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‘It’s too late’: David Suzuki says the fight against climate change is lost - iPolitics (www.ipolitics.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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How to say Marx was right without saying "Marx was right".

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[–] -3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Even if we do pass some kind of "tipping point" (and you need to understand that every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people's attention to the problem), we can still mitigate the damage. There is never a point where fighting climate change becomes worthless. The less we do now, the greater the damage will be in the future. That's all there is to it. Tipping points are just a way of illustrating that.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem

    That is completely, utterly wrong. Climate scientists are talking about the physical concept of the tipping point, which is observed in nature and also comes out of their models. In climate, it's the point at which reversing a change that originally happened over decades would take thousands of years. For example, this has been the huge concern with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which plays a large role in the climate of western Europe: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2791639/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation

    Especially read the sections about Stability and vulnerability, Effects of an AMOC slowdown, and Effects of an AMOC shutdown.

    My point is, tipping points are absolutely not an arbitrary thing. They are very solid predictions based on the physics of the climate. We don't necessarily understand exactly how close we are, even though we're observing some effects of being close to them, but the impacts of crossing them will make climate change even worse and hence the alarm.

    Edit: If anyone reads these links and your eyes glaze over and you don't understand of word of what's written, then you need the humility to listen and accept what climate scientists have been trying to tell you. Some of the smartest people on the planet have been working on this for decades.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    If that's what we're meaning when we talk about "tipping points", yes, they exist. But as you yourself said, "We don’t necessarily understand exactly how close we are." The idea that passing some arbitrary line like "1.5 degrees" is a point of no return is unscientific nonsense, and that's what the vast majority of people mean when they say "tipping points."

    And the point is, none of that changes the need to keep working towards improvement. Every fraction of a degree less the planet heats will make a difference. Even as monumental climate changes occur, those changes can be lessened, their impact reduced, by any amount that we decarbonise the atmosphere.

    If you're under the impression that I'm arguing against climate change being real in any way shape or form, or that I'm arguing against it being utterly catastrophic, you've missed my point so badly that you might as well be reading it in a different language. My point is very, very simple; there is never a point where we get to give up.

    No matter what happens, every effort to reduce the damage to our climate will save lives. Things can always be worse, and because things can always be worse it ontologically follows that things can always be better, even when the definition of "better' is "fewer people die."

    The fight isn't lost or won. Get those concepts out of your mind. Suzuki - as brilliant as he may be - is an idiot for invoking them like this. He's speaking about a very limited, very specific piece of the fight, but he should have understood that the public would take his words entirely out of context. The people who want to poison and destroy our planet for profit are, right now, actively pushing the propaganda that the battle against climate change is over. They are wrong, and they are lying. The battle against climate change is a battle to reduce harm, and you can always reduce harm, now matter how great the scale of the eventual harm may be.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I think it helps to look at other problems caused by fossil fuel use. Higher CO2 concentrations make breathing air worse. Ocean acidification kills fish etc.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I think the bigger impact is thinking about changing weather patterns long term leading to new and larger deserts in the centres of continents and regular, massive storms on the coasts. That’s a changing climate beyond “everybody is a few degrees hotter” that is implied by global warming. CO2 isn’t going to effect breathing, but does cause acidification.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem

    The +1.5C threshold is a somewhat arbitrary line designed around tipping points. The tipping points themselves are not imaginary/arbitrary. Forest fire spread increase. Methane defrosting. Polar melting path certainty. All of these increase GHGs and warming. Hurricane intensity+drought+intense rainfall events destroying property values is somewhat of an economic tipping point starting to affect some right now.

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