8 ms·

I'll say two things that will be controversial. But first, just want to be clear: global warming is real; human caused; and will have negative effects on many

by timmg 3y ago

I'll say two things that will be controversial. But first, just want to be clear: global warming is real; human caused; and will have negative effects on many parts of the world. 1) We are not heading for "the end of the world". There are lots of projections of what things can go wrong. But the climate changes slowly, we are becoming richer and we'll adapt. Also a lot of what is reported is on "worst case" (or things might get as bad as so-and-so) that are often based on CO2 projections that have almost no chance of coming true. 2) Even if you disagree with #1: we are already on our way to solving the problem. We will still have warming, for sure. But we will likely be at or near the goals we've set for end of century. Tech is improving: we are deploying solar, wind and (suddenly) more nuclear; electric cars; heat pumps; and so on. We will eventually run out of fossil fuels. And, population growth is slowing faster than anyone predicted. Yes, we should be vigilant and continue to try to reduce CO2 emissions. But the idea that "we're all gonna die!" -- or anything close to it -- is wrong. And it's not supported by the science at all.

rcxdude 3y ago
There are two things which have kind of cancelled out in terms of climate predictions: the worst-case CO2 emissions have not occured (mostly because growth became linear instead of exponential), but also a lot of the negative effects of climate change have happened sooner than expected (especially extreme weather events). The really, really bad scenarios depend either on the CO2 emissions not reaching an inflection point and decreasing (which I think will happen, but how quickly it happens will have a big impact on outcomes), or on some positive feedback mechanism kicking in, of which there are a few potential candidates but a lot of uncertainty for where the thresholds are (predictions range from 'already passed' to 'in the relatively far future'). These should neither be ignored as a possibility nor treated as inevitable.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  We're still fighting to keep below the 2 degree C milestone, because we already passed the 1 degree C milestone which was the worst-case projection by some 1970s scientists. There is certainly a sense that we're not "expecting the worst-case" today because we keep inventing new "worst case" predictions instead. Also, some of the frighteningly hard to stop feedback mechanisms have started, such as glacier melting has hit some extremes that scientists feared would be points of no return. Whether this will play out in the ways of those 1970s worst case predictions we don't know, and a variable here is that we are working to avoid them (badly, but still some avoidance work is better than doing nothing). Some of that is like the Y2K problem: the self-unfulfilling prophecy. We've warned ourselves for decades what the risks are and what the worst cases are. We've put in a lot of work to mitigate/slow/stop the worst cases. We've partly failed, several times over, and had to invent new worst cases. We're still working to prevent those new worst cases. We likely will not ever hit a worst case, we're just in our own feedback loops trying to find the acceptable compromise. If the acceptable compromise "turns out alright" people will claim we never really were in danger of the worst cases, discounting the huge amounts of effort we put into avoiding it. "The prophecy was self-unfulfilled so it wasn't really a big deal was it?" "Y2K didn't happen, so why was everyone so worried about it?"
disruptiveink 3y ago
We're not "all going to die", but "A lot of your coastal historical cities are going be be underwater and parts of your country will become uninhabitable, meaning you and everyone else will need to move elsewhere" is absolutely horrific. Add that to housing being increasingly out of reach for most people and it's hard to not feel disillusioned. In some sense, you could argue that "Work all your life to be able to buy a house on land that will be destroyed" is worse for morale than the Cold War's version of "We'll probably all just die from nuclear war at some point all at the same time".
- jjulius 3y ago
  > In some sense, you could argue that "Work all your life to be able to buy a house on land that will be destroyed" is worse for morale than the Cold War's version of "We'll probably all just die from nuclear war at some point all at the same time". In some sense, sure, I guess - maybe mostly for those who bought a house on land like this a long time ago. But if you're choosing to buy a house on land in an area like this now, or in the future, or even the relatively recent past, when we all know the risk and/or inevitability of it's eventual destruction, then I don't know what to tell you...
  - disruptiveink 3y ago
    Depending on how bad it goes, it's unavoidable without upending your (current) life. Sure, let's assume things don't go too bad and you just avoid properties at close to sea level right next to the ocean. That's fine. But what if you're expecting for things go real bad? Do you rule out living in NYC completely? Do you preemptively move out of Florida leaving all your family behind? The issue is that this is not a swift "now the bad thing happened and it took us all together" crisis. For the better or worse, humans are actually reasonably ok with dealing with situations like that. This is a "your life is going to suck at some indeterminate point in the future, maybe, and depending on where your roots are, maybe you can avoid it at the cost of continuous great personal expense" crisis. No one can possibly be well prepared to deal with that and I'd wager that's where the incredible frustration around climate change comes.
perrygeo 3y ago
