18 ms·

Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2 degrees: U.N

206 points by clumsysmurf 8y ago

wrong_variable 8y ago
Its most likely we are heading for 4 degree warming, I have very little faith that this type of collective action problem will be solved in time. Best way to protect yourself is to invest in real estate up north and in inland parts of the world. [ The time horizon is too long though, I wish 4 degree warming happened much quicker so that I can reap the rewards of my investment earlier. /s. ]
- heurist 8y ago
  Climate is not consistent across the north. Real estate is particularly tricky because it is so reliant on local conditions, which are completely unpredictable at this point. Maybe refugees drive up demand for real estate in the south, maybe invasive beetles destroy all the maple trees, maybe the government drains the great lakes to irrigate Iowa. It's better to make solid (eco-conscious) 10-20 year investments than to try to guess what will be valuable in 50-100 imo
- myrryr 8y ago
  You joke, but I would guess Russia will ultimately be the winner here.
  - cperciva 8y ago
    In the 1960s, the idea of deliberately warming Canada's arctic -- in order to make more farmland available for cultivation(!) -- was a serious policy proposal.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Russia and China. And Canada, but the US will presumably annex it.
  - chupasaurus 8y ago
    Regions which are habitated less aside Far East are either swamps where you can't build a house or with permafrost. You are very welcome here.
- konschubert 8y ago
  How likely do you consider a 6 degree world or higher?
- konschubert 8y ago
  Which regions do you think would still be liveable in a 4 degree world?
  - trashtester 8y ago
    Everywhere in the world, at least 5 meters above see level that have maximum temperatures below 40 degrees celsius will be livable, as long as economic output is sufficient to purchase food (if it cannot be grown locally any more). Just like Dubai is livable today.
    - konschubert 8y ago
      Yes but which regions will still have maximum temperatures below 40 degrees Celsius at that point, at least on most days of the year? A 4 degree change worldwide is easily a 10 degree change over continents, and that's just the average! From what I understand, that can easily mean a 20 or 30 degree change in max temperatures, or does it? I'm saying Central Europe 60 degrees Celsius on a normal summer day. Please tell me I'm wrong, but that's the understanding I've gained so far
      - trashtester 8y ago
        60 degrees C is almost impossible in non-desert areas (due to evaporation of moisture). The practical limit, today, in tropical areas is about 45 degrees, and at that point, it's getting deadly. Which also answers the first question. Future temperatures of up to 45 degrees will be survivable. Exactly where that will be, is complicated, but anywhere north of the alps in Europe should be too far north, as should the northerns states in the US. That does not mean that every place further south will be unlivable, only that it the risk is higher. Spain, Italy, Texas and California could start looking like Sahara, or it could be more similar to Egypt or Thailand, depending on how rainfall patterns change. In any case, if we look 50 years into the future, who knows what kind of technologies we would be able to leverage to mitigate these problems?
        bigbugbag 8y ago
zaroth 8y ago
Imagine the force required to make governments do their share to prevent >2 degree shift. There is a cost to compliance. There is a point where the damage is so incalcuable that you are compelled to force compliance on all other governments.
- labster 8y ago
  Nuclear winter is a very effective way to reduce global temperature, despite the initial CO2 spike. Also, the damage is quite calculable.
  - bigbugbag 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure a nuclear winter does not reduce global temperature other than the short term (~10 years). IIRC the hopi prophecies have one such outcome where all humans die crawling in the dark with no food due to no agriculture possible without photosynthesis.
Razengan 8y ago
Could it be that the human brain just cannot relate to or care about large-scale and long-term problems without continually making a conscious effort to? It seems that as long as our immediate lives are good enough, we're fine with everything. Does that make our species incapable of expanding beyond our home planet let alone the solar system? Because those undertakings require a fundamental reconfiguration of how we operate and interact. So far the best "hack" we've found for keeping things going is money: Someone finds a way to make money from projects that may or may not happen to advance the species as a whole, convinces people to work on those projects with the offer of money, and those people use money to improve their immediate lives. So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Could it be that the human brain just cannot relate to or care about large-scale and long-term problems without continually making a conscious effort to? What we are experiencing is a failure of particular institutions - government, industry, NGOs, Intergovernmental organizations etc. What an average brain might or might not care or related-to is a significant distance from this. One might argue we have a failure of brains together to create responsible organizations and frameworks. But here, we have had quite a few struggles between types of organizations, with some winning and some losing. Perhaps the losers might have done better, perhaps not.
