vyelkin posted:

Over time everything gets steadily more expensive and you start not being able to always buy whatever you want, either because it's now out of your price range or because there are actual shortages of things like coffee. Weather gets more severe and less predictable. People you know have their homes and livelihoods destroyed by extreme weather events and have to decide whether to rebuild or start over somewhere new with nothing. If you're unfortunate enough to live somewhere like the desert (lol Phoenix, Arizona) then it will become actually unaffordable to live there at all because you'll spend more on air conditioning than you make in income. Every summer you hear about hundreds of elderly people whose air conditioning broke and they died of heatstroke in their own home. Diseases that haven't been seen in your country for decades or centuries start to reappear, like malaria. Diseases that have never appeared in your country before, like Zika or Dengue, also start to appear. Mosquitoes seem to be the one insect that isn't dying out.

Insurance stops covering a lot of climate change-related damage, so as extreme weather events hit other parts of your country and people aren't able to rebuild where they lived, places like southern Florida get abandoned, not from some government plan, but from millions of people individually deciding to pack up and leave one day. The place where you live gets more crowded as internal migrants relocate only to find that life isn't any easier when they show up out of the blue with no job, no money, and no assets to sell. Your wages get cut at work because there are suddenly ten highly trained unemployed professionals who used to do your job in Miami, any of whom would gladly replace you. Your rent goes up even faster than usual because of all the population growth in your city.

The news is full of stories of weather destroying other parts of the world like Mozambique and Puerto Rico, and conflicts breaking out in areas hit by drought, famine, and disease. It's also full of stories about migrants trying to come to the developed world. It never mentions that the two things are connected, and never explores the fact that the migrants are moving because they can no longer live in their homes because their fields dried up, it didn't rain for ten years, and the desert swallowed their town. You notice the people around you getting more and more anxious about migration as their own incomes are getting stretched thinner and thinner and there are only ever more and more migrants. Electorates vote in more and more extreme right-wing figures who ban all immigration, militarize the borders, and implement ever-more draconian surveillance and monitoring of people inside the country as well. You're repeatedly told that if you're a natural-born citizen and not breaking any laws, you have nothing to fear.

Global supply chains start to break down as some regions of the world get less and less livable and some resources get either more difficult to extract and process, or get wiped out by climate change themselves, making prices rise even more and shortages hit even harder. As places start to see economic decline, people get restless and there are instances of mass unrest. On the news you see stories about mass demonstrations and massacres in random other places around the world. But here people are too busy working five gig economy jobs just to afford bread, they're too busy to protest. Governments get overthrown, countries descend into civil war, millions die in armed conflict, famine, and ensuing disease outbreaks. This further exacerbates the millions of people already trying to migrate to the less-affected developed world, but by this point our borders are so hardened that most of them die before they make it here. Deaths of hundreds or thousands of people trying to cross our borders across oceans and through deserts stop even making the news because they're so routine and we're too concerned with our own daily survival to worry about people we don't know.

What you do see on the news are feel-good stories about how a billionaire CEO now flies around in a solar-powered plane and he planted trees on his green roof. Meanwhile our cities are more choked with smog than ever, and the numbers keep getting higher. Fewer people are smoking than ever before, but lung cancer rates seem to be higher than ever. You get a particularly bad cough and you'd like to see a doctor about it, but they cut your benefits at work so you just hope it goes away on its own. The UN releases a report saying that we have three years to act if we want to avoid 8 degrees of warming, but by this point we've read so many reports saying we've already passed the tipping point that no one cares.

All our topsoil is vanishing and by this point even some people with jobs literally can't afford food. But the state is militarized enough that no one really thinks about protest except for the occasional spontaneous riot that doesn't accomplish anything long-term. Facial recognition software and ubiquitous surveillance and tracking means protesting is a one-way ticket to prison, if you aren't literally killed or maimed by the police breaking up the protest. And anyway, even attending a legal protest harms your social credit score and means you won't be able to get a loan the next time food prices spike and you can't afford enough to get through the week. Drug abuse, overdoses, and suicide are all rampant as people lose hope and decide to numb themselves or end it quickly rather than die slow, painful deaths. There are people literally starving to death in the streets and every summer you're pretty sure some of the homeless people lying on the sidewalk have died of heatstroke. Half the food you used to see in supermarkets is just plain gone, wiped out by disease or unable to grow where it used to or the supply chains that used to ship it in from halfway around the world have collapsed completely. The other half of the food is so expensive that you can only afford to buy the barest essentials. The wars on TV get worse as countries invade each other to get at the farmland that remains. Despite the police everywhere, law and order seems to be breaking down in your city, there are enormous waves of robberies, burglaries, home invasions, murders, as desperate people do whatever it takes to get through another day. The rich are comfortably secure in gated communities protected by private mercenaries with tanks and machine guns, who regularly use lethal force to defend their employers' property.