> almost no chance of coming true I agree, with caveats. The worst case emissions scenarios (RCP 8.5) are not likely to happen because we'll hit economic limits that prevent us from accessing every last drop. We're already past peak conventional oil and dipping into the low EROI tight oil. At some point in the future, there will be plenty of oil left but it will be the bottom of the barrel, too expensive to access at a profit. So even if we technically have enough carbon in the ground to spike CO2 to those levels, economic incentives and availability of alternatives are likely to prevent it long before we get there. That said, I think we're underestimating the impacts of even low emissions scenarios. Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions today, we're locked into a wild ride of feedback loops for the next century or more. A low carbon future doesn't free us from climate impacts. I'm not saying we should give up on mitigation but we certainly can't ignore adaptation - no one is "fixing" climate change without a time machine.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
> But the climate changes slowly, we are becoming richer and we'll adapt. WE are, sure, as in the people in this comment section having this conversation right now. Billions of people are not included in this "we" and have much grimmer outcomes predicted. Seems nasty to leave that out.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  No, outside or a few specific places everyone in the world has been getting richer for the last half century and the trend is continuing[1]. That isn't to by pollyannaish, there are certainly going to be some places that really struggle with aridification and increased flooding. However flooding is mostly a solvable technical problem, and plenty of people already live in deserts. The biggest problem for adaptation might turn out to be heat waves. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-per-capita https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-per-capi...
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    People are going to get richer than they were by some measure of wealth, but not rich enough to save them from climate change. Which is basically what you're saying I think, though you're more optimistic about it.
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      > but not rich enough to save them from climate change I'm not sure what this really means. It seem clear that adaptation will happen, and that may mean some amount of migration by the end of the century which is personally upending for a lot of people but not unprecedented in the last century. Desalinization is showing a lot of progress recently and will likely be much more affordable in the next 20 years. Lithium prices are dropping so we might have a path for ward for grid scale power storage, which would be huge. Major flooding and heat risk that effect large numbers of people are concentrated in a few spots so it seems like infrastructure can be built to handle flooding, and architectural changes coupled with cheaper renewable power can address the heat. We collectively managed to tackle the ozone layer issue before Australia got cooked, so it think there's precedent here. Technology is getting better and we collectively have more resources to bring to bare now. Its not going to be easy or fun, but probably won't be an unraveling of civilization either.
lock-the-spock 3y ago
I acknowledge your position but it is very blind to the real impact global warming is already having. Yes, we, meaning the decently off in rich countries, will adapt. In other places this is much more difficult - see Bangladesh, Pakistan, various sub-saharan countries. We will not go extinct, but millions or tens of millions will die from climate change over the coming years and decades (and many have already died), many many more will suffer for it. No, technology will not fix this in the near term. It's similar to air pollution, which we have many ways of stemming and are estimated to kill 7 Mio per year, much less however in todays rich countries which can invest to reduce it (and still do woefully little as everyone wants a big car). https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2
- timmg 3y ago
  > but it is very blind to the real impact global warming is already having. Can you be specific? Like, I get that every time there is a natural disaster, the media blares about climate change. But, for example, there's been no trend in hurricanes. Political leaders love to blame climate change for their poor policies (water management, forrest management, etc). And certainly some of the small sea-level rise we have seen is definitely from climate change. But we've also seen "global greening". Productivity of crops keep going up: maybe in spite of climate change -- but maybe partially due to CO2 increases.
  - piva00 3y ago
    > Can you be specific? Warming of the arctic and sub-polar regions is probably the most visible in-your-face trend we can look at. It's been warming, it's getting faster, it's breaking records of temperature. Another point we can look at is oceans warming, which is definitely happening and we don't have a complete picture of all the cascading effects such warming might trigger. The issue of being specific is that you need to look at a diverse dataset, point out trends, while still being prepared and ready with arguments for the counterpoint of "but these are tiny timeframes in geological scale". It's a very slow moving phenomenon, if there's a small increase right now in forest fires it'd require to plot it over 30-50 years to show someone "look, this is definitely the result of what we've done 100 years ago". It might be alarmist to link every atmospherical natural disaster to global warming, at the same time it's hard to ignore an uptick of droughts, massive flooding events, if we need to wait until we gather enough empirical data to absolutely conclude it is directly caused by global warming we will be too late. Could there be a failure of water management, forest management and so on affecting us? Yes, I agree, those need to properly address a changing environment, we just don't know how fast that environment will change and how drastic our changes need to happen. > But we've also seen "global greening". Productivity of crops keep going up: maybe in spite of climate change -- but maybe partially due to CO2 increases. Global greening will not keep up with all the energy we're making the atmosphere retain as a result of CO2, just thinking in pure thermodynamics terms: if there's more energy being contained in the system, everything subsystem has more energy to use: winds, currents, rain, etc. It won't help either with ecosystems that don't depend on greenery, like the Arctic.