  - atomi 8y ago
    It's hard to blame our government when millions of people voted for a guy that proclaimed climate change was a Chinese hoax.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Those fossil fuel dudes have done some great PR, haven't they? It's arguably China and Russia that will come out ahead, with the Arctic Ocean as the new Mediterranean. And maybe the US, after it annexes Canada. Edit: See https://www.arctictoday.com/chinas-arctic-plans-represent-new-way-looking-world/ https://www.arctictoday.com/chinas-arctic-plans-represent-ne...
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
And even the agreed upon measures were criticized as hardly enough to affect the change we really need. Scientists criticized the governments for making a show out of the agreements despite them being insufficient, and here they’re not even meeting those goals.
zaro 8y ago
> A promise by rich nations to provide developing nations with $100 billion a year to tackle climate change is only one part of the huge transformation needed, she added. This sounds like a joke when the military budgets are in the trillions. But on the other hand when poor countries become inhabitable and people start moving military will be needed to push them back .
- onion2k 8y ago
  Unless you're happy to have your sons and daughters kill people fleeing their uninhabitable countries, military solutions won't help.
  - batiudrami 8y ago
    Unfortunately it seems increasingly inevitable. You only have to look at what my country is happy to put faceless brown asylum seekers through rather than take a (comparatively minuscule) compromise in their living conditions to recognise that, when it comes to it, probably this results in war or genocide. When it comes down to it, faced with hundreds of thousands or millions of people coming to Australia in boats, threatening an already shaky lifestyle, the most likely outcome I can see is that we kill them, as sick as that makes me feel.
  - adimitrov 8y ago
    Actively kill? Probably not, or at least not widespread. Passively watch them die (while denying life-saving care)? That is already reality, and in no way hypothetical. It's already happening in Europe [1] and the Sahara Desert [2]. This situation is already in large parts due to climate change, as the entire Syrian war, for example, can be seen as being caused by climate change [3], and the patterns of migration in Africa are driven by desertification, among other things. In all of these cases, a large military can secure a border, creating a fortress few, if any refugees can enter. And climate change is going to be the main driver of refugee migration. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/03/mediterranean-migrants-drown-three-days-libya-italy https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/03/mediterranean-... [2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/walk-die-algeria-abandons-13000-refugees-sahara-180625064043040.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/walk-die-algeria-aban... [3] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-syria-war-climate-change-drought/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-syri...
newnewpdro 8y ago
The National Geographic film Before the Flood [0] did a reasonably good job of covering this topic. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a watch. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Flood_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Flood_(film)
- rb666 8y ago
  I just can't watch it, too depressing. Especially with the USA actively steering the opposite direction, I have little hope.
  - bigbugbag 8y ago
    If the only way out is to kill everyone in the USA, this is something that may be attempted at some point. Putin and his new set of weapons could probably razes every major US cities and put an end to the US nonsense. One way or the other, most humans are gonna die before the end of the century and a dramatic reduction of population will happen. The US way of living will also come to an end, it is simply a matter of doing it voluntarily and aim to avoid the worst or having it forced on them by powers over which they have no say and feel the burn.
    - newnewpdro 8y ago
