this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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A new study has confirmed that the Gulf Stream, a crucial ocean current that helps regulate climate and sea levels, is weakening. The flow of warm water through the Florida Straits has slowed by 4% over the past four decades. This slowdown has significant implications for the world's climate, and scientists are concerned that it may be a sign of further weakening to come.

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[–] [email protected] 194 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But profits are up, how could this have possibly happened? People aren’t buying enough of our green washing products, that must be it!

[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Has anyone tried bribing the gulf stream with some of these massive profits? Everything has a price

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Let's hire a private security firm to find some dirt on that son of a bitch. We'll find some fucking dirt to get him going!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I heard the gulf stream hangs out near Epstein's Island! (It's not that close, please don't flame my geography knowledge)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

No, no, that would be too expensive. Let’s ~~bribe~~ lobby our ~~bought~~ elected representatives to pass laws saying it can’t do that. That’ll work

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (8 children)

At this point, I don't think anything short of losing coastal cities will whip apathetic people into climate action.

[–] [email protected] 134 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Very optimistic of you.

Joking aside, apathy isn't the problem. That is, the issue isn't that people don't care. Ordinary people care a great deal. The problem is that the cost of the action that would be sufficient to change things is too high personally for those ordinary people to take.

People just don't want to be gunned down by riot police or go to prison for assassinating oil executives. The solution to this problem isn't paper straws and recycling (and it never has been). Further, abandoning cars isn't feasible for stroad-bound Americans. Abandoning beef is, but your family switching to chicken and fish won't even twitch the needle.

Point is, the kind of change that's needed is societal--the kind of revolutionary change that's paid for in streets full of blood. In the "Well if enough people just ..." argument, the enough people is hundreds of millions. We have to become a fossil fuel eschewing society. Whole industries have to collapse.

The companies responsible for climate change can be counted on one person's fingers and toes, and they're names any adult can guess in a few tries.

We're not storming their doors because we don't want to be recipients of the state violence these companies will muster to stop us.

Flooding cities might change our minds, but probably only for the people who actually live there. The sad truth is the rest of us will sooner consign Miami to the depths than orphan our children for their grandchildren's sakes.

Things will change when we starve, but probably not a moment sooner.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

Bang on. The Earth's population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion. We have more than tripled that number now, largely enabled by agricultural, medical, and transportation technology powered by stored energy in the form of fossil fuels. Global ecological footprint analysis shows that we "overshot" Earth's sustainable capacity limit in around 1970.

It is impractical (and probably impossible) with current technology to sustain >8 billion people on Earth without fossil fuels. And, it is impossible to keep burning fossil fuels without inducing devastating climate change. So, unless we can replace almost all fossil fuel burning with another incredibly powerful and non-harmful energy source (like fusion, I guess?), we are screwed. I agree with you that the ecological debt we have incurred will likely be paid in lives lost to starvation and conflict over food.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Maui is the truth of what will happen to the rest of us.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Covid-19 has made me even more cynical than ever. It has shown that people would rather die than accept reality. And compared to climate change, the effort to protect against covid was minuscule on an individual level. But still, too many people couldn't be asked.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me, the biggest one is the push for a return to office. I see it as a great opportunity to contact the economy and reduce resource consumption and carbon production with a lot of white collar support. But the owners just aren't having it and insist on a return to the status quo, even though it's obvious we're killing the environments we need to survive with this status quo.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's one of the greatest sadnesses I can name. We were shown it was possible, and in many cases beneficial, and yet... We went back.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Won't anyone think of the commercial real estate market? Also, middle managers can't middle manage remotely. Whats a middle manager to do if they can't justify their position?

/s

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Just looked it up on Wikipedia and "Hurricane Katrina displaced over one million people from the central Gulf coast to elsewhere across the United States, becoming the largest diaspora in the history of the United States."

Having a million Americans lose their homes wasn't enough to even move the needle on climate action. Same way that over a million Americans died of COVID and many people still claim it's a "hoax". I'm convinced that the propaganda is just too much to ever overcome.

I really, really, really want to be proven wrong - but I think you could literally have entire nations be made uninhabitable, and rather than welcoming refuges and making policy changes to avoid climate disaster, we'll find a way to bury our heads in the sand and complain about immigrants taking our jobs.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, but those were brown people that were displaced, nobody gives a shit about them /s

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

That's objective reality, not sarcasm.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Every time I read these articles I just keep waiting for all the other people to finally catch on to how fucked we are and a critical mass of people to actually do something meaningful. Still waiting.

As a result I was feeling frustrated and scared. But now I have come to bitterly accept we are probably going to kill ourselves off (mostly or completely) after mass suffering. At best, I figure whoever is left goes insane because 99% of all species will have gone extinct and the earth will have become a barren, silent, cheerless wasteland.