andsoitis 3y ago
We are effectively shitting in our only home and pretending it won't make things really unpleasant, but instead we'll adapt. I don't want to adapt to plastic strewn all over the planet, air pollution that chokes us, or warming ocean waters that is having deleterious effects on ecosystems and our food chain.
- timmg 3y ago
  > We are effectively shitting in our only home and pretending it won't make things really unpleasant, but instead we'll adapt. I mean: yes. We (including you) could stop using any form of fossil-fuel derived energy tomorrow. But that would actually cause a collapse of civilization. Is that better than "making progress with renewables" and/or "adapting"?
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
As others have pointed out, there are parts of the world where increased mortality is actually a problem. Places that will either experience famine & drought, or where the outside temperatures may exceed habitable / safe ranges. (Thinking of parts of e.g. the Indian subcontinent). So not only does it suck for those people, but in that context, Political and economic instability is a huge concern. Mass migration is already happening, but it will become more intense. People will try to gravitate to areas perceived as more stable. Border wars have the potential to become more frequent. Concerns about control over fresh water and arable land will be heightened. Demands to exploit currently protected regions (e.g. great lakes watershed) will be made. We have an entire politico-economic system built on cheap fossil fuel energy. There are whole regimes whose power and control and prosperity is founded on petro-chemical extraction. If/as that collapses, there will be major crisis. We already seeing this. In the context of raising my children, my wife and I are coming around to the perspective that our number one priority is to build resiliency. Not survival-prepper stuff (though we do have a modest 6 acres of arable land, that's not really the focus), but family resiliency: trying to keep kids local to us, concentrating family assets and committing to taking care of each other, making sure we're in a position where we can pass on a stable living situation (house, property), etc. That, and emotional/ideological/intellectual resilience: understanding what climate change is, understanding what we can or cannot do about it as individuals and a family, understanding the role of collective action... and trying to avoid fear and anxiety by emphasizing knowledge over the unknown and distress.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
I'm generally positive about both climate tech, and climate diplomacy, but don't feel it's right to be so cavalier about the potential downsides. Like, one of my "climate apocalypse" bingo squares was "Russia starts a war to prolong fossil fuel usage". It currently looks like that will backfire and, on balance, be a positive for sorting out climate change, but we're talking about the "positives" of a war with potentially hundreds of thousands of dead! Where people were gleefully predicting the collapse of Western Europe governments and replacement with right wing populists who would stop any attempts to continue supporting the "climate hoax"! A war is the kind of thing that can go very wrong, and this is neither the first, nor the last, war that people could attribute to climate change.
pyrale 3y ago
> But we will likely be at or near the goals we've set for end of century. ...And then it'll simply magically stabilize, and will stop being a problem, right?
clydethefrog 3y ago
Have you looked at the scientific data of the temperatures of the world the last month? Global warming has breached 1.5°C threshold in summer for 1st time. Ocean temperatures this spring have been the hottest ever at this time of year, in records going back 174 years. Even the most dependable net-zero pledges would still lead to close to 2.5C of warming according to recent study. The world must slash emissions by 43% by 2030 in order to hold warming to 1.5C, by one estimate. No single country has actually implemented policies to make it happen. And how chaotic the climate has already become after just 1.2C of warming over pre-industrial levels! Deadly heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. Storms and floods. Millions of people have died, been displaced or suffer long-term health effects from these disasters. Species are going extinct en masse. This is just a taste of what may come. The science supports that many, many of us will die.
juujian 3y ago
Climate tipping points are definitely a thing that my colleagues discuss. For instance: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0 It might not be 1.5 degrees, or even 2--3 degrees, but the longer the current trajectory holds, the closer we will get to it. That's the tricky thing with climate change, if you sleep on it, it's not that you lose the opportunity -- you just suddenly face the next, even bigger challenge. I don't agree with 2) that we are on our way to solving the problem. If you just look at global emissions trajectories and GHG concentration in the atmosphere, there is no sign of slowing down. Everything we do, we just do on top of business as usual. Most scientists don't want to be perceived as lunatic alarmists in the public, and most have a sentiment that you should try to convey some hope, and maybe folks also do that to keep their own sanity. The counterargument is that people who panic a bit are more likely to take action, but I don't see a lot of folks taking that stance. But a debate exists on dangerous tipping points that we could realistically run into, and it is lead by knowledgeable and famous people like Johan Rockström. Every opinion in the media though is already thought over for the effect scientists want to achieve, nobody just goes in guns blasting.

