3 ms·
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 v
by 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 agoThese 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.