      The US has a high footprint per capita, but its population is relatively small. Frankly I think the more concerning nations would be China and India. India still has something like 30% of its population, which roughly equates the entirety of the US, living without electricity. India's top priority is development and bringing their people out of poverty, and they have abundant coal to do it cheaply. You can beat up the US all you want, but the multiplier is important and a place like India can easily move the global needle via the slightest improvements to their average quality of life. I'm hopeful that China uses its position of control over how everything is being made and resulting prosperity to pivot from fossil fuels. Russia's future in the warmer planet is especially interesting. Imagine what impact Siberia becoming arable land would have on their place in the world.
rdm_blackhole 8y ago
It is not just governments, its people too. How many couples will have more than one child? How many people eat meat or fish every day? How many people drive their car to the corner store less than a mile away? How many people buy huge SUVs and trucks as a status symbol when a smaller car is all they need? Governments won't solve this issue. We the consumers have to solve it, the problem is that nobody gives a fuck. I have tried to reduce my carbon footprint to the minimum and guess what? It won't matter because by the time I have saved a few kilos of Co2 there's a douchebag with a hummer driving down the street sucking gasoline like there is no tomorrow! And to top it off everybody thinks that the world's economy can continue to grow without any limits. I believe that as a species we are simply delusional.
- abyssin 8y ago
  Driving to the corner store isn't the issue. Having a lifestyle that makes you need a car is the issue. Also travelling in general is a big taboo, because environnementalists usually love to travel. Relying on individual's changes will lead to what we've been doing for 30 years. It leads to the current situation of “penny wise and pound foolish”, saving water when brushing teeth but taking planes.
  - pimmen 8y ago
    > Driving to the corner store isn't the issue. Having a lifestyle that makes you need a car is the issue. This. I pissed off my ex's sister once when she said that since she was moving 40 kilometers outside of the city, she and her husband needs two cars. I asked her why she was moving then, you already have a house with a room for all your kids close enough to work that you can bike. She answered that she loves nature, and just going for a run there whenever she wants. So I said "wouldn't you then say that to go for a run in the woods whenever you want, you'll get two cars"? It sort of killed the mood. I'm a monster.
    - pendenthistory 8y ago
      I've had these kinds of conversations often with family, and I think it comes down to them believing in the "right" to live anywhere. They have a right to living in a house close to nature. This attitude comes up when some parties in our country want to raise the price of gas or some other way make it more expensive to drive (to save our planet). The reaction is always the same: "how am I supposed to bike or walk to work, it would take 10 hours!". Well yeah, but it's your choice to live so far away from everything, should we destroy our planet because you want to have a yard and live next to a forest?
qqqwwweeerrr 8y ago
I feel somewhat embarassed to talk about this, but does anyone else feel a sense of dread and depression when reading news like this? I can't seem to shake it and it's quite strongly affecting my worldview.
- polotics 8y ago
  Nope. Just a strong motivation to get ready. From where I stand in terms of worldview for my children, the 21st century looks like a race between geo-engineering and forced adaptations, inclusive of genetics, with the lowlands' populations having one chance at armed migration. So maybe not as bad as the 20th...
- atomi 8y ago
  These news stories are ominous.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Based on my experience over the past few decades, it's going to just keep getting worse. And there's not much that we can do about that. Except to maybe mitigate the extremes. And even that's iffy, because we don't know what'll happen with the permafrost.
    - akvadrako 8y ago
      It probably will get worse, until people get tired of ominous news. Eventually it must get tiring or at least cause desensitisation.
- batiudrami 8y ago
  I do too. Considering the scenarios in which this plays out makes me feel sick, and overwhelmingly helpless.
- awestroke 8y ago
  Climate Anxiety is starting to get more and more common. APA's guidelines are interesting: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-healt... It's very jarring to read information from experts and scentific reports on where we're heading and at the same time everyone in the media and all people around me just ignore the problem completely except some comments now and then that reveal how greatly they underestimate the problem. If you start trying to talk about how severe our problems are becoming, you may be labeled a conspiracy theorist / "prepper" and your opinion thrown out the window.
Discombulator 8y ago
