chapotraphouse

I'm told that even in the most extreme cases it's unlikely to the point of impossibility that the anoxic atmosphere thing will happen.

Last time an anoxic ocean event happened, terrestrial surface temperatures were about 12 C higher than they are now; there's plenty of other stuff that'll kill you before we come anywhere near that.

Do you want journal articles on how the process of ocean anoxia would take many thousands of years to occur even if the conditions were perfect for it to occur? Are you demanding we create novel debunks of the so called "Kump hypothesis" in this thread? It's pretty pointless to debunk a random pop science journalist's 20 year old deliberate misinterpretation of a climate science study about a chemocline excursion during the Devonian extinction, and which makes zero climate change predictions.

Literally nothing seems to be sufficiently convincing for you here, so maybe you should quit your job that you hate and go get a climate science degree so you actually know some of those unknowns instead of pretending they're unknowable and dismissing every other person in the thread. Maybe go seek therapy because there's clearly a lot more going on here than just fear about some flashy fictional climate change scare tactics that were disputed decades ago.

The problem is not that you're being unreasonably doomer, the problem is you're more willing to fall over and die than to give up your lifestyle and work towards revolution. But that goes for the rest of us too.

Idk feels like we’ll just get more of what we’ve been getting for the last decade or so. “Once in a lifetime weather events” will become the norm, and I feel like even the most ghoulish corporations you can think of are planning for climate-induced resource shortages

There's a Buddhist parable about getting hit with two arrows. You could imagine it in a scenario where you are on a battlefield and are struck by an arrow. But for some reason you freeze up and stare at it, so you get hit by a second. You should have taken cover.

Another way, more secular if you prefer that, is shooting yourself in the foot. That only happens when you're not watching what you are doing or thinking.

Existential fear and the unknown unknowns aren't something that you should seriously be afraid of. They are fears of fears, that something potential may be potential. Two degrees removed from reality. At least something more immediately threatening, you can act against.

Those more abstract dangers are for humanity as a group to deal with. Tackling them as individuals will result in anxiety. Focus on more immediate problems, or find others to tackle the more abstract problems together, knowing you still might not achieve anything material just yet

This world wants to kill you. It scorns at your existence. Never give the miserable fucks the satisfaction. I’m sorry things are so hard. You and I are both going to make it through.

I am existentially afraid of the unknown unknowns.

You don't know that everything will be okay. And you don't know a situation in which that unknown could be known. It's an unknown unknown. You can't be afraid of all the unknown unknowns because that's just being afraid of what you don't know, which is everything. You can live your entire life and only know what you know, but never the things you can't know. Climate change is just an excuse to vent about a deeper fear and lack of control.

Everyone fears the unknown unknowns. Every generation. Every person who would never get to live in a world where climate change was possible. You're not the first person or the first group of people in history to fear them. You push on, not because you'll eventually known the unknowns or survive them, but because you don't actually know what's going to happen. Because you don't know what moment of history you're actually in, because history hasn't happened yet. You're still living it. The hand-wringing comes from trying to imagine yourself from a future where your life is history, but that's not how time works for us.

There are a lot of things to worry about with respect to climate change, but this is almost certainly not one of them. If something like this happened, it would take place over the course of thousands (at least--more likely tens-to-hundreds of thousands) of years, and there would be many, many other fatal problems for humanity along the way. If we were on the road to this scenario (or something like a Venutian hothouse scenario), human civilization would be gone for other reason eons before we ever got there. Climate change is not going to destroy the world, or wipe out all life on Earth: the reality of our current trajectory is much more pedestrian, and "just" represents the death and immiseration of billions of people, mostly in the global south (at least at first).

When I was 20, I wanted to plan the rest of my life around avoiding the negative repercussions of global warming. I eventually gave it up because it was both impossible and made me feel sick to think about. I would get this horrible empty pit in my stomach.

Now, in my later 20s, I am just grateful that I got to live this little bit, see and feel some beautiful things. Call me greedy, I am just around to see how much more I can get away with before my time/ all of our times are up.

(Besides, some of the most beautiful things I've seen and felt were when things were worst for me.)

Anyway, I've seen your posts around a bunch and you seem cool and funny. DM me anytime.

At what point do the phytoplankton I'm currently breathing the poop of have a mass extinction event? All of human civilization is about to drown on dry land and I spend 5 days a week maintaining software that charges people for turning on their lights.

You're worrying about the wrong thing.

You're far more likely to die from nukes. Humanity is not going to be made extinct by the direct effects of climate change. What's far more likely to happen is climate change leads to societal instability which leads to the nukes flying. By the time phytoplankton reaches the point of mass extinction, humans would have long since wiped out every single vertebrate and most invertebrate with nukes.

