• @[email protected]
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    365 months ago

    If there’s a silver lining to this, is that the people of one of the most populous countries in Earth are going to become far more likely to support policies against climate change.

    • @[email protected]
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      375 months ago

      I wouldn’t bet on it. They have just re-elected Modi, whose record is pretty sketchy.

      • @UnderpantsWeevil
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        5 months ago

        Modi’s party lost its majority to a bunch of smaller parties, forcing him into a coalition government. The Bharatiya Janata Party is sixty seats off its 303 seat peak in 2019, in a year when Modi himself predicted a 370 seat landslide in his favor.

        That said, the coalition is still largely composed of business-focused neoliberals and religious fascists. I suspect we’re more likely to see Modi pivot to direct military conflict with his Muslim neighbors in an effort to shore up his nationalist base. Also isn’t helpful that Indian social media is awash in “China rigged our elections!” conspiracy theories, as tensions of the border escalate again. It doesn’t look like they’ll be overly invested in climate change mitigation when they’re building up their military and cranking up their fuel consumption.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 months ago

          I’ve read a book about this once. It didn’t end well for the Indians. Nor the Chinese.

    • TFO Winder
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      -35 months ago

      Most of their population is living hand to mouth.

      I don’t think they care slightest about climate change.

      • acargitz
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        85 months ago

        There is no consensus on the actual size of India’s middle class. Using the classification of those spending between US$2–10 per capita per day, over 600 million people — half of India’s population — were in the middle class in 2012, up from less than 300 million or 27 per cent of the population in 2000. Nearly 75 per cent of the middle class is comprised of the lower middle class — those spending US$2–4 per capita per day, a figure that’s only slightly above the global poverty line.

        If using a higher income band — where a person is considered middle class if their daily income is approximately US$17–100 — 432 million Indians can be included in the middle class as of 2021, comprising 31 per cent of the population, up from 14 per cent in 2005.

        Source

        These are people who are able to care about more than subsistence. Not “middle class” in a western sense, but secure enough in their own community to be able to push their politicians to do something about them not dying of heatwaves.

  • @jordanlundM
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    145 months ago

    “The latest heatwave has seen temperatures in New Delhi match the capital’s previous record high: 49.2 deg C clocked in 2022.”

    120°F! Fuck me! That’s like walking around in a latte!

  • @Lost_My_Mind
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    -1005 months ago

    Now, I do believe in climate change. I just believe that the earth will dictate its own tempatures more than anything we do. The earth used to be 150F in the area currently known as Alaska in the time of the dinosaurs. Then we had 2 ice ages. The area currently known as Florida was at one time -200F.

    And a lot of that ice still stuck around. It’s melting, as thats what ice does. We may have sped up the ice melting, and the ice may have been what was keeping the planet artificially cold, but I think earths natural tempature was ALWAYS hotter than anything humans experienced.

    I think even without humans melting the ice caps, the ice caps would have still melted. It would have just taken longer.

    But, if I’m wrong, than India, the most densely populated country on the planet by far, reaching record high tempatures would be pretty good proof that humans ARE behind climate change.

    • @[email protected]
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      545 months ago

      Earth warms up and cools down naturally that’s a known fact. But over thousands of years, not 200. What we’re witnessing right now is not natural and we have the data to support it.

      • @[email protected]
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        5 months ago

        Millions even, we haven’t been this warm in millions of years! And same for our co2 concentrations. All done in the blink of an eye geologically speaking. We’ve reversed a natural Co2 trend in only 0.004% of the time!

        The commenter above you and anyone in doubt desperately needs to see these graphs:

        https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/

        If we follow projections and do nothing to change our behavior we’ll get to levels and temperatures not seen in hundreds of millions of years, all bascially instantly when compared to the the ability of life to evolve and adapt. Earth will survive, it’s been through worse. Gonna be rough on the humans though. We were 10c temperature above where we were then, but it would be even worse now of we got back to those co2 levels, becaue of differences in orbit and solar activity.

