The Time Paradox of Climate Change (Atmos)

"Climate calamity is a slow burn—perhaps too slow for us to address with urgency."
April 8, 2024
Foucault Pendulum, from Openverse

Summary:

  • Climate change is a slow moving disaster – its effects will be felt for centuries after we stop emitting greenhouse gases.
  • Building new fossil fuel infrastructure is a bad idea as it locks us into decades of emissions.
  • We should rapidly deploy existing clean energy solutions to address climate change.

Quote:

The ice sheets are melting too slowly for us to stop them.

Even if we pass those tipping points, Miami and Shanghai will not disappear tomorrow. They won’t disappear next year, or next decade, or depending on which specific city we’re talking about, maybe not even within a couple of centuries. Even once melt is locked in, it will take a few hundred years or so for the ice sheets to disappear. That sort of time scale is not one that human brains and societies are particularly well equipped to deal with.

Atmos, DAVE LEVITAN

Read the full post at Atmos.

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