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Saying we have failed is the easiest thing to say.
I try to stay postive but we're slowly burning and yet politics has never been so aggressively stupid about this. And the warlords dictating or culture too. I don't want this.
Canada (and the world) will burn. You think migrants are a problem now? Wait until millions of people have no choice but to go north and the water wars start.
O damn, almost forgot about the water wars. Those were brutal. Before those people genuinely believed there was nothing bigger than a World War. The fools. Like if you're still here in 2125.
Did he fly across the world on his private jet to announce this?
the focus on politics, economics, and law are all destined to fail because they are based around humans. They’re designed to guide humans, but we’ve left out the foundation of our existence, which is nature, clean air, pure water, rich soil, food, and sunlight. That’s the foundation of the way we live and, when we construct legal, economic and political systems, they have to be built around protecting those very things, but they’re not.
Powerful truth!
Let's be clear about something; climate scientists almost universally agree that there is no such thing as "winning" or "losing" the fight against climate change (Suzuki, for the record, is a zoologist, not a climate scientist). This isn't a game, there's no referee, and no one gets a trophy at the end.
The battle against climate change is about mitigating harm. The worse we do, the more harm there will be. But there is never a point where it is "too late". The car is going to crash, but the sooner you hit the brakes, the less damaging the impact will be. Everything we do to push the needle will save lives. There is never a point where we get to throw up our hands and succumb to the comforting fantasy that it's "too late" to change anything.
I have a lot of respect for Suzuki, and I don't blame him for feeling defeated with everything that's happening, but spreading this kind of message is, dangerous, damaging, and flies entirely in the face of the science.
Suzuki is and always was just a mouthpiece for corporate masters. Controlled opposition to steer public opinion. He is not and never will be a climatologist. His message is one of defeat because his backers want us to give up.
Suzuki can kiss my white ass.
"Too late" implies civilization collapse to me. That's pretty much guaranteed once the warming we're locked into happens.
Sort of? I don't think he mentioned tipping points anywhere in there, it was pretty non-specific and ranty, but if we've passed a tipping point it becomes less a matter of applying a brake and more of actively causing massive climate change in the other direction. Failing that, climate change will stop when it reaches a new balance and no sooner.
Nobody really knows where those tipping points are. The Paris thresholds were our expert's best guesses for a "safe" amount of warming.
Even if we do pass some kind of "tipping point" (and you need to understand that every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people's attention to the problem), we can still mitigate the damage. There is never a point where fighting climate change becomes worthless. The less we do now, the greater the damage will be in the future. That's all there is to it. Tipping points are just a way of illustrating that.
every tipping point is just an arbitrary line that climate scientists draw to try to draw people’s attention to the problem
That is completely, utterly wrong. Climate scientists are talking about the physical concept of the tipping point, which is observed in nature and also comes out of their models. In climate, it's the point at which reversing a change that originally happened over decades would take thousands of years. For example, this has been the huge concern with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which plays a large role in the climate of western Europe: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2791639/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturning_circulation
Especially read the sections about Stability and vulnerability, Effects of an AMOC slowdown, and Effects of an AMOC shutdown.
My point is, tipping points are absolutely not an arbitrary thing. They are very solid predictions based on the physics of the climate. We don't necessarily understand exactly how close we are, even though we're observing some effects of being close to them, but the impacts of crossing them will make climate change even worse and hence the alarm.
Edit: If anyone reads these links and their eyes glaze over and you don't understand of word of what's written, then you need the humility to listen and accept what climate scientists have been trying to tell you. Some of the smartest people on the planet have been working on this for decades.
If that's what we're meaning when we talk about "tipping points", yes, they exist. But as you yourself said, "We don’t necessarily understand exactly how close we are." The idea that passing some arbitrary line like "1.5 degrees" is a point of no return is unscientific nonsense, and that's what the vast majority of people mean when they say "tipping points."
And the point is, none of that changes the need to keep working towards improvement. Every fraction of a degree less the planet heats will make a difference. Even as monumental climate changes occur, those changes can be lessened, their impact reduced, by any amount that we decarbonise the atmosphere.
If you're under the impression that I'm arguing against climate change being real in any way shape or form, or that I'm arguing against it being utterly catastrophic, you've missed my point so badly that you might as well be reading it in a different language. My point is very, very simple; there is never a point where we get to give up.
No matter what happens, every effort to reduce the damage to our climate will save lives. Things can always be worse, and because things can always be worse it ontologically follows that things can always be better, even when the definition of "better' is "fewer people die."
The fight isn't lost or won. Get those concepts out of your mind. Suzuki - as brilliant as he may be - is an idiot for invoking them like this. He's speaking about a very limited, very specific piece of the fight, but he should have understood that the public would take his words entirely out of context. The people who want to poison and destroy our planet for profit are, right now, actively pushing the propaganda that the battle against climate change is over. They are wrong, and they are lying. The battle against climate change is a battle to reduce harm, and you can always reduce harm, now matter how great the scale of the eventual harm may be.
Back before George W Bush directed NASA to call it climate change, it was called global warming, and you can definitely win against that - by stopping the earth from warming. That's unwinnable due to feedback loops that have now begun.
Does not remotely address my point. We can always - always - work to reduce the harm caused by climate change.
