2024: Hottest year to date, and first year over 1.5ºC

I feel like we're in a movie where we are all bickering for petty reasons (namely wars and political polarisation), while in the background-- away from our sight and out of mind-- an abstract, cosmic horror is progressively happening. Preparing to kill us all.

You should watch Don't Look Up
- I watched Don't Look Up long ago. But in our real life case, I imagine somehow a far more sinister yet indescribable horrific dark entity conspiring to kill humanity.
  
  I haven't even read any of Lovecraft's work, and yet here I am imagining an indescribable horror lol.
  
  I think now that the real horror is humanity committing a slow collective suicide. We're all trapped by our own ego that we neglect the greater problem.

According to several other data sets, 2023 reached 1.5C too. Dramatic record low Arctic sea ice volume throughout the year, and current, including at north pole is ominous for north pole being ice free in next 2 summers.

https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/thk.uk.php

Congrats, everyone! We finally did it! And way ahead of schedule! Take that, scientists! They said we couldn’t do it before 2050. They warned us! They scolded us! But look at us now! Eat it, nerds!

sigh

This is fucking ridiculous.

I'm just sad I'll never have another snow filled winter living here

Don't despair! If we keep at it for long enough, we might destroy the AMOC (Atlantic Current), which might mean much lower temperature in Europe and North America, and much higher temperatures in the equator.

So you might not see snow in winter, but you'll probably get ice sheets in New York and Paris
- Haven't Paris and new york have it hard enough?

Don't worry, cheaper solar panels, electric cars and entrepreneurs will save humanity. And by humanity I mean a specific share of the world's developed nations. Discourse on this frustrates me to an unhealthy degree.

If you promote techno-fetishism laden, borderline tech-bro driven or shitass bill gates financed media, please reply so I may wish upon your remaining bloodline an everlasting mildly inconvenient curse.

And if you like Kurzgesagt tech videos, please reply so I may respectfully call you a fucking donkey.

I'm frustrated by the discourse too but I'm not sure it's for the same reasons as you.

What frustrates me is we never seem to discuss goals and why we have those goals.

Is the goal to keep the average temperature of earth as low as possible for as long as possible?

Is it to minimize the impact and costs for humans?

What exactly are we aiming for, and why?

What is your frustration with the discourse?
- Is the goal to keep the average temperature of earth as low as possible for as long as possible?
  
  Human sustainability requires having those goals. Protecting oligarch wealth is within oligarch corruption power, and human prosperity is a sacrifice they are willing to make. Genocide of the uppity disenfranchised as a final solution seems natural today., as the path forward.
What's that about kurzgesagt?

I often found good citations/ research evidence linked to their claims (on climate change)
- They list their sources! Their content tends to be pretty well done, even if not perfect.
- They repeat whatever their donors claim without any checking on their part. Sometimes this lines up with science, sometimes it's just propaganda.

So about when can we expect the next ice age?

We're in the ice age, it's supposed to be cold right now. So... Around 100,000 years after humanity either dies out or becomes subterranean.

And so far, what have we done?

Pretty much nothing. We've done a lot of pretending with "let's recycle plastics", which them just get dumped anyway because fuck you, that's why.

We're slowly slowly moving to electrical cars instead of pushing hard for bicycles and public transportation. Profits over anything else!

We've implemented.next day deliveries, because THAT is important. Fuck your winter

The US just choose a climate change denier who put a guy in charge of the EPA that can't stop talk about pushing businesses and economy and oil.

The world is lead by narcissistic psychopaths and everyone just lets them.

- I wanted to see that compared with global energy demand

Denmark has officially cancelled winter translated article. I don't like this timeline.

Bingo!!!

I had this on my 2024 bingo card.

God I hope I'm wrong about 2025 BOE.

May our descendants never forgive us.

If there are any.

Don't blame me, I recycled! /s
- Our mass cowardice, mine included, is our shame and culpability.
  
  Like the German citizens who weren't Nazis but stayed quiet and didn't protest, only on a global scale. We should all be Greta, getting arrested doing the right thing, but again cowardice in the face of inhumanity is our sin.

Yes, the line is going up. That's good, right? Shareholders keep telling me that the line must go up, and it looks like we're doing it! Good job, everyone.

Line go up so line can go up

Big fucked if true.

