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Luckily, we can choose to reject reality and believe whatever makes us feel better.

I feel best believing the biosphere is gonna force humanity to “find out” for the last century of fuckin around with a recklessly unplanned terraform.

My uber driver said that global warming is actually true but have literally nothing about human influence.

Some years ago these persons were saying that global warming was a hoax, now that only the human influence is a hoax.

What I hear some acquaintances say is like "who cares, I'll go to the beach, turn the AC on, what's the big deal" .

As if the floods we had in Italy this year, or the wild fires, or the storms, or the draughts, or the Alps without snow, the glaciers disappeared, the sea turned green, the invasion of jellyfish weren't connected.

Some people, most people, are just too fucking stupid.

Recycling metals is good, especially aluminum. Recycling glass? Not bad. Recycling plastic? That is literally something the oil industry forced by having their resin codes look almost exactly like the recycling symbol. People understandingly confused the resin codes to mean it was recyclable and flooded recycling centers with plastic. So instead of throwing it in the garbage and telling people plastic is not recyclable, they did what they could to recycle it. Sorting and cleaning was a pain in the ass and made it not worth it...in the US. China was happy to accept it for a couple decades until a few years ago. Now most recycling centers only accept plastic with a reason code of 1 or 2. But people do not really check the number on the symbol. A lot of it is 5 which is not recyclable in the vast majority of places but people still toss that into recycling because they think it has the recycling symbol on it. So recycling centers have to sort that shit out and send it to the landfill. It is a massive waste of resources that the oil companies are fine with since people think they are doing their part.

Recycling in general though was not supposed to be a fix for climate change. While recycling things like aluminum is significantly more energy efficient than mining, the bigger issue there is the mine itself.

We aren't locked in for the next twenty years, only the next ten years.

We could build a thousand RBMK like nuclear reactors in a decade and then suck out 50 ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere in another decade.

Would cost $500B to $1T or so.

We just don't really think global warming is serious enough to warrant an action plan at the scale of the Manhattan project, Apollo program or Messmer plan.

I've started telling people to prepare for the Mad Max times. Yeah it's hyperbole, but it actually makes them pause for half a second.

What's disturbing is the gleam in some alt-right people's eyes.

“Sell their houses to who, Ben? Fucking Aquaman?”

(reference at 4m21s) (piped.video link)

Edit: fixed link

But they actually are... Down in Miami, wealthy people are fleeing the beachfront property and buying up housing where all the poor people live, which also happens to be further from the beach. There have been a number of documentaries and news segments on this trend which you can easily find on YouTube.

My father in law is in complete denial. According to him they moved all the measurement equipment so that it favours "the Agenda" and gives wrong readings. He also claimes CO2 isnt a greenhouse gas. Sigh...