9 ms·

Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

69 points by 4mpm3 7y ago

WilliamEdward 7y ago
What are the implications of 'irreversible'? Practically irreversible? Cannot be reversed naturally? If we run out of ice, what's to say cooling down the planet by halting carbon production won't recreate the ice caps?
- PeterisP 7y ago
  The implications of 'irreversible' are that it's going to become much more difficult to reverse in the "short term" (less than hundreds of years) as after the various tipping points reversing would involve not only to cancel/compensate for our emissions, but also to overcome the much larger positive feedback loops e.g. methane released by melting permafrost, increased solar absorbtion/heating after the reflective icecaps melt, etc. It's not technically irreversible, however, the point is that however expensive and difficult prevention might seem, reversing it after the temperature increase is going to be much, much more expensive and difficult. And our capacity to do stuff is going to decrease as we suffer from the consequences - e.g. population reduction, conflicts, etc.
  - wolfgke 7y ago
    > And our capacity to do stuff is going to decrease as we suffer from the consequences - e.g. population reduction, conflicts, etc. If the population reduces, the emission of greenhouse gases decrease which helps to reverse the effect of climate change.
    - PeterisP 7y ago
      These feedback loops are in total larger than our emissions, so once we hit them in the coming decades, the global warming would continue increasing for at least a few centuries even if all humans would be dead and make zero emissions. Hitting zero emissions now (which IMHO is unrealistic) would stop global warming at something like +2C level. Hitting zero emissions in 2050 will still mean a runaway global warming, and fixing that would require some effects that go way beyond zero emissions e.g. large scale carbon sequestration (effectively negative emissions), geoengineering sci-fi or something like that. In 1980 it would have been sufficient to "just" reduce the growth.
- sleepysysadmin 7y ago
  You will find that predictions of climate change have been 100% false. Nobody has a crystal ball and nobody can predict what will happen in the future. So lets look into the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... About 20,000 years ago the earth was 10 celcius colder. For the last 20,000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily. About 100,000 years ago the world was 5celcius warmer than today. If you look at the black/red dots from the IPCC predictions. All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen. Overall on the graph what's happening is that we are more or less exactly flat. However look at those spikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:EPICA_delta_D_plot.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:EPICA_delta... Temperature on earth frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature. So what happened to life on earth when it was 5+ celcius warmer? It was fantastic for life. Frozen wastelands like Canada and Russia thawed and became extremely livable. People moved into these northern places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14celcius warmer and life thrived better than no other time in history.
  - gjm11 7y ago
    > predictions of climate change have been 100% false That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. Here's one example. In 1982, some of Exxon's scientists wrote a memo for their management containing a graph (figure 3, page 7, of http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-management-about-co2-greenhouse-effect/ http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-ma...) saying that by 2020 CO2 levels would be in roughly the range 400..430 ppm and global mean temperature would be up by roughly 1..1.3 degrees C compared to 1960. Here we are in 2020 and the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say? > For the last 20,2000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily What the graph you yourself linked to shows is something very different. There are wild oscillations in the Pleistocene (i.e., before 20k years ago), ending up with temperatures much colder than the present. Then a rapid increase from 20k to 10k years ago. Then near-flat temperatures for the last 10k years. And -- though it's over so short a period that it's hard to see on that graph -- an extremely rapid increase over the last ~50 years. > All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen How? By whom? > we are more or less exactly flat This https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat". > look at those spikes ... frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada? > it was fantastic for life Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ... > The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14 celsius warmer and life thrived ... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at http://www.floodmap.net/ http://www.floodmap.net/ that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator). At 100m, things we would lose include: about half of England and Ireland; all of the Netherlands; half of Belgium; most of western France; all of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau; huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island. I'm sure life would thrive. The human race would adapt too, no doubt; we're a very adaptable species. But a whole lot of us would have our homes under water, and large regions of what's now the inhabitable world would become inhospitable to human life. E.g., a temperature rise of 14 degrees C turns San Francisco into Death Valley.
umanwizard 7y ago
