It’s funny because here in Austria right now in August I need my sweater in the morning. Very much not normal. (Not that I mind it being cool, but it’s worrying.)
ACTUALLY!
Due to climate change, the polar vortex is very unstable. It used to be that there was the Jetstream around the North Pole, keeping the cold air there, and only sometimes it would make a U-shape down towards europe (or other parts of the world) but due to global climate change it’s extremely unstable and squiggly at times, meaning that sometimes in summer the cold polar circle air extends towards Europe, as we have it right now.
For anyone interested:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/understanding-arctic-polar-vortex
I‘d like to post the studies as well but I can’t find them this quick.
In Estonia we had an abnormally cold June and beginning of July followed by 3 weeks of heat so far. Normally you never got more than 2 hot days in a row here, but past 10 years have been pretty hot summers.
The idea that this goes against climate change rather than being a symptom of it is rooted in the outdated and oversimplified idea that everything everywhere would get slowly hotter without much other appreciable effects. This is why the term “global warming” fell out of favor with climate scientists a long time ago.
Indeed. Whilst many people (such as AlsaValderaan, based on their comment) understand this, there are also people who don’t seem to understand that unpredictability and more extreme weather is evidence of climate change, not against it.
As you say, “global warming” hasn’t been used by scholars in and adjacent to the field in many years, but the term and it’s connotations seem to have stuck in people’s heads. As a scientist, I have an instinct to say “this is a messaging problem, and if scientists better understood how to use rhetoric, perhaps people would have a better understanding of climate change”. However, I think that’s an incorrect instinct that only exists as a form of “cope”.
I do think that scientists, on average, need to get better at communicating their research to laypeople and policy makers. However, it low-key feels like victim blaming to lay responsibility for muddy public understanding of climate change, given that the primary cause of this is moneyed interests who stand to profit from the ongoing rape of the planet’s ecosystems.
My expertise isn’t in a climate related field, but I have friends who do work in that sphere, and it feels like there’s a sort of collective trauma amongst researchers (I mean above and beyond the despair that many of us feel at political negligence exacerbating the climate crisis). I can’t imagine how it must feel to go to a conference and present some research that says “this extremely specific thing that I am a hyper specialised expert on is at risk of permanent loss, here is what needs to happen”, and find that despite unanimous agreement, and everyone else there is shit scared because they have their own hyper specific objects of expertise that are at risk for the exact same reasons; nothing will change because you’re preaching to the choir.
There are scientists who are good at shouting at public policy makers, but they’re outnumbered and outspended by the people and corporations that want more profit. Sometimes people fight for years to implement a particular scheme, but it gets corrupted along the way — usually not from a malicious sabotage of climate action kind of way, but through the kind of bureaucratic incompetence that arises when the people steering the ship fundamentally don’t care about the aims of a project. Policies get progressively watered down, or completely distorted from their original aims. It’s depressing as hell.
Honestly, the only reason I’m still alive is spite. I don’t think climate change will eradicate humanity, but it will put countless lives and ecosystems in jeopardy. For all my privilege, I know that to the ones in power, I am just as much an acceptable sacrifice on the altar to profit as a Bangladeshi textile worker, or a Congolese cobalt miner. The assholes with money are probably going to win this war against most of the planet, but ironically, they’re some of the least well equipped for climate resilience — money only gets you so far at the end of the world, after all.
Nah, I’m well aware that this is a symptom of climate change, hence my worry. I see reports that nordic countries get ridiculously hot as well. Weather everywhere is shifting around in unpredictable ways. You didn’t see me call it “global warming”, did you?
I just hate sweltering hot weather, so perversely I like the result of an autumny August, but this weather is very out of wack.
Ok yeah I was just commenting in general because this sentiment is shockingly common on social media.
I’m Poland we went straight from winter to autumn this year. And autumn in Poland is very shitty. Just rain, cold and depression.
Yeah hello from south of the border. 2 weeks of almost constant cild weather rain every other day. Mornings at 5° and winds. It was hotter during march than during july.
Yup, same here. 11C today, max daily 22C. Autumn weather in August!
