• zephyrvs@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Not a Climate Change denier but it feels weird that scientists who projected climate change to take a few decades to really fuck us is suddenly melting the planet.

    Right after a pandemic, while AI is killing jobs and a war between Ukraine and Russia can officially escalate to WW3 any day.

    • Solivine
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      1 year ago

      Well they projected it to take a few decades… a few decades ago

          • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            With an Inconvenient* Truth.

            An uncomfortable truth would have been in the backseat of a Volkswagen (that’s a Mall Rats joke for anyone keeping track at home).

      • Grimpen@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in the nineties. But we had lots of time then, so no rush…


        Back when I was young and naive I figured the Kyoto Protocol would work. We had lots of time then. The climate change is a hoax thing didn’t really take off until the early aughts as I recall.

    • l_one@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      To my knowledge, there had been an understanding that scientists were being fairly conservative with their statements of how bad things were going to get, and how fast it was going to happen.

      I know of two primary drivers for this (which I am somewhat oversimplifying for brevity):

      1. Scientists really didn’t want to get it wrong by saying X will definitely happen by year Y, and then be wrong, thus giving ammunition to climate deniers and vested interests running counter-PR such as oil companies.

      2. Scientists didn’t want to paint a picture of unstoppable, inevitable doom that no person could possibly imagine a way for them to fix, or contribute to fixing, thus leading to the mindset of ‘if there’s no way to stop it why even try?’.

      • Goddard Guryon
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        1 year ago

        For your first point, I’d just like to add that the scientists didn’t give conservative estimates to stay clear of conspiracy theorists, but to stay clear of criticisms of fellow scientists. If there’s insufficient data to back up the claims a researcher makes, you can bet the other researchers will always beat the conspiracy theorists in calling out the bullshit.

    • BrotherCod@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      That’s the whole point. They’re surprised that it’s happening so fast. The acceleration at which things are happening has gone far beyond anything they predicted. My local area hit 40°C a couple of days ago, the highest recorded temperature on record since we started taking temperatures. We’ve had constant temperatures in the high 30s for the past 2 weeks. I can’t remember temperatures this high and I’m almost in my fifth decade on our little blue dot. The icebergs that we see every year failed to show up this year because of the large amount of melt happening in the Arctic, something I can’t remember seeing in my lifetime. I know what I’m saying is all anecdotal but there’s also plenty of evidence supporting global atmospheric warming that’s backed up by scientific data.

    • sci@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      the climate changes greatly improve the likelyhood of extreme events, going from once in a million years to once every few years.

    • CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I bet you they are as surprised as you are…

      Nothing gets me more depressed than climate crisis these days tbh…