Essay by Eric Worrall
But eco-communism can save us, according to “The 2023 state of the climate report“.
Earth’s vital signs have never been worse, as climate scientists warn of ‘unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater’
By Mark Saunokonoko • Senior Journalist
“Unfortunately, time is up.”
That’s the bleak warning headlining a concerning new report where climate scientists conclude Earth’s vital signs are now worse than anything humans have seen.
The climate situation is now so bad that life on Earth is imperilled, the scientists said, pointing to 20 of 35 identified planetary vital signs that are teetering at record extremes.
Those red-lining vital signs meant “profoundly distressing scenes of suffering” will unfold on the planet’s population, the report published today in Bioscience declared.
…
Read more: https://www.9news.com.au/national/earth-vital-signs-now-worse-than-ever-been-before-climate-scientists-warn/fb978b1c-7b97-45ae-a1f9-6321a8ee3ef7
The report referenced by the press story above;
The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory
William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Jillian W Gregg, Johan Rockström, Thomas M Newsome, Beverly E Law, Luiz Marques, Timothy M Lenton, Chi Xu, Saleemul Huq, Leon Simons, Sir David Anthony King
BioScience, biad080, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad080
Published: 24 October 2023
Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in an uncharted territory. For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, time is up. We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broken, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.
…
Climate-related all-time records
In 2023, we witnessed an extraordinary series of climate-related records being broken around the world. The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists and caused concern about the dangers of extreme weather, risky climate feedback loops, and the approach of damaging tipping points sooner than expected (Armstrong McKay et al. 2022, Ripple et al. 2023). … possibly the warmest temperature on Earth over the past 100,000 years (figure 1e). It is a sign that we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability.
…
Energy
It appears the green recovery following COVID-19 that many had hoped for has largely failed to materialize (Zhang et al. 2023). Instead, carbon emissions have continued soaring, and fossil fuels remain dominant, with annual coal consumption reaching a near all-time high of 161.5 exajoules in 2022 (figure 2h).
…
Economics
Economic growth, as it is conventionally pursued, is unlikely to allow us to achieve our social, climate, and biodiversity goals. … We therefore need to change our economy to a system that supports meeting basic needs for all people instead of excessive consumption by the wealthy (O’Neill et al. 2018).
…
Food security and undernourishment
After declining for many years, the prevalence of undernourishment is now on the rise (figure 5e). In 2022, an estimated 735 million people faced chronic hunger—an increase of roughly 122 million since 2019 (FAO et al. 2023).
…
Read more: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biad080/7319571?login=false
The report claims extreme weather is worse, but we’ve all heard this nonsense before.
The only significant bad identified, food security and undernourishment, is more likely the consequences of the Ukraine war, and high energy prices driving up the cost of fertiliser. The ongoing high level political attacks on the use of fertiliser and agricultural chemicals, and insane agriculture policies such as buying out farmers and requiring they never farm again, as part of the settlement, are probably contributing to disruption in the agricultural sector. The push for “rewilding“, destroying farmland and giving it over to the weeds, is probably also contributing. Greens are responsible for creating a food crisis we don’t have to have.
As for the claims of climate instability, there is no paleo climate evidence that a warmer climate is less productive. Quite the opposite.
How could our monkey ancestors have colonised much of the world during the hothouse world of the PETM, if all that global warming damaged their food supply?
Last time the world was really hot, The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, the species which did really well was monkeys. Our monkey ancestors colonised much of Eurasia and North America, feasting on the abundance which the PETM warmth delivered. The monkeys passed through the warm temperate forests of Greenland on their journey. Our monkey ancestors only retreated when the warm age ended, because they were driven out of their new homes by the encroaching cold.
The biggest problem with the report though, is they simply ignored some options for addressing what they claim is a crisis.
Why do we “need to change our economy to a system that supports meeting basic needs for all people instead of excessive consumption”? Why can’t we just build a bunch of nuclear reactors, like France did in the 70s?
The report only contains one mention of nuclear energy that I could find, and that mention was not in the context of a potential climate solution – even though the French experience proves that nuclear power is a scalable and affordable path to reducing CO2 emissions.
