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- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
More than a hundred dolphins have been found dead in the Brazilian Amazon amid an historic drought and record-high water temperatures that in places have exceeded 102 degrees Fahrenheit [38.8 °C].
The dead dolphins were all found in Lake Tefé over the past seven days, according to the Mamirauá Institute, a research facility funded by the Brazilian Ministry of Science.
The institute said such a high number of deaths was unusual and suggested record-high lake temperatures and an historic drought in the Amazon may have been the cause.
The news is likely to add to the concerns of climate scientists over the effects human activity and extreme droughts are having on the region.
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It's worse. The rich want civilization to break, so they can become the new aristocracy - ruling their own countries, having their own armies.
If that’s their plan it’s incredibly stupid. They’re really underestimating the lethality of ecological collapse, and overestimating the ability of their wealth to mitigate it. Their best bet at survival is being holed up in a bunker by themselves living an austere subsistence life with maybe some close family. There’s not going to be anything to rule over.
In the end, the rich and powerful only live in wealth because of the supply chain and, ultimately, the workers.
If civilization crumbles, so does their little empire.
What's funny is that in a real collapse. Their skills are the least useful.
My structural engineer buddy often says “I’m still an engineer when the power goes out” lol
I keep saying the same things. These wealthy morons are destroying the planet, lives, civilization, and governments to earn short-sighted profits. They clearly aren't as smart as they like to think they are because the low pay to workers means those workers' can't buy a lot of the shit these businesses make. Then because of low profits, the jackasses lay off workers to show "growth" in the company at earnings. Fewer people have the means to buy what they're selling so it just keeps spiraling down.
They destroy the planet for the same reason. They think at the end of it all, they can just throw money at the problem and fix it immediately, making it all worth it on the end. Thing is, circling back to the first part, they're wealthy and not intelligent. If the planet took this long to get to 1.5°C, what do they think they can accomplish before catastrophic ecological disaster we're already seeing the start of?
Then should they fail to fix it, a subset of them think they can just escape the planet to space. Thing is we're still decades from living in space or another planet. The planet is on the decline now, not in a few decades.
It's infuriating how selfish these people are…
Heres the thing though. Its not just the wealthy, anyone with a 401k and wanting it to appreciate is carrying part of the blame too. The stock market allows us all to demand infinite return from finite resources and a lot of peoples' retirements are nested in that hell handbasket. This entire place is built like this. Literally everything has to change.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve made a shit ton of money in the market by investing in green technology.
If that’s their plan it’s incredibly stupid.
It's not, like most things it's a lot dumber and simpler. Rich people don't fight or organize as a class, but they don't need too. The wealthy just have to look after themselves, and by doing so will vicariously establish benefits for other rich people.
I think in regards to climate change the wealthy are experiencing a malicious version of the bystander effect. Where they on some level understand their own endangerment, but expect a higher power to fix it for them.
However, when a government does attempt a fix that is personally detrimental to their financial health, they take it personally and become reactionary.
Anyone who thinks wealthy equals smart should not have a driver's license or be out in public without a handler.
The richest person that I personally know was unable to finish highschool, but is the most ruthless, cold hearted motherfucker I ever crossed paths with. Of course he doesn't believe in climate change.
They are indeed building huge bunkers in large numbers
Removed by mod
My theory is that the corporate oligarchy want climate change to cull billions from the human population, right at the time when hundreds of millions of jobs are being eliminated through robotics and AI.
There aren't enough resources to support the current developed world population of < billion, so another several billion people at that level of consumption is literally impossible. Demand will dramatically exceed supply this century.
There will be global resource shortages and massive inflation either way, but in a 2-4c world they can "let" billions die without firing a shot. They have their prepper bunkers stocked and ready to roll for when shit hits the fan, so they assume their wealth will ensure they prevail regardless of how bad things get. It doesn't matter that no-one can escape ecological collapse. All that matters is that they believe they can.
Why are they always bitching about "low birthrate"? Seems contradicting.
You need the workers procreating, otherwise who will serve as the army, farmers and slaves?
They still need to maintain concern for short-term profits, and having less workers and consumers doesn't help.
