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164 points bikenaga | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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TSiege ◴[] No.45399683[source]
Something to keep in mind in the comments when talking about climate change and CO2 levels is that it’s not the level so much as the rate. We’re on the path to doubling (or have doubled if you look at CO2 equivalents) global CO2 levels faster than likely any other time in earths entire history. We have the CO2 levels equivalent to a time period when the earths poles didn’t have ice caps and instead forests in the span of about 200 years.

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.

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jvanderbot ◴[] No.45399913[source]
I have total fatigue about it. It is true, and also it is terrifying, and also it is completely debilitating to imagine doing anything effective about this.
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softwaredoug ◴[] No.45399951[source]
The silver lining politically: its not like the impact goes away. So progress won't just grind to a halt from one bad administration or one country's government. And there is a lot of progress happening.
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ffsm8 ◴[] No.45400531[source]
It is?

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.

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1. generativenoise ◴[] No.45400726[source]
I think reality is a potentially a bit darker in that we really have impacted the trajectory, it is just grossly insufficient to have a meaningful change in the direction.

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.