      • @[email protected]
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        135 months ago

        Furthermore: we shouldn’t care too much about the speed at which Earth heats or cools down on its own. If we know we’re a significant factor alongside its natural processes, we should still contribute to the NET temperature being one that’s appropriate for human life. If the Earth was heating up this fast naturally, we should still try to cool it down by artificial means, if possible.

    • @SlopppyEngineer
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      295 months ago

      It would have just taken longer.

      You could say that. The earth in general changes temperature one degrees in a few millennium if it’s in a hurry. Humanity is causing changes of a degree in a decade. It’s unnaturally fast.

      • @Lost_My_Mind
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        -225 months ago

        I think that math is way off. We didn’t have all these polluting machines in the 1800s, yet the 1800s were warmer than the 1700s. We didn’t start using cars until the early 1900s. Same with planes, and it wouldn’t be until the 1930s that we got jet engines that pollute in the way you think of today.

        • @Redredme
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          155 months ago

          Just watch that xkcd graphic my dude. Somebody else already linked it. It makes the issue very clear and is quite scientifically based.

          Yes, everything you said is factually true. That doesn’t mean your interpreting it all correctly. We not just accelerated it, we where strolling along the path of planetary heating and then decided to step aboard the Starship Enterprise and screamed: “MR SULU WARP FACTOR NINE, STAT!”

          We’re fucking with systems (planetary weather patterns) we can’t comprehend. And to solve it we again fuck with that system but now not by adding energy (heat) but by removing energy from it (wind, radiation)

          I think both will have issues. But for now removing lots and lots of energy from the system will greatly benefit us.

          In the end it will always come down to population control or going interplanetary as a species.

          More people on this planet, in this system will always mean more heat. Remove the excess from the system and it will find its equilibrium again.

          But… Removing the excess sounds nice but isn’t. Especially when you are deemed to be the excessive one.

          You want to know where global warming can lead to? Look no further then Venus.

          • @Lost_My_Mind
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            -225 months ago

            The comic was over 22,000 years, and the tempature got cooler over time. Which right off the bat isn’t true.

            But also, I’m talking about over billions if not trillions of years.

            • @KISSmyOSFeddit
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              5 months ago

              Billions of years ago there was no multi-cellular life.
              Trillions of years ago there was no universe.
              And it just doesn’t matter how hot it was in the distant past. Our modern civilization with everything we now depend on (agriculture, technology and so on) was built in the last couple hundred to thousand years where the climate wasn’t all that different from the 1800’s. The issue is that it’s now changing too fast for us to adapt.

              If you’re callous, you don’t have to give a fuck about the plants or the wildlife, fuck what’s “natural”, go ahead and kill all polar bears and pandas! But global warming is going to cause famines and disasters for us that will force billions of people to migrate north, which will trigger an upheaval of all societies and a global war that could turn nuclear. Because the systems we have in place now aren’t designed for a hotter climate, and the crops we have now can’t handle it.

              How hot the dinosaurs had it doesn’t factor into it at all.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      What is this, mumble rap for science deniers? Just riffing this bullshit on the fly.

      Florida was -200F.

      Exactly, the closer you get to the equator, the colder it gets.

      • @Lost_My_Mind
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        -355 months ago

        -200F in the ice age WAS the warm spot. The polar caps were closer to -500F. The whole planet was an ice planet. It’s not like Florida was -200F, but Ohio was 73F.

        • @[email protected]
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          275 months ago

          -500F is about 40 degrees F colder than absolute zero. It has never been that cold anywhere in the universe. -200F is certainly more “actually possible in our current understanding of physics”, but it’s over 100 degrees colder than the current Martian temperature and thus also not a temperature it’s ever been on Earth, even at the heart of the coldest Ice Age directly on the poles. While Earth’s average temperature has certainly fluctuated, the temperatures you’re talking about are so cold that all life on Earth would have gone extinct.