The failure to even mention the nuclear solution to the alleged climate crisis in the context of a possible solution, let alone discuss the pros and cons of nuclear energy, along with the report’s emphasis on renewable energy and economic transformation, in my opinion betrays the true nature of this document – transparently politicised academic communist propaganda, masquerading as a climate warning.
Yet another sermonette from the Church of Climate Change.
“Life on plant Earth is under Siege.”
I think Uranus is missing a dozen idiots.
Up there is where they have their heads.
Super idiots and LIARS: article says “highest temp in 100000 years…figure 1e ” but that figure only goes back a 100 plus years:
100? I only see about 30 years in that chart.
Cherry picked numbers with specious claims.
e.g., Antarctic sea ice extent, a meaningless number.
e.g. 2, Global surface temperature with extreme temperature anomaly claims
e.g. 4, Cumulative area burned in Canada, never considering how much burned forest was due to arson.
Or the comrades of the communist collective!
Excellent article.
The key point is nuclear energy.
People who actually believe the human race is at risk from CO2 can have no problem embracing nuclear energy. It’s risks, even exaggerated, are only local.
The others are frauds advancing a political agenda.
Apparently about 97% of them are frauds.
These so-called scientists should be stripped of their white coats, caned in the public square, and the exiled to Desolation Island.
MiloCrabtree, I suspect the residents of Desolation Island also wouldn’t want the so-called scientists.
Regards,
Bob
They should keep their white coats.
(But the coats should have much longer sleeves.)
Longer sleeves and be much, much tighter.
Tied in a doble knot.. at the back 🙂
Many people on the left will believe this in a sorta fear porn kinda way and demand their leaders “ do something, some body do something!”
Fortunately for us it is all hyperbolic click and cluck bait. And none of those “ caring and concerned “super libs are giving up their comfy life style when push comes to shove.So in the mean time invest accordingly. Fossil fuels will remain king for years to come.
I don’t see the leaders of the right challenging them. Maybe they own shares in Tesla.
Many so-called “leaders of the right” are nothing of the sort.
Most sheeple think: Oh boy, those experts with their sensitive instruments must be detecting OMINOUS warming, somewhere, the weather seems the same to me but I am no scientist, so they must be right! But I will continue my life just as before, since we are all going to die anyway let’s keep using FF, what else can I do? The experts keep on using FF so why shouldn’t I?
BTW – story tip – article – EV – What Is the Long Game for the EV Push? – American Thinker
Toyota chuckle with up to 2 year order books for hybrids from the silent majority-
Toyota CEO Says “Silent Majority” Doubtful Of Electric-Only Future (insideevs.com)
While others get cold feet with EVs piling up in the showrooms-
GM And Honda Ditch Plans To Make Cheap Electric Cars Together (msn.com)
Leave Tesla to cut EV prices and thrash the EV segment profitability.
This is fear-mongering at its worst, and its not surprising. What occurred this summer is far from being a clear demonstration of humanity’s adverse influence on the environment. Instead, it stands as a compelling illustration of the immense potential of our climate and highlights the gaps in our understanding of it. Regardless, the weather is just fine at least where I live. In Northern Utah, we are expecting the season’s first freeze a few days prior to Halloween, a timeline that completely aligns with historical patterns of first freeze dates. While I understand that my local weather doesn’t represent the entire globe, if I, along with many others from various parts of the world, consistently report that there have been no issues with our weather over the past few decades, doesn’t that carry at least some weight?
Not unless you’ve got some Mickey Mouse degree from the University of Nowhere to brandish!
Ah, you also noticed Tim Lenton (Exeter) has his name to this hysterical piece..
As does the notoriously always wrong Sir David King.
They studied basket weaving 100, 200, and then riot incitement 300, 400 to graduate with honors, getting extra credit for outrageously practicing in public areas, etc.
The Marxists have controlled the MSM for decades and they’re using it to push their propaganda. Thank God for the internet.