by timmg 3y ago

rcxdude 3y ago

There are two things which have kind of cancelled out in terms of climate predictions: the worst-case CO2 emissions have not occured (mostly because growth became linear instead of exponential), but also a lot of the negative effects of climate change have happened sooner than expected (especially extreme weather events). The really, really bad scenarios depend either on the CO2 emissions not reaching an inflection point and decreasing (which I think will happen, but how quickly it happens will have a big impact on outcomes), or on some positive feedback mechanism kicking in, of which there are a few potential candidates but a lot of uncertainty for where the thresholds are (predictions range from 'already passed' to 'in the relatively far future'). These should neither be ignored as a possibility nor treated as inevitable.

WorldMaker 3y ago
We're still fighting to keep below the 2 degree C milestone, because we already passed the 1 degree C milestone which was the worst-case projection by some 1970s scientists. There is certainly a sense that we're not "expecting the worst-case" today because we keep inventing new "worst case" predictions instead. Also, some of the frighteningly hard to stop feedback mechanisms have started, such as glacier melting has hit some extremes that scientists feared would be points of no return. Whether this will play out in the ways of those 1970s worst case predictions we don't know, and a variable here is that we are working to avoid them (badly, but still some avoidance work is better than doing nothing). Some of that is like the Y2K problem: the self-unfulfilling prophecy. We've warned ourselves for decades what the risks are and what the worst cases are. We've put in a lot of work to mitigate/slow/stop the worst cases. We've partly failed, several times over, and had to invent new worst cases. We're still working to prevent those new worst cases. We likely will not ever hit a worst case, we're just in our own feedback loops trying to find the acceptable compromise. If the acceptable compromise "turns out alright" people will claim we never really were in danger of the worst cases, discounting the huge amounts of effort we put into avoiding it. "The prophecy was self-unfulfilled so it wasn't really a big deal was it?" "Y2K didn't happen, so why was everyone so worried about it?"

