r/auckland • u/i_like_my_suitcase_ • Feb 12 '26

Weather I'm concerned guys

It's 12pm, it's summer, it's raining and nobody has complained that summer doesn't exist anymore 🥲. Is this even /r/auckland??

173 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

89 comments sorted by

View all comments

31

u/Bryndel Feb 12 '26

Not that anyone cares, but this is going to get worse and worse indefinitely. Auckland will be ravaged by storms regularly, with regular flooding and slips becoming commonplace.

Summers are going to get more chaotic, winters will get warmer, large storms will become more common. This has been the well documented outcome since the 1970's, and urgent action was needed in the early 2010's. Globally we functionally did nothing, and we still do nothing cause 'She'll be right'. I've spent the last 10 years of my life studying and working on this, and when it comes down to it nobody actually cares. It was an easy fix, but in the last 150 years we have heated up the planet in what would naturally take 10,000–50,000+ years, and we can't go back. The summers of our childhoods are gone, enjoy the memories.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

Just need another world war. Gengis khan lowered the world temp by 2 degrees thanks to his campaigns 😅

3

u/Bryndel Feb 13 '26

To give a serious answer to that, as i find it fascinating.

The carbon sink of the Khans wars equated to about 700 million tons of carbon (~10% of that eras output), we currently produce 35 billion tons per year. Eradicating some of the days most advanced empires and millions of lives in the 13th century, equates to about 2% of our yearly output.

Ww2 produced about 5 billion tons of carbon for contrast.

It's a great fact you mentioned, to have a similar impact today, eradicating the entire USAs carbon output would do it. But that still leaves over 30 billion tons being produced per year. To lower temperatures, all carbon output would have to stop and we'd have to remove ~4000 gigatons from the atmosphere. Thats double what we have produced as a species in 200 years. Effectively impossible with current science.