“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said.
There is no ceiling. It might go up 6 or 7C. The people who have the power to change things do not give a shit if the rest of us die. They don’t care, and they won’t change anything. That’s the world we live in.
Oh, you’re hot? Return to work. Our buildings are kept cool for your convenience! 😈
That’s the next play
uh no florida has already made the next play, and it was to repeal all protections for outdoor workers against the elements
in other words the next move is literally “Fuck you, die”, apparently, so, good to know we’re past the bullshit and can get on with actually solving the problem properly.
They (selfishly) believe that allowing the problem to flourish is what will get us to solve it.
They’re not wrong. There’s just way better, more humane approaches.
So you’re mostly right. Because they know they have the wealth to weather the discomfort in comfort. But it is accurate that humans historically are fucking aces at reacting and kinda piss poor at proacting.
Yes, they are wrong. Because we don’t know if there are positive feedback loops that will take us beyond survivable temperatures once we’ve crossed an invisible line.
Even the ultra-rich won’t survive +5C because the entire concept of “wealth” falls apart when society does.
Not really. Economies started to slow down and crash when warming gets over 2°C and CO2 production crashes with it.
Finally some good news on the climate. Our ability to fuck the Earth will mostly go away when our civilization collapses. We might even get a second Genghis Khan cooling when everyone dies.
There is a problem of lag. By the time temperatures are high enough to force the economy to stop, the amount of CO2 will be sufficient to continue pushing the temperature up considerably.
The problem is that feedback loops start to kick in above 2°C so it doesn’t matter if the economy crashes.
In fact, in some cases that makes things even worse. One example is that without smokestacks and ships pumping out sulfur dioxide the albedo of the atmosphere will rapidly drop, which might cause immediate and rapid warming over a period of only a few years.
We could be pushed past 2.5°C or even 3°C without industrial forces contributing at all.
Not if, when
People will be fleeing famine, uninhabitable areas, rising sea levels and wars. The areas that can support life will grow smaller, more valuable and crowded.
“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” Gretta Pecl of the University of Tasmania told The Guardian. “[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”
But, reason to keep fighting:
Others found hope in the climate activism and awareness of younger generations, and in the finding that each extra tenth of a degree of warming avoided protects 140 million people from extreme temperatures.
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of options.
I have a postmortem science degree, but hobby in studying paleontology/pre-history. It took a rise of only 10°C and excess pollution to wipe out over 83% of all life on the planet between the Permian and Triassic eras. Entire chains of life just wiped out. Carbon dating, sediment layer study, fossil records, they all show how screwed me are if we keep this up. The earth will survive, it always does, but it took 30 million years before life recovered.
Humans need to learn from the past, see the consequences of what most would think is a small change, but the ones in power don’t seem to give a shit.
If you don’t mind me asking what does postmortem mean in this context? I have this funny image in my head of a skeleton studying for a degree lmao
Mortuary science, pathology, autopsies, etc. I was going for a masters in Anatomic Pathology before I became disabled. I just research all things dead. I was always the weird little girl that liked studying mummies and fossils, so it seemed the logical step when I was choosing a career
Thank you for the explanation!
but the ones in power don’t seem to give a shit.
Conservatives also don’t give a shit.
I think they give a shit.
Enjoyment counts as giving a shit.
I read this headline and think, “this will happen and still nothing will be done.”
There was a powercut this week in a large part of Mexico (I know because of family from there). They’re getting rarer now as Mexico has really tried to get its grid uptogether. The downside of countries like this having more stable grids is more people and business installing aircon systems, which just means more energy used, more emissions.
The funny thing is there are ways to passively cool areas. You can literally install shading over windows and walls that face the main sun. Last year in the UK we had a few days where it was over 35C. Nobody here has aircon. So that heat is a shock to us. But I managed to cover the outside of open windows with reflective bubble wrap insulation cut into sheets.