This is a classical example of a market failure. The issue is that today, when you you are buying any good, you are not paying for the full end-to-end cost of the item, which includes the cost of disposal (collection, sorting, recycling) and the cost of fixing the issues caused by for example, CO2 emitted during the production process. In other words, everyone of us is enjoying now a large subsidy/handout paid by future generations. This is called a negative externality. The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society. Note that market failure does not mean that the “market” mechanism is the cause of the failure - rather the issue is the incompleteness of information. Markets would solve this allocation problem very efficiently once the subsidy is removed. I imagine for example that most packaging using non recyclable plastics would become entirely uneconomical, and the full price of gas would be so high that industry will be incentivized to look for alternative technologies and sources of energy.
- mturmon 8y ago
  And what really burns is that certain segments of our society are aggressively exploiting this externality.
  - roel_v 8y ago
    I can't tell if you mean 'rich people' or 'poor people' by that, because depending on how you look at it, I could argue both. But doesn't that mean that everyone is at fault?
    - tozeur 8y ago
      I don’t think OP is segmenting explicitly by income (read: singling our rich people); better segmentation could be developing vs developed country per capita, which is what I assume is more like what OP is thinking of.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      They presumably mean people who profit from the extraction and use of fossil fuels.
trashtester 8y ago
That global warming is man made and likely to produce catastrophic results, seems well documented now. (possibly 10s or 100s of millions of deaths over the next 200 years, along with a number of species going extinct). But any claims of cataclysmic outcomes (collapse of most civilizations or even extinction) seems unlikely, as far as I can tell. There are other possible events that are much more likely to produce that kind of results. Here is my list of fears: 1. Runaway AI (>40% over the next 200 years) 2. Nuclear War (>20% over the next 200 years) 3. Runaway nanotech 4. Runaway biotech 5. Runaway, cataclysmic global warming effects (full ecosystem collapse, ice age triggered, >5 degree warming, etc)
- randyrand 8y ago
  this is my feeling to. the 10s or 100s of millions of people that die will mostly be from A) children not being born that otherwise would have been B) indirect deaths - a few years off life expectancy
  - trashtester 8y ago
    I'm less optimistic than this. The 10s or 100s I was referring to would be due to events like famines, wars directly caused by climate change, hurricanes, etc. Still, even 200million over 200 years is not a cataclysm. In fact, the reduction we've seen in global hunger over the past generation is a greater effect than that (in the opposite direction). Which is NOT to say that 200 million deaths is not a problem! It just needs to be seen in perspective.
- awestroke 8y ago
  You should read the article The Uninhabitable Earth[1] by David Wallace-Wells on NyMag. It's a good primer on the current information and predictions. [1]: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
  - trashtester 8y ago
    Thanks for the link. I've seen most of these points before, I think. My impression is that this view is a fringe view within the academic community. Do you have any references to indicate that this is actually becoming an academic consensus? To be clear: I'm all for taking the possible actions in order to slow down the global warming. Unfortunately, the best replacement we've had to coal up until now (nuclear) has been unjustly demonized by many of the same people that claim to be most concerned about global warming. Even the worst case outcome for nuclear is better than the best case outcome for coal...
thenewewb 8y ago
The comments here are so far extremely biased towards panic. It’s worth considering that perhaps the world’s governments aren’t panicking because it’s not warranted. Climate change, while generally “accepted,” has a pretty amorphous definition and most current research agrees that there has been a pause since 1995 or so. Given that we are in a 20 year “pause,” it’s not entirely unreasonable - though clearly heretical - to posit that the alarm is largely unwarranted. Year after year we see climate predictions fail to come to pass. Good science is based on hypotheses leading to testable predictions, and global warming predictions have a really poor track record of accuracy. It might be time for the more scientifically minded among us to start increasing our criticism of climate alarmism.
bigbugbag 8y ago
Funny that this would be news in 2018 when a year after the paris COP21, at the 2016 COP22 in Morocco the matter was that we were already past the 1.5° goal and we were on course for going over 2° faster than expected which meant a possible increase of 2.5-3° These estimation were not even taking into account the full picture and things like positive feedback loops.

