“When you’re among young people, it’s hard for them to understand how long we’ve known all the basic facts about climate change,” said Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who has worked on the topic for 35 years. “Even when I started as a PhD student in the 1980s, it was very clear that our emissions were causing global warming and all the consequences it would have.”
Yet even as Europe’s leaders acknowledge the scale and cause of the problem, they have weakened the very rules in place to stop it from getting worse. Two weeks ago, the European Commission proposed watering down the continent’s emissions trading system, a form of carbon market widely hailed as its most successful tool to cut pollution.
“What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”
A study Rahmstorf co-authored in 2023 found ExxonMobil’s predictions of global heating over the following decades to have been mostly accurate, as skilful as independent academic and government models, and also very much at odds with its public statements on the matter.
By the time we start going after the companies and the greedy old fucks that are responsible for this rapid decline they’ll all be dead and we’ll be left with a slow roasting hellscape.
There is already a couple of generations of dead people who were responsible for decades of this rapid decline.
It’s infuriating that we have known about the source of the problem, and have known what problems it will cause for my entire lifetime and now it becomes my children’s generation’s problem to deal with.
History is repeating itself at ever grander scales. It really is a shame that we always end up led by sociopaths (governments and businesses alike) because humans are terrible about misidentifying confidence as competence, only to discover the guy with zero shame has no idea what he’s doing and is happily marching us into the fires of hell.
*by the time - have you been outside this summer?
I mean, that’s the point of the article - it’s going to get much worse than this.
Yes smartass i HAVE been outside and i work for a textile company so imagine over a hundred machines producing heat while it’s 40+degrees outside and the AC was busted so a comfy 40+ outside and 50+ inside, an absolute fucking dream.
❤️
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