… We therefore need to change our economy to a
systemMarxist one that supports meeting basic needs for all people instead of excessive consumption by the wealthy (O’Neill et al. 2018).*****************
Time to make Marx’s Communist Manifesto required reading for all of us who are not yet believers. The climate scare narrative isn’t making us all believers fast enough.
Addendum:
I am all for making society more equal. But when science generally and the CAGW narrative in particular become a false front to promote Marxist ideology or activist agendas having little or nothing to do with the climate and energy, then it is time to take a serious look at what is causing it and address those causes.
I am not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.
No one can make society more equal. The only thing possible is to ensure equal opportunity for people to improve their own lives. The ridiculous notion of equity requires central control that actively utilizes discrimination to try to artificially bring about equality. If people are left to be free, there will never be societal equality.
The problem is when it’s the same people that widened the inequality gap with their globalist agenda who are now pushing this socialist agenda. It’s just about making more money for themselves and keeping hold of it.
The biggest impediment to greater economic equality, is people.
Talent, intelligence, even motivation are not equally distributed.
The reason why some people are wealthier than others, boils down to these factors.
Sure, there are a small number of people who are wealthy because their parents were, but these people are few and far between and the wealth always dissipates in a few generations.
The biggest impediment to greater economic equality, is people.
If we were to distribute all the wealth in the nation absolutely equally among everyone, in only a couple years, and probably much less, almost everyone would be right back where they are now.
If we eliminated money as the instrument of trade, much the same would happen, only with a different instrument (most likely power).
Therin lies the problem, equal to what? I understand your sentiment, but social equality in humans is dangerous. Are you referring to “political” equality with respect equal rights under the law, the fundamental inalienable rights we all have as humans?
The egalitarian elite establishment and political class want equality, but it is a perversion of true individual equality and rights. They wish to deprive the individual of the opportunity to be great, to achieve success. It is equality of outcome, to bring society down to an arbitrary level, not build up as far as one can go. The destruction of capitalism.
Of course, the elites will sit on top of this new “equal” society.
Basic needs can be met with – a job- almost any job! Almost anywhere. Too many people just don’t want a crummy job. None of us do- but most of us have had them.
Smells of panic to me. Fingernails screeching as they slide over the cliff to ridicule, disbelief and obscurity. When it all doesn’t happen
Wow the stupidity is very strong with this F grade crap.
What is under a torrential flood is the unending stream of scaremongering/fearmongering manure pile of lies and green moldy baloney since the climate is the SAME in most places in the last 120 years.
Now another 12 morons who parage their brainless babble in public, I would be red in the face embarrassed to be associated with any of these people.
Time for some parody. Crank up the crap another order of magnitude. Pretend to be a climate scientist. Oh, wait a minute- this might not be possible since Gore said the oceans are boiling and Guterres said the entire globe is boiling. What’s worse than boiling? The Earth will explode if the magic rise in temperature reaches 2 deg C? The Earth will fall into the Sun?
Climate has been redefined so now it is only about the last 30 years. That’s probably all their models could hope to predict and they haven’t even done a good job at that.
Bioscience
William J. Ripple (bill.ripple@oregonstate.edu) and Christopher Wolf (christopher.wolf@oregonstate.edu) are affiliated with the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University (OSU), in Corvallis, Oregon, in the United States and contributed equally to the work. Thomas M. Newsome is affiliated with the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at The University of Sydney, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Jillian W. Gregg is affiliated with the Sustainability Double Degree program and the Department of Crop and Soil Science at OSU. Timothy M. Lenton is affiliated with the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, in Exeter, in the United Kingdom. Ignacio Palomo is affiliated with the Laboratory of Alpine Ecology at the University of Grenoble Alps, in Grenoble, France. Jasper A. J. Eikelboom is affiliated with the Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Group at Wageningen University and Research, in Wageningen, the Netherlands. Beverly E. Law is affiliated with the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at OSU. Saleemul Huq is affiliated with the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University Bangladesh, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, India. Philip B. Duffy is affiliated with the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in the United States. Johan Rockström is affiliated with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in Potsdam, Germany.