I also installed a small solar system on our shed to run a fridge freezer out there. The funny thing is the half inch stand-offs actively created significant shading and the inside of the shed really cooled down to where we could sit in there and chill out or do tasks without melting. When I realised this I started looking online for research on solar power and shading and found agrovoltaics. Solar panels over farm crops such as fruit in hotter regions mean less watering needed… its more spread out than usual solar farms as it has to let the sun in a bit more to the food but its something that needs to be done more.
I also read of people ignoring their energy policy for their home electric and installing grid-tie solar. They use sheds, stands in their garden, conservatory roofing etc, and usually just a few hundred watts of solar. Typically homes have a fuse rating of 30-50 amps. One 300w solar panel grid tied is not going to be anywhere near that, but will mean up to 300w of clean energy. Energy companies should just allow these systems, even provide them if its a problem or worry to them. You can buy this stuff off amazon for a few hundred quid.
Haha and Italy just banned agrovoltaics!
Perfect place for it too. All those grapes will be sour.
it’s the same in vietnam, where it reaches 40c. many do not use ac
Mexico City is having water issues.
I remember being there in 2013 and the rivers and streams were all dried up. They were quite worried about farming.
What do you mean no one has an aircon in the UK? I have. Plenty of my friends have them as well.
I have a small unit too, but we’re the rare ones. “Nobody” means “majority” here or do I really have to be literal wth everyone on the internet???
I have a small unit too
Haha!
Its how you use it. 😉
We’re close to blowing past 1.5c
I think we’ll blow past 2.5c
I think we’ll be looking back, waving longingly to the incredible hulk ending song, to 5c
Because the world doesnt exist to serve the 8 billion humans. It exists to serve a few thousand rich and business owners. . which means as long as there is profit to be had, the killing of the planet and the population will continue not only at pace, but ever accelerating
Aren’t we past 1.5c? Thought we’re just waiting to see if it’s sustained
I’m only horrified for all the non-human life we’re continuing to decimate on the way out.
Humans don’t even seem to tolerate one another as we recklessly decimate this world with technologies we’re just smart enough to develop and then immediately use with the same consideration for consequences as a monkey being handed a loaded shutgun, supposedly in humanity’s name.
You want us to survive so we can keep a perpetual underclass subsisting in misery? So we can point fingers and call this group and that nation and this gender and that race the problem over and over and over? We are the problem, sorry. Long term, our self-destruction will be a W for the Earth. It will take millions of years, but our mother will eventually clean up our mess we left behind, and continue on like we never existed.
And from my perspective and decades of observation, that is for the best, including for our “everything will be great, once those humans I don’t like are shown their place” in perpetuity species.
Seems low.
22% of climate scientists are likely funded by big oil. The other 1% are just normal stupid.
I can see some climate scientists just saying that 2.5C won’t be as dire as others predict without being stupid or paid off. There are often contrarians and sometimes (not often, but sometimes) they can be right, so it’s healthy to have them even when there is broad consensus. It’s how we came to accept ideas like plate tectonics.
So sure, maybe some of them are paid off (I doubt any of them are stupid since they have scientific degrees), but maybe some of them just disagree about the predictions for whatever semi-legitimate or maybe even legitimate reason and that’s fine. It’s worth exploring why just in case they could be right. The thing is, they’re scientists who are dissenting, not just some random guy on Facebook, which is why it’s worth exploring them.
To be fair we don’t know what the bottom climate scientists think. They be closer to 100%.
While the developed world rests on its laurels having already developed key technologies that insulate from the worst effects of climate change, the Global South is attempting to push through rapid industrialization to achieve the same effects, bringing with it public infrastructure, electricity, robust food supply, reliable transportation, healthcare…
Meanwhile, the developed world looks at the Global South and says “ah, but why aren’t you being greener about it? despicable! how dare you raise emissions?” while simultaneously restricting the free trade of essential green economy components like solar panels and batteries. The fact is, we don’t actually care about climate change. Our political entities and economies are not structured to reward innovation in that space, so we simply end up pulling teeth to push through minor advances. Germany used to be a world leader in solar panels before it stagnated due to political pressure. The US used to be a world leader in developing nuclear before it stagnated due to political pressure. Japan used to be the world leader in batteries before it stagnated due to, well, Japan.
