To worry that the planet is heating faster than we have been led to expect and whether we can cope?

[100thingstoknowaboutspace]

I understand that extreme weather events, including spikes in temperatures and longer heatwaves, are a result of smaller incremental rises in global temperature. But the rate of heat records and large jumps in the temperatures during those spikes and heatwaves that we have experienced during the last 10 years feels off the scale for me, and I am wondering how we can actually cope if it continues at this pace? Climate experts talk about 2 degrees warming by mid century, but if we experience heatwaves that are 5 or more degrees hotter or go on longer than this one, I genuinely don't understand how we will cope. At the moment my flat is only just tolerable - with every measure of cooling I could think of. A few degrees more, and survival is literally threatened. Whereas humans may be able to cope with 5, 10 etc degrees lower, as it is easier to heat up, it seems we are reaching the edge of survivability in terms of being able to stay cool enough to maintain life. Not only here in the UK obviously.

I do believe there is still action that we as individuals and as a country (which in turn may impact other countries) can take, but I am scared that things are worse than even experts, in their carefully hedged or caveated statements and predictions, cause us to believe. I am worried I won't be able to keep my child safe as they grow up.

Grateful if anyone can talk me down from this climate anxiety - and also, grateful for insight about what might be most effective for us to do.

It's clearly not. You need to calm down and get some solar panels and a/c installed. Maybe pick up some soleros.

I mean in the 80s I was assured that half my home city would be under water from the Rising Oceans by now

Nonsense, I work in one of those industries, climate change is cyclical, what we are experiencing is normal, survival is not threatened, spend some time educating yourself.

How do people have so little understanding and write this sort of hysterical nonsense?

What's your understanding of climate change then?

Where did the Carbon come from to get locked up in trees, coal and oil?

The whole Carbon Cycle depends upon CO2.

The climate change is accelerated you are not wrong. I had lettuces that survived the winter. That concerns me more than a few hot days in the summer. This is what will cause sea level rises. Honestly we are experiencing temperatures that we'd normally travel to another country to intentionally enjoy. Everyone has gone way ott about the temperatures these last few days. We need to learn to carry on in the more extreme periods of weather and adapt our lives around it.

Greening our streets and schools would be a great places to start. The DfE are on this with their latest school design brief. Trees and vegetation significantly reduce temperatures compared to hard surfaces. We should ban people from converting front gardens to driveways and find ways to limit cars.

I also think it would be worth considering ditching our half term holidays in February and May in favour of children having July and August off though.

The opposite, in fact. Mitigation of climate change means investment in education, infrastructure and technology. The ‘profit’ will not be measured in financial terms, rather in preserving some level of function and comfort for humans.

There are potential gains of course - in health, savings, and a cleaner environment for everyone - but that means the majority would have to stop consumerism, frequent flying, and driving everywhere, and opting for a plant based diet.

I guess this isn’t you?

People who have tried to make the situation clear have been shut up by people who didn’t want to know , and by people who benefit from people not knowing ( and they tend to be rich and powerful ) and people didn’t bother reading the “what this means “ - they just saw “oh a couple of degrees warmer would be nice” everyone wants things in short sound bites but “sort this or die” was ignored as scaremongering. Sort this or die is where we are at.

give up meat and as much dairy as possible
give up flying
stop driving everywhere
give up buying Chinese imports - don’t buy new clothes because your old ones are shabby or not the latest fashion. Stop buying “products” - hair make up beauty, little gifts for the kids , party bags. Don’t buy anything that isn’t food basically and be careful with food origins.
give up streaming TV and all the hidden causes of climate change like AI. Have the smallest broadband speed you can survive with

ten years ago - minor lifestyle changes would have been ok

now - the very basis of capitalism needs to be ripped out painfully . We can’t keep spending as we are and expect that the carbon footprint of things will be magically reduced. We have to refuse to buy until the footprint is minimised.

I am not wound up.

I have AC thanks. I live somewhere where it is needed. We limit it to nights only though.

The climate is changing, and it is changing fast.