And by wiping out vertebrate life with nukes, you don't have to nuke every single square inch of earth. You just have to nuke enough cities to cause gigantic firestorms which blanket the Earth with smoke ie nuclear winter. There's a debate among scientists on how much cities you have to nuke before the snowball effect happens, but with enough nukes, it'll happen. Nuclear winter and societal collapse means the population starves to death. If you aren't the lucky ones to be instantly vaporized or turned to red mist by pressure waves, you'll either die from radiation poisoning or starvation. It's starvation that will ultimately kill humanity if the nukes start flying.

As a final note, you should read about all the close calls we had towards the "nukes fly everybody dies" lose condition of humanity. So many close calls. Outside of complete and total nuclear disarmament, our luck will eventually run out if we don't do something about it.

I've come to accept, even despite my instincts or tendencies to lament and sink into periodic despair, that living is not a rational thing. It must be irrational: Irrational optimism.

Generations before us and after us have experienced the end of the world, the end of their people, the end of their society and culture, through war, famine, disease, and death itself. We still lived on and echoes of the past have survived until those echoes became new things and new people.

Immortality of the species was always a fantasy, but we still have to try to exist and thrive. To strive for meaning, to imbue our lives with purpose and love. And seek to be part of a continuity of hope in that respect; the Christians would call it resurrection.

Like the prophet Jeremiah, who saw the destruction of Jerusalem and Judea by Babylon, who still saw hope and life for the Jewish people after its apparent annihilation by Babyllon, we must have faith that we will overcome and see peace and survival become a reality.

You see my son, at the beginning when it created the universe, the Demiurge has doomed us all to the mortal coil and thus we suffer in the Hell that is our material reality.

Our creator is a twisted being that cares not for our suffering.

The hurricanes, floods, wet bulb events, and plankton extinctions are a tapestry of utter desolation that was brought forth by the Demiurge's servants on this earth, the ruling class of demonic parasites that also do not care about us, nor our suffering, for they are hollow godforsaken beings that seek only the perpetuation of their own death grip on the steering wheel of this infernal machine called capitalism which the angloid lost control of during the AD > 1700 I guess.

After untold millions died to imperialist genocide brought forth upon Earth by its rampage, it currently is on track to kill billions more.

Even the very reality of entropy ensures that the unknown that will come to pass will probably be awful if left to its own devices.

All you can count on is everyone getting angry enough to kill the demon, destroy the overlord, spit acid bile into the face of the adrenochrome-guzzling child-sacrificing world-starving monsters that have doomed us all to this wretched fate. To cancel the apocalypse.

If you are truly afraid, then when you know who is responsible, after you mourn our stolen future, let your fear turn to wrath, and may your wrath crystalize into principled action. As His Holiness St. Bhagavan Shree Matt Christman (PBUH) says, nobody can know what "principled action" will be, only time and your personal circumstances will tell, the imperative He gives us against the Demiurge is to join together in whatever capacity we can to help those around us such that the machinery to build a revolutionary answer, or an oasis from the apocalypse, can be constructed.

May His Large Adultness guide you to the proper path,

Fr though even if humanity dies something else will evolve and hopefully learn from our mistakes.

Existentially afraid? No way, man, when I die in the Water Wars of 2032 I'll get to die knowing that my life had meaning, that I served a purpose, that I was more than a sack of meat that dreamed it was special. And my purpose was the ensure that the supply lines from Lake Michigan remained open through the ruins of Chicago so that the Duke of Peoria could control supply of fresh water to his serfs and retainers, thus protecting his own holy rule. And so long as the Duke of Peoria maintains his just rule of the farmlands of Illinois he can protect us from the savage Iowan raiders. I hear they love nothing except to destroy the works of pious men and worship foreign gods from the distant Orient.

you're right, those are pretty scary, but Existence itself is scary. this isn't a trite claim that "the world is a scary place", but more that the required acceptance of consciousness as a material phenomenon can be a pretty horrifying concept, and we have to come to terms with it. so maybe that helps: Understanding that this dread is more fundamental than just the knowledge humans -- like every other species in history -- inevitably must go extinct, and that extinction will perhaps be sooner and more ignoble than we hope. This is a dread which you really would strive to master in any lifetime. whatever happens, there is a good chance it will be interesting to watch at least.

Now, before you conclude this is just totally tangential rambling, I'll refer to something specific you wrote: "I spend 5 days a week maintaining software that charges people for turning on their lights." This is definitely not an irrational observation. you should be concerned about whether your work is meaningful and so on, and you should be prioritizing whatever you need to do to change that. Obviously, youd've put a lot of work to get the career you have now and it probably feels, at least a little, like you're stuck on a certain path, but the guys freighted to Treblinka weren't even on a fixed path, so suppose with me that a software engineer has more than a couple degrees of freedom. I trust you can find some meaningful use for your talents, and eventually you wont need to waste them on any worthless Smart Home SAAS anymore.