climate change news; as bad as I knew, but still...

[Anonymous]

It's really hit me how hopeless it is. At this point we are only mitigating the level of effedness.

When I watched nature documentaries as a kid (Im now 52) they ALL ended with "but if we make changes NOW we can turn this around."

It may have been too late then, but its now officially too late.

All we can do now is live with the consequences of our actions....which have been dictated by industry and greed.

[Anonymous]

Yeah. My DH works in the field. It's just a matter of how bad how fast.

[Anonymous]

The people of Easter Island doomed themselves by their actions affecting the environment. They probably didn't know better.

We are the same.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The people of Easter Island doomed themselves by their actions affecting the environment. They probably didn't know better.

We are the same.

?

[Anonymous]

A common hypothesis is held that the apparent decline of Rapa Nui culture and society before European arrival in 1722 was caused by the over-exploitation of the island's environment, most notably through deforestation of almost all the island's trees. The most prominent proponent of this explanation is Jared Diamond who proposes a scenario for the "ecocide" on Easter Island in his 2005 book Collapse.

This idea that Rapa Nui society collapsed came out of the imbalance between general resources present on the island, mainly population, timber and food sources, and the energy- and resource-intensive feat of transporting and raising the moai. Food resources may have been scarcer than in other areas of Polynesia because of factors like the cooler climate, lack of rainfall in comparison to other islands in the area, high winds and a lack of biodiversity, leading to common Polynesian crops not faring as well as they would in other areas of the Pacific. A source of good timber is also currently noticeably absent from the Island, the tallest, extant plant life averaging around 7 feet.

Although Easter Island currently has only 48 different kinds of plants as evidenced by botanical surveys of the island, it once possessed many more, shown through pollen analysis conducted on sediment layers from swamps or ponds. From these samples, 22 no longer present on the island were shown to have existed at some time there. These plants included a giant palm, the Rapa Nui Palm, that showed signs of being the largest palm species in the world, eclipsing the size of the Chilean Wine Palm if it were not extinct. There are also signs of Easter Island's once possessing a far more diverse collection of fauna. The skeletal remains of 25 different species of nesting bird have been located on the island, but have since been reduced to 16. This trend of extinction and extirpation is a common occurrence when humans populate a new area, because of tendencies to overhunt and overexploit resources.[13]

Deforestation would have caused a decrease in crop yields due to soil erosion, loss of wood as a resource to construct fishing boats, among other things, and would have necessitated a halt to the construction of the moai erected around the island. Diamond hypothesizes that resource scarcity may have led to brutal civil war, creating a drop in population. He further hypothesizes that there were about 7,000 individuals pre-war, a number which fell to the 2,000 whom missionaries met when they showed up in the 19th century and conducted the first census of the island.

In recent years this decline has been increasingly implicated upon the arrival of Europeans to the island and the diseases that commonly came with them like smallpox, with several researchers having instead noted that pre-colonial Rapa Nui society was rather stable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapa_Nui_people

[Anonymous]

I looked it up and found this.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2020.0662

[Anonymous]

I agree, OP. I was worried and scared before. With events of this summer, I alarmed. It really feels like we are on the cusp of a catastrophic tipping point.

If I had to do it all over again, I don't think I'd have children. The global political instability and national security impacts are pretty terrifying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I looked it up and found this.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2020.0662

By "it" I meant Easter Island and environment.

[Anonymous]

So, as someone admittedly not as up to date on all the ins and outs of climate change as I’d like to be, how bad is it going to get, and what’s the timeline?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So, as someone admittedly not as up to date on all the ins and outs of climate change as I’d like to be, how bad is it going to get, and what’s the timeline?

OP here. Here is the CNN link, and from there you can find the UN report if you want. I will be doing that later. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/world/ipcc-climate-key-takeaways/index.html

The timelines are varied depending on what aspect you look at, and whether you see your vantagepoint right now as being within the timeline.

Put it this way: my teen daughter will never know the planet I grew up on. And to her children, it will be radically different still.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree, OP. I was worried and scared before. With events of this summer, I alarmed. It really feels like we are on the cusp of a catastrophic tipping point.

If I had to do it all over again, I don't think I'd have children. The global political instability and national security impacts are pretty terrifying.

I agree and am very worried for my children’s future.

[Anonymous]

OP again. The kicker is that our pandemic is a result of deforestation, decrease in animal habitat and increase in human/animal contact.

It is all connected.

Living in balance with our environment is a ship that has long since sailed.

The grimmest dystopian scifi is looking more like a documentary of the future.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, as someone admittedly not as up to date on all the ins and outs of climate change as I’d like to be, how bad is it going to get, and what’s the timeline?

OP here. Here is the CNN link, and from there you can find the UN report if you want. I will be doing that later. https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/world/ipcc-climate-key-takeaways/index.html

The timelines are varied depending on what aspect you look at, and whether you see your vantagepoint right now as being within the timeline.

Put it this way: my teen daughter will never know the planet I grew up on. And to her children, it will be radically different still.

The article in WaPo about how close we might be to shutting down the entire Atlantic Gulf Stream was horrifying. That's almost disaster movie catastrophic.

[Anonymous]

Yes, the news of the Atlantic conveyer belt is shocking. We may see the end of the UK in our lifetimes.

[Anonymous]

We deserve the coming catastrophe. I tried. I did my part. But not enough people did. Hopefully my DD won’t have children, and hopefully she’ll be able to live a normal lifespan before things really descend into destruction. But I’m not hopeful.