A diversified group of academics whose livelihood depends upon making a convincing case for upward leaps of climate temperature caused by carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
Instant communication not only allows teen-age girls to chat to one another about the cute guys in class, it also enables far-flung researchers to easily and quickly coordinate their stories. Most academic professionals are on the left side of the political spectrum but that’s not a requirement for this sort of thing. They’re trying to further their credentials in the climate society and attract fees from speaking appearances and more lucrative positions. Publish or Perish is the name of the game.
Publish
orabout Perishing is the name of the game.Fixed it!
Thanks general.
Here is the explanation of the “diversified group”:
Home Page | Alliance of World Scientists (oregonstate.edu)
Belonging to this alliance means you cannot have a diverse opinion.
They share the characteristic of cluelessness. 🙂
Their website doesn’t say where an Alliance of World Scientists T-shirt can be purchased.
If the game is up we can defund all these institutions as there is no point to them existing anymore.
Well that’s that isn’t it. Me – time to dump this aggrevating electric car and buy something fun. Let’s not let the remaining hydrcarbons go to waste. Party on dfolks!!!
Bioscience has been going the way of Scientific American. What too many biologists and others are into is policy, used to be verboten. If you look at the citations you will see nearly all very recent, oldest in 2009, a quote from abstract which is full of hypotheticals below. Have to wonder how many of these authors have been to sea or even gotten their feet wet in salt water. While it is not worth the time to check did not see any references for the physics involved. Too many at one time credible, which the Bioscience authors may or many not be, marine biologists violate the avoid politics rule and forget problem solving and the proper language necessary. They need to be careful what they seem to wish for and quit using terms like “uncharted and unprecedented” which requires examining the older science instead of coal (last reference). https://www.sciencedirect.com/bookseries/advances-in-marine-biology/vol/56/suppl/C
“Considering the importance of the oceans to climate change and our limited understanding of climate-related ocean processes, our ability to measure the changes that are taking place are conspicuously inadequate.”
Here is one new 2023 study that says that depending on the surface temperature and solar irradiance datasets that one uses, one can show anything from mostly human-caused warming to mostly natural warming.
‘Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850’
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e
“We are seeing the manifestation of those predictions”
“The rapid pace of change has surprised scientists”
Which is it? We told you so, or who would have guessed?
“Earth’s vital signs have never been worse….”
These writers are extremely mental!
I just spent much of this wonderful afternoon here in Wokeachusetts sitting in my back lawn enjoying some reading. It’s 70 F at 2:43 PM. But I’m supposed to believe the Earth is dying.
It’s snowing in the northwest US.
Oh, no- climate change caused it! 🙂
We must all panic! The ocean is boiling! The islands are sinking! Greenland is melting! The polar bears are dying! We must save the planet! The end is near!
It’s almost November what did you expect.
Time is up all right.
story tip
Clean-Energy Sector Suffers New Stock Crash: German Giant Siemens Energy (yahoo.com)
Such good news. And not before time – how can ANY technical people back this anti-carbon dioxide scam?
Mmmm, that explains it.
Because about 5 or 6 miles from my front door (as the crow flies) is a little (gas fired) power station BUT, on some land adjacent there has been constructed a 100+ acre solar farm.
At 2 miles away from me, along the same crow-flying line, is a high-voltage sub-station.
This was originally constructed to connect an offshore windfarm into the grid but is now being extended to accommodate more windfarms AND, this new solar farm.
Connecting the solar farm meant, for reasons beyond anyone’s imagination, digging up the narrow country lanes around here so as to bury huge great 33kV cables from the solar farm to the station.
(Why not use the existing overhead 110kV line that goes directly from one to the other? No-one knows.)
Bo matter, it was promised that road closures would last for no longer than a week while this work was being done, starting 1st week of September.
Now = last week of October and all the road closures and diversions are still in place and Siemens have their name all over every part of it..
Proudly too – they’re Saving The World doncha know.
8 weeks (and counting) to do what was promised inside one week ##
Remind me, Who did ‘Win The War”
## Is that why the 1.5C deadline has passed, Siemens didn’t “get their fingers out” fast enough?
haha <unprintable> haha
Siemens Energy is in trouble and has had to ask the German Government for a multi billion euro bail out largely related to problems in its wind turbine arm, Siemens Gamesa. I guess they are more concerned about that than a few roads in E Anglia 🙂
This ridiculous idiocy being promoted should be criminal. At least, it should end up with all of these morons finding themselves in insane asylums (along with the people stupid enough to believe them).