If history has anything to teach us is that we should expect the opposite outcome from such a collapse. i an not a doomer/tankie advocating for collapse. I am just pointing out you have the wrong conclusion.
The problem lies with the people.
People did try to increase taxes for things like funding public transport or on CO2 but people don't want less consumption they want more. Can't even get Americans to stop driving huge oversized cars. We can't built cycling lanes. We can put taxes on imports from polluting countries. We can't ban gas and force heat pumps and induction.
People do not want change.
Because of that the business do business as usual. It's the responsibility of the people to get leaders and laws in place to reduction consumption. But the people really really don't want that so it isn't going to happen.
If we stopped the economy and stopped all emissions worldwide, this progression would still occur for more than 2 decades.
This is just the beginning for stuff we did since y2k.
By the time we actually make serious change, it will be far too late.
Happy Sunday. Enjoy football.
Forget the progression.
Getting back to pre-industrial CO2 levels will take millenia if we don't do anything.
If we start spending 50% of our energy budget (and let's say that energy generation magically became all renewables and nuclear starting tomorrow) on scrubbing all the CO2 out of the air, we'll still need over a century to get back to pre industrial levels, and that is not counting CO2 storage and or conversions to (for example) plastics. If we include that too then it'll be multiple centuries.
Let that sink on for a second. No matter what we do, none of us, none of our children, none of our children's children will ever see normal CO2 levels in their lives.
And in the meantime we bake, loads of animals will die, food production will be fucked up, and we'll get mass starvation which likely will trigger war for food resources.
I'm painting a pretty picture, don't I? I do fear it's going to be even worse than what I see right now because until now, most climate change predictions actually turned out worse.
We might stand a chance with atmospheric engineering. Start seeding the upper atmosphere with sulfides. They'll cause acid rain over time, but at least block enough sunlight to stop us from cooking. It's done before (80's pollution, volcanos) and it works and we'll need it sooner rather than later
Yeah that's a major thing that people aren't getting. Scientists writing the reports specifically published the lower possibilities because they saw earlier publications get tarred as extremist and ridiculous. So now that we're actually getting consequences everyone is surprised that it's happening faster and more violently than publicly predicted.
You painted a perfect picture. A wordsmith I am not and loved your version better.
All of us on Lemmy collectively can’t make a fingernail dent into the problem. We have no power to stop it. If we did, we’re labeled terrorists against the economy.
Before the wars about food occur there will be wars about water. There are already assume pretty heated situations. Ethiopias grand Renaissance dam and it's conflict with Egypt. All countries connected to Euphrat and Tigris have a big war potential too.
Start seeding the upper atmosphere with sulfides. They'll cause acid rain over time, but at least block enough sunlight to stop us from cooking.
Can you elaborate more about this? Don't sulfides burn up into SO2, which is classified as a greenhouse gas?
Don't invest in the future, don't have kids. Be here for a good time not a long time. Fuck the world.
That's kinda where I'm at, but I already have kids, and now they're having kids. I worry about them.
Well f*ck you. Why should others pay for your selfishness.
Because FUCK YOU you destroyed the fucking world and simp.for billionaires, corporations and dictators!
This shit is NOT worth preserving let it burn the fuck down and die. Humanity is a failed experiment. Death is Inevitable just fucking embrace it, just don't bring others into this shit fucking hole.
Sad part is we've more or less figured out on paper how to cut our emissions while retaining a fairly high quality of life. Not perfect obviously and we'll lose a lot of the amenities people in developed countries have gotten used to, but to say the path to sustainability is uncharted is simply not true, and it could have been implemented 20 years ago, it can also be implemented today. But it would require gutting the wealth of the rich, totally overhauling the economy, government, and society as a whole, and everyone from all socioeconomic statuses agreeing that it should be done. So it's basically impossible under capitalism. Most of the upper class/upper middle class people in the West won't even entertain the idea of not owning a car, living in an apartment, or cutting out meat from their diets, let alone the radical changes needed for our species to actually be sustainable.
