- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
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People in Brittany in 2014: oh we’ll be fine no worries 😙
People in Brittany in 2026: what da fuk just happen? 🥵
But car goes WROOM WROOM!
Ah, mais en France car goes «vroum vroum»
Cars can’t vroom vroom anymore. There’s too much traffic.
Doesn’t matter what your intentions are.
Doesn’t matter what earnings you posted this quarter.
Doesn’t matter if you believe in climate change.
Doesn’t matter if you need this truck.
You’re on this rock of wind and water and it’ll do what it needs, to get back to it’s equilibrium. That might be at a level we don’t exist anymore nature is emotionless and you can’t control it.
Doesn’t matter what earnings you posted this quarter.
That actually matters quite a bit. If you have enough money you can easily deal with the consequences of climate change until you’re dead.
Humans existed in harmony with nature for a very long time, and in many places still manage to, despite the increasing challenges posed by climate change.
The human species isn’t what’s throwing the planet out of equilibrium. It’s capitalism and the closely-related evils of white supremacy and war.
We can survive this if we kill capitalism, kill the notion of whiteness (and Zionism), return to listening to nature if we have strayed, and avoid war.
Though the human population is projected to begin shrinking very soon even without major environmental pressures, so “surviving this” might not look like the society we have today. Maybe we’re maintaining our own equilibrium, at least a little bit.
While I agree that the capitalist requirement for unceasing exponential growth is at the heart of modern climate change, it is slightly disingenuous to claim that humans have been living in harmony with nature prior to the industrial revolution. There is a lot of evidence for pre-modern humans clear cutting swathes of land, wiping out megafauna, and treating the environment as an object for exploitation long before the notion of infinite growth became commonplace.
If we really want to get to the heart of it, it is the monotheistic notion that the world was created for us, that there is another (better) world for us after we die, and that therefore it is our birthright to use this land in any way we see fit. Capitalism and industrialisation have provided humanity with the tools to proliferate to such an extent that the scale of the damage we are causing is far greater than anything we were capable of previously, but the Christian imperative to reap the land has been around far longer.
More animistic cultures/religions tend to emphasise the importance of balance with nature and recognise humanity’s place in the larger ecology, but they are therefore also less likely to propogate widely and become a dominant global force.
Fair point with megafauna, but my counterpoint would be that we were struggling to exist, like any other animal, and extinction is a part of nature. Driving things extinct isn’t inherently unnatural.
But then you could say, “Yes, but the same applies to climate change. The earliest oxygen-exhaling plants poisoned the atmosphere and lead to the extinction of more ancient plants.” (Or was it the giant fungus? I forget.) And you’d have a point there too.
But I think the key difference is having a viable alternative and being aware of the suffering we’re causing. We know what we’re doing; the plants did not, they just evolved that way. We have alternatives to farming and hunting animals until their extinction; early inhabitants of Aotearoa, who drove the Moa to extinction, probably didn’t. I will pick preserving megafauna over having my hypothetical preferred megafauna dinner, but I can’t pretend I’d pick preserving megafauna over preventing my family from starving to death.
If we really want to get to the heart of it, it is the monotheistic notion that the world was created for us, that there is another (better) world for us after we die, and that therefore it is our birthright to use this land in any way we see fit. Capitalism and industrialisation have provided humanity with the tools to proliferate to such an extent that the scale of the damage we are causing is far greater than anything we were capable of previously, but the Christian imperative to reap the land has been around far longer.
I agree so strongly that that philosophy definitely makes it much worse. My main issue with Abrahamic religions is the notion that god resembles man (and vice versa) instead of resembling forces of nature.
But I don’t think monotheism was a prevailing philosophy when the megafauna were driven to extinction. Animals (and sometimes even plants) have driven each other to extinction many times in our planet’s history, and we’re just animals. I think the only thing that gives us the potential to rise above that status is knowledge, and that acting as caretakers to all other living beings on this planet is the highest application of that knowledge in the short-term. Long-term, the highest application is extending the reach of life to other planets, even if it’s as simple as intentional panspermia with extremophile microbes.
We could really use a covid-style lockdown for a few years.
But this time no cure until we wipe out all the anti mask/ anti vaccine idiots first
Yeah, the people with the blood clots, myocarditis, infertility, and skyrocketing rates of ass cancer are the smart ones.
They knew that COVID is stopped by a mask, except you’re sitting down at a restaurant.