disruptiveink 3y ago

We're not "all going to die", but "A lot of your coastal historical cities are going be be underwater and parts of your country will become uninhabitable, meaning you and everyone else will need to move elsewhere" is absolutely horrific. Add that to housing being increasingly out of reach for most people and it's hard to not feel disillusioned. In some sense, you could argue that "Work all your life to be able to buy a house on land that will be destroyed" is worse for morale than the Cold War's version of "We'll probably all just die from nuclear war at some point all at the same time".

jjulius 3y ago
> In some sense, you could argue that "Work all your life to be able to buy a house on land that will be destroyed" is worse for morale than the Cold War's version of "We'll probably all just die from nuclear war at some point all at the same time". In some sense, sure, I guess - maybe mostly for those who bought a house on land like this a long time ago. But if you're choosing to buy a house on land in an area like this now, or in the future, or even the relatively recent past, when we all know the risk and/or inevitability of it's eventual destruction, then I don't know what to tell you...
- disruptiveink 3y ago
  Depending on how bad it goes, it's unavoidable without upending your (current) life. Sure, let's assume things don't go too bad and you just avoid properties at close to sea level right next to the ocean. That's fine. But what if you're expecting for things go real bad? Do you rule out living in NYC completely? Do you preemptively move out of Florida leaving all your family behind? The issue is that this is not a swift "now the bad thing happened and it took us all together" crisis. For the better or worse, humans are actually reasonably ok with dealing with situations like that. This is a "your life is going to suck at some indeterminate point in the future, maybe, and depending on where your roots are, maybe you can avoid it at the cost of continuous great personal expense" crisis. No one can possibly be well prepared to deal with that and I'd wager that's where the incredible frustration around climate change comes.

perrygeo 3y ago

> almost no chance of coming true I agree, with caveats. The worst case emissions scenarios (RCP 8.5) are not likely to happen because we'll hit economic limits that prevent us from accessing every last drop. We're already past peak conventional oil and dipping into the low EROI tight oil. At some point in the future, there will be plenty of oil left but it will be the bottom of the barrel, too expensive to access at a profit. So even if we technically have enough carbon in the ground to spike CO2 to those levels, economic incentives and availability of alternatives are likely to prevent it long before we get there. That said, I think we're underestimating the impacts of even low emissions scenarios. Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions today, we're locked into a wild ride of feedback loops for the next century or more. A low carbon future doesn't free us from climate impacts. I'm not saying we should give up on mitigation but we certainly can't ignore adaptation - no one is "fixing" climate change without a time machine.

giraffe_lady 3y ago

> But the climate changes slowly, we are becoming richer and we'll adapt. WE are, sure, as in the people in this comment section having this conversation right now. Billions of people are not included in this "we" and have much grimmer outcomes predicted. Seems nasty to leave that out.

