77% of Top Climate Scientists Think 2.5°C of Warming Is Coming—And They're Horrified

TokenBoomer@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 745 points – 77% of Top Climate Scientists Think 2.5°C of Warming Is Coming—And They're Horrified | Common Dreams
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"I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South," one expert said.

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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.

4C is basically Mad Max breakdown of society. Problem is self-correcting after that.

If there are survivors, they will be the dicks. Nature is heartless and unforgiving. It is truly survival of the fittest.

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.

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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.

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.

Source? (The past tense make me think you're quoting a paper)

There isn't one definitive paper I can give. They're are of course also papers claiming the opposite.

I've seen multiple articles about this. Less yield from staple crops, productivity loss with heatwaves, storm damage. There are a bunch of papers too, usually about a specific region. But roughly above 2°C, the hurt really begins with the cost to the economy exceeding almost every country's growth. Exact numbers differ per article.

Too bad, I'll have to hunt around myself. Simulation is always a bit vulnerable to assumptions when human behavior is involved, but it's definitely worth trying to model things.

If that's true, the political landscape is going to become starkly different. We expect growth right now; it's used as the yardstick of economic success. Obviously past civilisations didn't, and we could go back, even peacefully for all I know, but it would be uncharted territory post-industrialisation.

I kind of suspect climate adaptation produces more CO2 than other forms of activity, because it would be construction heavy. I wonder if that's factored it. Actually, I wonder what the adaptation assumptions are in general.

I mean they might care when billions of people try migrating in to more northern countries.

As a citizen of one of those "more Northern countries", that is one of the things that concerns me.

Same. England for me, but I think it’ll bother the people in power who abhor people migrating and also deny climate change or at the least taking adequate action to mitigate the effects / affects (which is it).

Edit: The interweb says its effect.

Well, renewables seem to be saving our undeserving asses, just by 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.

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.

I get ~2 decades when I extrapolate these numbers (from 2010-2023) to get to 2022 total primary energy usage for solar alone.

Energy usage will grow as well, and keeping that growth is ambitious, but it the future doesn't look that bleak too me if you look at it that way.

Did you use linear extrapolation, or something else? Because it's an actual paradigm shift happening now, I'd guess some kind of exponential or subexponential curve would be best. That would bring it even faster.

Extrapolation is tricky, and actually kind of weak, although I think it's appropriate here. This XKCD explains it really well, and I end up linking it all the damn time.

Exponential, it fits the curve very nicely. I can give you the python code if you want to. I got 2 decades for all energy usage, not only electricity, which is only one sixth of that.

I just took the numbers for the whole world, that's easier to find and in the end the only thing that matters.

The next few years are going to be interesting in my opinion. If we can make efuels cheaper than fossil fuels (look up Prometheus Fuels and Terraform Industries), we're going to jump even harder on solar and if production can keep up it will even grow faster.

Yes, code please! This sounds amazing.

E-fuels are a big deal, particularly for aviation. Non-electricity emissions are also something to watch. Hydrogen as a reducing agent seems like it can work very well as long as we do phase out fossil fuels like promised, so that solves steel production and similar. Calcination CO2 from concrete kilns is a very sticky wicket apparently, since they're extremely hot, heavy, and also need to rotate, which is challenging to combine with a good seal.

Cheap grid storage is a trillion-dollar question, but I suspect even if new technology doesn't materialise, pumped air with some losses can do the trick, again subject to proper phase-out of dirty power sources.

