That's rough, whatever gains we thought we made, puff gone. The next sentence paints us a picture of what the future holds. Many of us are going to be here for pretty drastic events I could imagine.
But there were some important tipping points that have pushed us into our current do-nothing trajectory. The stolen 2000 election was a notable one.
We've already hit 1.5C, by the way. Hold on to your butts.
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024...
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/amaz...
Think about how much fuel they waste, tons of CO2 and heating the atmosphere just to get to the oil
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...
> Today, 29 percent of the natural gas extracted in North Dakota is just burned away. This wasted amount represents enough gas to heat half a million homes
The current administration has reduced deforestation rates in Brazil by around half.
Plants don’t get the optimal amount of any component, because they balance the components they take from the environment against the energy costs of acquiring them and other constraints.
If any component gets a little easier to aquire, the plant will do a little better. If it’s a long term change, the plant will evolve a new balance that will improve it slightly more.
But rising CO2 (in addition to making animal life dumber*) is contributing to a slow but radical rearrangement of local conditions through the globe.
Temperature changes, precipitation levels, wind and storm prevalence, sea encroachment and season lengths being the biggest. And both have tremendous impact on plants.
The faster the change. The worse the damage. When changes compound, they can happen very fast.
* CO2 levels have gone from 240ppm to 420ppm. At 1,000 ppm there are clear measurable impacts on human cognition. Given cognition is such a critical capability, it begs the question: what is the actual curve of CO2ppm to cognitive effects. Same goes for metabolic efficiency related to our need to expel CO2.
Because even small consistent subtle effects over time are likely to have practical effects. And also because raising the floor of CO2 outside, also raises the bar inside where CO2 notoriously collects, and decreases the rate that enclosed spaces can renormalize levels when given a chance. Both of which raise the indoor CO2 expected and ceiling values.
Naturally other issues like El Niño and factors outside of Brazil also play a role, but it stands to reason this would not have been as tragic had he not been elected president.
CO2 is so demonized that people forget that it's essential to life (at least, to some forms of life).
The changes to the climate can disrupt things like ocean currents to disastrous effect. Atmospheric gas won’t kill anyone, we’ll kill each other over access to resources like food and water.
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
Or if it is helping it’s certainly not enough and the limits of the biosphere to accept more CO2 are being exceeded.
So far the best way to protect it I have found is through the Rainforest Trust [3] which is a foundation that's trying to purchase and protect parts of the rainforests that companies would otherwise cut or burn down for agricultural use.
[1]https://youtu.be/hb3b-A6QAc8
[2]https://www.nasa.gov/earth-and-climate/human-activities-are-...
Won't it get much warmer and wetter once global warming hits, allowing the rainforest to grow back?
This forums' USA centrism (although unsurprising) is really starting to get on my nerves.
I mean I suppose it could but contingent on that would be things like "thousands of years" and "likely substantial extinction of human population centers".
So much so, that Eucalyptus trees evolved to become a fire dependent species that benefits from regular burning. This is why they are so dangerous when planted in places like Los Angeles.
Every organism and ecosystem you’ve ever encountered in your life is adapted to an Ice Age climate, but we’ve recreated the conditions of a Hot House earth. Species and ecosystems adapt on much slower time scales. They cannot adapt to changes this abrupt, which means they will necessarily collapse if we do nothing and allow emit CO2. Every other time in earths history that the CO2 levels have rapidly risen it’s lead to a mass extinction. Yes it’s been hotter before but that change happened gradually. It’s like the joke about poison vs medicine, it’s the dose that kills you.
Long-term carbon cycles last about 30000 years, and the majority of climate change is driven from burning old carbon sources deep in the earths crust.
Fossil oil is incredibly useful stuff, and it is wasteful burning it as fuel. Something to consider between the floods, fires, droughts, and contrarians. lol =3
So while absolute terms are less it isn’t the same and we should be worried about what OP is discussing
The Amazon rainforest is close to a tipping point at which point it will almost entirely die off and convert to Savanah. And if you think fossil fuels are incredibly useful wait till you learn how useful a stable climate has been
Mismanagement is ultimately a self-correcting problem, as local extinction events are also natural. If I recall the rain-forest floor organic layer is rather thin when compared to other ecosystems.
However, China economic interests in South America agriculture and resources is a complex issue. All world donations sent to help preserve the forest was negligible by comparison. =3
there are a few others in Brazil, like Biomas and Mombak
Most importantly we need to drastically change our consumption patterns to prevent emissions from continuing to rise.
To my understanding, the only time CO2 emissions were down was during covid.
While there are a few localized success stories, I'm not aware we've actually meaningfully impacted our trajectory.
To be abundantly clear: it's true that eg. Trump's administration will have limited effect, mainly because it's a global thing ... But global emissions have been rising, too.
People have predicted peak CO2 multiple times, but it hasn't actually crystalized beyond the shutdown year to my knowledge.
We now seem in the unfortunate place where we have kicked or are kicking off system dynamics that are going to cause a large scale reconfiguration of our life support system.
But then you hit the "laws of the high seas" problem. Maybe tariffs can have a role to play here! Via a Nobel Prize!
https://skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation...
And now they stated a public CO2 reduction goal for the first time.
I suspect people in the US haven't really noticed this as much because the 100%+ tariffs on cars and PV isolate the country from the dramatic changes happening everywhere else. Here in Germany I can buy 2 kWp in panels plus an inverter for under 400€.
Our government is owned by the ultra wealthy who pursue their own narrow interests at the expense of the common good. Some of these people are just cynical; others identify their narrow interests with the common good. In either case they’ll continue to steer our world toward self destruction.
The best thing to do isn’t to hide one’s head in the sand or place our faith in failed institutions. These are two kinds of denial. We should be building a base of popular power in labor unions. The ideology is solidarity and striking holds actual power over the ownership class. It’s really the only thing that has a chance of leading society out of the collapse we are witnessing around us.
But all that's modeling, there are too many variables to really know.
You might argue the ONLY progress -- in the US -- is not at all from the gov't but from private players genuinely caring about the issue. A lot of people wake up in the morning and decide they'd rather work on an important issue, like climate, than squeezing a tiny bit more profit for some soulless corporation.
And that carbon capture through planting trees may be something fragile and short lived.
Obviously not every tree died due to the fires, but the death and destruction left in the wake of this fire was on a scale far surpassing past fires. Not to mention the deaths of animals.
Recommended reading: The End of Eden by Adam Welz, which basically covers how global weirding and extreme weather events have pushed species already teetering on the edge of survival over the brink.
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