2 decades is likely optimistic. 5 is probably more likely. that said at what point do we just reach absolute nihilism and just stop giving a fuck. We're well past the point of no return. Our emissions are still INCREASING despite knowledge that it's going to destroy the liveable planet as we currently know it causing mass extinction events.
If we don't have any sense of urgency at this point, I can't see it starting anytime soon.
Everyday we delay we make it worse. what's worse than catastrophic?
I'll point out we did have a brief decline in emissions during covid and in 2009 during GFC but that was accidental becuse people stopped spending and travelling.
By the time we actually make serious change, it will be far too late.
Optimistic of you to assume that we will ever make serious change.
We will, one way or another. At some point simply enough people will have died that we will stop making things meaningfully worse 🤷♂️
I'm surprised that there isn't an open source guide on how to be an effective eco terrorist and what the most vulnerable global chock points are. People have gone to war over less.
Oh there are some out there just the people who want to go to war over this are poor
What also worries me is that there's a lot of talk about the environment collapsing in a century; however, given how things are going, I'm starting to suspect these people are seeing exponential change and slapping on a more linear approximation to predict what will happen. No one really knows what's going to happen, but we do know that it's happening right now and all we can do is try to protect what's left from the absolutely moronic shitheads that have their heads so far up their ass they look almost normal until they start speaking.
If we stopped the economy and stopped all emissions worldwide, this progression would still occur for more than 2 decades.
The economy did basically stop for a month in March 2020, and pollution dropped incredibly.
Change is possible. We just don't want it.
Maybe we shouldn't have unplugged our computers during y2k
we are now on the cusp of an extinction level event, Godzilla help us all
It's tough to see stuff like this and not think that we are helplessly doomed.
All the flooding… water temps over 100…
And crude oil is like $90 a barrel.
It gets easier to process the more you accept that we are bound for civilizational collapse, due to runaway climate catastrophes.
I figure we've got about 10 years of relative normalcy left. After that I feel like the world will be so unstable, famine, wars, mass migration, natural disasters etc. will just cripple humanity
Depending on what one means by normalcy, we have already started to deviate from it. With it mostly being felt economically, at the moment.
Yeah that's why I said relative normalcy. Just like, most people are still going to work every day, grocery stores still have decent stock, regular services and infrastructure is still maintained, etc etc
I used to like going out in summer mid-day. Now I usually prefer to stay indoors. It's only the few morning hours when I can stand the temperature. But 30°C at 65% air moisture und no shade or water to bathe to be found… No thank you.
It gets easier to process when you remember you can always just fucking kill yourself when society starts to collapse. So, sit back…have some fun, and remember where the exits are.
Orrr…
Kill the rich arseholes responsible and use their corpses to fertilise the ground so that we can grow some trees .
For a Klingons, that was the plan all along.
I see you’re a fellow romantic.
I wait till the third date to ask for feet pics
Being a gen z anti-capitalist is wanting a revolution for workers rights and to stop the ongoing mass extinction.
Anticapitalist action is environmental action.
I heard some heavy machinery magnate saying it's all a ruse you should come experience the winter they just had in North Dakota…
That's been a refrain among the great plains dwellers since I was a kid and the term "global warming" was first ideated. Every winter, some chucklefuck would "lol, I'd like some of that global warmin' right about now!"
And they still do it, while complaining about persistent summer drought diminishing crop yields, bitching about government "handouts", and being the biggest recipients of them in the form of farm subsidies to produce corn that gets shoved into high-fructose corn syrup and spiking morbid obesity across the entire country.
/rant
Go soak him in Amazonian 102° water for a day.
Nevermind all the birds and insects dying, the crop and literal drinking water shortages. We’re gonna have front row seats to the collapse of civilization as we know it. What a fucked up time to be alive for anyone like me who cares deeply about nature. This shit is ruining my mental health.
Humanity does not deserve to exist. It has been decided, greed is our great filter. If there were 100 people to blame for all of this I could go out and kill them, but 100 million? What the hell can any of us do about that?
We still have the whole republican party denying climate change… these people are hopelessly fucking greedy and stupid.