206 points by clumsysmurf 8y ago

Its most likely we are heading for 4 degree warming, I have very little faith that this type of collective action problem will be solved in time. Best way to protect yourself is to invest in real estate up north and in inland parts of the world. [ The time horizon is too long though, I wish 4 degree warming happened much quicker so that I can reap the rewards of my investment earlier. /s. ]

heurist 8y ago
Climate is not consistent across the north. Real estate is particularly tricky because it is so reliant on local conditions, which are completely unpredictable at this point. Maybe refugees drive up demand for real estate in the south, maybe invasive beetles destroy all the maple trees, maybe the government drains the great lakes to irrigate Iowa. It's better to make solid (eco-conscious) 10-20 year investments than to try to guess what will be valuable in 50-100 imo
myrryr 8y ago
You joke, but I would guess Russia will ultimately be the winner here.
- cperciva 8y ago
  In the 1960s, the idea of deliberately warming Canada's arctic -- in order to make more farmland available for cultivation(!) -- was a serious policy proposal.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Russia and China. And Canada, but the US will presumably annex it.
- chupasaurus 8y ago
  Regions which are habitated less aside Far East are either swamps where you can't build a house or with permafrost. You are very welcome here.
konschubert 8y ago
How likely do you consider a 6 degree world or higher?
konschubert 8y ago
Which regions do you think would still be liveable in a 4 degree world?
- trashtester 8y ago
  Everywhere in the world, at least 5 meters above see level that have maximum temperatures below 40 degrees celsius will be livable, as long as economic output is sufficient to purchase food (if it cannot be grown locally any more). Just like Dubai is livable today.
  - konschubert 8y ago
    Yes but which regions will still have maximum temperatures below 40 degrees Celsius at that point, at least on most days of the year? A 4 degree change worldwide is easily a 10 degree change over continents, and that's just the average! From what I understand, that can easily mean a 20 or 30 degree change in max temperatures, or does it? I'm saying Central Europe 60 degrees Celsius on a normal summer day. Please tell me I'm wrong, but that's the understanding I've gained so far
    - trashtester 8y ago
      60 degrees C is almost impossible in non-desert areas (due to evaporation of moisture). The practical limit, today, in tropical areas is about 45 degrees, and at that point, it's getting deadly. Which also answers the first question. Future temperatures of up to 45 degrees will be survivable. Exactly where that will be, is complicated, but anywhere north of the alps in Europe should be too far north, as should the northerns states in the US. That does not mean that every place further south will be unlivable, only that it the risk is higher. Spain, Italy, Texas and California could start looking like Sahara, or it could be more similar to Egypt or Thailand, depending on how rainfall patterns change. In any case, if we look 50 years into the future, who knows what kind of technologies we would be able to leverage to mitigate these problems?
      - bigbugbag 8y ago

zaroth 8y ago

Imagine the force required to make governments do their share to prevent >2 degree shift. There is a cost to compliance. There is a point where the damage is so incalcuable that you are compelled to force compliance on all other governments.

labster 8y ago
Nuclear winter is a very effective way to reduce global temperature, despite the initial CO2 spike. Also, the damage is quite calculable.
- bigbugbag 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure a nuclear winter does not reduce global temperature other than the short term (~10 years). IIRC the hopi prophecies have one such outcome where all humans die crawling in the dark with no food due to no agriculture possible without photosynthesis.