I looked it up the other day. We crossed 1c in 2015/2016. News stories at the time talked about how 1.5 might happen as early as 2035 if we don’t get our climate act together.
Yikes.

I looked up a few articles from to 2015 and non of them spoke about 2035. Do you have a link maybe?
With Trump, he’s gonna help get to 2c by 2028…. Mega fucked.
- Any carbon backed crypto coin I can short?

Hottest year to date, so far.

Insert rookie numbers meme

We did it guys 🥳

I see so many people thinking that this isn't going to be a problem for them because they are thinking of heaters and AC and also that they'll probably die while it's still livable.

But meanwhile they put kids on this world, who will call our generations the worst people to have ever existed.

We at least didn't have kids, and I'll probably accidentally drink myself to death anyway.
- Same here. Cheers!
Despite what capitalism would have you believe, humans are part of nature. With the same effort that has allowed us to destroy nature faster than any other species, we can maintain or restore balance better than any other species. It makes as much sense to argue against the next generation of humans to "restore the ecosystem" as it makes sense to argue against the next generation of bees.

Let them call us, those born in the 20th century, the worst people to have ever existed. It's not far from the truth. But why let that stop us from doing the right thing: giving birth to them so they can fix this mess for future generations or die trying? Why let our shame deny the ecosystem the best chance at recovery?
- Cringe
- With all the respect, Your argument feels just dogmatic. If we can solve the climate crisis, we must do it, not hope for someone else to. All this generational talk feels just like an excuse to keep the status quo. There's no magical generation coming to save the world, just people just like us.
- I'm saying it's extremely selfish to put kids on a world you're not fighting hard enough for because it doesn't concern you.
- This is a genuinely nice sentiment, but it is worth noting that the world is way more populated than most past generations, and while any hope for us will fall largely on the squares of future generations, their job would be so much easier if there were a lot less of them.
  
  Some developed countries seem to have this notion that declining birth rates will be the end of them and while that can be somewhat true for how economic systems are set up, the world was objectively a lot more sustainable before the boomers generation, population wise
- Because living in a world with extreme weather events where you can't leave your house for weeks because of heat waves and never before seen storms, and possibly damage to your home(this has already happened where I live), where a home garden will die to heat waves, with constant shortages of food and water, is not a life I'd wish on my enemy, much less someone I love.
  
  We are already starting to see more extreme heat waves and weather, we know it's happening, and we're drilling for more oil than ever, so the chances the next generation will suddenly start making big changes when the past two have done worse than nothing while being fully informed seems extremely unlikely to me. I'm pretty optimistic on most everything, but there is not a single sign pointing to this being resolved by humans within the next 100 years, if ever.

Grim milestone and barely a peep about it in popular discourse. Everyone needs to prepare personally for the consequences.

For one thing I'm not expecting food prices to level off for the rest of my life. Everything's just going to get more scarce and expensive. Is it possible common foods we enjoy now we may never have again at some point?

On a lighter note. I got a new winter jacket in 2019. Between covid and the rapid decline of cold winters I've barely worn it.

Conservatives successfully turned it into a "politically sensitive" topic. A weatherman can't even bring it up without getting angry calls, but I can feel them biting their tongue when discussing things like ocean heat content.
Human migration is going to get crazy really soon.

Sitting here in a beautiful sunny day, people can be forgiven for thinking its not a big deal.

Until you realise how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of the ocean and land by 1.5. And then that all that energy goes into every weather event forever until we reverse it.

55 degrees F in Massachusetts a week before Christmas. I was driving with my windows down. I got nuthin else. What the shit, man.
- It’s been twenty degrees F (11C) above average in Arizona this week. Should be frigid with snow on the ground (in the mountains) yet I was riding my bike with a t-shirt this week.

The shape of that curve scares me. I just hope it's a sigmoid curve, not an exponential.

Every collapse seems to trigger 12 others, further compounding things at an insane rate
True exponentials are rare in nature. Things can look exponential in the short term but are really logistic.

Look at it this way: if the atmosphere gets hot enough it’ll boil off into space and then the earth will cool back down again due to the loss of greenhouse effect.
- Unless we’re the next Venus

Yeah, sadly not a suprise

And with it, another group of mitigation advocates become doomsday acceptors in the scientific community.

I just binged la Palma on Netflix. Here we go.