids? They're going to slowly cook to death as they're running out of food/water/oxygen. Or, y'know, get blown up in one of the wars fighting over scraps of food/water/oxygen.

But look on the bright side: we're on track to beat last fiscal year's profit margin! If we do that, we'll get a free company branded pencil and one ticket to use some leave-without-pay at you manager's discretion -- and the regional manager gets another vacation home!!

Mass famines and heat that kills without AC coming summer of 2024 or 2025. Won't kill the global north too much yet, but it will be one of the biggest deadly events in history for the rest of the world.p

People are already dying to the effects. We know climate change can cause more and higher intensity hurricanes, more droughts, fires, famines, wilder weather swings, floods, and wars and refugee crises, etc. We know these things are increasing and we know people are already dying to them now.

So while you can't pin any individual disaster to climate change, we already know it's causing deaths.

As for if we're all going to die? Probably not all of us, so if you're lucky and don't mind you or your kids living in a Mad Max world, you can relax a little.

Nope, ocean is boiling.

Overtemp gulf is going to create some monster storms.

All of these things are bad, but the effect on phytoplankton is most frightening of all. Diatoms provide 50-85% of our global oxygen supply. Not only are rising temperatures a problem for them, but ocean acidification also eats away at their silica-based shells. But it does it slowly so by the time they die, they are in deep water where no other diatoms are around to reuse the silica.

Luckily, there are other ways of recycling diatom remains. The most notable example is the dried lake bed that used to be part of Lake Chad when that lake was far bigger and held many living diatoms. Due to natural changes in climate, the water dried up and that area is now part of the Sahara Desert. About 100 days a year, winds kick the ancient diatom dust high into the atmosphere where it is carried across the Atlantic Ocean and then it settles across South America.

This is a big reason the Amazon Rainforest is so lush. Diatomaceous fertilizer carried all the way from Africa. And since more plants means more photosynthesis, it causes a lot of water that would have otherwise been locked away in the ground to evaporate through transpiration. All of this excess water is blown westward towards the Andes mountain range. In narrower parts of the Andes, the dense Amazonian clouds overcome the rain shadow effect to precipitate across the west side of the Andes.

This rainwater causes erosion of quartz, which is ground into fine silica dust. As silt, this dust is washed into the Pacific Ocean, where diatoms absorb the silica and use it to reproduce. In a beautiful global balancing act, as diatom-heavy lakes in Africa dry up, the remains of those diatoms cause a chain reaction that ends up causing a huge increase of diatoms on the opposite side of the globe.

Great, right? It would be if we weren't replacing so much of the Amazon Rainforest with monoculture farms which don't have nearly the same evapotranspiration effect as the flora of the natural ecosystem. So, not only are we baking the diatoms, not only are we dissolving them with acid, we're also removing one of their most critical reproductive resources.

It's like we discovered how resilient the planet is and how hard it is to kill, and humans took that as a challenge.

Enjoy the oxygen while it's plentiful.

Or the 2000 dead penguins washing up on the coast of Uruguay just a few days ago. Apparently starved to death, though the cause is still being investigated.

But yeah the phytoplankton and algae boiling to death is triggering a catastrophic change in the ocean that is going to domino in horrible ways and I feel like I don't often see a lot of people mentioning it. It's very scary how the collapse of aquatic ecosystems is playing out.

This is why insurance companies are dropping out of the State, and yet I'd wager a good chunk of the population deny climate change exist.

If it was Celsius the sea would be boiling.