“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source? (The past tense make me think you’re quoting a paper)
Not if, when
Well, renewables seem to be saving our undeserving asses, just be virtue of finally getting cheap.
Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.
There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.
Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.
I don’t think that’s quite true. Where I live it has expanded from nothing to a major power source in just a few years. We’ll need grid storage of some kind to kick fossil fuels completely, but that seems surmountable. Worst case scenario we build pumped air and just eat some round trip losses.
Nuclear plants take many years to get off the ground, so I’m not sure that’s actually an easier solution. Once they’re up and running at scale they’re actually really cheap per unit production, so I would have agreed with you a decade ago, but as it is solar and wind have just pulled ahead.
Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.
Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.
You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.
Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.
And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.
Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.
It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…
…or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.
Sorry for the delay. I’m trying to get this the response it deserves, including gathering figures for Alberta, and some basic mathematical modeling.
Alright, I can’t seem to find useful numbers anywhere. We went from 50% coal to nil in just a few years, though, so big changes fast are possible. If you’re in Ontario, you also have to consider your local renewables penetration was really high to start with, because of those waterfalls.
And yeah, like I said to the other person, exact growth pattern matters. It’s probably exponential-ish right now, not linear, because it’s just unambiguously cheaper to move to renewables, and so just getting ducks in order to do it is the bottleneck.
I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.
The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.
Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.
Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.
Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.
Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.
The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.
This why argued we might as well make it worse maybe we will suffer a bit less is unlikely change is coming in time anyways
4C is basically Mad Max breakdown of society. Problem is self-correcting after that.
The Global South? Those people aren’t going to lay down and die. They’re gonna climb North, as they should. And then we’re gonna have to decide whether to shoot people approaching the borders or accept a huge population influx. Given our political reality, I think there’s a good chance we try the first option at first.
Yup. Sadly the truth. And then probably cry about all these migrants bothering them “for no reason”, and that it’s hard to find a good reef to dive in on vacation.
The used the wrong language even though they need to because they need to be accurate.
“Global South” and “by 2100”
Billionaires: oh so not in my yard and not in my lifetime? Great! Drill baby drill!
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%.
Fun fact: a lot of mining companies have been incorporating climate change projections into their closure plans for years now, using RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5 scenarios. Hey, we are using a thermal cover to make sure this gargantuan pile of mine waste rock doesn’t cause metal leaching/acid rock drainage issues later on: we’d better over-engineer it to take on higher-than expected warming, given that we’ll be liable for it for the next 100+ years
It’s certainly interesting, but I feel mostly sad thinking that it’s just BAU for everyone, even when everything is dying. Such a great example of it.
Bit of a misdirect in the headline. This was not primarily a scientific projection. This was a political reckoning by scientists who had recently suffered the bureaucratic pain of serving on the IPCC, and voluntarily responded to a survey.
As one climate scientist put it:
“As many of the scientists pointed out, the uncertainty in future temperature change is not a physical science question: It is a question of the decisions people choose to make,” Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on social media. “We are not experts in that; And we have little reason to feel positive about those, since we have been warning of the risks for decades.”
Change never comes from politicians first, but these are people who are zoomed in on whether politicians are changing their minds.
They’re not going to change their minds slowly over time. It’s gonna be nothing at all until the electorate is too loud to ignore, and then suddenly 100% of officials will claim they’ve “always condemned fossil fuels”, “from day one”, and “in the strongest terms possible”.
We’ve seen time and again that policy changes tend to bubble just below the surface for long time and then suddenly emerge with multiple changes happening in quick succession.
I was of voting age when just saying the word “civil union” in the context of gay rights was political suicide, and I’m not that old. Things can change quickly. Keep your hope alive and keep agitating. We can do this.
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
but the ones in power don’t seem to give a shit.
Conservatives also don’t give a shit.
Worse. Normal people don’t give a shit. Even the ones that are on the team that buys into it don’t want to give up much to fix it.
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.
We keep doing it because we have to do it, so [the powerful] cannot say that they didn’t know," Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who works on climate modeling at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told The Guardian. "We know what we’re talking about. They can say they don’t care, but they can’t say they didn’t know.
It seems to me that we are at such a stage that no matter what we do, there is no turning back. We are doomed, lucky not likely in my lifetime.
Maybe im too optimistic, but i think its more current society as a whole is doomed, but humanity will probably survive and maybe even recover, hopefully smarter and less profit driven.
And even if we don’t make it, at least the Earth will survive, and maybe the next civilization wont be so greedy.
we need some people, either hacking or inside job, setting the temperature in all conference rooms used by any politicians worldwide 2.5 degrees C higher than normal.
Oh, if only.
The shitty thing is they’d start wearing lighter clothes, and use it as a campaign point that it’s not that bad, actually. Power appears to be a hell of a drug.
Let’s stop climate change!
Let’s stop it at 1 degree!
Let’s stop it at 1.5 degrees
Okay, we might get to 2.5 degrees, but the economy!
This will go on until we get to around 5 degree and most parts of the world have become uninhabitable and most animals and vegetation has gone extinct and we’ve locked ourselves in perpetual wars due to water and food shortages. Sounds like a shitty B movie, but this is what I truely believe we will end up with.
If it makes you feel any better, once it gets that bad, society will eventually break down and our CO2 levels will naturally return to normal over the next several centuries while the Earth is reclaimed by nature as we go extinct.
Finally some good news
I’m hopeful economies and governments will collapse before 3 degrees and measures will be put in place. I’m not extrapolating a utopian future. Before we get to the point where the world reacts, there will be many wars, migration and fascism. But as it gets worse, I’m hopeful groups will work together and fight for a better future.
Nah, what will happen is that said incompetent governments will be replaced by incompetent dictatorships that will just tell people over the barrel of a gun that things are better now.
A nuclear winter will cool things off quite a bit.
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 get your frustration. I feel it myself. Still, I fear, calling people assholes won’t be helpful and prevent folks from admitting they did wrong. At the same time, it can always get worse (hotter) and I think it would be best to win as many people over as possible, to do the right thing.
I don’t know. We’re fucked anyway, I guess.
Yes yes, suddenly we shouldn’t mock because it’s unhelpful…not see through at all.
mocking is pointless. most conservatives don’t care if you mock them. neutralizing their threat to democracy is the answer.
so ____ all conservatives for the sake of humanity. i’ve been saying this for decades.
Global South
Yeah, right. How is Europe’s food security going nowadays?
Good question, but we are rearming and integrating our militaries so that the far right who will take power in the chaos can massacre random demographies with relative ease.
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