Hear, hear. Something that comes close to to how I feel about us killing our biosphere is a quote from Paul Ehrlich: "What we're losing are our only known companions in the entire universe".
I am so enchanted by all of the weird little lifeforms we are supposed to be sharing our world with. All their amazing intricacies, beauty, and evolutionary history. All of it (but especially birds! Birds are my favourite). It's so alien to me that people don't give a shit and, to the detriment of everything else, only care about looking inwards to other humans.
That was a ramble! Quite sleep deprived and loopy over here.
What we’re losing are our only known companions in the entire universe
That is one hell of a quote and absolutely on point. I'll remember this one.
Shit, when you put it that way…we've really fucked up.
It breaks my fucking heart man I’m about to cry just thinking about it. Why don’t people care? It’s so easy to just call them stupid/ignorant, but is that really all there is to it?
I think about this a lot. I think a lot of people simply don't care. It's just not something they think about. This ties in with feeling entitled to taking everything the planet makes for humans. Unfortunately it seems to be how a lot of politicians think. Which I suppose makes sense, as what could be more anthropocentric than fucking politics?
I can't comprehend it, but then I remember that there are people who feel the exact same way about the view that the planet doesn't just belong to humans. We were supposed to share :(
You can take heart in that once we've wiped ourselves out, nature will slowly but surely find its way back. We like to think that we're special, and we certainly are loud and boisterous. Yet we underestimate how small and fragile we are.
If there were 100 people to blame for all of this I could go out and kill them, but 100 million? What the hell can any of us do about that?
Oh you could definitely go a long way by killing the right 100 people. I think killing even one of those would require a coordinated effort by way too many people though, so not that it changes much.
It's too bad there isn't some huge forest somewhere that would be a big carbon sink and help stop the river from getting so warm. I hear there used to be though…
I don't want the rainforest to be deforested, but it's kinda fucked up to tell all the South American countries covered in trees they aren't able to do exactly what Europe did. Most of Europe used to be covered in trees 200+ years ago and they deforested it all for industrialization and profit. America cleared untold amounts of fields for farming and building suburbs. Just because this was done before global warming was a real concern we now all feel entitled to tell countries like Brazil they can't do the same. It's basically just the same old story of the west wanting to exploit the developing worlds resources for themselves all over again. Just now the resource is air.
True, however letting them make the same mistakes just because America or Europe did isn't the right answer either. All 3 regions should be reforested and all push towards deforestation should be stopped.
While I agree that it's a bit hypocritical, we didn't know what clearing those forests would do in the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution. It wasn't widely known until the post war era. Now that we do know we need to act.
But we shouldn't just tell them they can't do stuff. We should be pouring massive amounts of money into helping them skip over coal, farm vertically, and get away from slash and burn farming.
There's more we can do than just tell them they're being bad.
Ya, the whole issue is there's almost zero willingness to help them economically to avoid deforestation. It's much cheaper to just tell them not to and that it's bad.
But we shouldn't just tell them they can't do stuff. We should be pouring massive amounts of money into helping them skip over coal, farm vertically, and get away from slash and burn farming.
Not to be rude, but South America's energy production is overall greener than many developed countries. If anything, it's you guys that need to start reforesting, going greener and lowering your carbon emissions.
The thing is it's not just energy production and you know it. But again I'm of the opinion that rather than pointing fingers we should be identifying problems and throwing trillions of dollars (collectively) at them.
It's almost like, we as a global entity, need to provide these countries with the resources to protect their environment and still prosper.
But the billionaires are buying carbon offsets when they fly around on their private jets. Surely that's doing the trick right? There's no way that entire concept is a scam and doesn't do anything.
I understand what you're saying, but why is there so little replanting everywhere?
And from what I've read, replanting projects sponsored by the timber industry, planting all pine trees six feet apart, created the ideal setting for massive wildfires. I may have the details wrong but that was the gist.
Just plopping trees down won't cut it anyway. The saying "can't see the forest for the trees" is so apt because a forest is so much more than just trees.
Here in Sweden we've long since cut down our forests and replanted them with industry wood, then we got shocked when pests started eating the entire buffet we served for them.
