3 ms·

I commented about this before: [0] A lot of people seem to misunderstand the 12 (now 11) year deadline. It's not that suddenly an apocalypse will occur in 2030

I commented about this before: [0] A lot of people seem to misunderstand the 12 (now 11) year deadline. It's not that suddenly an apocalypse will occur in 2030. It's that after that point, we'll no longer have any realistic hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change that will arrive in the following decades and centuries. Maybe we need to explain it to people like cancer treatment: if we'd caught it early, maybe chemotherapy alone would have been sufficient. Today, we need invasive surgery, plus chemo, plus radiation therapy, and we also need to hope that untested immunotherapy treatments will work. If we continue to leave it untreated, then our prognosis is very grim indeed. We won't die immediately, but our cancer will be inoperable. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20262089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20262089

kgwgk 7y ago
U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday. Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study. ″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said. ... The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown. The difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago. Brown said if the warming trend continues, ″the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.″ He said even the most conservative scientists ″already tell us there’s nothing we can do now to stop a ... change″ of about 3 degrees. https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 PS: The 30-years period has just elapsed, how did the “most conservative scientific estimate” of 1 to 7 degrees rise fared?
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  > how did the “most conservative scientific estimate” of 1 to 7 degrees rise fared? Seems accurate to me. We've already passed +1C and approaching +1.5C today: https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-globe-is-already-above-1c https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-globe-is... You didn't even specify whether you're talking about Centigrade or Fahrenheit degrees, but +1C is ~1.8F. 1.5 C would be about 2.7F.
  - kgwgk 7y ago
    Maybe it won’t seem so accurate to you when you realize the baseline in your link is not the 1989 level. Edit: But you might have a point on the C/F question. I don’t know what Dr. Brown meant. The quoted 9 degrees difference relative to the Ice Age may suggest it’s not Celsius, but even in that case we would barely be at the lower end of the “conservative” range of 0.6-3.9 C rise.

kgwgk 7y ago

U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control. As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday. Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study. ″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said. ... The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown. The difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago. Brown said if the warming trend continues, ″the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.″ He said even the most conservative scientists ″already tell us there’s nothing we can do now to stop a ... change″ of about 3 degrees. https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 PS: The 30-years period has just elapsed, how did the “most conservative scientific estimate” of 1 to 7 degrees rise fared?

ForHackernews 7y ago
> how did the “most conservative scientific estimate” of 1 to 7 degrees rise fared? Seems accurate to me. We've already passed +1C and approaching +1.5C today: https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-globe-is-already-above-1c https://www.climatecentral.org/gallery/graphics/the-globe-is... You didn't even specify whether you're talking about Centigrade or Fahrenheit degrees, but +1C is ~1.8F. 1.5 C would be about 2.7F.
- kgwgk 7y ago
  Maybe it won’t seem so accurate to you when you realize the baseline in your link is not the 1989 level. Edit: But you might have a point on the C/F question. I don’t know what Dr. Brown meant. The quoted 9 degrees difference relative to the Ice Age may suggest it’s not Celsius, but even in that case we would barely be at the lower end of the “conservative” range of 0.6-3.9 C rise.