        • @[email protected]
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          115 months ago

          So true. And before that don’t forget that Earth didn’t even exist, because it was just a clump of dust.

          • @Lost_My_Mind
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            -245 months ago

            No…it was extremely hot before the ice age. Do you seriously think the dinosaurs were just hanging out in 70 degree weather?

            Look at insects, as oxygen levels decreased they became smaller. Even alligators used to be like 150 feet…now they’re closer to 18-30 feet depending on type.

            The living creatures of that era were all bigger. It was more humid. There was more oxygen in the air. And then astroids hit, and basically were world ending events. Happened twice, hundreds of millions of years apart.

            And you think that YOU can kill a planet? No. This planet decides if it ALLOWS you to live. And humans are awful pests. Honestly surprised the 2 nukes in WWII didn’t trigger a 3rd ice age.

            But until the 3rd ice age, it’s just always going to get hotter. Humans or not.

            • PahassaPaikassa
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              85 months ago

              Honestly surprised the 2 nukes in WWII didn’t trigger a 3rd ice age.

              Why are you surprised? How do you think the nukes would have triggered a ice age?

              • @Lost_My_Mind
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                -105 months ago

                Same way the astroids did. Big boom, big ripple effect around the globe, and the force pushes the earth slightly out of orbit.

                Apperently nukes aren’t powerful enought to do what astroids did. I thought they would.

                • PahassaPaikassa
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                  75 months ago

                  Just checked from wikipedia, the yucatan impact was “The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 72 teratonnes of TNT (300 ZJ).” The Little Boy dropped on hiroshima was 15 kilotons of TNT. To say theres a vast difference is a understatement of the century.

                  You either have wrong understanding or no understanding of physics.

        • yeehaw
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          85 months ago

          What is this imperial temperature crap? 🤣

    • @apocalypticat
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      255 months ago

      This user has 600 comments in their one month since joining. That’s 20 comments per day. Maybe they should try to spend less time commenting falsehoods, and more time reading?

      • @Lost_My_Mind
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        -35 months ago

        “Lemmy needs to grow!”

        “Hey everybody, check out this loser who actually is active, and posts more activity in a day, than I do in a month…he should go away, so lemmy can remain small and unheard of!”

        Seriously? THATS your attack??? If anything 20 messages per day sounds really low. These messages take like 20 seconds to write, and boost activity and engagement on an almost completely dead platform.

        But then I see posts elsewhere on Lemmy “what have you done to boost niche communities?”

        Uhhhhh…have you guys tried POSTING AND COMMENTING???

        I know its a crazy idea, but it just might work! I look forward to seeing your reply…in like 4 days after I’ve long forgotten about any of this.

        • @apocalypticat
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          35 months ago

          I have little tolerance left for your climate change denialism, and a similarly miniscule need to “engage” via misinformation or with you and your ilk. So here’s my reply. Cherish it, print it out, put it in your back pocket if you want. I don’t care.

    • @cyd
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      5 months ago

      Yes, the world was a lot hotter in the distant past, but that’s because the carbon in the biosphere was gradually sequestered by natural geologic processes, leading to a gradual cooling over hundreds of millions of years. We’re now partially undoing that, by pumping and digging the stuff back up and burning it.

      If fossil fuels hadn’t come along, it’s possible that the long-term cooling of the Earth would have been a problem, eventually. Nobody wants another Ice Age. But we’ve gone waaaay past in the opposite direction now. We really, really don’t want to see an “age of the dinosaurs” climate, with its pole-to-pole super-hurricanes, continent sized mega droughts, and other forms of extreme weather that human civilization has zero experience coping with.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil
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      75 months ago

      the earth will dictate its own tempatures more than anything we do

      Over a long enough timeline, the high temperatures will force a sharp decline in human population and economic activity. But this isn’t earth dictating its own temperature any more than a guy with a gun to his head is an example of a bullet dictating its own velocity.