They get COVID again and again because the vaccine works!
Hmm. The Lemmy antivax crowd.
“Crowd” being, in this case, one guy lol
Decades of doctors, researchers, and Nobel prize winning immunologists willing to endure endless derision and destroy their careers.
Hundreds of thousands of parents with identical stories.
But we’re just the antivax crowd. Smart people believe the ads on TV.
Decades is a way to count people now? I think the number you’re looking for is 2%.
I don’t know where you got the 2% number and I think the real number is probably a lot higher, but let’s assume that number is right for a moment. I know what you’re probably thinking because I used to think the same thing. IF vaccines were not as safe and effective as claimed, that number would be a lot higher than 2%. Four vaccines to cause SIDS, cancer, autoimmune diseases, autism, etc. that would mean that a massive amount of very smart people we’re either dumb or lying.
It seems inconceivable. But, the pharmaceutical industry is incomprehensively, wealthy and powerful in part because they own or effectively own pretty much every major scientific and medical journal and every med school and medical textbook. And they have a government that mandates their products and protects them from lawsuits. You can’t sue a vaccine manufacturer.
Under those circumstances, at least one and 50 medical professionals is screaming from the rooftops that vaccines are not safe, even when the industry is dedicated to destroying their careers and reputations for doing so and is willing to throw essentially unlimited money at it.
And there’s the fact that every study done that truly compared vaccinated and unvaccinated, such as the recent Henry Ford health study, has found that the vaccinated had significantly higher rates of every disease studied. Whereas the unvaccinated had close to zero.
I didn’t take the vaccine at first because they pushed it as having “no potential risks”. Every medical procedure has risks, so I knew they were bullshitting and was therefore unwilling to risk it. Mind you I worked through the entire pandemic as essential medical personnel (running a weed dispensary lmao)
Eventually, accurate risk information about the myocarditis / etc became available. That actually made me more comfortable because at least it was fucking honest. So I could evaluate, what is likely to cause me more harm, the vaccine or COVID?
The clear, science-based answer is COVID. You aren’t a free thinker, you just opted into a different lane of dogma.
You know that phrase when people show you who they are believe them? You knew they were lying. They told you they knew for sure it was safe and you knew they couldn’t know that. Then they admitted a little bit that it might be a little bit unsafe, and suddenly you trusted them?
Imagine a wife, who knows that her husband has cheated on her with dozens of women. She knows that he is currently sneaking out behind her back again and confront him. After some arguing and denial, he eventually admits that he did see another woman, but insists that they only kissed. Should she believe him?
That’s
not a remotely comparable analogy lol
The vaccine did not work well for me: I got COVID at least 3 times. Was wearing N95 masks from the start (happened to have some). Stayed at home except for vital shopping. Grew my hair out. Social distanced the best I could. Played a lot of Animal Crossing. But interacting with work and family is unavoidable, and that’s who I believe I got it from every time, as they were generally not taking it seriously.
From what I read, when I got the shot and boosters I should have had some kind of mild reaction. Felt bad for a day or at least a few hours, something like that. But that never happened to me. However, others I talked to did have a reaction, and they also didn’t seem to get COVID. So I’m inclined to believe that the vaccine probably did work, for at least some segment of the population, just not for me for some reason. It was a rush job, so it not working for everyone isn’t a conspiracy, to me it’s somewhat expected. And maybe one of the other brands would have worked, but I don’t think you were allowed to mix them.
The conflation of antivaxxers with tin foil hat conspiracy theorists is the product of huge marketing and PR budgets. I read that Pfizer had something like 112 employees just dedicated to Reddit.
It’s not a grand conspiracy theory. It’s just money and perverse incentives.
People like Biden and Fauci went on TV and said “when you get vaccinated, the virus stops with you… you can’t get it and you can’t transmit it.” They forced people to get the vaccine or lose their jobs.
And as you noted, it didn’t work, or at least not well. The data shows that it offered some protection to the initial variant, but the protection waned quickly, and once it wore off, your immune system was primed for a variant that no longer existed, which meant that you were actually at increased risk for new variants.
I know vaccinated people who have been hospitalized with COVID multiple times, and unvaccinated people who can’t seem to get COVID if they tried. It didn’t work. They lied and made billions on that lie.
Now think about what else they’re lying about.