While the developed world rests on its laurels having already developed key technologies that insulate from the worst effects of climate change
But this isn’t true. Can we fight temperature changes? Sure, we have air conditioning and heaters.
There’s lots of things we can’t isolate ourselves from. Natural disasters, for example. We see forest fires and floods on a yearly basis, and it’s getting worse. We’ll face droughts, and diminished crop yields. It’ll be particularly bad for all the areas near the equator (which are also incredibly populous and export a lot of food), and what will happen then?
Famine yes, probably, but likely also an exodus away from these areas, which I’m sure will go well as countries are known to welcome people seeking a better life with open arms. We’ll face humanitarian tragedies. I’d be surprised if there won’t be camps, and with that comes disease. Maybe we’ll even see another pandemic.
Aircon won’t shield us from that.
Global warming is funny in that there is a threshold at which runaway reaction evaporates all water on the planet and changes it into inhabitable wasteland akin to other sad space rocks.
I don’t know what are the chances for that but I feel if it is anything above 0.1% then it is too fukin big of a chance.
I don’t want to risk that the scientists completely missed the mark in some computer simulation or missed some vital, crucial info and this is the actual scenario, those things are awfully hard to model and predict. Maybe the rate of change is so meaningful that it kicks in some bad stuff that would not happen if the rate of change was hundred thousands years. Who knows at this point. Climatologists are fumbling around in confusion
0.1% chance would be huge. That kind of probability is an unacceptable risk even just for a personal injury, let alone the destruction of all life on earth.
Oh shut up. This is just moronic.
The good news is that almost all lines of evidence lead us to believe that is unlikely to be possible, even in principle, to trigger full a runaway greenhouse by addition of non-condensible greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. However, our understanding of the dynamics, thermodynamics, radiative transfer and cloud physics of hot and steamy atmospheres is weak. We cannot therefore completely rule out the possibility that human actions might cause a transition, if not to full runaway, then at least to a much warmer climate state than the present one. High climate sensitivity might provide a warning. If we, or more likely our remote descendants, are threatened with a runaway greenhouse then geoengineering to reflect sunlight might be life’s only hope. …[2 sentences cut to meet arXiv char limit]… The runaway greenhouse also remains relevant in planetary sciences and astrobiology: as extrasolar planets smaller and nearer to their stars are detected, some will be in a runaway greenhouse state.
Goldblatt, Colin; Watson, Andrew J. (8 January 2012). “The Runaway Greenhouse: implications for future climate change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 370 (1974): 4197–4216
We have a huge geoengineering greenhouse experiment running on earth as we speak with unclear final outcome. But at least the science of climate will become clearer during this experiment that’s for sure.
It’s not that outlandish as one would instinctively think considering we have no idea why warming accelerated so much in the last years. It’s a good reason to act, among many others. However before that would happen obviously humanity would be long gone anyway.
Also from interesting bits as of now theoretically our GHG ppm is the same as when there was no ice on Greenland and sea level 10 m higher. It seems we are now merely waiting for the delayed reaction because even if we would stop all emissions we would also have to remove the GHGs to avoid it.
Another interesting thing is that scientists are intentionally underplaying some things to not appear ‚alarmist’ because it was figured out that this would have opposite and unhelpful effect to climate action. Except for James Hansen.
In any case it’s useful to know what is the absolute worst scenario and what huge GHG numbers do to the planet(s).
Global South
Yeah, right. How is Europe’s food security going nowadays?
There are models that predict as much as 4 C
Shhh… don’t tell anyone. At 4 degrees Antarctica becomes the refuge of humanity. There’s a reason Trump wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark.🇩🇰
Extreme weather will make a lot of places rethink their infrastructure and whether they should even move somewhere else.
Bye Florida.
Don’t worry DeSantos is just going to outlaw hurricanes. Problem solved