ch4s3 3y ago
No, outside or a few specific places everyone in the world has been getting richer for the last half century and the trend is continuing[1]. That isn't to by pollyannaish, there are certainly going to be some places that really struggle with aridification and increased flooding. However flooding is mostly a solvable technical problem, and plenty of people already live in deserts. The biggest problem for adaptation might turn out to be heat waves. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-per-capita https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-per-capi...
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  People are going to get richer than they were by some measure of wealth, but not rich enough to save them from climate change. Which is basically what you're saying I think, though you're more optimistic about it.
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    > but not rich enough to save them from climate change I'm not sure what this really means. It seem clear that adaptation will happen, and that may mean some amount of migration by the end of the century which is personally upending for a lot of people but not unprecedented in the last century. Desalinization is showing a lot of progress recently and will likely be much more affordable in the next 20 years. Lithium prices are dropping so we might have a path for ward for grid scale power storage, which would be huge. Major flooding and heat risk that effect large numbers of people are concentrated in a few spots so it seems like infrastructure can be built to handle flooding, and architectural changes coupled with cheaper renewable power can address the heat. We collectively managed to tackle the ozone layer issue before Australia got cooked, so it think there's precedent here. Technology is getting better and we collectively have more resources to bring to bare now. Its not going to be easy or fun, but probably won't be an unraveling of civilization either.

lock-the-spock 3y ago

I acknowledge your position but it is very blind to the real impact global warming is already having. Yes, we, meaning the decently off in rich countries, will adapt. In other places this is much more difficult - see Bangladesh, Pakistan, various sub-saharan countries. We will not go extinct, but millions or tens of millions will die from climate change over the coming years and decades (and many have already died), many many more will suffer for it. No, technology will not fix this in the near term. It's similar to air pollution, which we have many ways of stemming and are estimated to kill 7 Mio per year, much less however in todays rich countries which can invest to reduce it (and still do woefully little as everyone wants a big car). https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2 https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2

timmg 3y ago
> but it is very blind to the real impact global warming is already having. Can you be specific? Like, I get that every time there is a natural disaster, the media blares about climate change. But, for example, there's been no trend in hurricanes. Political leaders love to blame climate change for their poor policies (water management, forrest management, etc). And certainly some of the small sea-level rise we have seen is definitely from climate change. But we've also seen "global greening". Productivity of crops keep going up: maybe in spite of climate change -- but maybe partially due to CO2 increases.
- piva00 3y ago
  > Can you be specific? Warming of the arctic and sub-polar regions is probably the most visible in-your-face trend we can look at. It's been warming, it's getting faster, it's breaking records of temperature. Another point we can look at is oceans warming, which is definitely happening and we don't have a complete picture of all the cascading effects such warming might trigger. The issue of being specific is that you need to look at a diverse dataset, point out trends, while still being prepared and ready with arguments for the counterpoint of "but these are tiny timeframes in geological scale". It's a very slow moving phenomenon, if there's a small increase right now in forest fires it'd require to plot it over 30-50 years to show someone "look, this is definitely the result of what we've done 100 years ago". It might be alarmist to link every atmospherical natural disaster to global warming, at the same time it's hard to ignore an uptick of droughts, massive flooding events, if we need to wait until we gather enough empirical data to absolutely conclude it is directly caused by global warming we will be too late. Could there be a failure of water management, forest management and so on affecting us? Yes, I agree, those need to properly address a changing environment, we just don't know how fast that environment will change and how drastic our changes need to happen. > But we've also seen "global greening". Productivity of crops keep going up: maybe in spite of climate change -- but maybe partially due to CO2 increases. Global greening will not keep up with all the energy we're making the atmosphere retain as a result of CO2, just thinking in pure thermodynamics terms: if there's more energy being contained in the system, everything subsystem has more energy to use: winds, currents, rain, etc. It won't help either with ecosystems that don't depend on greenery, like the Arctic.

andsoitis 3y ago

We are effectively shitting in our only home and pretending it won't make things really unpleasant, but instead we'll adapt. I don't want to adapt to plastic strewn all over the planet, air pollution that chokes us, or warming ocean waters that is having deleterious effects on ecosystems and our food chain.

timmg 3y ago
> We are effectively shitting in our only home and pretending it won't make things really unpleasant, but instead we'll adapt. I mean: yes. We (including you) could stop using any form of fossil-fuel derived energy tomorrow. But that would actually cause a collapse of civilization. Is that better than "making progress with renewables" and/or "adapting"?