Razengan 8y ago

Could it be that the human brain just cannot relate to or care about large-scale and long-term problems without continually making a conscious effort to? It seems that as long as our immediate lives are good enough, we're fine with everything. Does that make our species incapable of expanding beyond our home planet let alone the solar system? Because those undertakings require a fundamental reconfiguration of how we operate and interact. So far the best "hack" we've found for keeping things going is money: Someone finds a way to make money from projects that may or may not happen to advance the species as a whole, convinces people to work on those projects with the offer of money, and those people use money to improve their immediate lives. So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.

joe_the_user 8y ago
Could it be that the human brain just cannot relate to or care about large-scale and long-term problems without continually making a conscious effort to? What we are experiencing is a failure of particular institutions - government, industry, NGOs, Intergovernmental organizations etc. What an average brain might or might not care or related-to is a significant distance from this. One might argue we have a failure of brains together to create responsible organizations and frameworks. But here, we have had quite a few struggles between types of organizations, with some winning and some losing. Perhaps the losers might have done better, perhaps not.
- atomi 8y ago
  It's hard to blame our government when millions of people voted for a guy that proclaimed climate change was a Chinese hoax.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Those fossil fuel dudes have done some great PR, haven't they? It's arguably China and Russia that will come out ahead, with the Arctic Ocean as the new Mediterranean. And maybe the US, after it annexes Canada. Edit: See https://www.arctictoday.com/chinas-arctic-plans-represent-new-way-looking-world/ https://www.arctictoday.com/chinas-arctic-plans-represent-ne...

TaylorAlexander 8y ago

And even the agreed upon measures were criticized as hardly enough to affect the change we really need. Scientists criticized the governments for making a show out of the agreements despite them being insufficient, and here they’re not even meeting those goals.

zaro 8y ago

> A promise by rich nations to provide developing nations with $100 billion a year to tackle climate change is only one part of the huge transformation needed, she added. This sounds like a joke when the military budgets are in the trillions. But on the other hand when poor countries become inhabitable and people start moving military will be needed to push them back .

onion2k 8y ago
Unless you're happy to have your sons and daughters kill people fleeing their uninhabitable countries, military solutions won't help.
- batiudrami 8y ago
  Unfortunately it seems increasingly inevitable. You only have to look at what my country is happy to put faceless brown asylum seekers through rather than take a (comparatively minuscule) compromise in their living conditions to recognise that, when it comes to it, probably this results in war or genocide. When it comes down to it, faced with hundreds of thousands or millions of people coming to Australia in boats, threatening an already shaky lifestyle, the most likely outcome I can see is that we kill them, as sick as that makes me feel.
- adimitrov 8y ago
  Actively kill? Probably not, or at least not widespread. Passively watch them die (while denying life-saving care)? That is already reality, and in no way hypothetical. It's already happening in Europe [1] and the Sahara Desert [2]. This situation is already in large parts due to climate change, as the entire Syrian war, for example, can be seen as being caused by climate change [3], and the patterns of migration in Africa are driven by desertification, among other things. In all of these cases, a large military can secure a border, creating a fortress few, if any refugees can enter. And climate change is going to be the main driver of refugee migration. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/03/mediterranean-migrants-drown-three-days-libya-italy https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/03/mediterranean-... [2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/walk-die-algeria-abandons-13000-refugees-sahara-180625064043040.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/walk-die-algeria-aban... [3] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-syria-war-climate-change-drought/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-syri...

newnewpdro 8y ago

The National Geographic film Before the Flood [0] did a reasonably good job of covering this topic. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a watch. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Flood_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Flood_(film)

rb666 8y ago
I just can't watch it, too depressing. Especially with the USA actively steering the opposite direction, I have little hope.
- bigbugbag 8y ago
  If the only way out is to kill everyone in the USA, this is something that may be attempted at some point. Putin and his new set of weapons could probably razes every major US cities and put an end to the US nonsense. One way or the other, most humans are gonna die before the end of the century and a dramatic reduction of population will happen. The US way of living will also come to an end, it is simply a matter of doing it voluntarily and aim to avoid the worst or having it forced on them by powers over which they have no say and feel the burn.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    The US has a high footprint per capita, but its population is relatively small. Frankly I think the more concerning nations would be China and India. India still has something like 30% of its population, which roughly equates the entirety of the US, living without electricity. India's top priority is development and bringing their people out of poverty, and they have abundant coal to do it cheaply. You can beat up the US all you want, but the multiplier is important and a place like India can easily move the global needle via the slightest improvements to their average quality of life. I'm hopeful that China uses its position of control over how everything is being made and resulting prosperity to pivot from fossil fuels. Russia's future in the warmer planet is especially interesting. Imagine what impact Siberia becoming arable land would have on their place in the world.