That sounds like what our summers used to be like in Western Canada, but now we get to burn up hovering around 30 and dealing with constant smoke fire, though smoke season seems to be late for this side of the country this year and I wish not to invoke it.
Constant 30C is what our summers used to be! July was really wet and cold this year.
I don’t care for depicting this kind of violence toward oil company executives. It looks like she might have missed some of them.
Jesus, I miss sweater weather too.
My friend just offered me some really cute sweaters and I wanted to take them but I knew I’d never fucking wear them because it’s either too hot for them or too cold to even be outside
If it’s cold too cold to be outside, it should be cold enough inside for a sweater inside. What are you keeping the heat at in the winter?
69.F
Nice
I’d keep it at 67 or 68, but I gotta live life by the meme lol
Hey, I don’t care about the reason as long as it helps the cause.
Why is she using a stinger launcher though? Those are for aircraft.
Sometimes, the best tool for the job is the one you already have. Is she supposed to go out and buy a new missile launcher and all the consumables that go with it when she’s got a perfectly functional stinger in the garage already?
Consumer culture has gotten out of hand!
/s … kind of???
🎶 With your feet in the air and your head on the ground… 🎶
I know this reference but why have you used it here at this moment?
Fight club, end of movie. Buildings being blown up
Bingo. I was young and impressionable, and that move convinced me that “Where is My Mind” is the sound that buildings make when they blow up.
I had completely forgotten that song played in that moment.
I assumed it was a Project Mayhem reference
💯
Cuz it’s too waaaaaa-aaa-aaaa-aaarrrm for you here and now so let me hooooo-ooooo-oooo-ooolllld both your hands in the space that was my sweater.
And if I may just take your Breath away
She needs to move to San Francisco
“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
- Not Mark Twain
The first time I went to SF was summer 2008 to move my brother out there. Packed shorts and tshirts, because it’s fucking August, why would I need jeans, and especially why a jacket?
So that’s how I bought jeans and a jacket in SF, as soon as that fog rolled in, RIP.
is that meryl silverburgh
Could be. Also explains the stinger.
Oil Coinc sounds like the noises of a robot pig.
Valid
The song?
The book with the same name is actually really good, you should read it.
Never heard of sweater weather, hate sweaters. Hate oil companies, too.
Oil companies are evil. Sure. They lobby for everything they can get to benefit their business, and often get it. They lie about the dangers of climate change.
BUT
They didn’t cause the climate to change single-handedly. Oil companies are pumping out vast quantities of oil because people insist on buying and driving cars. People insist on taking vacations involving flying to a beach or a mountain. Even people who “love nature” will go on a camping trip that involves driving hours in a huge metal box so that they can spend some time in nature.
Sure, it’s hard to get by without a car, especially in North America. And you can definitely blame oil industry lobbyists for making cities more car-centric. At the same time, look how much of a stink suburbanites raise any time a city wants to get rid of some car lanes to put in a bike lane. Look at the fury when cities introduce congestion pricing.
tl;dr: this bitch probably drove her car to get to the building where she launched the rocket.
Ok but
people insist on buying and driving cars
because of
oil industry lobbyists … making cities more car-centric
I hear you when you say
look how much of a stink suburbanites raise any time a city wants to get rid of some car lanes to put in a bike lane. Look at the fury when cities introduce congestion pricing
However, it’s important to understand that those people are absolute donuts, and their complaints should not be taken seriously or reflect on the rest of us.
I just think that “the rest of us” includes a lot of people who drive daily, but still like to blame oil companies.
We blame oil companies because, as you yourself said (see my previous comment where I quoted you), the oil companies are to blame.
No, people’s lifestyles are to blame. Oil companies meet the demand. They partially shape people’s behaviour, but people still have choices, and most westerners choose to destroy the environment and blame the oil companies.
Ok so I’m confused, were you just lying when you said oil companies are to blame?
No, I meant what I said, go re-read it again, you seem to have missed the point.
If I’ve missed your point, it’s because you haven’t made it very clear. It’s obvious I read your comment, my reply to it was almost entirely quotes from it.