It annoys me when people act like Y2K was apocalyptic scaremongering. No, Y2K was a real threat, which the human race spent huge resources to meet and thereby mitigated appropriately.
- redleggedfrog 7y ago
  I remember my father, a mainframe programmer, spending years correcting code for Y2K for the bank he worked for. COBOL and assembly. At the rollover, it went without a hitch, but there was a lot of sweat to make that happen
  - Ensorceled 7y ago
    My uncle (a COBOL programmer in the 60's) got together with some other retired guys and made a lot of money doing exactly the same thing in the late 90's. One of his contracts he landed because they found his name all over the code.
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  Whenever I hear whinging about Y2K, I always jump in and say that the polio and smallpox scares were also overrated. "We also spent all that money on polio and smallpox vaccines and shit and look there's no polio or smallpox anymore, what a waste of money that was." Might not work on anti-vaxxers but it has shut down more than one stupid conversation about Y2K.
- paulsutter 7y ago
  Y2K was indeed a real threat, AND there was also a good bit of apocalyptic scaremongering. No conflict. Those writing apocalyptic scare stories were poorly informed and deliberately trying to activate people’s base fears. AND there was a huge effort by very smart folks to avert it. No conflict.
  - 4mpm3 7y ago
    This exactly. There was basically a run on canned goods the day before thanks to media stories, some of which didn't seem to have the slightest bit of logic to them. That doesn't mean that Y2K (and other date bugs) aren't real.
rayiner 7y ago
Climate change was never going to be reversible with behavioral measures. Even if everyone had followed the Kyoto protocol to the letter starting in 1992 that wasn’t going to avert climate change, because nobody contemplated how quickly China and India would develop. There is no calculus where you can significantly limit climate change through behavioral measures that also allow the third world to have comfortable, modern lives. There will be 400 million people in Nigeria by 2050 and there is no political regime to address climate the change that’s workable unless it allows them to live a life at least as decent as say Eastern Europe. The west could reduce GHG emissions to zero and it wouldn’t do the trick. People have viewed climate change as a political issue and its not. It’s a scientific issue. It’s the astroid hurtling toward earth in the movie Armageddon or the aliens in Independence Day. The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It’s engineers. It’s always been engineers.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  In the BP World Energy statistical review for 2018, they showed that though renewable energy had fantastic falls in prices, there wasn't enough addition to meet new energy demand, especially in China and India for industry, and for the USA regarding its huge growth in natural gas. They then asked the question, how much faster would renewables need to grow to JUST meet this new energy demand (nevermind decarbonizing existing demand). They found renewables would have to grow over 2X as fast (from 800 TWh up to 1,800 TWh). Let this sink in: We are literally adding half the renewables we need just to keep the emissions curve flat. We probably need to go 4X faster to bend the curve downwards on emissions. Can engineers solve that? They are a piece of the puzzle, but their most fundamental innovations will take years to kick in. We need policy, we need individual behavioral changes, we need everything we can get.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    According to IPCC projections we need to hit zero emissions worldwide within the next decade to avoid a 2C increase. Can politicians do that?
    - 7y ago
Ensorceled 7y ago
There was a lot of talk about how the world will be "uninhabitable by 2050" or "civilization will crumble by 2050" and anecdotally, that really backfired for all my elderly aunts and uncles. They happily admit that climate change is real but don't care because they will be dead by 2040. Hell, I'll be in my 80's.
- knd775 7y ago
  They sound like terrible, self-centered people.
  - Ensorceled 7y ago
    Yes, and so is most of the population apparently. But they are also focused on their own problems; declining health, fixed incomes, cuts to government programs, etc. Hard to get to worked up about a problem that won't occur for 30 years when you're going in for surgery next week. I keep trying to focus on the fact the process is already starting now and WILL affect them in their lifetimes ... hurricanes, fires, wierd storms, droughts ...
  - sametmax 7y ago
    Like most humans. Hell, we comment here using devices made by slaves on the other side of the world. We could choose not to. We could make our life harder so that we didn't sponsor slavery. We don't. We are all very selfish.
  - AlexTWithBeard 7y ago
    Sorry, we don't have a better breed of people to populate this planet.
- bureaucrat 7y ago
  Kek, in 1970 crude oil was predicted to run out in 2020. They also predicted the world will be inhabitable by now because of intense pollution. How are we? We breathe cleaner air and use more petroleum than 1970. I will be 55 in 2050, and I bet my entire fortune that the world will be better then.
inlined 7y ago
The part about divers crying into masks hit home. It was on my bucket list to dive in the Great Barrier Reef but it’s now been declared dead. 95% of my diving has been in the last 25% of my diving career because I know I have a limited time.
- radford-neal 7y ago