And “AI” idiots who insist on burning entire areas just to generate shrimp Jesus memes
Ai data centres used about 0.5% of global electricity production last year. Electricity production is about 26,000 TWh annually, versus total energy production of 185 TWh annually, so AI was about 0.07% of all energy consumption. Energy production causes the bulk of greenhouse emissions: 73.2%, putting AI on 0.05% (this is unfair to AI, because electricity is cleaner than the average energy production which includes just burning gas for heat).
In comparison, trying to find something small on https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector my favourite comparison is that energy for making paper consumes more than 10x as much as does AI.
A large TV might consume about 100W while on, so 100Wh to watch for an hour. To reach the same consumption with AI, you’d need to run about 55 expensive (the upper estimate I found was 6700J - I assume this means long coding answers, research or image generation) chatgpt queries.
Personally I think it unlikely that someone would reach that 1 prompt per minute at that expensive estimate, so all yourself: is AI really “burning entire areas” compared to just watching TV?
It has it’s problems but this is a moral panic.
However there is sharp growth in demand being predicted and I don’t see any sign of humanity trading in some other power usage to get their data center power allocation. Even if we’re are greening the grid it is all for nothing if the extra capacity has to be filled in by more fossil fuels.
Yes, about 12% per year these days. Not enough to really change the picture for a long time, though.
It all well and good comparing data centre energy usage with global production. But you miss out the important reality that a good chunk of the data centres running today and in the near future are using fossil fuel power on-site, without a grid connection, which is so much worse.
Be honest. Even if every single data centre did that, would it worse enough to really change the picture? It’s still going to be less than paper production by a long way for a long while.
You’re fighting a losing battle here, some people just have decided that AI is bad no matter what. There are quite many here on lemmy, which is a shame because there are good and bad sides about AI, but IMO it for sure is here to stay, so discussions would be interesting, again IMO.
some people just have decided that AI is bad no matter what.
Correct, because outside of scientific and medical applications (run by actual scientists and medical professionals), all AI is bad no matter what.
Nothing it can possibly do for you justifies the harm it does, and your reliance on it atrophies your cognitive skills.
Yep, I’ve not had a productive discussion about it that I remember. It’s not just that people have made their minds up; they also will not hear anything that is misaligned with their belief, even if ultimately compatible: you don’t need to think that ai is useful or good to realise its energy use is not especially important. But if it’s bad everything about it must be bad.
AI is bad, but it’s bizarre to point to its energy usage, out of all things. It’s really missing the forest for the trees. As top commenter’s data shows, even gaming on a gaming PC is so much worse (considering a 650W PSU, which is 6.5 times the TV example).
I mean you’re talking to a guy who has halved his total energy usage over the past four years including watching fewer shows, playing fewer games, and sharing more books with friends from our already existing libraries. Trying to convince me that AI isn’t that bad because it only adds a little more energy usage is a real lost cause when I’m constantly trying to push things to less energy usage in every way I can because I hear climate scientists sounding all the alarm bells.
It’s an extra 0.5% that didn’t need to exist on top of everything else we need to reduce.
Do you complain that everyone is being immoral for continuing to watch TV? Or do you accept that energy usage for entertainment is allowed?
How do you compare the relative moral value of using AI, watching TV, driving 10 miles, eating a steak and catching a flight?
If I wanted to halve my carbon footprint I’d further reduce my meat consumption. I would do nothing about gaming, safe in the knowledge that it’s basically irrelevant.
Everyone should be doing what they can was more my point. I went for the biggest things for myself. I already was mostly vegetarian and didn’t drive much so nothing to change there. Most of my carbon footprint was gaming, TV, and AC. Things I was able to work on easily. I do understand I’m fortunate enough to be able to add more insulation to my house and get more efficient appliances and so on. I do know we need to tackle things at the industrial level for best effect.
My point, again was that adding more power consumption and heat generation is definitely not the way.
Sure, but everyone needs to stay sane and alive - so whether someone is generating a slop meme, or watching TV - or using Claude to keep their boss happy, or whatever, these are relatively morally equivalent things. Yet here, AI is singled out as if it were uniquely damaging, when in fact it’s similar. Just more hated.
And the fascist oligarchs. Maybe lock em in submarines and drown the lot of em.
i know the perfect company for that one, im sure they still use a logitech controller.
We don’t need a covid-style lockdown to do that. Just saying.
Genocide is cool so long as it’s targeting the people I think are vile and sub-human.