Ha ha ha. If its got David King’s name on it it’s a joke – a very bad joke.
“Unfortunately, time is up.”
For whom the bell tolls? It tolls for thee, alarmist.
So we had “the warmest temperatures of the last 100,000 years!!!” Is that so? If it was warmer 100,000 years ago, how did that happen without man causing it? You freaking moronic charlatans.
Apart from the fact that most of the last 10,000 years have been warmer than now. …
… Earth being in a tepid period of the Holocene.
So, the lesson for all you plebs of the world is –
if you want some nice things in life, you have to get a gig as a parliamentarian a UN official, a WEF member, an academic or a bureaucrat.
i.e. a member of those classes of people who live handsomely off the (alleged) “wealth” of the rest of us.
Where’s Nick and our other trolls to reassure us that nobody is making these kinds of apocalyptic pronouncements?
It doesn’t get more self explanatory than that. As such, Nick can’t change the definition of words to confuse everyone.
Except for over 95% of the Holocene, that was warmer than it is today.
Plus the Earth is still in a 2.56 million-year ice age named the Quaternary Glaciation. 20 percent of the land is either permafrost or covered by glaciers. Outside of the tropics, it is much too cold to live outdoors with no technology.
Communism provides the bare minimum that is needed for survival, except when is doesn’t. Read up on the Holodomor and Mao’s “Great” Leap Forward, under which 10’s if not 100’s of millions died.
Communism pushes everyone who isn’t in charge of the asylum into absolute, bare minimum poverty. Meanwhile those who are in charge are wealthier than even the most lavish billionaires in the West.
Mainland China is doing well after the US moved most of its large manufacturing there.
Mainland China is doing very well since it switched to being fascist from communist.
I doubt that things in the USSR were quite as bad as that in the decade before it collapsed but Jimmy Reid (ex-Communist) made a television series in the late 1980s called “Reid About the USSR”. In the series he visited the home of a medical consultant who was married to a civil engineer and had one grown-up daughter. They lived in a tiny flat. However, they were among the lucky ones: they owned a car. But when the consultant parked the car he removed the windscreen wipers. Otherwise they would be stolen. Jimmy Reid also visited a shoe shop. It was selling sandals in the middle of a Russian winter. As for the supermarket! Talk about basic. No wonder the Russians were desperate to replace Communism with Capitalism.
More juvenile gibberish from the CAGW zealots. I’m not impressed. It appears they fear the 1.5C increase from the end of the little ice age. I say what do we have to fear we are already there. Time for these guys to shut up.
Alarmists have to walk a fine line. They can’t say that the harm will be apparent in 100 or 50 or even 20 years. No one will care. People have more pressing concerns. They also have to be specific about the effects, too – vague and nebulous threats are easily ignored.
On the other hand, if they say “We’re all dying now” or imminently, people are at least smart enough to look around and say “Huh… We seem fine. What are these nutters talking about?” They need to maintain vagueness about the timeframe and effects, otherwise the emperor’s missing clothes are too apparent.
I think they are failing on the 2nd part. I know they are trying to take advantage of the underwater volcanic eruption combined with an El Nino in order to scare people, but it will only increase the apathy for their cause in the long run as things moderate once again.
So I love this kind of “we’re doomed now!” alarmism. It will speed up the world’s cognizance Warmunism scam.
The fraud of alarmists and their marketing of some doomsday was shown decades ago in Ghostbusters 2.Bill Murray did this expertly in this clip.
The World Of Psychics With Peter Venkman | Film Clip | GHOSTBUSTERS II | With Captions – YouTube
Bloomberg’s green energy research team estimates $200 trillion to stop warming.
For $1 trillion we could surely develop air-conditioned clothing using solar cells and thermoelectric cooling materials. We don’t try to warm up the winters, we wear clothes to keep us at the temperature we like.