  What? "Declared dead?" Here's a BBC report from a few days ago that says that it's in danger, but certainly "not dead yet". https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49520949?SThisFB https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49520949?SThisFB Since the BBC is now officially a climate alarmist organization, I think one can be sure that this report is as alarmist as one can be without blatantly disregarding easily verifiable facts.
  - gjm11 7y ago
    > now officially a climate alarmist organization What exactly does that mean? (The BBC report is summarizing a report from the Australian government, and unless it's just lying its level of alarmism will pretty much track those of that report itself. So whether the BBC is "officially a climate alarmist organization", whatever that means, matters less than whether the Australian government is one. Regardless, it would be nice to know what you mean.)
    - radford-neal 7y ago
      See, for example, https://www.carbonbrief.org/exclusive-bbc-issues-internal-guidance-on-how-to-report-climate-change https://www.carbonbrief.org/exclusive-bbc-issues-internal-gu... Even when reporting on a report, it's possible to emphasize certain aspects, or misleadingly paraphrase its conclusions. I haven't looked at the original report to tell whether that has happened here.
      - gjm11 7y ago
        OK, I read it. I don't see anything there that to me seems to justify calling them "officially a climate alarmist organization". Could you elaborate on what exactly about their position you're describing by those words?
bjt2n3904 7y ago
You know, there was this guy that made a fool of Christianity when he predicted Jesus would return in 2011. When nothing happened, he said oops and adjusted the date. (People fortunately paid much less attention to him then.) Kinda getting tired of hearing "the sky is falling" all the time from environmental folks. When you hear "the world is ending next year, it's gonna be too late" every single year, it seems like a thinly veiled push for suckers who want to make campaign donations and bad laws. Ironic that the author makes this exact point, and then doubles down on it.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  I think you're missing the point slightly. We have pretty good evidence to suggest that "bad shit" will probably happen eventually as a result of anthropogenic climate change. How bad, and how far into the future? Depends on the model. The problem was, as you point out, that setting arbitrary deadlines led to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario. That doesn't invalidate the science indicating that the bad shit will start to happen eventually.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  Climate change doesn't work like the Second Coming. It's not a catastrophe until a cat 5++ hurricane hits your city, and then it is. It's not evenly distributed, it does not happen all at once everywhere.
- xamuel 7y ago
  How does a guy making a prediction make a fool of Christianity? That's like saying if I read a science textbook and then incorrectly predict flying cars by 2020, that I have made a fool of science. Jesus Himself said: "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. ... Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day on which your Lord will come. But understand this: If the homeowner had known in which watch of the night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into." (Matthew 24:36-43)
snikeris 7y ago
> The only rational path is a virtuous cycle of better politicians enacting better policies and promoting better public understanding of climate change. But as of today, there is no sign the world is moving in that direction. Suppose my politicians fight the good fight and we enact the necessary policies. What about the other countries, especially those that aren't as well off?
- noobermin 7y ago
  The good news is apart from China which is at least paying lip service, most countries produce much less than we do.
- CodeCube 7y ago
  A well off industrialized nation making progress on energy and pollution reduction would a) demonstrate what things works, and b) provide investment dollars into those technologies, which _usually_ results in optimizations and lowering of costs ... so even if those "other countries" don't follow immediately, their adoption could be enabled by earlier adoption by us
  - mola 7y ago
    We should thank Obama for pushing green energy initiatives
ubertakter 7y ago
I recommend the title be changed to the actual story title or something actually similar. The article is about how setting deadlines for action on climate change came from more of an advocacy perspective rather than scientific, which had an effect opposite what was intended.
paulsutter 7y ago
Would sure be nice if we spent those war trillions to solve the real problem. Unfortunately most people seem to have discovered climate change in November 2016. Good that they did. Better to see more focus on solutions. It would be great and exciting to work on mass scale solutions and government can easily create laws to incent it
mannykannot 7y ago
No matter how you put it, people will find tendentious excuses for ignoring the issue, and when they are no longer tenable, they will switch to another, without any concern as to whether it is consistent with their previous position.
noobermin 7y ago
>Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming? No. I also see no evidence in the article it has hurt attitudes either way. In fact, polls show general concern about climate change. Doing something is another matter[0], but people are mindful of it. Nonetheless, the article seems to be more about the author's personal feelings than whether it influenced the movement around it either way. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climatechange/americans-demand-climate-action-reuters-poll-idUSKCN1TR15W https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climatechang...
