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Legitimate question: will there be a point where we speak about this war in the past tense, as in `The world lost the war against climate change'? How do we det
by 317070 8y ago
Legitimate question: will there be a point where we speak about this war in the past tense, as in `The world lost the war against climate change'? How do we determine that turning point?
- WhompingWindows 8y agoThere was an article in the NYTimes stating that we have already lost the war, but since climate changes in a continuous and highly complex fashion, I personally doubt there'll be an agreed-upon point where things changed from not lost -> lost.
- imgabe 8y agoBased on the wars on drugs and terror: no.
- ebbv 8y agoNot exactly the same because at some point climate change will make the planet uninhabitable.
- pas 8y agoHow? What does that mean? Habitability is not a binary thing.
- Tade0 8y agoActually, it is. For most mammals a temperature over around 31C at 100% humidity is lethal after no more than six hours of exposure. Go beyond that and everyone dies.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoYou're right to a point. The hotter it gets on average, the faster the less fit die due to various heat related reasons. Once it hits 31c@100% relative humidity, land mammals die. So it's on a rolling scale up to 31C. At or past, yeah its a binary cliff.
- PeterisP 8y agoI haven't seen any projected warming scenario where it'd be 31C everywhere. There's a gradual change in habitability as the habitable zone becomes smaller and smaller. Perhaps our descendants will be farming Antarctica.
- pas 8y agoSure, but will humans just sit idle by and wait for extinction, or will they do whatever it is necessary to keep the ecosystem from boiling away? Of course it depends on how severe the problem is, but in general we have the means to affect climate. (Solar shade comes to mind and large scale GHG capture.)
- gus_massa 8y agoEven the worst case models predict that Earth will be habitable for humans for a long time. IIRC the worst that can happen in the next 100 years is that the sea will raise a few foots and flood some costal cities, change the sites where you can cultivate some food and cause hunger in some places, more floods and drought in many places, and kill many animals and plants. The worst case prediction is a huge huge huge disaster but it is still faraway from the point it is uninhabitable for us (and uninhabitable for roaches (and uninhabitable for bacteria)).
- pas 8y agoHistory is written by the victors. However, we already lost it - in a very real sense - because we failed to convince enough humans that it's important, that they ought to demand tougher legislation, policies, treaties, mandates, cleaner air, better waste management, more energy efficiency, instant order of nuclear and renewable plants to phase out CO2 producing energy sources as soon as possible, etc. We should be building 20km long hydro T-s, electrifying more and more railways, capturing as much emission as we can (chemical plants, big freighter ships, etc.) Instead we are building walls on borders, blabbering about secession, killing/jailing/maiming/kidnapping/torturing each other in an organized fashion all around the planet. We're simply late to efficiently manage a lot of things. But humanity is very likely to survive, so in that sense as long as someone can ask that question we don't have to use past tense.
- btrettel 8y agoI wonder if future generations will think people were even serious about solving the problem. In this respect the war was lost long ago. The vast majority of people who believe climate change will have large negative consequences make no major changes to their lifestyles. As someone who rides bike for transportation largely to save money and stay in shape (I think climate change is a lost cause), the environmental crowd seems to think I am doing something saint-like. But it really isn't anywhere near as difficult as they believe. They rarely adopt cycling to work, and at least part of the reason why seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere. This is speculation, but I think most people stop at signalling that climate change is bad. They rarely take effective action.
- eropple 8y agoA large part of it is that it is a collective action problem. If you want to talk about "effective action"? You're talking about shutting down coal plants, not going after the man or woman on the street. A person needing a car to get to work is, both in real and proportional terms, causing overwhelmingly less damage to the environment than industrial-scale polluters. If everybody who could switch to a bike instead of a car (which is fewer people, at least in America, than you might realize), you would see a blip on the graph. Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff. And it's also counterproductive. It's the "but Al Gore flies in jets!" thing all over again, discrediting what state actors need to be doing because of the actions of private citizens. Don't do that. It's bad for you and bad for us.
- Retric 8y agoCommuting using a 50+MPG vehicle is an option for the vast majority of humanity and would make a huge difference. So, it's not like the average person has zero options. People drive ~3.22 trillion miles in the US using 142.85 billion gallons = ~22MPG so a 50% reduction is completely viable. Further the first 50% reduction is the lowest hanging fruit. We don't need to get to 100% to make a huge difference over time.
- Tade0 8y agoLook up "wet bulb temperature". ELI5: if the temperature of a wet thermometer(which would normally be colder due to evaporation) in a given place goes over around 31C this area becomes uninhabitable for almost all mammals. Burning all the known fossil fuels would be enough to make it so for some places on earth, but the big unknown is what about the other sources of GHG's like thawing permafrost or clathrates lying under the sea?
- SamUK96 8y agoHard to say. I don't think there will be a well-defined turning point. The thing is, the climate changes on long scales, and humans only pay attention to the immediate details, like children analyzing the stock market. The climate will get _gradually_ worse, and people will be forced to migrate north where the environment is more livable. This is obviously what is happening now, and isn't fully sustainable. A little patch of green (Europe) can't feed the world, in slightly over-the-top terms. However, I will say this. If anyone has ever been in a large storm, or a drought, you'll be shockingly aware at how quickly a small announcement about "sold-out water" or "store stock issues" turns into absolute, utter, pure, _pandemonium_. Once _that_ happens often enough, I think people will begin to admit that we lost _something_, for sure. To answer your question though, it's generally believed that it will be a gradually-growing sense of despair and dread, and a growing struggle. Migration into the northern hemisphere as it slowly becomes the last livable place on Earth. Ever played musical chairs in the later stages of the game? Yeah. Honestly, it's remarkably similar to the mechanics behind the French Revolution, but instead of just rich vs poor, it's some kind of crazy triadic chaos-war between rich, poor, and nature, all made more ironic that nukes have a triadic motif.
- mmphosis 8y agoWar is in the past. The war on drugs. The war on whatever. We are not waging war. War doesn't work. War is what has exacerbated the problem. We needn't dwell on the past but maybe learn from it. I agree that wording is important. Talking about climate changes is important. We need an effort, perhaps greater than the war effort in world war 2 to make the changes necessary because whether we do nothing or make needed changes for the better, change is coming. There is no turning point. The Great Turning is a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.
- mattygh 8y agoIt's all about changing the goalposts. We have probably lost the war against 1.5 deg C climate change, as even if we were to freeze emissions now, I believe we would hit that (need fact check on that). We are currently losing the war against 2 deg C climate change. The next war is against 3 or 4 deg C climate change. All of these milestones have severe consequences more significant than the last, so all are worth fighting.
- aurailious 8y agoWe have almost certainly already lost. The challenge now is to adapt to the change. Paris was not about bringing global temp change to 0C, just limiting it to 2C. Fortunately planet Earth won't be bothered by us too much. The cycles of ice ages we are in will "correct" most anything we do. The loss of biodiversity will probably be our only legacy.
- bmarkovic 8y agoBiodiversity will recover on a planetary timescale. Our civilization will probably be lost tho.
- jandrese 8y agoWe've lost the war when everyone is dead.
- rabidrat 8y agoI say we've lost the war when global civilization is over. People can survive Mad Max style but that's a colossal failure in my book.
- carry_bit 8y agoWhen we accept the change instead of fight to prevent/reverse it.