Eventually you die. If you're lucky it's in some extreme weather event and it's over quickly. If you're unlucky you starve to death because you lost your job and bread is too expensive. I hope you don't have kids because they still have a few more decades in this miserable hellhole, while civilization continues to collapse around them. They probably eventually die deaths even less pleasant than yours.

Some humans will survive, even in 15 degrees of warming. Our civilization won't.

Communist Thoughts posted:

start bombing factories

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Azathoth posted:

for the record, only thing objectionable in that post was "you start blowing up cars and killing the people who drive them", but that's a doozy

no one's telling you not to be really down on the state of the world and super depressed. world's a hosed up place. i don't personally think it's healthy, but that's not any of my business.

but talking about indiscriminate killing because lol nothing matters, that's always gonna earn some time off and possibly a ban depending on context

Taima posted:

the “real” adjusted price of housing will continue to rise unless you are content to live in a broken community (which is increasingly like 80% of them).

So many reasons. The USA business model is almost entirely to monetize things that are necessary for survival. It’s the only markets where we can still extract wealth. They are essentially monopolies, but instead of no competition in the market, it’s a concerted effort that occurs along class lines.

Every year we play musical chairs. There is always fewer chairs. The chairs are getting much more fancy though. This is strictly mandated by fiduciary duty; it is literally illegal to not be a sociopath, on a corporate level.

On top of that, we are simultaneously making it impossible to afford children and our answer is to force those children into existence by refusing to fund or allow population control measures; we could see the effective banning of many forms of contraception, but only if you’re poor. Women become slowly removed from the workforce as they are forced to fulfill the transactional roles they once did, making their existence largely one of economic hardship on the family producing them as they are unable to secure jobs on a policy-level basis. They have a job, after all. It just doesn’t make any money.

Gender reveal parties, once popular, slowly cease to be meaningful as there is only one correct option for the bottom 80% who can’t take on such a financial burden even if they wanted to.

Cars are needed for transport in the USA while lower priced used autos are exiting the market- fewer, more expensive cars being sold new will only make this worse, and we have been so against public transit and reliant on suburbs that reverting back into walkability is impossible. We traded community and the environment for a lawn and smoked meat, even as beef becomes too expensive to eat regularly and drought kills the lawn. An irony that no one notices.

They say a man is not an island but we’re trying our best, leading to a destruction of community and an entire growing class of mentally unwell single people who have nothing to lose, but simultaneously so beaten down by the system that the best they can do to protest is to shoot up their workplace or kill themselves via insidious and methodical lifestyle choices.

Nutritional food is a pipe dream for the bottom 80%; the idea of plentiful lean protein, fresh veggies and fruit is untenable. Even if people could afford these items, broadly speaking, they have no training on eating healthy, can’t cook to make healthy food that is also delicious food, and are being slowly mummified alive by preservatives, micro plastics and simple carbs/sugar to the point that healthy food tastes actively bad to them.

Being poor costs more than being rich, leading to disenfranchised individuals who are harvested for their scant resources like the matrix harvests humans for battery power. They are purposefully raised to be uneducated, hapless automatons who work 60+ hours a week, raise children the rest of it, and spend their meager free time to doom scroll tiktok or watch cynical, cheaply created reality tv. The average length of a typical video lowers with ever-reduced attention span and poor nutrition until a 30 second video (at 2x speed, of course) feels unbearably involved.

The easiest solution is to not think about any of this, and largely, people don’t; this is true across all economic classes. It’s not their individual fault, of course, and few below the top 10% can morally have children, since the progeny of the bottom 90% will experience a brutally low quality of life.

We just push it out of our minds, have the children (rightfully so, it is our greatest mandate as humans) and studiously ignore the elephant in the room that, for example, your only son will find work as an assistant to an AI blockchain CEO program whose only job is to extract dollars from the most vulnerable and generate ape NFTs. He will be curious and vaguely nostalgic about the concept of buying a single family home, and rightfully so, because you can only vote, or exist in the scattered remaining cities, if you own land. The 10x10 storage unit that he shares with two other families doesn’t count as owned property, of course.