bregma 7y ago
I was alive in the 1970s when folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead form overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000. Those self-same folks told us this century the arctic will be completely ice free by 2013. In the 1980s, others predicted our total demise due to acid rain and ozone depletion. Mean time, people are making good progress on both feeding the masses and curbing the exponential growth of humanity across the globe. At the same time, clear progress is happening on the reduction-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions front. Acid rain and ozone depletion have been curtailed. We'll always have doomsayers, extremists, and prophets. They're so busy with themselves they rarely get in the way of people who actually get work done.
- mola 7y ago
  On the other hand, these doomsayers also caused public outcry that changed a few things. We can never know if these changes are the reason doom didn't happen, or because the prospects were imaginary. Anyway, I believe that it'll be very hard to annihilate humanity let alone the planet, but it'll be very easy to lower the living standards slowly enough that we won't notice the reasons for it. If you plan to have children, I think it's something you should thinks of. Ofcourse, I'd prefer a rational discussion regarding the issues. But the powers at be, which usually have what to lose, usually steer the debate to be anti rational. And then you find yourself in a position where you must exaggerate in order to gain attention to your cause. It's a tragedy...
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Club of Rome predictions are pretty much spot on. It's been re-evaluated two or three times recently and each time has held up an amazingly accurate picture of what has happened since. See here for the graphs filled in the intervening years[1]. I don't recall any ice predictions from Club of Rome - do you have a link? In the 1980s the world actually came together to phase out CFCs, and fit sulphur scrubbers on coal power stations. Interestingly the builders of Battersea were the first to fit these - in 1925. They took a while to catch on. The ozone hole has finally stopped increasing only this decade. It's trending to resolve in 50 more years, if and only if, the recent discovery of CFC use in China doesn't grow. So a century to probably solve the man-made problem. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...
magwa101 7y ago
shaming people is a waste of time, this solution has to be economically viable.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
Wouldn't it be nice it it were something as simple as setting a timeline. The reality is, it's a combination of two things (mainly): 1) We can't afford to undermind the economy. That is, any plan that cuts back on consumption (even in the short term) is going to hurt an already hurting economy[1]. However, there aren't any "leader(s)" who want to be pinned with such things so the buck gets passed. 2) Along the same lines, we've convenience'd ourselves into a corner. At this point, sacrifices (in the context of status quo lifestyles / cultural expectations) need to be made; habits needed to be changed. But again, there's no leader willing to disrupt that which needs to be disrupted. We talk a good game when it comes to wanting change but then once the call comes in, we whine. "Leaders" that cause people to whine don't get elected / re-elected. It used to be, "at war" mean the POTUS (in the USA) had carte blanche to ask for help and sacrifice. Now we live in a world where "at war" means to keep the masses distracted by keeping up with the Kardashians. [1] Not to get off topic (but to prove my point); there's a reason fracking hocket-stick'ed under the previous POTUS. That reason is, the Fed had shot it wad and keeping the cost of fuel down is a proxy for economic stimulation (without having to say so). Ultimately, we tossed Mother Nature under the bus to keep the economy from going tits-up. If that's what "green presidents" can get away with, then that doesn't exactly raise the bar for the rest.
- esotericn 7y ago
  > We can't afford to undermine the economy. Heh. This is such a brilliant phrase that perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong. We can't afford to not afford things. :D
  - musingsole 7y ago
    It's the same argument the US south made for keeping and perpetuating slavery.
    - chiefalchemist 7y ago
      To clarify: It's not __my__ argument. I'm simply saying that the powers that be are maintaining the status quo because its what keeps them in power. I'd like to add, I put "leader" in quotes but what should be done is something real leaders do. They're willing and able. Instead, we have people in charge who are no leaders, and thus we don't get leader-esque action from them. Essentially, the spineless leading the mindless.
m4gw4s 7y ago
My takeaway is different: we are beyond the tipping point. Even if we technically would not, our inability to make good decisions as a group dooms us. The good strategy is to prepare to live through the extinction event, and use that as the proof of need for better group decisions (a.k.a. politics). We do have the scientific knowledge to design a much better system, but the same knowledge hints that the momentums of the system, set by the current motivational structure would not allow a change for better without a collapse.
sunkenvicar 7y ago
Climate change is already solved with nuclear power. You just don’t know it yet.
4mpm3 7y ago
With a few notable exceptions, the comments on this post really are a step up from the Medium comments on the original article.