Hopefully we have exploited natural resources to a degree where it will be out of reach for the next sentient species. They won't find pip or gold or other minerals just lying around so maybe they will remain primitive and low population.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Given that we're already losing entire island nations, I'm not sure even that will do it.

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

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It wont happen like in Day After Tomorrow.

The beaches will get shorter, the docks will get deeper, then some warehouse will get flooded along with some homeless camp.

Land prices will shift, people will move, it'll be a curiosity.

That island nation on the Pacific? Oh well.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I don't think they ever will.

It's probably not going to be a whole city at once. It's going to be a building here, a building there, barely escalating beyond local news unless it's a famous building (Mar-A-Lago?). There's going to be more and worse hurricanes, but climate deniers will point out how they weren't as bad as Katrina or Maria or Sandy. Insurers have already started leaving those areas, changing policies, and/or hiking rates.

The big exception will be if another New Orleans levy breaks. But people will blame the very idea of that city existing below sea level as being an inherently bad idea (which.... I don't think is entirely wrong) and use that to deflect away from the influence of climate change.

People still denying climate change today are either financially invested in doing so, or will need a ridiculous and dramatic event to convince them. Something like you would see in a disaster movie, like a 300ft tall Tsunami.

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But for a fraction of time humanity generated profits for shareholders. The End.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Really is our story and our end. Jfc

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Whelp, enjoy extinction everyone.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Psh, the capitalists will save us all with their record profits and zeros at the end of their bank accounts! I'm sure that's not why these rich assholes aren't trying to race into space or anything.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Global revolt against the few inbred old wealth

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I hate to say it, but even if somehow the top 1% or .1% disappeared, we'd probably stay on the same trajectory.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

At this point its just for a bit of fun

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

But it would make us feel better!

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This means Europe will freeze.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

Only in the winter. Summers will be burning hot.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good thing we left, now we won't have to deal with the European climate :)

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

The people that need to care- don’t. And the people that DO care, are unable to do enough to change the outcome.

We’re fucked.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Original scientific work: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2023GL105170

It has a plain language summary, nothing as far as dramatic. I definitely didn't find any actual study predicting a collapse.

Plain Language Summary

The Gulf Stream is a major ocean current located off the East Coast of the United States. It carries a tremendous amount of seawater and along with it heat, carbon, and other ocean constituents. Because of this, the Gulf Stream plays an important role in weather and climate, influencing phenomena as seemingly unrelated as sea level along coastal Florida and temperature and precipitation over continental Europe. Given how important this ocean current is to science and society, scientists have tried to determine whether the Gulf Stream has undergone significant changes under global warming, but so far, they have not reached a firm conclusion. Here we report our effort to synthesize available Gulf Stream observations from the Florida Straits near Miami, and to assess whether and how the Gulf Stream transport there has changed since 1982. We conclude with a high degree of confidence that Gulf Stream transport has indeed slowed by about 4% in the past 40 years, the first conclusive, unambiguous observational evidence that this ocean current has undergone significant change in the recent past. Future studies should try to identify the cause of this change.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

one thing i don't see mentioned much is the fact that while Europe gets colder, the real problem will be that it's going to get very, very dry.. the supercharged hurricane cycle should bring some devastating seasonal flooding though..

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hopefully I'm safe-ish in Québec…

It's sad to see all these climate tipping points taking hold with humans not even (really) trying to slow them down, forget reversing them.

Continiously bickering over pointless things. With wars taking over unexpectedly one after another (in retrospect, maybe not that unexpected). China just itching for anything to start their own little "special operation" next door. While some other militarized countries/organizations are too trigger happy and in fear of missing out on the action.

We may indeed not make it past the hyperobject that is Climate Change simply because we are too busy blaming inflation, opposing political views, illusions of our own imagination and an unending amount of irrationality. Since it is inconvenient/difficult to try and understand slightly complex concept such as taxation, vaccination, immigration, or even just a map amongst so many things, let alone complex systems feeding into each other such as the Human-Ecology-Climate systems.

Moreover, the prevalence of misinformation doesn't help.

Nevertheless, let us hope for better times. 🥹

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

you're not.

If you're on earth, you're not safe from catastrophic climate change unfortunately.

our only hope is a absolutely radical shift towards decarbonisation, however the drive of capitalism and greed is an unstoppable force.

Enjoy normal life while we still have it at this point.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

We're not safe anywhere because people move. Borders ar nothing more than a concept.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Wait a minute, This seem like a scene of The Day After Tomorrow?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

After becoming YouTube educated on this matter.. Not to that extent. The main thing to notice in the short term is the slowing of the gulf stream will reallocate 'sea level' on either side of the ocean.. Which sounds like a 3ish ft increase on the west, and the same as a decline for the east.

I'm not a water science person though, so I'm just mimicking words.

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