Worse than they feared* Saying worse than they hoped implied that hoped it would be bad
No? Worse than they hoped implies that they hoped (wished) it would be better than it actually is.?
The game is rigged and the people are too deluded into believing they need their oppressors for there to be any hope. The 3,000 or so billionaires on Earth could be stopped... If they weren't defended by legions of ignorant "love me senpai" house peasants who buy into the lie that they'll be let into the little club/climate change bunker for their loyalty and defense of this sociopathic economy and poisoned civilization.
Humanity will have to learn the hard way. I only hope whoever is left does actually learn the primary lesson of this cataclysm: the dangers of letting human greed take the wheel of civilization ever again. Greed is worse than hate. Greed kills with a shrug and cold, reptilian indifference. Greed doesn't even care who it kills, that's an externality and someone else's problem. People who kill out of hate at least cared about their victims in some way, instead of just seeing them as another speedbump to profit.
If you let it, greed won't let go until civilization crashes as it hunts wildly for new vectors of exploitation to try to satiate its insatiable gluttony. It will just propagandize most of its victims to defend it against their interests with false promises that they will personally benefit from the destruction.
I'll be putting my thumb on the scale to favor action in any way I can.
Hey, you get enough people together to be effective at tearing down the gates, going where the owners are, and doing what we should have done decades ago, I'll be there with bells on.
Instead people will shout "eat the rich!" on the internet until doomsday, and no dinner will ever be served.
There is a small, specific class of people that must be dealt with to even begin to address this. They hold all the keys, all the cards, all the hard power. Humanity lacks the will. And the owners make fun of people like you for believing trying to reason with them will ever do anything for the long term survival of the species when there's still another dollar to exploit.
If you aren't willing to be a part of handling that problem, you aren't serious either. They own the "justice" systems that would hold them responsible. They own the media that tell most peasants what to think and who to blame. They own the governments that were supposed to regulate them. Force is the only practical option. One the people won't exercise out of either rational fear of the individual consequences, or ignorant faith in their oppressors.
Go ahead and beg instead, I'm sure you believe we can change the outcome peaceably, lol. Scientists and rational people have been for half a century, begging the owners to look at the hard data of what they're doing and stop for the sake of their own species. How has that been going?
This is the tough pill to swallow that everyone is indeed avoiding.
Well unfortunately for humanity, minimizing, reframing, or simply ignoring man-made climate change doesn't matter. Distorting reality works great on humans, probably why humans are so eager to try it on climate change, but the physics of our little fishbowl are absolute, it is immune our stupid little human vs. human capitalist propaganda tricks we pull.
I've come to find that almost poetic in the absense of hope. All the lies we tell each other to fuck one another over to get a little more than our neighbors, "I don't have anything" to the hungry homeless person, "raising interest rates to increase unemployment will help poor people" from the fed to the willful idiots, on and on.
Say what you will about the coming famines, droughts, superstorms, and novel viruses that come will bring our species to its knees, all of those events will be honest. The climate warned us, it was measurable for over half a century, it basically screamed "there WILL be consequences" as the scientists translated for it. I'm positive millions to billions of willful fools will cry and claim no one saw it coming, but climate change, more than any human government or company in human history, will be Promises Made, Promises Kept.
And nobody is gonna do anything
People are doing things. It's that it's not enough yet; we need to go from supplementing fossil fuels and displacing them at a national level to actively displacing their use on a global scale.
It's that time of week I guess.
The lack of action on this is evidence of mankind's selfishness and shortsightedness. I hope a technological solution is forthcoming, because political solutions have failed spectacularly. The oil industry has invested so much in disinformation that they may destroy our habitat forever for some temporary shareholder value.
At 1.5 degrees C, sea levels are expected to rise up to ~30 inches, which would put huge parts of New Orleans, Corpus Christie, Key west, Southern Florida, SF's south bay, and Miami underwater. See what goes underwater using this NOAA map.
I think we will be saved just in time by nuclear fusion and nobody will learn from this, just like nobody learned from COVID. The majority will probably shrug and go "see, wasn't that bad".
Even if we did develop fusion, how long would it take to switch to it and would it even be economical? A ton of places still use coal and other fossil fuels simply because they're cheap or were already built. It's hard to make assumptions about how much fusion would cost when we still don't have it. Nuclear fission's fuel is cheap (cause so little is needed), yet nuclear is still insanely expensive because building the plants is a difficult task mired in red tape and the general public is afraid of it (on that note, I'm not sure how many people even have a concept of fusion beyond perhaps what Spiderman 2 made them believe).
There's also the divide in the world. Even if the rich western countries got fusion, would everyone? The west also got covid vaccines early while much of the rest of the world had to wait. And further drawing on the covid analogy, some countries pretended there wasn't an issue, which already is going on with climate change.
If we haven't learned by the time we get fusion that climate is global and should be tackled globally, we deserve extinction.
My friends this ship has sailed as far back as the 1970s- 50 years later and we're still dicking around with who to blame and pretending like we're going to make some drastic change at the last second. Lol at this point the best we can do is care for one another and accept the end (when it finally ~~affects~~ crushes your part of the world) with as much grace as you can muster
Meaningful changes in energy systems are starting to happen. It's too late for zero change, but we're likely to avoid some of the worst case scenarios.
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.