69 points by 4mpm3 7y ago

What are the implications of 'irreversible'? Practically irreversible? Cannot be reversed naturally? If we run out of ice, what's to say cooling down the planet by halting carbon production won't recreate the ice caps?

PeterisP 7y ago
The implications of 'irreversible' are that it's going to become much more difficult to reverse in the "short term" (less than hundreds of years) as after the various tipping points reversing would involve not only to cancel/compensate for our emissions, but also to overcome the much larger positive feedback loops e.g. methane released by melting permafrost, increased solar absorbtion/heating after the reflective icecaps melt, etc. It's not technically irreversible, however, the point is that however expensive and difficult prevention might seem, reversing it after the temperature increase is going to be much, much more expensive and difficult. And our capacity to do stuff is going to decrease as we suffer from the consequences - e.g. population reduction, conflicts, etc.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > And our capacity to do stuff is going to decrease as we suffer from the consequences - e.g. population reduction, conflicts, etc. If the population reduces, the emission of greenhouse gases decrease which helps to reverse the effect of climate change.
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    These feedback loops are in total larger than our emissions, so once we hit them in the coming decades, the global warming would continue increasing for at least a few centuries even if all humans would be dead and make zero emissions. Hitting zero emissions now (which IMHO is unrealistic) would stop global warming at something like +2C level. Hitting zero emissions in 2050 will still mean a runaway global warming, and fixing that would require some effects that go way beyond zero emissions e.g. large scale carbon sequestration (effectively negative emissions), geoengineering sci-fi or something like that. In 1980 it would have been sufficient to "just" reduce the growth.
sleepysysadmin 7y ago
You will find that predictions of climate change have been 100% false. Nobody has a crystal ball and nobody can predict what will happen in the future. So lets look into the past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... About 20,000 years ago the earth was 10 celcius colder. For the last 20,000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily. About 100,000 years ago the world was 5celcius warmer than today. If you look at the black/red dots from the IPCC predictions. All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen. Overall on the graph what's happening is that we are more or less exactly flat. However look at those spikes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:EPICA_delta_D_plot.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#/media/File:EPICA_delta... Temperature on earth frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature. So what happened to life on earth when it was 5+ celcius warmer? It was fantastic for life. Frozen wastelands like Canada and Russia thawed and became extremely livable. People moved into these northern places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14celcius warmer and life thrived better than no other time in history.
- gjm11 7y ago
  > predictions of climate change have been 100% false That statement is itself 100% false, so far as I can tell. Here's one example. In 1982, some of Exxon's scientists wrote a memo for their management containing a graph (figure 3, page 7, of http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-management-about-co2-greenhouse-effect/ http://www.climatefiles.com/exxonmobil/1982-memo-to-exxon-ma...) saying that by 2020 CO2 levels would be in roughly the range 400..430 ppm and global mean temperature would be up by roughly 1..1.3 degrees C compared to 1960. Here we are in 2020 and the figures are about 410ppm and +0.9 degrees C. That matches up pretty well, wouldn't you say? > For the last 20,2000 years the earth has been warming pretty steadily What the graph you yourself linked to shows is something very different. There are wild oscillations in the Pleistocene (i.e., before 20k years ago), ending up with temperatures much colder than the present. Then a rapid increase from 20k to 10k years ago. Then near-flat temperatures for the last 10k years. And -- though it's over so short a period that it's hard to see on that graph -- an extremely rapid increase over the last ~50 years. > All of those have already been disproven as false and not going to happen How? By whom? > we are more or less exactly flat This https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ is not what I would call "more or less exactly flat". > look at those spikes ... frequently rapidly spiked up in temperature You're looking at a portion of the Pleistocene, also known as the last Ice Age. Glaciers came and went, and the Eemian "spike" is one of those periods in which the glaciers melted. So, yes, indeed, temperatures "spiked up" and we had a transition from a large fraction of the earth's land area being covered in ice to hardly any of it being. Are you suggesting that we shouldn't be worried about climate change because the consequences might not be any more severe than those of the melting of an ice sheet covering the whole of Canada? > it was fantastic for life Pretty good for life overall, yes, and the climate change we're causing might be too. However, my own interests are parochial enough that I care much more what happens to our species and the others that we've grown to depend on, which is any entirely different question. For instance ... > The Eocene 50 million years ago was 14 celsius warmer and life thrived ... 50M years ago, sea levels were something like 100m higher than they are now. There's a handy tool at http://www.floodmap.net/ http://www.floodmap.net/ that lets you explore the consequences of a given increase in sea level (though it's a bit glitchy and it looks like maybe it doesn't have data for anything too far from the equator). At 100m, things we would lose include: about half of England and Ireland; all of the Netherlands; half of Belgium; most of western France; all of Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau; huge amounts of the eastern USA including more or less all of Florida, Louisiana, Delaware and Rhode Island. I'm sure life would thrive. The human race would adapt too, no doubt; we're a very adaptable species. But a whole lot of us would have our homes under water, and large regions of what's now the inhabitable world would become inhospitable to human life. E.g., a temperature rise of 14 degrees C turns San Francisco into Death Valley.