The AI CEO he works for has no use for money. It simply accumulates, a contextless number that represents nothing but a transfer of buying power and basic resources from the most vulnerable. Many humans will not eat tonight, but there is now an extra number at the end of the AI’s checking account. This makes the AI fulfilled; it’s his true purpose. Humans used to transfer these numbers to their own checking accounts, but everyone has forgotten why. Money cannot buy any additional utility for the rich, who cannot even conceive of a use for the excess funds. So it sits, compounding, in the recesses of the AI. A number created by an entity that is made of numbers, but no one remembers why or how. All we can recall is that if you don’t have numbers, you are no one. It has always worked this way, we think.

It’s simply not worth it for capital to rent housing; easier to hold it vacant. Wouldn’t want to endanger the quality and long term compounding valuation by having increasingly financially unstable tenants stay in them. Simply not worth the risk, and after the water wars started, rental housing became ground zero stash spots for hoarding bottles of Kirkland signature h2o, which are now the de facto currency, but simultaneously illegal to have on hand if you don’t own land. Legal water is distributed only by key card activated public water fountains, leading to a thriving industry of selling that day’s allotted water for luxuries like level 4 rations, which are only 58% microplastics by weight.The buyer nobbles at the ration slowly and methodically; it will be months before they can spare the water like this again, but the lack of h2o has slowed their mental capacity. Slowly, they forget why they bought the ration, the gentle sheen of microplastics and simple carbohydrates glinting in the hot desert as the ration shifts in their hand. They drop it; what was it even for, again?

Small, physically stunted scavengers, the result of decades of malnutrition, quickly emerge from under a nearby pile of metal - refuge that was difficult to obtain, making this move risky at best - and begin fighting over the forgotten food. The mid-day sun is too intense for this desperate scuffle; several of the participants slump over, mummified by the sun’s warmth and moisture loss from their wounds. The remaining scavenger desperately pulls the ration towards the safety of the scrap pile, but it’s of no use. They die clutching the ration, arms outstretched like a desperate prayer. Others see this unfold but know it’s not worth it; the desiccated remains of the “winning” scavenger will now serve as an important warning to those in the future.

In the next town over, a rich, impeccably handsome businessman unbuttons his suit and takes a slow, luxurious shower. The water evaporates before it even hits the ground; he doesn’t even wear a stillsuit, a power move emblematic of true nobility. Small, leathery animals fight amongst themselves in his wake to absorb even the smallest amount of moisture his uncovered body releases. He lets them do so both because it amuses him, and because it provides the closest thing he’s had to companionship.

He turns off the shower, but it continues to slowly leak. The shower always leaks, day and night, but it’s been decades since someone existed who could fix it. It doesn’t worry the man; he has lots of numbers, after all.

His wandering gaze centers on the scavengers who always follow him - his only friends - and a solitary thought echoes about his mind: Why do people insist on living like this?

Mayor Dave posted:

lmao which one of you bought this banner ad:



leading to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNjWOCdony4

Horizon Burning posted:

fox blocked this outside the US, i think lmao

Xaris posted:

Mostly already beaten but I should add that half the atmosphere has been filled with intense smoke this year so that has certainly "helped" as an overall cooling mechanism

IAMKOREA posted:

Haha oh my god i can't imagine the kind of person who would write that post in D&D and also lurk the cspam climate thread holy gently caress I'm dying over here lmao

IAMKOREA posted:

I haven't read the needle thing can you post a link pls thanks buddy

quote:

A recent International Energy Agency (IEA) [82] report estimates that reaching “net zero” globally by 2050 would require six times the amount of mineral resources used today. This would entail a quantity of metal production—requiring considerable FF combustion—over the next 15 years roughly equal to that from the start of humanity until 2013

SniperWoreConverse posted:

This is literally the two skeletons walk into a bar bit. Literally the joke became real. gently caress.

Topo Chico Debarge posted:

ngl, i thought that the video was Rime's. do we know who made it? i'd kinda like to glance over a transcript.

AppleNippleBOB posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

Hexigrammus posted:

That's some stiff competition in the Pants making GBS threads Burnover category, Australia's going to have to step up its game.

Interesting. I wonder if the explosives planted to tear the wreck apart also deactivate any leftover munitions still in those hulls. Must be exciting to dump a load of steel on the deck and find a live one rolling around.