Here you go, you'll need numpy, scipy and matplotlib:

from scipy.optimize import curve_fit
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

# 2010-2013 data from https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy [TWh]
y = np.array([32, 63, 97, 132, 198, 256, 328, 445, 575, 659, 853, 1055, 1323, 1629])
x = np.arange(0, len(y))

# function we expect the data to fit
fit_func = lambda x, a, b, c: a * np.exp2(b * x ) + c
popt, _ = curve_fit(fit_func, x, y, maxfev=5000)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.scatter(x + 2010, y, label="Data", color="b", linestyle=":")
ax.plot(x + 2010, fit_func(x, *popt), color="r", linewidth=3.0, linestyle="-", label='best fit curve: $y={0:.3f} * 2^{{{1:.3f}x}} + {2:.3f}$'.format(*popt))
plt.legend()
plt.show()

Here's what I get, global solar energy generated doubles every ~3.5 (1/0.284) years.

Thank you! That does look like a great fit.

So that's just solar, then? Long term, it does seem like the one that's the biggest deal, but right now there's also a lot of wind and hydro in the mix, so that's another point in favour of the assumptions here being conservative.

Yes, just solar. Hydro is bigger now, but it doesn't have the growing potential. Wind is currently also growing exponential, but I don't see it doing that for 20 more years. And even if it does, it doesn't really make a big difference since exponential + exponential is still exponential. If it grows as fast as solar that would mean we're just a few years ahead of the curve.

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.

I don't mean to diminish your point about the utility of nuclear, but (a) it's subject to the same ramping up/scaling issues as anything else*, and (b) you'd be surprised how quickly we could ramp up manufacturing of renewables if The Powers That Be actually wanted to.

(* Or worse: in particular, the absolute debacle that was Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 -- delivered years late and billions overbudget, while bankrupting Westinghouse in the process -- shows that we definitely did not maintain our nuclear expertise over the past several decades of building exactly fuck-all new plants.)

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

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"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.

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.

Right wing parties are already massively strengthening Frontex. They're fully aware what will happen, but still not willing to kill our emissions. "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."

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.

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.

What worries me is that combined with anti immigrants sentiment. I fear beaches of dead as people are prevented from fleeing. I read a SciFi with that and it chilled me as I can see it happening.

Prevented from arriving is how anti immigration works, not leaving. Jesus. Think. If you can.

Will we be assholes if when this happens we be like. WE FUCKING TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN, but y’all more concerned with arguing over pronouns and protests (I support both).

hear hear! please stop fighting over the petty things and get to work on the things that matter. electing a president that will fight climate change is far more important than what happens in the middle east.

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.

stop worrying about being polite and start attacking the root of the problem - conservatives.

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.

I mean the ones that think that trans people shouldn't have human rights also tend to be the ones who don't believe in climate change so...

Lol ook.

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.

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.

That's part of the issue, but the even bigger problem is that people fallaciously think they have to give up much to fix it when the reality is a combination of (a) they don't, and (b) the changes that they do have to make actually represent an improvement in lifestyle, not a deprivation.

For example, Americans who've been brainwashed for decades by GM propaganda about the "open road" and car-dependent suburban "American dream" and whatnot have to be dragged kicking and screaming into higher zoning density and walkabilty, but once people have it they realize they're happier, healthier, have more free time, etc.

Well, no. Burning fossil fuels was indeed cheaper than any other energy source, until recently, and for some things still is by far the cheapest. So yeah, we have to sacrifice something today to not cook the Earth. Apparently that's too abstract for us, though, and we will knowingly steer towards a cliff a few decades away.

As an example, in Canada we have a modest carbon tax, and one that comes right back to people as refunds. It's still become a political lightning rod and the entire campaign target of the opposition, who is decisively leading in the polls right now. Another one, gen Z says they care, but it's not grandma buying Shein.

Investing in better technology is categorically disqualified from counting as a "sacrifice!"

Could you help me understand how we differentiate the latest warming temperatures being related to climate change and not just another period like the one you mentioned?

To be clear, I fully believe that climate change is real, but sometimes when discussing it with people they will be of the camp that things are cyclical and just natural. I want to better arm myself for these arguments.