umanwizard 7y ago

It annoys me when people act like Y2K was apocalyptic scaremongering. No, Y2K was a real threat, which the human race spent huge resources to meet and thereby mitigated appropriately.

redleggedfrog 7y ago
I remember my father, a mainframe programmer, spending years correcting code for Y2K for the bank he worked for. COBOL and assembly. At the rollover, it went without a hitch, but there was a lot of sweat to make that happen
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  My uncle (a COBOL programmer in the 60's) got together with some other retired guys and made a lot of money doing exactly the same thing in the late 90's. One of his contracts he landed because they found his name all over the code.
Ensorceled 7y ago
Whenever I hear whinging about Y2K, I always jump in and say that the polio and smallpox scares were also overrated. "We also spent all that money on polio and smallpox vaccines and shit and look there's no polio or smallpox anymore, what a waste of money that was." Might not work on anti-vaxxers but it has shut down more than one stupid conversation about Y2K.
paulsutter 7y ago
Y2K was indeed a real threat, AND there was also a good bit of apocalyptic scaremongering. No conflict. Those writing apocalyptic scare stories were poorly informed and deliberately trying to activate people’s base fears. AND there was a huge effort by very smart folks to avert it. No conflict.
- 4mpm3 7y ago
  This exactly. There was basically a run on canned goods the day before thanks to media stories, some of which didn't seem to have the slightest bit of logic to them. That doesn't mean that Y2K (and other date bugs) aren't real.

rayiner 7y ago

Climate change was never going to be reversible with behavioral measures. Even if everyone had followed the Kyoto protocol to the letter starting in 1992 that wasn’t going to avert climate change, because nobody contemplated how quickly China and India would develop. There is no calculus where you can significantly limit climate change through behavioral measures that also allow the third world to have comfortable, modern lives. There will be 400 million people in Nigeria by 2050 and there is no political regime to address climate the change that’s workable unless it allows them to live a life at least as decent as say Eastern Europe. The west could reduce GHG emissions to zero and it wouldn’t do the trick. People have viewed climate change as a political issue and its not. It’s a scientific issue. It’s the astroid hurtling toward earth in the movie Armageddon or the aliens in Independence Day. The solution to climate change is not governments and politicians and lawyers. It’s engineers. It’s always been engineers.

WhompingWindows 7y ago
In the BP World Energy statistical review for 2018, they showed that though renewable energy had fantastic falls in prices, there wasn't enough addition to meet new energy demand, especially in China and India for industry, and for the USA regarding its huge growth in natural gas. They then asked the question, how much faster would renewables need to grow to JUST meet this new energy demand (nevermind decarbonizing existing demand). They found renewables would have to grow over 2X as fast (from 800 TWh up to 1,800 TWh). Let this sink in: We are literally adding half the renewables we need just to keep the emissions curve flat. We probably need to go 4X faster to bend the curve downwards on emissions. Can engineers solve that? They are a piece of the puzzle, but their most fundamental innovations will take years to kick in. We need policy, we need individual behavioral changes, we need everything we can get.
- rayiner 7y ago
  According to IPCC projections we need to hit zero emissions worldwide within the next decade to avoid a 2C increase. Can politicians do that?
  - 7y ago

Ensorceled 7y ago

There was a lot of talk about how the world will be "uninhabitable by 2050" or "civilization will crumble by 2050" and anecdotally, that really backfired for all my elderly aunts and uncles. They happily admit that climate change is real but don't care because they will be dead by 2040. Hell, I'll be in my 80's.

knd775 7y ago
They sound like terrible, self-centered people.
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  Yes, and so is most of the population apparently. But they are also focused on their own problems; declining health, fixed incomes, cuts to government programs, etc. Hard to get to worked up about a problem that won't occur for 30 years when you're going in for surgery next week. I keep trying to focus on the fact the process is already starting now and WILL affect them in their lifetimes ... hurricanes, fires, wierd storms, droughts ...
- sametmax 7y ago
  Like most humans. Hell, we comment here using devices made by slaves on the other side of the world. We could choose not to. We could make our life harder so that we didn't sponsor slavery. We don't. We are all very selfish.
- AlexTWithBeard 7y ago
  Sorry, we don't have a better breed of people to populate this planet.
bureaucrat 7y ago
Kek, in 1970 crude oil was predicted to run out in 2020. They also predicted the world will be inhabitable by now because of intense pollution. How are we? We breathe cleaner air and use more petroleum than 1970. I will be 55 in 2050, and I bet my entire fortune that the world will be better then.

