I posted on Facebook about hurricane Helene hitting Asheville North Carolina and how climate change resulted in one of the most severe storms and disasters we have ever seen in American history. This public school teacher in Florida proceeded to message me privately to tell me that climate change is fake, and how I need to get real because climate change supposedly had nothing to do with Western North Carolina looking like the setting for the next season of Fallout TV series. There’s no other way to put it, honestly. I have seen so many pictures and videos of the damage, it is simply astonishing. I have never seen something so gruesome and horrific in my whole life…
It’s honestly crazy that there are teachers, who are responsible for educating other people, and this is the kind of stuff that they are telling people.
Because actually, the biggest change came on May 9th, 2013…
If I recall my understanding correctly, it’s 1) because there hasn’t been consistently this much CO2 in the atmosphere since an era when the planet whose climate was fundamentally different and 2) that this is an escape velocity type thing, where it becomes harder and harder for us to get back under 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, because of how long it takes for CO2 to be absorbed. Thus, climate change will spin out of control far faster in this new, different environment.
So literally, yes, we were climate changing, but post 2013 things are indeed a lot more grim and the outlook less clear.
These people are fools who are making a conscious choice to ingest information that would challenge their worldview.
I’d argue the biggest change was last year. Because of the banning/restrictions of sulfuric emissions from ships trading in the Pacific, a huge quantity of smog was cleared from the atmosphere. Unfortunately for all of us, that smog had been reflecting some sunlight and depressing the effects of climate change in the short term. While those sulfur-based emissions clear out of our atmosphere in as little as 2-3 weeks, carbon emissions take centuries to fully clear out of the atmosphere.
In other words, we had been unintentionally geoengineering the climate to be slightly cooler before 2023. That’s why it was such a huge jump in temperature last year and has no signs of reversing course. The good news about this is that it means that we can geoengineer our climate to be cooler in the short term in order to prevent greater catastrophe because we already were. The bad news is that we likely will have to.