Don’t allow Siberia and Canada to become habitable! That would be the end of settled science!
What unadulterated garbage!
In about 4 months their warning of “unbearable heat” will change to “unbearable cold.”
Seasons are obviously proof of the climate crisis…
The communists have been building many more coal-fired power plants. They say growth is their main objective.
When communists build coal plants they burn good coal. And since they are not motivated by profit, communist coal plants are part of their orderly social transition to Net Zero.
This is the real climate science. Forget all the dots, graphs, plots, and models. This has been the agenda for many years.
“possibly the warmest temperature on Earth over the past 100,000 years”
Out of all the falsehoods they are spouting that is the most outrageous. Hard to not conclude they are intentionally lying because nobody with any understanding of the geologic record could make such a statement.
If I remember correctly that was a model that referring to. A MODEL to tell us what the temperature was on July 15, BC 180.
That wasn’t the day Julius Caesar got stabbed, was it?
Time is up for what? Are you going to stop browbeating us about our CO2 sins now that we’ve passed a “tipping point”? Excellent! Shut up and leave us alone.
We noticed that CO2 was ten times higher, global temperatures several degrees higher, and oceans several meters higher in the past and life managed to thrive; there was no death spiral into an inhospitable, hothouse planet. So what exactly are these “tipping points” of which you screech?
They get all the cushy flyover jobs and you do the tipping with your taxes deplorable.
NOTED..
Not one of the usual AGW trollettes has the courage to come out in defence of this anti-scientific gibberish.
Or to come out to say it is just moronic balderdash.
“affiliated with” ???
And is Bangladesh really in India?
Yawn.
If CO2 is of such an exteme global threat as to risk, well, something between the “ending of life as we know it,” to “global extinction”, then activists would be rushing to build as many nuclear plants as possible. It is the only proven carbon free power supply.
The fact that scientist and activitst don’t demand replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power proves global warming is about creating green energy novo-robber barrons, not saving the planet. If CO2 is a global threat capable of destroying life as we know it within decades than in comparison any risk from modern nuclear energy is minor and localized. Small price to pay for efficient, reliable, CO2 free energy.
It’s been said for years by many realists.
There is no way that anyone should believe in global warming, when none of the people pushing it, act as if they believe in it.
We therefore need to change our economy to a system that supports meeting basic needs for all people instead of excessive consumption by the wealthy
Are you listening Leonardo Dicaprio, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Klaus Schwab and all the other very wealthy people who tell us there is a climate emergency?
Such an economic system would have to be government controlled with the government telling enterprises what to produce and how much to produce and rationing output so that nobody gets more than what the government has decided meets their ‘basic needs’. I can just see Leonardo and Co singing the praises of that suggestion.
If you read the article half the “vital signs” listed have nothing to do with the health of the planet nor its temperature. It lists a comical set of “vital signs” including: lower number of births per woman (so heat makes women have fewer kids?), higher amount of eating meat (so fighting malnutrition is bad?), increased air travel, lack of diversified investments (because the amount of money in fossil fuels investments directly damages the planet..?), increased energy use, carbon credits…. yeah, all environmental vital signs indicating earths health…
Of the vital signs that it does list about the planet, most are improving not getting worse. Artic ice loss is stable. Deforestation has decreased, billon dollar floods have decreased, US Area burnt has decreased (even ignoring that 95% is arsen), brazilian rainforest deforestation decreased, number of hottest days decreased,…
So at beast this is a report that uses bad alalysis in order to reach unsupported conclusions in to produce a dramtic headline. …
“We therefore need to change our economy to a system that supports meeting basic needs for all people instead of excessive consumption by the wealthy (O’Neill et al. 2018).”
When a person comes into the family owned appliance store where I work, and they buy a $20,000 package of appliances to upgrade their $1 million plus condo, the gross profit from that sale to the store is around $7,000 (including installs and delivery). That $7,000 helps pay the bills that keep the store open so I can work there, and it pays my wages. So thank you wealthy people for spending your money on more than basic needs.
Oddly enough, the basic needs (and more) for all people are met in almost all First World countries.
Perhaps they have their own definition of “basic needs”.