Disingenuous bullshit for 300 Alex.
The anti-mask/no jab people were convinced to be dangerous by billionaire propaganda.
So? Matrix rules motherfucker, I don’t care if you’ve been manipulated into trying to kill me, I just care that you’re trying to kill me and it’s not my responsibility to deprogram your death cult ass. Fuck em, every last one.
And also made to be susceptible to that level of stupidity by capitalists & their owned politicians gutting education / failing to fund it adequately to begin with. (For US anyway.)
Naaah. Get your lazy asses back to the office… so its market value doesn’t decrease.
Also, no wind turbines or any such humbug in our neighborhood… so we can keep increasing rents. Which we, the boomers, decided ourselves, through collective hypnosis. Also, what’s with this freeloader mentality? Imagine if any of the hoi-polloi could simply use wind and sun. Like, for themselves.
Future is way hipper than we expected it to be.
The fictional one has something along the lines of “as usual” while in reality it’s exceptional (for now). Though europe especially is affected by climate change, gets hotter summers, and it’s concerning, that we get a few more over-30°C days each year.
Media in France keep repeating it’s exceptional because it’s hotter than previous years, but they also sometimes add that it’s probably colder than all years to come.
they can bake baguettes out in the sun now.
Just woke up. It’s 6 am and 28 c.
Truly wild.
I’m in the northern us and traveled to Austin, TX for work recently.
I departed at 72 degrees and raining and landed in 98 degrees with a 78 dew point. It was a heat index of 116.
I understand exactly why the world is burning, watching all the people scurry from AC to AC in a state which derives most of it’s power from fossil juice. And then of course, everyone is driving a monster vehicle and coal rolling pedestrians and e scooter renters.
We’re so fucked.
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I departed at 72 degrees and raining and landed in 98 degrees with a 78 dew point. It was a heat index of 116.
Global warming or American degrees…
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I think he grew up and lived in Europe after his ancestors moved there from Africa.
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This is not supposed to be personal, but an additional point is how it is completely natural to us as a society to fly somewhere. Even if it’s for work.
Absolutely.
I don’t fly often, but my entire team travels for work, meaning they are on the road all day, everyday. We are a sales organization and that’s what is expected by our customers.
I’m not exempt from blame here. I do what I can to reduce my footprint, sadly it’s not much.
I fully understand. I did that for a long time, too (working and participating in a frequent flying environment). But that’s really where we need to change society. The way we think about things that we have never questioned before.
And one additional thing should become very clear: it’s not only about our footprint. Someone needs to stop others from destroying everything, from flying, from coal rolling monster suvs etc. And as there are too few people being that someone, we need to be that someone.
I keep wanting to make “we are flocked” signs with arrows pointing at the cameras, but I don’t know if I should worry about putting them up.
No you just haven’t adjusted the numbers for inflation
This is one of the reasons my spouse and I opted to not have kids. This place is doomed.
Dude I feel so incredibly guilty for bringing my kids into this horror. You’re doing the right thing.
Thanks; it’s a super depressing choice but I know it’s the right one.
Given that overpopulation likely contributes to climate change, you’re also doing your part for those who do have to live through this hellscape!
It doesn’t really make a huge difference tbf, also, most of the work is done by a few countries (see India, China and many african countries), countries like South Korea or Italy actually have the opposite problem, there aren’t enough kids
Honestly having kids or not doesn’t make a huge difference since most countries are below replacement already anyway. Not like it’s normal to have 3+ kids anymore even if you do have kids.
I actually think it might even be worse to not have kids at this point, someone needs to fix all the issues previous generations have created. I’m pretty sure we need human intervention, some kind of Geo-engineering/Terraforming to avoid a runway hot house earth (something like effective carbon capture)… So I don’t think antinatalism helps…
brother, we have a couple years left. capitalism was and will be extremely efficient.
it actively even degraded people’s intelligence level to maximize consumerism and most importantly the holiest of all: profit accumulation. education is completely indoctrinating us in every aspect to affirm the system.
change is completely out of reach to have every human being on earth to emancipate, so we’d dissolve all borders and switch from this hellscape of commodity based production to a to a needs based one.
its not going to work within national solutions, all those will have to play the game of the mightiest, we need all people to realize this but media already done its job to scare people out of reach for years. its literally the allegory of the cave, and people choose the chains.