inlined 7y ago

The part about divers crying into masks hit home. It was on my bucket list to dive in the Great Barrier Reef but it’s now been declared dead. 95% of my diving has been in the last 25% of my diving career because I know I have a limited time.

radford-neal 7y ago
What? "Declared dead?" Here's a BBC report from a few days ago that says that it's in danger, but certainly "not dead yet". https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49520949?SThisFB https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49520949?SThisFB Since the BBC is now officially a climate alarmist organization, I think one can be sure that this report is as alarmist as one can be without blatantly disregarding easily verifiable facts.
- gjm11 7y ago
  > now officially a climate alarmist organization What exactly does that mean? (The BBC report is summarizing a report from the Australian government, and unless it's just lying its level of alarmism will pretty much track those of that report itself. So whether the BBC is "officially a climate alarmist organization", whatever that means, matters less than whether the Australian government is one. Regardless, it would be nice to know what you mean.)
  - radford-neal 7y ago
    See, for example, https://www.carbonbrief.org/exclusive-bbc-issues-internal-guidance-on-how-to-report-climate-change https://www.carbonbrief.org/exclusive-bbc-issues-internal-gu... Even when reporting on a report, it's possible to emphasize certain aspects, or misleadingly paraphrase its conclusions. I haven't looked at the original report to tell whether that has happened here.
    - gjm11 7y ago
      OK, I read it. I don't see anything there that to me seems to justify calling them "officially a climate alarmist organization". Could you elaborate on what exactly about their position you're describing by those words?

bjt2n3904 7y ago

You know, there was this guy that made a fool of Christianity when he predicted Jesus would return in 2011. When nothing happened, he said oops and adjusted the date. (People fortunately paid much less attention to him then.) Kinda getting tired of hearing "the sky is falling" all the time from environmental folks. When you hear "the world is ending next year, it's gonna be too late" every single year, it seems like a thinly veiled push for suckers who want to make campaign donations and bad laws. Ironic that the author makes this exact point, and then doubles down on it.

nerdponx 7y ago
I think you're missing the point slightly. We have pretty good evidence to suggest that "bad shit" will probably happen eventually as a result of anthropogenic climate change. How bad, and how far into the future? Depends on the model. The problem was, as you point out, that setting arbitrary deadlines led to a "boy who cried wolf" scenario. That doesn't invalidate the science indicating that the bad shit will start to happen eventually.
roywiggins 7y ago
Climate change doesn't work like the Second Coming. It's not a catastrophe until a cat 5++ hurricane hits your city, and then it is. It's not evenly distributed, it does not happen all at once everywhere.
xamuel 7y ago
How does a guy making a prediction make a fool of Christianity? That's like saying if I read a science textbook and then incorrectly predict flying cars by 2020, that I have made a fool of science. Jesus Himself said: "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. ... Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day on which your Lord will come. But understand this: If the homeowner had known in which watch of the night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into." (Matthew 24:36-43)

snikeris 7y ago

> The only rational path is a virtuous cycle of better politicians enacting better policies and promoting better public understanding of climate change. But as of today, there is no sign the world is moving in that direction. Suppose my politicians fight the good fight and we enact the necessary policies. What about the other countries, especially those that aren't as well off?

noobermin 7y ago
The good news is apart from China which is at least paying lip service, most countries produce much less than we do.
CodeCube 7y ago
A well off industrialized nation making progress on energy and pollution reduction would a) demonstrate what things works, and b) provide investment dollars into those technologies, which _usually_ results in optimizations and lowering of costs ... so even if those "other countries" don't follow immediately, their adoption could be enabled by earlier adoption by us
- mola 7y ago
  We should thank Obama for pushing green energy initiatives

ubertakter 7y ago

I recommend the title be changed to the actual story title or something actually similar. The article is about how setting deadlines for action on climate change came from more of an advocacy perspective rather than scientific, which had an effect opposite what was intended.

paulsutter 7y ago

Would sure be nice if we spent those war trillions to solve the real problem. Unfortunately most people seem to have discovered climate change in November 2016. Good that they did. Better to see more focus on solutions. It would be great and exciting to work on mass scale solutions and government can easily create laws to incent it

mannykannot 7y ago

No matter how you put it, people will find tendentious excuses for ignoring the issue, and when they are no longer tenable, they will switch to another, without any concern as to whether it is consistent with their previous position.

noobermin 7y ago

>Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming? No. I also see no evidence in the article it has hurt attitudes either way. In fact, polls show general concern about climate change. Doing something is another matter[0], but people are mindful of it. Nonetheless, the article seems to be more about the author's personal feelings than whether it influenced the movement around it either way. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climatechange/americans-demand-climate-action-reuters-poll-idUSKCN1TR15W https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climatechang...

