Autism and climate change

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^^ And the popular solutions offered at the ballot box are to stop adding carbon to the air by 2050, and keeping all the profitable consumption and destruction going, just using electricity instead of liquid fuel. We can already produce synthetic fuel from thin air and wind power at a tolerable price, before any economies of scale. The process could easily be tweaked to sequester a percentage of the carbon handled as well. That would instantly change any gas-guzzler into a big Green Machine. The problem is that oil which we must not burn is the security behind a lot of currency, and there's more profit to be made selling replacements for the whole fuel industry, from refineries to custom built farm machines.
If we want our climate back, we have to work on re-growing the glaciers, not slowing their loss. Those big ice cubes have defined the road network for the weather systems.

So you're saying that...global warming will cause Britian to become ....colder?

Yes, in a great upset, there are bound to be local variations. In the case of Europe, the current balmy temperatures depend on the Gulf Stream, which is being de-energized by the meltwater coming from Greenland. For all the details on how this works, see https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/videos/t ... veyor-belt

I think that climate change is very real. There have been more forest fires in the past 10 years than there have ever been. There have been record high temperatures around the world last summer. Glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising. This is very scary stuff.

I have a cynical view on this. First of all I am sure climate change is real. To fix it will require innovation and that innovation will come from Aspies. People like Newton, Tesla and Elon Musk.

My cynicism comes in when I ask what happens after a group of our best thinkers saves the world? Do we start being respected and treated like human beings? Or do we follow the same fate as the Russian peasants turned soldiers who were hailed as hero's for defeating the Nazi's, remembered in parades every year but left to slowly starve on their collective farms when they went home. Perhaps a better analogy is the biblical story of Joseph, who saved Egypt but who's people were later enslaved.

I think climate change is like moving from California to Canada and vice versa. So it should be easy.

Right now, most Americans and Canadians don't legally qualify to move to the other country. Moving even 1,000 miles within Canada sets me back years to get settled and feeling safe. However, when you throw in climate change, you have many millions of people needing to move to fewer and fewer hospitable areas and needing new housing, while the natural world, unable to hire movers, is dying, and crops are regularly failing due to unexpected weather. I have seen the world population triple. Younger people may see it reduce even more radically.
My area got a large influx of people during the Dust Bowl years, and while a few families prospered, many others were stunted or broken up. One had a fire in their moving truck, and is still struggling to recover almost a century later.

It turns out others also have a gloomy outlook.

From Yahoo!, attributed to CBS News: "Scientists warn about risks of a worst-case 'climate endgame'"

Autistics, and NTs, are about equally skilled at treading water.

So when the ice caps melt it will be an equal opportunity catastrophe when it comes to neurology.

I think the NTs have better social skills for moving to higher, more crowded areas.

I deal very badly with it, personally. I live in a wildfire zone, and last year, I could not go out much at all, because of severe overwhelm with smoke. I live near the Cali border and we had all the smoke from their fires last year. I had panic attacks just trying to go outside. The smoke was just so heavy, it was overwhelming, suffocating. So for me, I react much more to it. I am more sensitive to heat, to cold, to smoke, to bad air. I find myself staying indoors more and more. But then...so I've always been good with staying indoors, so in that light, perhaps I am better at dealing with it...I am more set up to move life to indoors, if necessary. Lately, I've been finding myself feeling very down and sad about the state of our planet- it makes me sad, anxious and more prone to isolating.

I think it might be related, but only inderectly. It is part of globalisation, so our strength of calling people out when they do not accept different ideas that are not malicious helps us not fight on a broader picture. Now we are in a recession and resources are limited, our less aggressive stance is more successful.

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My take is that many parts of the world are already seeing their major lakes and rivers drying up; resources that have provided water for bathing, drinking, irrigation, power generation, and the flushing of toilets.  Life will become a nightmare of enforced water rationing and rolling blackouts, even a return to the Dickensian "dark ages" of 19th-century England.

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It is a problem for mankind. The world needs to come together and work out solutions. We are not off to a good start with the way Russia is behaving. Aspies may be the only ones capable of taking the lead on a global scale as Greta Thunberg and Elon Musk are demonstrating. You think they are not going to change anything, but they are doing far more than the actual "leaders". You think mankind can't come together to do this, but they must.

It worries me but I'm not completely depressed about it, I think there are innovative people and companies trying to change things. There's a popular saying in the activist circles of "Think globally, act locally." In my opinion, thinking about climate change as the problem of the whole world is good as that's what it is and pressure should be put on governments, but at the same time, it can really paralyze the individual when people don't really know what they can do when protests don't seem to get us very far. Very few people are willing to change their consumerist behavior and I don't know how ethical it is for rich countries now to demand that from developing nations.

I personally don't fly or drive or shop all that much but I use a lot of electricity being mostly at home so I try to focus on that, as well as my diet; I keep my house cool in the winter and wear more clothes indoors and try to use the washing machine and the fan sparingly in the summer. I eat mostly vegan and local and organic as much as I can afford (not much, I'm very poor but I do my best) and I grow a lot of food myself and produce very little food waste. I forage and clean forests from trash when I visit and of course sort my trash, I take care of my things, I repair and reuse and when I do purchase I try to buy things without plastic. I even sowed bee-wild flower-mix seeds to wastelands to help them out last spring. But it seems like that's still all very little, a drop in the bucket really.

My favourite subject in school was sustainability though, I would love to study it more and be able to have a bigger positive impact.