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.

  • entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    24 days ago

    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.