There's a WWII wreck at the bottom of a long straight channel just south of Prince Rupert. It's been leaking oil for decades so the government finally got around to tapping the tanks and emptying the fuel sometime around 2010. One of the things that made the job interesting was the cargo - a load of tanks and 500 lb bombs bound for Alaska. At least it wasn't those two nuclear bombs lost off the Central Coast in the late 1950s. So much crap in the oceans.

Minrad posted:

just realized rime named this thread as such to help stop posting in the dnd climate change thread

lol but also lmao because its stopped me from posting there once now already

Cascade Failure posted:

I, as well, already regret bookmarking this thread. Watched the dome video and found myself just kinda going "Yep, sounds about right".

To contribute, for extra lols check out this 1,000 page report from the prestigious (no, really) Geological Survey of Finland on replacing existing fossil fuels as an energy source: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf

From the abstract:

Lmao at the last sentence. hosed indeed and the author knows it lol.

Captain Gordon posted:

I am 36 so I will most definetly see some poo poo before the end. I am just selfishly hoping it will be "bad poo poo that happens on the other side of the world in the news" and not a local version of thunderdome

Xaris posted:

Even if you didn't, it's very noticeable for even the most innocent rube. like forests and hills are just completely dead and silent now, and dry as a bone. maybe you'll hear a bird or two, and probably some ants. actually leaving the 'burbs/city and going out into nature is the most starkest contrast to how bad things are.

Bathtub Cheese posted:

Even if the only significance it ends up having is aliens advanced enough to come across it just go “lmao” and move on.

Conspiratiorist posted:

We know it's a consequence of human activity, but just like with the thiamine deficiency across the trophic chain, we have no idea by what mechanisms is it that insect biomass is collapsing, because it's exceeding what would be expected from shifting temperature bands or ecosystem loss due to land-use changes.

We could cease all carbon emissions tomorrow and poo poo would still keep dying because we aren't even sure what is it we're doing that's killing the planet.

On that note, our future biodiversity loss estimates are invariably hosed because we just don't know what the gently caress we're doing that's so deadly to the biosphere.

Rectal Death Adept posted:

I think if we mandate that half of all cars be electric by 2030 we might make some progress

The key is to vote for the racist rapist that is having his border control agents chase down climate refugees on horseback like it's 1800, and then arguing the semantics of whether or not they are truly "Climate Refugees"

Truly the path to the solution

Serf posted:

hold on, why do the babies have so much more polyester in their shits than me? what gives

bad boys for life posted:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/23/weather/lake-powell-power-generation-outlook/index.html

Weve known that this was going to happen for decades. We now know it will happen this decade.

From the article:
In 2025, the updated projections now show a 66% chance that Lake Mead could drop below the critical threshold of 1,025 feet above sea level. If water levels stay below that threshold, it would trigger deep water cuts, potentially affecting millions of people in California, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.
There is also a greater than 1-in-5 chance that water levels in Lake Mead will fall below 1,000 feet above sea level in 2025. That is barely 100 feet above what is considered "dead pool," the level at which water can no longer flow through Hoover Dam.





That means tens of millions of people, most of the southwest, will experience severe power outages and infrastructure collapse. This is going to happen, and no one is doing anything about it right now. They literally know this is coming, and absolutely nothing is being done. We are completely and irrevocably hosed.

Trabisnikof posted:

please we've had a plan to do this for over 70 years now

ughhhh posted:

https://inhabit.global/

Stay quite. Gather a crew. Get ready for the new world.

ughhhh posted:

https://inhabit.global/

Stay quite. Gather a crew. Get ready for the new world.

Greta Thunberg posted:

“There is no planet B, there is no planet blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah," she said.

"This is not about some expensive, politically correct, green act of bunny hugging or blah blah blah. Build back better, blah blah blah. Green economy, blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050, blah blah blah. Net zero by 2050, blah blah blah. Net zero, blah blah blah. Climate neutral, blah blah blah," Thunberg went on.

She said in a speech to the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, Italy, on Tuesday. “This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have not led to action. Our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises.”

Funky See Funky Do posted:

lmao rime what are you doing advertising this thread in the QCS shooting thread while making a bid for cspam mod?

silicone thrills posted:

Are we legit gonna have to put sarc marks at the end of any post where there's mention of morons who think population is the biggest global warming/climate change problem?