rdm_blackhole 8y ago

It is not just governments, its people too. How many couples will have more than one child? How many people eat meat or fish every day? How many people drive their car to the corner store less than a mile away? How many people buy huge SUVs and trucks as a status symbol when a smaller car is all they need? Governments won't solve this issue. We the consumers have to solve it, the problem is that nobody gives a fuck. I have tried to reduce my carbon footprint to the minimum and guess what? It won't matter because by the time I have saved a few kilos of Co2 there's a douchebag with a hummer driving down the street sucking gasoline like there is no tomorrow! And to top it off everybody thinks that the world's economy can continue to grow without any limits. I believe that as a species we are simply delusional.

abyssin 8y ago
Driving to the corner store isn't the issue. Having a lifestyle that makes you need a car is the issue. Also travelling in general is a big taboo, because environnementalists usually love to travel. Relying on individual's changes will lead to what we've been doing for 30 years. It leads to the current situation of “penny wise and pound foolish”, saving water when brushing teeth but taking planes.
- pimmen 8y ago
  > Driving to the corner store isn't the issue. Having a lifestyle that makes you need a car is the issue. This. I pissed off my ex's sister once when she said that since she was moving 40 kilometers outside of the city, she and her husband needs two cars. I asked her why she was moving then, you already have a house with a room for all your kids close enough to work that you can bike. She answered that she loves nature, and just going for a run there whenever she wants. So I said "wouldn't you then say that to go for a run in the woods whenever you want, you'll get two cars"? It sort of killed the mood. I'm a monster.
  - pendenthistory 8y ago
    I've had these kinds of conversations often with family, and I think it comes down to them believing in the "right" to live anywhere. They have a right to living in a house close to nature. This attitude comes up when some parties in our country want to raise the price of gas or some other way make it more expensive to drive (to save our planet). The reaction is always the same: "how am I supposed to bike or walk to work, it would take 10 hours!". Well yeah, but it's your choice to live so far away from everything, should we destroy our planet because you want to have a yard and live next to a forest?

qqqwwweeerrr 8y ago

I feel somewhat embarassed to talk about this, but does anyone else feel a sense of dread and depression when reading news like this? I can't seem to shake it and it's quite strongly affecting my worldview.

polotics 8y ago
Nope. Just a strong motivation to get ready. From where I stand in terms of worldview for my children, the 21st century looks like a race between geo-engineering and forced adaptations, inclusive of genetics, with the lowlands' populations having one chance at armed migration. So maybe not as bad as the 20th...
atomi 8y ago
These news stories are ominous.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Based on my experience over the past few decades, it's going to just keep getting worse. And there's not much that we can do about that. Except to maybe mitigate the extremes. And even that's iffy, because we don't know what'll happen with the permafrost.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    It probably will get worse, until people get tired of ominous news. Eventually it must get tiring or at least cause desensitisation.
batiudrami 8y ago
I do too. Considering the scenarios in which this plays out makes me feel sick, and overwhelmingly helpless.
awestroke 8y ago
Climate Anxiety is starting to get more and more common. APA's guidelines are interesting: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-healt... It's very jarring to read information from experts and scentific reports on where we're heading and at the same time everyone in the media and all people around me just ignore the problem completely except some comments now and then that reveal how greatly they underestimate the problem. If you start trying to talk about how severe our problems are becoming, you may be labeled a conspiracy theorist / "prepper" and your opinion thrown out the window.