Most people are sheep. They just follow the stream and eat what big tech serves. As long as the entertainment in the arena (tiktok etc) is good enough, nothing else matters. No need to think, no time to reflect. With AI you don’t really have to think at all. (feels like this is true, but hope it is not)
Portland, Oregon, in °C (cause I never learned Fahrenheit)
It’s not typically known for being a hot place, but this is just the weather report for today.
We’re so very fucked.
(yes watch is in Japanese cause that’s what I grew up speaking and I don’t want to lose it despite having pretty good English, get off my back)
Edit: and then I checked the weather report for later. We’re not cooked, temporarily. Grand scheme of things, thoroughly fucked. But the eye of the storm feels nice.
Hey friend, you sound like you’ve had a rough time with people trying to get you to “integrate” or some such. Your choices of how you experience the world and technology aren’t any one else’s concern and whatever they are, they are valid. I live and work in highly international environments and basically everyone prefers their native tongue for things like computer/phone interface.
Fuck the haters, stay cool, peace out ✌️
I learned English when I was eleven and spent my twenties and thirties masking as yet another basic white American chick, and then in my late thirties I realized that just cause I’m not the exact ethnicity I needed to be for my childhood to be easily believable (white kid growing up on an Air Force base in rural Japan) that I didn’t need to hide it, and that I should celebrate who I was when I was barely a meter tall, thirty years ago. I try my best to keep up my Japanese, but I don’t look like someone who speaks it, which is great when I overhear people shit talking me for being trans or whatnot.
I could take an hour and learn Fahrenheit, but I just don’t want to. I know Fahrenheit for values over 300 anyway: set oven to the number on the box.
さあ、しょうがないね。
I’ve lived within an hour or so of Portland for 40 years, and 24C (75F) has always been a reasonable temperature for late June
I’ve accepted that we won’t survive the coming storm. Covid showed us that people couldn’t be bothered tonwear a mask or get a shot to fight off a disease that was visibly killing millions. If we can’t come together on that, there’s no way we’ll come together to survive the climate crisis.
O think humans well survive not through any planing or anything just that there is so damn many of us and we are adaptable that some well survive.
Do you mean ‘we, society as it is right now’ or ‘we, the human species’. Because i don’t really disagree, but at the same time i’ve seen people get through stuff i expected would kill them. I’m quite convinced some people will survive the storm. Might not be many if we continue this way though
Oh humans will survive. We’re hands down the most adaptable species evolution ever spat out. Billions of us living as we have been? Definitely not. But make no mistake, it’ll be humans, cockroaches, and whatever’s going on on those deep sea vents left at the end.
If anything is left, it’s not the end. Revolutionary optimism even in the face of extinction, man.
That and the willingness to throw every billionaire into a woodchipper.
It’s the end for billions, possibly trillions of living beings though (remember not only humans are suffering from climate changes). There will be some sort of rebuilding sure, but the cost will have been unimaginable.
I wouldn’t overestimate humanity’s survival capabilities. There have been over a dozen known species of the genus homo, yet all but one are extinct. The rest have died out mostly due to natural changes in climate.
Sure, we can adapt, but we’d have to put in an actual effort to do so. Reducing emissions is an adaptation, but we’re not doing enough in that regard.
The cynic in me imagines that the media purposely promoted the longer timelines to lull people into thinking we had more time, and so there was no rush.
I think it’s more about scientists being extremely conservative with their estimates, because they know they’ll get impaled over being ‘alarmist.’
And then fired from their job.
Also, you should check out conservative coverage. There is no timeline compression, its strait up cynicism and hostile denial.
I feel like some counters should immediately banish the speaker to sitting in the corner. “Alarmist” and “divisive” are the top two that come to mind. It’s almost always idiots not engaging with the material in good faith who pop those out.
I dunno about “divisive.” Sometimes thats a legitimate criticism, and pot-stirrers are little shits, IMO.
If someone is just trolling, sure. But usually I hear it when someone’s like “gay people should be allowed to live” and someone else goes “you’re being diViSiVe”
Well there’s no retort to that. If you’re in a debate environment where an acceptable critique is “well, these people existing is not part of our beliefs, so its not okay,” then the whole debate is rigged from the start.
The thing is each individual issue feeds the speed of the rest. Sun melting ice from above, rising sea temp melting from below and both speed the other up. There’s thousands of things like this. I’m not an expert or anything I just remember reading something like this.