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

As others have pointed out, there are parts of the world where increased mortality is actually a problem. Places that will either experience famine & drought, or where the outside temperatures may exceed habitable / safe ranges. (Thinking of parts of e.g. the Indian subcontinent). So not only does it suck for those people, but in that context, Political and economic instability is a huge concern. Mass migration is already happening, but it will become more intense. People will try to gravitate to areas perceived as more stable. Border wars have the potential to become more frequent. Concerns about control over fresh water and arable land will be heightened. Demands to exploit currently protected regions (e.g. great lakes watershed) will be made. We have an entire politico-economic system built on cheap fossil fuel energy. There are whole regimes whose power and control and prosperity is founded on petro-chemical extraction. If/as that collapses, there will be major crisis. We already seeing this. In the context of raising my children, my wife and I are coming around to the perspective that our number one priority is to build resiliency. Not survival-prepper stuff (though we do have a modest 6 acres of arable land, that's not really the focus), but family resiliency: trying to keep kids local to us, concentrating family assets and committing to taking care of each other, making sure we're in a position where we can pass on a stable living situation (house, property), etc. That, and emotional/ideological/intellectual resilience: understanding what climate change is, understanding what we can or cannot do about it as individuals and a family, understanding the role of collective action... and trying to avoid fear and anxiety by emphasizing knowledge over the unknown and distress.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

I'm generally positive about both climate tech, and climate diplomacy, but don't feel it's right to be so cavalier about the potential downsides. Like, one of my "climate apocalypse" bingo squares was "Russia starts a war to prolong fossil fuel usage". It currently looks like that will backfire and, on balance, be a positive for sorting out climate change, but we're talking about the "positives" of a war with potentially hundreds of thousands of dead! Where people were gleefully predicting the collapse of Western Europe governments and replacement with right wing populists who would stop any attempts to continue supporting the "climate hoax"! A war is the kind of thing that can go very wrong, and this is neither the first, nor the last, war that people could attribute to climate change.

pyrale 3y ago

> But we will likely be at or near the goals we've set for end of century. ...And then it'll simply magically stabilize, and will stop being a problem, right?

clydethefrog 3y ago

Have you looked at the scientific data of the temperatures of the world the last month? Global warming has breached 1.5°C threshold in summer for 1st time. Ocean temperatures this spring have been the hottest ever at this time of year, in records going back 174 years. Even the most dependable net-zero pledges would still lead to close to 2.5C of warming according to recent study. The world must slash emissions by 43% by 2030 in order to hold warming to 1.5C, by one estimate. No single country has actually implemented policies to make it happen. And how chaotic the climate has already become after just 1.2C of warming over pre-industrial levels! Deadly heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. Storms and floods. Millions of people have died, been displaced or suffer long-term health effects from these disasters. Species are going extinct en masse. This is just a taste of what may come. The science supports that many, many of us will die.

juujian 3y ago

Climate tipping points are definitely a thing that my colleagues discuss. For instance: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0 It might not be 1.5 degrees, or even 2--3 degrees, but the longer the current trajectory holds, the closer we will get to it. That's the tricky thing with climate change, if you sleep on it, it's not that you lose the opportunity -- you just suddenly face the next, even bigger challenge. I don't agree with 2) that we are on our way to solving the problem. If you just look at global emissions trajectories and GHG concentration in the atmosphere, there is no sign of slowing down. Everything we do, we just do on top of business as usual. Most scientists don't want to be perceived as lunatic alarmists in the public, and most have a sentiment that you should try to convey some hope, and maybe folks also do that to keep their own sanity. The counterargument is that people who panic a bit are more likely to take action, but I don't see a lot of folks taking that stance. But a debate exists on dangerous tipping points that we could realistically run into, and it is lead by knowledgeable and famous people like Johan Rockström. Every opinion in the media though is already thought over for the effect scientists want to achieve, nobody just goes in guns blasting.