I'd say climate apocalypse and climate societal collapse are the same thing. Apocalypse doesn't mean extinction, otherwise how would we have a post-apocalyptic world?
Because the people who made money investing in the old way stop making money. That’s it. That’s the entire problem. The fossil fuels industry wants to keep making money, and the politicians who are bribed by them want to keep getting bribes. So they create a culture war so the facts don’t matter.
I'd add that especially in developed countries, we have gotten used to the high energy-density of fossil fuels, which is the result of millions of years of pressure, temperature or in short: energy. And we are using up this energy within two centuries. This resulted in the unsustainable lifestyle (it's everywhere we look), that would have to be curbed, if we were to get off this Jurassic Park Experiment completely.
Therefore a number of people see their very (unsustainable) way of life in jeopardy. This source of resistance is what gives that culture war BS its fuel in the first place. At least in my experience of talking with people it is this negative emotional place that leads them to embrace false information in order to keep their lifestyles. Which in turn makes cooperation impossible. To make it even worse, people in developing countries now aspire to the same lifestyle - and who can blame them? But I don't trust their (or ours for that matter) politics enough to hope for scientifically sound action to get there.
It's not THAT simple. For a period of time, there is a slight reduction in quality of life as people switch to renewables. Example, in many towns there are mandatory solar requirements on new homes, which inflates the cost of construction for homeowners etc. Same with the no gas hookup requirements now in some cities where you can' get a gas line to your house... which means higher costs to run your heat etc.
It's one of those short term problems but it impacts people in a real way and people just don't wanna go for that.
We are fucking ourselves. Which sounds nice, but not in this context. I guess our grandkids will have to get a taste for cockroach and muck. At least we can eat and drink and enjoy the sun like kings of old...
I think the conservatives don’t disagree that climate change is real, they disagree that humans are responsible. To them it’s things like El Niño or solar activity.
And they're wrong according to virtually every person who actually studies the climate for a living, so they might as well pretend it's made up.
And it's stupid anyway. You might be able to deny human-caused climate change, but you can't deny smog and pollution. Greener energy sources mean less smog and pollution. Why isn't that a good thing to them?
It's a fundamental lack of understanding of math and science.
There's a video going around conservative circles talking about how CO2 only makes up .04 percent of the atmosphere, and therefore even if it were doubled it would be less than 1/1000th of the atmosphere, so it's not worth worrying about.
I tried to explain to my father that that's exactly why we're able to have such an impact. They don't understand that we're able to make a much larger relative impact on CO2 versus Nitrogen and Oxygen and therefore a larger impact on global temperatures.
looking @ the conservatise political programs, they realize people will die due to climate change, but their solution is more babies (ergo, forbid women to stop/prevent pregancy), not stopping climate change...
I'm not fully convinced yet.. maybe if it was four weeks with records broken every day, then I'd really consider changing my mind. But probably not because it was all made up by Al Gore.
As far as I know that's mostly because there's much more land in the Northern Hemisphere and the temperature differences (day/night but also summer/winter) are much more pronounced over the land than over the sea: the land heats and cools faster.
Interesting that despite it still being summer and roasty toasty in the southern hemisphere in January, the world average temp is still lower than the northern hemisphere summer.
The southern hemisphere has a lot more water surface area, which has a larger heat capacity, is somewhat reflective, and a lower density / conductivity.
This is why Australians and Brazilians are known to be amphibious during summer.
Averages mean almost nothing. They can't really be used to say anything meaningful.
1000 men vs 1000 women:
999 men earn $1 per hour. 1 man earns $1,000,000 per hour.
1,000 women earn $500 per hour.
On average, men earn $1000 per hour, but women earn on average half that.
The reality is obviously very different to the average.
The average tells us quite a lot. It shows that overall, year on year temperatures across the entire planet are increasing, whether it's winter or summer. Like you say the impacts of that are higher spikes in more places every year and those spikes are lost from the data, but the average is valuable aswell. Because of the scale, and the fact that it's including winter for half the planet, 1 degree change in the average is pretty crazy.
My favorite was my aunt going straight from "climate change is a myth" to "well we can't do anything about it, so why bother doing anything at this point" like my sister in Christ WE MADE THE CHANGE