The timber industry only replants in hopes that they'll get to come cut it down again. Making that easier and more efficient is likely the only concern.
Bingo on that one. We rose to economic power before the problem became acute and now want to dictate that other countries can't do what we did to get here.
Meanwhile we have the resources and technology to mitigate some of the effects of global warming for our citizens and the global south will end up bearing the brunt of it.
Now, hear me out, this might sound crazy, but what if Europe gave historic reparations to Latin American countries for their colonialism and imperialism, therefore reducing the need for further deforestation? Though in all honesty a large portion of the current day deforestation is for soy plantations, which is used to make livestock rations that then go on to feed European and Yankee livestock for the profit of the local latifundiarios and nobody else. Despite what it may seem, most Brazilians (and the other countries) don't really want more deforestation nor are they benefited by it.
And that's not even counting all the indigenous people who are actively fighting the destruction and takeover of their lands, including a recent vote over legislation that could've legally barred them from claiming a lot of it.
They are still fucking up America to build mcmansions
Just went to a great mcmansion neighborhood for a child family members birthday party. They all look like castles, have 2-3 garages and are huge. Almost every house looks unoccupied when I go there. I'm sure there's a couple and a kid max in every one of those huge fucking things. It's absurd. Will never understand people wanting a tacky 6,000 square foot fake castle.
Wasteful shitty practice. It's somewhat the fault of the home builders too. I tried building and they wouldn't do much OTHER than mcmansions unless I pushed real HARD. They love all those upsells
We really need to pass some laws requiring some small, affordable homes get built. It's so obvious that in a capitalist system given the option builders are going to prefer to build bigger more expensive home builds as they have a larger profit. So builders only build the biggest houses they think they can sell. Every. time.
Yup, homebuilders are getting record profits. They have 0 incentive to build smaller homes.
Starter homes are like minimum 300k now anyways as well so yeah… Idk what to do but wait for this house of cards to come crashing down
I don't remember telling anyone to do anything…
Because you're on the "told how to live" side
The world bank and the imf are the ones who told most of the world that they're poor, and the only solution is to take loans… Pulling them into our craptastic system that cuts down a forest full of food for the taking in order to harvest something that can be sold overseas
Oh right so they should get to burn all the cool and oil they want also just to get ahead and catch up with us too. Let's let them start testing nuclear weapons while we're at it since we got to also. Got to make sure everything's fair or somebody might get canceled.
Congratulations you found the line where sarcasm makes you sound stupid and then did a nice long jump.
While this water temp is concerning, the Amazon river is also dammed preventing the dolphins from fleeing to cooler water.
I was wondering why they didn't just leave…
So long and thanks for all the fish.
Kinda ironic that Amazon.com is killing its namesake through its carbon footprint
They are playing by Highlander rules. There can be only one.
Seems bad
Ma'am, this is so horrible. I don't even know what to say anymore.
So long, and thanks for all the fish?
These dolphins truly did leave as the earth was being destroyed. What an unfortunate parallel between the books and life.
I'm clinging to hope, and working in a relevant field to try to solve our energy issues as an engineer.
On the bright side, Amazon river dolphins are "only" endangered, as opposed to possibly extinct, like some other river dolphins.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than a hundred dolphins have been found dead in the Brazilian Amazon amid an historic drought and record-high water temperatures that in places have exceeded 102 degrees Fahrenheit.
The dead dolphins were all found in Lake Tefé over the past seven days, according to the Mamirauá Institute, a research facility funded by the Brazilian Ministry of Science.
The institute said such a high number of deaths was unusual and suggested record-high lake temperatures and an historic drought in the Amazon may have been the cause.
Researchers and activists are trying to rescue surviving dolphins by transferring them from lagoons and ponds in the outskirts to the main body of the river where the water is cooler, reported CNN Brasil, but the operation is not easy due to the remoteness of the area.
Below average levels of water have been reported in 59 municipalities in Amazonas State, impeding both transport and fishing activities on the river.
Authorities expect even more acute droughts over the next couple of weeks, which could result in further deaths of dolphins, CNN Brasil reported.
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