Oh and look - I am not saying spend money - I am saying the exact opposite is what will save us

This is desperately sad.

But mitigation is expensive and it’s too late to avoid some costs

Probably would be better to stop building houses on the green belt then.

Even better if we could stop artificially inflating the population with immigration, so we didn't need to keep building, building and building.

Sunday the overnight low is 11c. If I stay up for the World Cup, I might have to dig a woolie out.

Of course people who work in the oil and gas industries say this.

Climate change may be cyclical but humans won't survive this one, and I guess that's the issue.

Dismiss as hysterical so you don’t have to do anything and hope you survive ?

people are driving full pelt towards a brick wall and refusing to slow down and calling the passengers hysterical for wanting to stop before they hit the wall

Yes, of course, ultimately Earth the planet will be fine.
But that's not the point is it? Humanity under the pressure that climate change could bring has the potential
to make every other war, revolution, disaster, genocide, combined look like a walk in the park compared to the entire planets population desperately fighting to survive, not to mention every other living thing doing the same. May you live through interesting times indeed!
To the Op, I do have hope despite saying the above but it annoys me when I hear stuff like the planet this the planet that. It's about our lives on this planet, not the planet itself.

Humans barely survived the last ice age

humanity Surviving - a few people living - isn’t the future I want for my family. I’d like them all to live

I think this shows that changes to our climate have profound effects on ecosystems. And your 20,000 years example is short-term in the grand scheme of things. So it can change fairly quickly, and those changes can have huge effects.

That makes it all the more sobering that due to us burning fossilised plant and animal material which permanently absorbed the massively elevated CO2 levels of the time, we are turning our climate into that of the carboniferous period.

The carboniferous period started out hot - average 20’C temperatures (now the average is 15 and rising), with high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This led to an abundance of plant life, which increased oxygen levels while absorbing the CO2. There were devastating forest fires, exacerbated by the increased oxygen. The oxygen levels would have been damaging to human life.

As the abundant forests absorbed the CO2, temperatures cooled, proving the link between atmospheric CO2 and temperature.

This closed the period with an ice-age due to the low CO2 levels. The plants died, turned to peat as they decomposed and fossilised into coal. All that CO2 which caused the 20’C average temperature, and which was balanced by the forests - was permanently locked away as coal.

Until we started burning the coal. We relased vast amounts of that locked away CO2, and exactly the same principles apply now - excess CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat, moving us back in the direction of 20’C.

This time we don’t have the trees to absorb it. We cut them down. We think farms and hedgerows and moorland are “nature”. The land should be forest.

Our biggest remaining forests are being felled to make room for soya - cattle feed - and cattle. So our buffer is diminishing.

Excess CO2 makes the oceans acidic, killing plankton which the entire food chain is built upon.

This pattern has happened before in nature which has been able to return to a balance, but this one is our fault, and we even destroyed much of nature’s way of balancing it out.

I think it's less of a problem if the right kind of humans survive.

Where did the carbon come from ? From exploding stars.

Then there is the 4.5 billion years of geology as the planet cooled after coalescing from nebulae, abiogenesis, life, plants and trees, algae in the oceans etc.

The trees that became coal were in the carboniferous era, about 300 million years ago.

The carboniferous era locked up massive amounts of carbon.

Actually the 'earth is flat' myth started in the C19th when historians were overexaggerating the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism - ie Catholicism bad because they were nasty to Galileo who thought the earth was round but was punished for his beliefs, but Protestantism good because they were 'enlightened scientists' and didn't have a nasty Pope being nasty to people (very roughly speaking). People knew the earth was a sphere over two and a half thousand years ago, and most ancient sailors didn't believe they would fall off if they sailed too far.

Yanbu, a metric called climate sensitivity has been shown to be too conservative on scientific models compared to real world data. Look up ‘earth’s energy imbalance’. Unfortunately it is bad news for our way of life.

I’ve said it on other threads, humans have caused nearly all the problems on Earth. We are the problem. The planet will thrive without human interference!!!