The point where the harm could be reduced to "none" is decades past us. If that's the point where you give up then fuck off. Climate change is actively causing harm as we speak, and it is still worth fighting. We can still make life better for ourselves and future generations.
The notion that climate change is some kind of runaway engine that will continue amok without any further human input is nonsense. Yes, I'm aware of ideas like "Permafrost methane bombs" and I've also done enough research to be aware that only a small fringe of climate scientists actually support those ideas. They're flashy and exciting and get big press, but they are not widely accepted climate science.
What climate science shows is that the climate actually responds faster to reductions in CO2 than our older models predicted. That means that debacarbonization can have real and meaningful positive impacts beyond what we previously thought possible.
There is real damage already done, and there is damage that we cannot undo, but there is never a point where the problem goes beyond our input. The climate fight is always worth fighting.
In your car crash analogy, we are now past the point where hitting the brakes will help. The car will be irrepairably destroyed and all passengers will be killed.
This is flat out wrong. In fact, the more co2 is emitted, the more extreme the consequences are. The change from 0->1 degree of global warming barely registers. The change from 3->4 degrees is catastrophical, for example.
Thus, the warmer it gets, the more worth it is to fight against it, as each small win contributes more to the bottom line than in the beginning.
That's why it's an analogy, and not reality.
There is no point where hitting the brakes will not help. We can always reduce the amount of harm done.
This seems like the "comforting fantasy" to me. Or a terrible analogy.
In not an appropriate analogy. We are not just the people in the car, we are the whole neighborhood.
Even if the people in the car cannot prevent a crash by braking, they can still prevent further damage to people and property by braking as much as possible while within their means.
The comforting fantasy is the idea that we can throw up our hands and say "We lost."
Losing is easy. It demands nothing from us. Losing has no call to action. If we've lost, then there's no fight left to be fought.
The reality is that the fight is always worth fighting. And that sucks, because it means we never get to give up. We never get to say "It's over", and stop caring. Caring is a lot harder.
Just put ice in the airbags.
Giving up is exactly where the "too late" come from, quitter shouldn't be leading climate advocacy.
I mean...the next steps involves lots of fire and death...so...that's not going to save the environment either but it will certainly send a message.
@asg101 I agree we've lost the opportunity and will have to "hunker down". But hearing it from David Suzuki is...hard.
🔥🔥 This is fine 🔥🔥
🐶☕
Yep, Trump just put all our climate mitigation funds into big oil. We’re cooked.
And Trunp is bringing back coal too. Fucked doesn’t even describe it.
I gave up a long time ago. The last time we really did anything about an issue like this was lead in gasoline. 50+ years of knowing we had to change. I wonder if maybe the wealthy elites know whats coming. I wonder if this new rise in facism is partially an answer to the fact that there won't be enough of anything to go around. That is why they want us having babies. for soliders. I hope they have some spark of humanity and let people self terminate but I bet you would need money for it.
If you gave up a long time ago, then why did you bother to write that comment? Clearly you haven't given up.
what possible reason could there be in self termination when there is a good fight to be fought (against the oppressors)
Just wanted to add that maybe the last thing that we did for the environment and that really worked was for acid rain in 1991. At least where I live.
A few years before that there was the Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs and helped to heal the hole in the ozone layer. I think.
But yeah, I don't remember anything of the sort recently,
Where I live people are replacing furnaces with heat pumps, if enough do it could mace a minuscule effect.
What about ozone layer?
I'm pretty sure that's what the grab for Ukraine and Trump's stated intent to annex Greenland is about. Both of those have the potential to become food security sources after significant global heating. I'm also pretty sure that's why authoritarians are seizing control of govt (and by extension that govts security services) because there won't be enough to go around and they're going to need soldiers to keep the hungry people away from their billionaire breadbaskets.
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Lol yup, trump also went all in on climate denial. Definitely fucked.
How to say Marx was right without saying "Marx was right".
Hard disagree, this is a liberal doing the usual thing. As John Bellamy Foster elaborates on in his articles and books, the fight against climate change isn't lost, it's been abandoned by the ruling class of imperial core countries. Look up some of his stuff on Monthly Review the ecological rift is a very important concept that never appears in the kind of discourse you're posting
So, how long do we have left?
The typical Lemming will be poorer but fine, unless it triggers other human disasters like a nuclear exchange. The lower classes of Bangladesh, less so, and 95%+ of coral reefs are fucked.
No one knows, many humans and other species are already dying from climate change today. Get used to hearing the phrase "It is happening much faster than expected." from now on.
Guess people better start updating their plans then. No point in starting a family and having kids when they'll just die to climate change.
People are doing that. Fertility rates are way below replacement rates. Now billionaires are freaking out that their customer base and work force is shrinking.
And the solution is of course outlawing abortions, instead of keeping the planet in a habitable state.
I am way ahead of you.
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"Collapse is a process, not an event." It's very likely we'll be extinct by the end of the century. There will be all manner of hell from now until then. Our population of over 8 billion is only possible because of a highly complex global web of systems. Complex systems are fragile. Once dominos start falling, people will start starving very quickly.
Its entirely possible that 99% of humanity dies but I don't really buy into us going extinct. People have an inate drive to survive and even if things are genuinely horrible I don't see them just giving up. Unless there is literally no food/potable water I think the planet is stuck with some form of humanity until the planet is uninhabitable. Remember there are still dinosaurs around today, they just look different.
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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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