Never mind private jets, which if I recall correctly, are more damaging and easier to take away (in theory)…
Private jets are awful, but luckily only a tiny number of people actually use them. Meanwhile hundreds of millions drive cars and tens of millions fly in planes every day.
You said it yourself
They lobby for everything they can get to benefit their business, and often get it. A lot of citizens want a better alternative but can’t get it because Oil industry has corrupted our officials. They lie about the dangers of climate change. This and their lobbying makes it so that many citizens didn’t (and still don’t) know what kind of problem they are part of. Oil lobbies corrupted scientists, media and politicians so the uneducated and the not-so-uneducated thought that climate change was not real. Many of them now have realized their lies and we are all in our 100% legitimate right to blame them and fight them.
The reason so many suburbanites complain about bike lanes it’s because oil companies pay and spread propaganda that has convinced them that it will affect their lives negatively.
A lot of people have to buy that metal box because there is no reasonable alternative, when your politicians, bought by oil lobbies, don’t invest or even work against public transportation.
And then there’s people like you that, when people try to do better, criticize them because they have a infinitesimal part of the guilt.
Just because they lobby for things doesn’t mean that people no longer have any choices.
The corn lobby lobbies for, and gets, all kinds of subsidies. That doesn’t mean you’re required to eat corn.
that has convinced them that it will affect their lives negatively.
Boohoo. They believed the propaganda, it’s not their fault!
A lot of people have to buy that metal box because there is no reasonable alternative
Because their definition of “reasonable” is too narrow. It’s slightly less convenient, therefore unreasonable.
And then there’s people like you that, when people try to do better, criticize them because they have a infinitesimal part of the guilt.
When have I criticized anyone for trying to do better. What I criticize is people trying to feel less guilty about their selfish decisions by trying to heap all the blame on oil companies instead, like you do.
They didn’t cause the climate to change single-handedly
All I hear is they were part of the problem.
Yes, as were consumers, as were lawmakers, as were courts. All of society is to blame, and society can’t just shift the blame to corporations and say “well, it’s not my fault, it’s his”.
Oh but we can. And we will. Corporations take the shortest path, disregarding anything that can cost money, including being environmentally friendly, with the excuse of “but we’re running a business here, we serve people”. No shit sherlock. Make corporations accountable for what they do, and you’ll fix a large part of the problem. When the saving projected by the population of whole countries can barely scratch the damages done by a handful of business, it is everyone’s responsibility to hold these business accountable.
Transportation is like 10-15% of global greenhouse emissions. So why are you blaming individuals driving and flying when it’s industry and fossil fuel companies that, by the numbers, should carry the lion’s share of the blame?
How much of that transportation is just fossil fuel companies driving things around in circles just for fun, and how much of it is delivering things that people ordered?
Again, it comes down to personal choices. The emissions wouldn’t be there if people weren’t buying things.
I think you missed my point. It’s not that individuals driving single-occupancy, gas-guzzling vehicles are blameless when it comes to climate change. Instead, it’s that the fossil fuel industry—with their years of lying, lobbying, and propaganda—should get the vast majority of the blame, along with other industries reliant on fossil fuel and greenhouse emissions. We’re taking our eye off the ball if we’re not directing most of our ire at them.
People should get the vast majority of the blame. Oil companies lobby and spew propaganda, but people choose cars because they’re comfy and more convenient than mass transit or biking.
We’re absolving ourselves of our own agency if we’re directing our ire at them instead of our own lifestyles.
If you think you can save the planet by letting the oil industry off the hook, you’re fooling yourself.
I think if people stopped using cars, travelling by plane, and ordering stuff from far away, the oil industry would collapse because it wouldn’t have customers.
I can’t grow enough food in the summer to feed myself year round so i buy groceries at the store and support the gas guzzling supply chain. Guess it’s my fault. I’m sorry y’all.
The grocery store supply chain might actually emit less CO2 than your own small home garden (assuming you drive to the store to buy seeds, etc). There’s a lot of efficiencies at scale. You could also buy at local farmer’s markets if you think that’s going to reduce emissions. But, I’m not convinced that’s going to reduce things overall.
The point is, you can’t just blame companies without acknowledging your own role in this situation.