I dont think there's a single person who's posted pro population control poo poo here but apparently fluffdaddy thinks there is? wtf

quote:

"On the other hand, methods of enforcement of the court's order have led to serious and substantial infringement of civil liberties, including impairment of the freedom of the press to a marked degree," Thompson said.

"And, enforcement has been carried out by police officers rendered anonymous to the protesters, many of those police officers wearing 'thin blue line' badges. All of this has been done in the name of enforcing this Court's order."

He wrote that the factors in favour of extending the injunction are outweighed by "the public interest in protecting the court from the risk of further depreciation of its reputation."

To date, police have made more than 1,000 arrests in connection with their enforcement of the six-month interlocutory injunction order.

quote:

It is simply not possible to carry on at the current level of economic activity without destroying the environment

quote:

There is a box labelled “climate”, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named “biodiversity”, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But they all contain aspects of one crisis that we have divided up to make it comprehensible. The categories the human brain creates to make sense of its surroundings are not, as Immanuel Kant observed, the “thing-in-itself”. They describe artefacts of our perceptions rather than the world.

quote:

What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault. A recent scientific paper estimates that only 3% of the Earth’s land surface should now be considered “ecologically intact”.

The various impacts have a common cause: the sheer volume of economic activity. We are doing too much of almost everything, and the world’s living systems cannot bear it. But our failure to see the whole ensures that we fail to address this crisis systemically and effectively.

quote:

We have no hope of emerging from this full-spectrum crisis unless we dramatically reduce economic activity. Wealth must be distributed – a constrained world cannot afford the rich – but it must also be reduced. Sustaining our life-support systems means doing less of almost everything. But this notion – that should be central to a new, environmental ethics – is secular blasphemy.

Paradoxish posted:

My one tiny ray of hope comes from the fact that the messaging has been advancing rapidly over the last 2-3 years. It's probably too late anyway and we're all hosed, but it's like a switch flipped and suddenly the evidence of total catastrophe became too overwhelming for the optimists to keep pace.

The specific thing I'm noticing more and more is that the "actually, everything will be fine!" articles are becoming a lot more reactive. The optimistic headlines used to be the default, and then there'd be an occasional op-ed counterpoint proclaiming doom. Now the headlines are getting doomier and doomier and, outside of financial news anyway, a lot of the optimism is limited to response articles going "wait wait wait no"

The Protagonist posted:

You don't think the hyper-nationalism turned hyper-fascism will do every horrible thing possible in its power to prolong some semblance of the lifestyle the imperial core has afforded them thus far?

This is not a callout directed at you or any individual in the thread, but I wanted to comment on a more pervasive phenomenon I've noticed picking up steam recently, concurrent with the accelerating extreme weather events and general breakdown.

I'm still workshopping it but for now call it 'sudden collapse optimism', the bizarrely comforting idea that the forces that have both perpetrated and denied the ecological cataclysm will suddenly be subject to the very forces they have unleashed. It's a much harder pill to swallow that they'll do everything they can to keep the party going a little bit longer (insert whatever atrocities your imagination can summon) and their political base of support will swell and grow as they continue to, quite successfully, project blame on outsiders and The Other.

Most of the posters ITT have reached some level of acceptance about the ecological predicament as it stands, and a sudden collapse of The State in the face of that is an odd, and I would argue, idealistic offshoot of that awareness.


The idea that the brutalism of capital will expand exponentially in the face of this crisis and is likely outlast all of us is another step down the crack-ping steps to hell that is hard to accept.




We will live to see manmade horrors beyond our comprehension.

Funky See Funky Do posted:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-30/us-declares-23-species-including-ivory-billed-woodpecker-extinct/100502454

Hexigrammus posted:

Really enjoying all the about this today. An unexpectedly good decision.

Definitely a blow to industry. What will they do without taxpayer funded thugs? They might have to go back to paying for their own mercenary armies again to guard their resource extraction. Battle of Blair Mountain V2.0

ughhhh posted:

BIG HEADLINE posted:

Capitalism is a process of destroying the Earth by mollifying the population with vices they're unwilling to give up.

Communism - as we've seen it executed thus far - is a process whereby the Party Elite enjoy capitalist excess and vices while intimidating the proletariat into being merely content with the privilege to exist...while also destroying the planet with inefficient and wasteful means of production.

It's poo poo, all the way down. At least with Capitalism we have so many wonderful flavors of Rice-A-Roni to enjoy!