The oceans have broken temperature records every day over the past year

Almost as if people latch onto the emotional immediacy of being 'activists for good' instead of making substantive change.

The problem isn't climate, it is that there are too many people and they keep having kids. Although right now the trend in global birth rates is extremely promising and if that keeps up (keeps down?) we'll be fine.

Yeah. But that isn't that unusual in the human experience. In fact, that was the default state of play for pretty much the period from 1900 (conditions become ripe for world wars) -> 1990 (end of the pressing nuclear threat of the cold war). The start date can be dragged back in time if you include the risk of being overrun by Europeans which was a substantial global concern and from which there was no escaping.

But I suspect my #1 concern would be earning enough to get an air conditioner and #2 would be that no war breaks out that would threaten the ability to run it.

* Animals and plants are dying at a mind-boggling rate. This has consequences for us eventually too, but on it's own, this is an atrocity.

* We're stuffing the air, sea and water with plastic, PFAs, insecticides, herbicides, etc. This will also have consequences for us.

* Our polar ice is melting, our vital weather systems collapsing, our topsoil eroding, our old growth forest near forgotten. As noted above, our oceans are doing some terrifying shit. Consequences are imminent.

* Inequality exacerbates all the above, and gives me serious doubt as to how our children will actually fare. Climate refugees are already a thing, and it could get soo much worse if our current path is maintained.

A stunning proportion of our leaders, megacorps, media, banks, and institutions are making this all worse. They subsidize and invest in fossil fuels, arms, big agri etc. They provide cover for them, enable them, and profit from them. They savagely beat anyone fighting against their acts into submission; sometimes with mortal methods, sometimes just with smears and legal abuse.

Have you considered any of this in your declaration of "we're in the best place ever"? I feel like we have a responsibility to our children and grandchildren to be honest about our fuck-ups.

Societies having to spend more in dealing with effects from climate change have to spend less in other stuff that are investments, stuff like education, R&D, healthcare, transportation; to build dikes, pumping stations, purchasing ever increasing food products after crop failures, rebuilding cities destroyed by climatic events (or moving whole cities/population centres that aren't possible to be rebuilt nor protected), building border defences to stop millions of climate refugees from immigrating to dwindling inhabitable spaces. All of that will have massive costs that will make life much harder for future generations.

We don't know what our children futures will be because as humanity we never been through a truly global catastrophe affecting every single corner of the planet at the same time, not even World Wars were any close to the potential destructive power that fucking up our climate is.

I don't know a single person that believe or thinks this way (that we're doomed). Maybe they do, but they don't say anything about it.

Fwiw, I live in a rural area, have kids and most of my friends have families. We all are good people, that recycle and try to conserve and not be wasteful. But I spend almost 0 thoughts on this topic and it causes me no worries.

Call it head in the sand if you want but I'd rather live this way than most of these comments.

If you look at this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/270499/co2-emissions-in-.... you see the emissions by country e.g.

Don't get me wrong.. I don't think anybody needs a Yacht or private jet.. however I think the emissions come primarily from industry.

Isolating everyone to only ever see the place they were born and never travel the world seems like a big overreaction to me. Transport (and specifically aviation) is hardly the biggest offender as well. Energy, Industry, and Agriculture are 80% of emissions, we should start there.

3 degrees basically requires countries to meet their commitments. Which for the developing world basically means net zero electricity generation by 2035, 99% of new vehicle sales being EV by 2030 and no new fossil heating in a similar time frame. That's 3/4 of the major emitters. Those are the "easy" ones, since those 3 changes all save money over the medium term. Some sort of technological or social miracle in the 4th (agriculture, especially meat) would give us a lot more slack.

Does this come from the same type of people that have kept part of us in a lockdown two years after the start of the pandemic? If yes, you can understand how come not that many us us can take those sentences seriously anymore. They get to sow what they reaped.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming

> Because the historical levels of global dimming were associated with high mortality from air pollution and issues such as such as acid rain,[123] the concept of relying on cooling directly from pollution has been described as a "Faustian bargain" and is not seriously considered by modern research.[111] Instead, the seminal 2006 paper by Paul Crutzen suggested that the way to avoid increased warming as the sulfate pollution decreased was to revisit the 1974 proposal by the Soviet researcher Mikhail Budyko.[124][125] The proposal involved releasing sulfates from the airplanes flying in the upper layers of the atmosphere, in what is now described as stratospheric aerosol injection, or SAI.[122] In comparison, most air pollution is in the lower atmospheric layer (the troposphere), and only resides there for weeks. Because aerosols deposited in the stratosphere would last for years, far less sulfur would have to be emitted to result in the same amount of cooling.

Forests have an albedo of 13%. Grasslands have an albedo of 20%. Deserts have an albedo of 36%. Ocean surface: 6%.

We can artificially create surfaces with an albedo north of 99.9% (99% reflective in visible and UV light). In fact we could create solar panels with an albedo of 83%, which would actually be more efficient than current solar panels.

Makes sense, doesn't it? The whole point of grass, trees, ... is to absorb as much visible and UV light as possible, without becoming too impractical. So forests REALLY pull in heat, almost as much as asphalt.

Cutting down forests, to replace them with nothing, undoes Global warming for (20%-13%)/0.015% or 500 times the area deforested. All 150 years of global warming. If you cut down all plants, 1500 times.

So we could simply destroy cut down 1 million sq. km of forest, about 2.5% of all forests (or simply prevent global warming from forming new huge forests, undoing the last 20 years of forest growth, which would be a lot gentler). Or, we could REALLY cut it down and only do 0.8% (changing forests into deserts) or we could cover 100.000 sq km with a real reflective material.

If we cover Iceland in an artificial white surface, or Iceland and change in those better solar panels that would not just stop, but undo climate change. Hell, we'd have to be very careful about how quickly we do that, or it would hit us like a bomb.

We could cut down 20% of the forests (everything BUT the rainforest for example) of Brazil.

But this seems to me the best way:

1) get people to make 83% reflective solar panels

2) install them slowly. Mandate new solar panel installations to have 80% or more albedo. Ideally cutting down new forests created by global warming to install them.

Even if we just waste the electricity they generate. At the current rates of solar installations that would undo global warming in 3 or so years, and would spread things out, which seems like it would be a good thing. 3 years seems much too fast though, it would have to be slowed down a lot.

And covering water, especially ocean, surfaces in solar panels should have an incredible effect on global warming.

Oxygen isotope ratios are more or less ^16O and ^18O. These isotopes are distributed differently based on temperature and precipitation patterns, which can be recorded in ice cores, ocean sediments, lake sediments, and even in the shells of marine organisms. ^16O is more often seen in 'warmer' events, vs ^18O

This is somehow a given when talking about seasonal data.