Climate change: We haven't experienced anything like this in the past 2,000 yearsClimate scientists

Alright even to this day it seems that not everyone can believe that current climate change is the direct result of humans or the Earth simply following it's natural cycle. One of the more popular consensus' is that it's a mix of both, as in yes the Earth is warming and yes the Earth does that on it's own but humans are helping to speed up the process. That's one of the most popular theories and one of the ones that most people can actually agree on. So lets go with one.

Here's the problem. What are we supposed to do? Seriously, get rid of the emotional aspect of this, what are we realistically supposed to do?

This is one of those times where people like AOC are actually correct and I actually respect her and her cohorts for having the courage to just flat out say it even though it's so implausible that most people say she is ridiculous. It would take a policy such as her Green New Deal proposal to actually slow this down or stop it if thats what we genuinely wanted to do. We would have to collapse modern society tomorrow if we wanted to effectively combat this.

I know people like to feel like they are in control and feel like they are "making a difference" but it's all smoke and mirrors. Buying your little reusable straws on Amazon is doing NOTHING. Absolutely NOTHING at all. It makes you feel good, you aren't helping. Running around picking up trash which has become one of the young people's recent internet "challenges" (good on them btw) is still doing NOTHING in the grand scheme of things. It's akin to trying to bail water out of an aircraft carrier using a syringe with a house sized hole in the other side.

What is required to actually "fix" this is a radical and damn near immediate change in modern civilization, basically what AOC said. Cattle production would have to be reduced by unrealistic orders of magnitude. Fossil fuel reduction by unrealistic orders of magnitude. The global fishing industry reduced by unrealistic orders of magnitude. All of it, RIGHT NOW. Not next year, not in 20 years. Right now. And the entire industrialized world would have to all do it together.

There goes your modern civilization overnight and that is the part that the climate change alarmists understand but I don't believe understand what that actually means in practice. So many people believe that "if we all just cut back on eating steaks to once or twice per week then it would work out". It's way more than that. You're talking corporations closing immediately, fast food joints, restaurants, etc. All of them gone. Your eating of steaks and Hamburger Helper a couple nights a week doesn't even remotely compare to McDonalds. And with these businesses all collapsing there goes hundreds of thousands of jobs. Now what? Now tackle the commercial fishing industry, that's where most of that plastic in the oceans comes from. Regulate the ever loving crap out of it, slow it down massively. There goes a massive food source for hundreds of millions of people in the world. Fossil fuels? Cut them in half, see what that does to global trade, transportation, getting to your job, etc.

The list can go on forever as can the spider web of effects from trying to implement such policies without even getting to mention the fact that not everybody is going to actually do that and how the Chinese would laugh their butt's off as America purposefully collapses it's own economy while they do a little here and there to smile in front of the UN.

Here is the sad reality that people don't want to hear. Our modern world, Western society in it's current state, our standards of living, our global economy's, our Taco Bell's, our iPhone's, etc all exists BECAUSE we **** the planet up. Our way of life is sustained by the fact that we consume MASSIVE amounts of natural resources and the reason why you can grab a drive thru burger is because of deforestation. There's a reason there's a saying that if everybody on Earth lived like American's we'd need 4 planets and if we all lived like Europe we'd need 2 or 3.

Some people think that the only change we'd see in our lives would be having to carpool sometimes and only eating beef on the weekends and bringing duffel bags to Wal Mart instead of using their plastic ones. That doesn't even come close to the tip of the iceberg of massive changes that would take place in all rungs of society if we had any realistic shot a combating global warming.

It's not that we don't care or we don't believe it's actually happening, it's a question of what the hell do you really expect us to do? There is nothing we can do beyond "feel good" measures that wouldn't have a MASSIVE impact on modern society and countless 2nd, 3rd, and 18th order effects thereafter. We do not have the technology to maintain our current modern society without our unsustainable resource consumption which has negative impacts on the environment. Our modern societal machine is designed to run this way and there is nothing we can do about it besides shutting it off, tearing it down, and rebuilding it from scratch so that it's powered by a more environmentally friendly fuel source instead of the blood of endangered Tigers and tropical rainforests.

The big problem is that shutting the machine off isn't actually possible...And THAT is what people are saying. I know it'll be incoming soon: "Well what we just say screw it then and let the planet die?!"

Yeah pretty much. I'm not saying just throw your hands up and start dumping motor oil in the rivers or anything but all of our little regulations and paper straw drinking isn't going to stop this. We may be able to slow it down a little bit if humanity itself all pitched in but humanity itself isn't going to make the actual sacrifices required to stop this.