Discombulator 8y ago

This is a classical example of a market failure. The issue is that today, when you you are buying any good, you are not paying for the full end-to-end cost of the item, which includes the cost of disposal (collection, sorting, recycling) and the cost of fixing the issues caused by for example, CO2 emitted during the production process. In other words, everyone of us is enjoying now a large subsidy/handout paid by future generations. This is called a negative externality. The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society. Note that market failure does not mean that the “market” mechanism is the cause of the failure - rather the issue is the incompleteness of information. Markets would solve this allocation problem very efficiently once the subsidy is removed. I imagine for example that most packaging using non recyclable plastics would become entirely uneconomical, and the full price of gas would be so high that industry will be incentivized to look for alternative technologies and sources of energy.

mturmon 8y ago
And what really burns is that certain segments of our society are aggressively exploiting this externality.
- roel_v 8y ago
  I can't tell if you mean 'rich people' or 'poor people' by that, because depending on how you look at it, I could argue both. But doesn't that mean that everyone is at fault?
  - tozeur 8y ago
    I don’t think OP is segmenting explicitly by income (read: singling our rich people); better segmentation could be developing vs developed country per capita, which is what I assume is more like what OP is thinking of.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    They presumably mean people who profit from the extraction and use of fossil fuels.

trashtester 8y ago

That global warming is man made and likely to produce catastrophic results, seems well documented now. (possibly 10s or 100s of millions of deaths over the next 200 years, along with a number of species going extinct). But any claims of cataclysmic outcomes (collapse of most civilizations or even extinction) seems unlikely, as far as I can tell. There are other possible events that are much more likely to produce that kind of results. Here is my list of fears: 1. Runaway AI (>40% over the next 200 years) 2. Nuclear War (>20% over the next 200 years) 3. Runaway nanotech 4. Runaway biotech 5. Runaway, cataclysmic global warming effects (full ecosystem collapse, ice age triggered, >5 degree warming, etc)

randyrand 8y ago
this is my feeling to. the 10s or 100s of millions of people that die will mostly be from A) children not being born that otherwise would have been B) indirect deaths - a few years off life expectancy
- trashtester 8y ago
  I'm less optimistic than this. The 10s or 100s I was referring to would be due to events like famines, wars directly caused by climate change, hurricanes, etc. Still, even 200million over 200 years is not a cataclysm. In fact, the reduction we've seen in global hunger over the past generation is a greater effect than that (in the opposite direction). Which is NOT to say that 200 million deaths is not a problem! It just needs to be seen in perspective.
awestroke 8y ago
You should read the article The Uninhabitable Earth[1] by David Wallace-Wells on NyMag. It's a good primer on the current information and predictions. [1]: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-...
- trashtester 8y ago
  Thanks for the link. I've seen most of these points before, I think. My impression is that this view is a fringe view within the academic community. Do you have any references to indicate that this is actually becoming an academic consensus? To be clear: I'm all for taking the possible actions in order to slow down the global warming. Unfortunately, the best replacement we've had to coal up until now (nuclear) has been unjustly demonized by many of the same people that claim to be most concerned about global warming. Even the worst case outcome for nuclear is better than the best case outcome for coal...

thenewewb 8y ago

The comments here are so far extremely biased towards panic. It’s worth considering that perhaps the world’s governments aren’t panicking because it’s not warranted. Climate change, while generally “accepted,” has a pretty amorphous definition and most current research agrees that there has been a pause since 1995 or so. Given that we are in a 20 year “pause,” it’s not entirely unreasonable - though clearly heretical - to posit that the alarm is largely unwarranted. Year after year we see climate predictions fail to come to pass. Good science is based on hypotheses leading to testable predictions, and global warming predictions have a really poor track record of accuracy. It might be time for the more scientifically minded among us to start increasing our criticism of climate alarmism.

bigbugbag 8y ago

Funny that this would be news in 2018 when a year after the paris COP21, at the 2016 COP22 in Morocco the matter was that we were already past the 1.5° goal and we were on course for going over 2° faster than expected which meant a possible increase of 2.5-3° These estimation were not even taking into account the full picture and things like positive feedback loops.