bregma 7y ago

I was alive in the 1970s when folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead form overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000. Those self-same folks told us this century the arctic will be completely ice free by 2013. In the 1980s, others predicted our total demise due to acid rain and ozone depletion. Mean time, people are making good progress on both feeding the masses and curbing the exponential growth of humanity across the globe. At the same time, clear progress is happening on the reduction-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions front. Acid rain and ozone depletion have been curtailed. We'll always have doomsayers, extremists, and prophets. They're so busy with themselves they rarely get in the way of people who actually get work done.

mola 7y ago
On the other hand, these doomsayers also caused public outcry that changed a few things. We can never know if these changes are the reason doom didn't happen, or because the prospects were imaginary. Anyway, I believe that it'll be very hard to annihilate humanity let alone the planet, but it'll be very easy to lower the living standards slowly enough that we won't notice the reasons for it. If you plan to have children, I think it's something you should thinks of. Ofcourse, I'd prefer a rational discussion regarding the issues. But the powers at be, which usually have what to lose, usually steer the debate to be anti rational. And then you find yourself in a position where you must exaggerate in order to gain attention to your cause. It's a tragedy...
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Club of Rome predictions are pretty much spot on. It's been re-evaluated two or three times recently and each time has held up an amazingly accurate picture of what has happened since. See here for the graphs filled in the intervening years[1]. I don't recall any ice predictions from Club of Rome - do you have a link? In the 1980s the world actually came together to phase out CFCs, and fit sulphur scrubbers on coal power stations. Interestingly the builders of Battersea were the first to fit these - in 1925. They took a while to catch on. The ozone hole has finally stopped increasing only this decade. It's trending to resolve in 50 more years, if and only if, the recent discovery of CFC use in China doesn't grow. So a century to probably solve the man-made problem. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...

magwa101 7y ago

shaming people is a waste of time, this solution has to be economically viable.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

Wouldn't it be nice it it were something as simple as setting a timeline. The reality is, it's a combination of two things (mainly): 1) We can't afford to undermind the economy. That is, any plan that cuts back on consumption (even in the short term) is going to hurt an already hurting economy[1]. However, there aren't any "leader(s)" who want to be pinned with such things so the buck gets passed. 2) Along the same lines, we've convenience'd ourselves into a corner. At this point, sacrifices (in the context of status quo lifestyles / cultural expectations) need to be made; habits needed to be changed. But again, there's no leader willing to disrupt that which needs to be disrupted. We talk a good game when it comes to wanting change but then once the call comes in, we whine. "Leaders" that cause people to whine don't get elected / re-elected. It used to be, "at war" mean the POTUS (in the USA) had carte blanche to ask for help and sacrifice. Now we live in a world where "at war" means to keep the masses distracted by keeping up with the Kardashians. [1] Not to get off topic (but to prove my point); there's a reason fracking hocket-stick'ed under the previous POTUS. That reason is, the Fed had shot it wad and keeping the cost of fuel down is a proxy for economic stimulation (without having to say so). Ultimately, we tossed Mother Nature under the bus to keep the economy from going tits-up. If that's what "green presidents" can get away with, then that doesn't exactly raise the bar for the rest.

esotericn 7y ago
> We can't afford to undermine the economy. Heh. This is such a brilliant phrase that perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong. We can't afford to not afford things. :D
- musingsole 7y ago
  It's the same argument the US south made for keeping and perpetuating slavery.
  - chiefalchemist 7y ago
    To clarify: It's not __my__ argument. I'm simply saying that the powers that be are maintaining the status quo because its what keeps them in power. I'd like to add, I put "leader" in quotes but what should be done is something real leaders do. They're willing and able. Instead, we have people in charge who are no leaders, and thus we don't get leader-esque action from them. Essentially, the spineless leading the mindless.

m4gw4s 7y ago

My takeaway is different: we are beyond the tipping point. Even if we technically would not, our inability to make good decisions as a group dooms us. The good strategy is to prepare to live through the extinction event, and use that as the proof of need for better group decisions (a.k.a. politics). We do have the scientific knowledge to design a much better system, but the same knowledge hints that the momentums of the system, set by the current motivational structure would not allow a change for better without a collapse.

sunkenvicar 7y ago

Climate change is already solved with nuclear power. You just don’t know it yet.

4mpm3 7y ago

With a few notable exceptions, the comments on this post really are a step up from the Medium comments on the original article.