this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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Maybe it’s methane release. Maybe it’s gasses from the sea floor we knew nothing about. We have no fucking clue what climate change is going to look like. PR firms told scientists to put the lowest projections in press releases for the last decade. The real numbers are both grim and proving to be optimistic.
As it turns out, the math was all wrong. Who knows why? Maybe all the Earth’s various systems are interrelated, and when one system collapses it causes dozens of other systems to collapse. Maybe Earth and the delicate balance that enabled life to grow on this planet is a little more sensitive to sudden, radical change than we thought.
Maybe all the people who lied about climate change since the 1970s lied about more shit we’re going to find out about shortly now that we can’t stop it from happening. But they’ll still make their profits and get their taxpayer-funded subsidies, so capitalism is working as intended.
It's kind of crazy to me how what felt like yesterday they were like oh yeah, let's see how bad dredging is? Oh it's the equivalent of the aviation industry...
We have had very smart people working on climate change models for decades and no one ever looked into that? Or has dredging increased so much recently that it was barely a factor before?
The problem isn't that no one has looked into it. The problem - and this is a general one for any scientist working in climate change or environmental protection - is that we can't afford to raise a single false alarm. We can't publish bad news unless we're 100% certain, because that will give oil companies' lawyers and 'journalists' enough ammo for the next fifty years. This means that published climate predictions are usually the most optimistic and conservative estimates.
It's definitely increased a lot in the last few decades, as ships have gotten insanely huge.