4 ms·
You want to figure out the climate problem? Think of climate rise as your body's temperature rising: when you're 1°C over normal, you're sick but that's manage
by wazoox 5y ago
You want to figure out the climate problem?
Think of climate rise as your body's temperature rising: when you're 1°C over normal, you're sick but that's manageable. When you're at +2°C you're really sick; 4°C over normal your life is at stake.
Or think about this: 20000 years ago, Scandinavia, Canada were under 2 or 3 km of ice (like Greenland today). The oceans were 120 meters lower than today. Most of today's temperate countries (Europe, USA, China) were a cold tundra with reindeer, wholly rhinos, bison and mammoths, cave bears and cave lions. In these harsh conditions, only a few hundred thousand humans could scrape by; and the average globe temperature was only 4 to 5°C lower than in 1850 (let that sink in).
The 4°C temperature rise that brought us the neolithic revolution, agriculture and the first population explosion, was a 4000 years affair. Now we're talking of bringing a similar change over the course of 100 years, on a crowded planet of 8 billion people. The question isn't "what could go wrong?" at this point, but can we imagine ways out of a looming catastrophe?
- lexapro 5y agoHow is that "figuring out the climate problem"? You're just stating the problem.
- wazoox 5y agoFiguring out the magnitude of what's coming. Almost everyone still seems to believe that "2°C, who cares, I'll just wear a lighter jacket" or something like that.
- y4mi 5y agoI'm so glad I'm already in my thirties. I'll be dead by the time the shit will really start to hit the fan. I'm pretty sure that people of the future will consider the time between 1950-2050 century to be the golden age of our current Civilization. There are so many basically unsolvable issues on the horizon that I see absolutely no chance that our society will survive in it's current form. My bet would be that we'll devolve into another form of aristocracy as soon as AI/automation make a human workforce mostly redundant. Technological progress is likely going to stagnate entirely at that point, we all know how rich people generally behave without outside forces...
- wazoox 5y agoThe famed Peak oil can't be pushed back forever: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Major-Total-Sees-10-Million-Bpd-Supply-Gap-In-2025.html https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Major-Total-S... https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/big-themes-and-risks-for-energy-in-2021/ https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/big-themes-and-risks-fo... https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/industry-and-energy/2021/04/russia-may-have-passed-peak-oil-output-government https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/industry-and-energy/2021/0... OTOH, there's still enough coal to kill us all: https://www.ft.com/content/4536bc72-6eb3-457d-b9a5-a94cc2669a96 https://www.ft.com/content/4536bc72-6eb3-457d-b9a5-a94cc2669... But we may lack the necessary mineral resources for "clean" transition: https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in... My bet is that we'll be crushed between a degraded environment, with declining agricultural yield, more pandemias, etc, and reduced energy availability (no energy == no economy == no efficient action against climate change). Don't worry, you'll live interesting times (as the Chinese curse goes). Seneca cliff, here we come!
- Mildlypolite 5y agoNope you won't, disruption is coming earlier unfortunately. https://youtu.be/1BDmIis9STE https://youtu.be/1BDmIis9STE
- y4mi 5y agoI'm not sure if you linked the correct video, because he's also saying that its going to be the children that will be in trouble. I really don't see europe failing before 2050, and that was the time horizon i mentioned...
- wazoox 5y agoEurope will be short on energy most probably around 2025 (all of its oil and gas suppliers are already in decline). That could be pretty bad by itself. Also, +1.5°C is generally anticipated for 2030, and it could be really bad, too. Both together: huge pain is almost a given.
- radu_floricica 5y agoThis only means 4 degrees cooler is bad. In itself it says nothing about 4 degrees warmer.
- DennisP 5y agoDeeper in geological history we can see what happened at 4 degrees warmer. The result was mass extinction and much less life on the planet, mostly clustered around the poles. Equatorial regions were uninhabitable. Sea levels were quite a bit higher.
- jules-jules 5y agoDo you have a paper / article with more details?
- DennisP 5y agoA good place to start is the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, which has references to hundreds of papers. Also Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren has several chapters on the geological history.
- jules-jules 5y agoThanks, appreciate it.
- akvadrako 5y agoNo. Earth for the past 2 million years has been in an ice age, several degrees cooler than the hundreds of millions of years before, when there was plenty of life thriving.
- radu_floricica 5y agoI'd like to look it up, if you give me something more specific than that.
- wazoox 5y ago
- gmuslera 5y agoNever cross a river 4-ft deep on average. That 1ºC over normal is the yearly average global temperature. It doesn't increase evenly over the globe (in the arctic has been over 4ºC, a region where permafrost thawing and ice melting will worsen the problem) and is causing extreme weather events all around the world. Temperature don't uniformly rise by 1ºC evenly all days, for all regions, nice and slowly, but you have weeks with over 40ºC or extreme sub zero temperatures, droughts and floods caused by big storms, hurricanes and so on. And with more global average temperature you will have even more extreme weather. With wet bulb temperatures you can have a lot of deaths of people that won't see how "the average" will eventually bring colder days. And it is not a sustained speed change. Positive feedback loops are triggered, adding emissions, reducing Earth's albedo, causing forest fires and so on that will speed up things even if we stop doing emissions. And remember that are not emissions the ones that are directly rising temperature, but decades of excess of greenhouse gases that keep more heat than what we emit. And that we only stop worsening things by the time we manage to reduce what is in the atmosphere (not just what we keep adding). If somewhat things get rough and we want to drop temperature urgently, dropping by then emissions won't do the trick, we need to capture a century of emitted carbon plus what is being emitted by feedback loops.