Mass extinction events have a cause. The Permian/Triassic one I mentioned, is generally agreed to be from unusual movement of earth's crust, creating severe volcanic activity. The eruptions caused CO2 and pollution, meaning greenhouse gasses built up. The heat shifted water currents and the temperatures, mixed with acid rain, decimated life in the oceans.

Humans are basically the volcanoes in modern times. Yes, the earth goes through normal changes, but these temperatures are increasing at a speed that, to my knowledge, has never happened. There is a way of teaching kids about how long the earth's had life, that visualizes it pretty well. If all of earth's history were to fit on your arm, shoulder to fingertips, if you gently scratched your fingernail on something rough, you'd erase all of humankind. We have barely existed on earth, but are throwing it off balance like never before. (With the exception of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, but that's a whole other tangent)

Having taken years of pathology/physiology classes, it really feels like the earth is a body, and it's getting a fever to try and deal with an illness... us.

Lmk if you need any sources. I can't exactly copy my books or the ones from my old college's libraries, but there's plenty of studies/resources out there if you're nerdy enough to dig 😊 (fossil pun)!

Mass extinction events have a cause. The Permian/Triassic one I mentioned, is generally agreed to be from unusual movement of earth’s crust, creating severe volcanic activity.

I think you'd get your point across even better with less understatement.

Let's put it this way: by "severe volcanic activity," what you really mean is that an area roughly the size of Europe was buried half a kilometer deep in lava!

We have barely existed on earth, but are throwing it off balance like never before. (With the exception of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, but that’s a whole other tangent)

I think we may very well be on par with the meteor, TBH. Especially in the worst-case emission scenario.

(Speaking of the K-Pg meteor, another large igneous province, similar to but smaller than the one at the P-T boundary, was basically the "exit wound" of that meteor impact. It could very well be that the P-T extinction was caused the same way, but all evidence of the crator would have been obliterated by subduction over the past 250 MY because the antipode of Siberia back then would've been somewhere in the middle of the Panthalassic Ocean. Edit: I take that back; turns out there is some evidence for it that managed to survive, so that's neat.)

Thank you for adding more information. I love reading more about this stuff. It would make sense if a meteor was related to the P-T volcanic activity. It would easily have enough force to mess with the crust of the earth.

I have a fun snarky way to handle “cyclical” people. If they say it’s cyclical I’ll say “so there will be dinosaurs.” And if they ask what I mean, I say “it’s a cycle, so there will be dinosaurs again.” If they say no, I ask if the continents will come together again. It’s an argument towards absurdity to point out that the world is always changing, as is the climate, so there is not a “cycle.”

but the ones in power don't seem to give a shit.

Conservatives also don't give a shit.

The majority of people on both sides of the spectrum don't give a shit. People need to stop acting like this is just politicians, or CEOs, when it is the vast majority of the voters & potential voters. You'd see a lot more votes towards green parties & candidates if it were different. But the truth is, most people don't want to lose their comfortable lifestyle. Real climate action would affect us all, in our lives, in the prices we have to pay for products, in the products available to us, how we move around, etc etc.

But the truth is, most people don’t want to lose their comfortable lifestyle.

The real truth is, the notion that a lower-carbon lifestyle is somehow inferior to our current car-dependent bullshit is 100000% fallacious bullshit brainwashed into us by the automobile industry. Walkability is just better in every way (environmentally, economically, sociologically) and people whose lifestyle doesn't depend on cars are, statistically, happier and healthier than people who do.

Now try to explain that people have to give up their job that's in the neighboring city, or having to get up 1-2 hours earlier due to bad train or bus connections, or that they now cannot get groceries anymore because they live in suburbia and have to drive an hour out to some massive parking lot desert to shop in their IKEA sized grocery halls. And that's just relating to the personal transport sector.

Why do you persist in assuming that all those shitty circumstances would continue to exist when they are exactly the things I'm saying we should be fixing? The whole idea is to have lots of nearby employers, good train and bus connections, grocery stores within walking distance (and with little to no parking), etc.

The #1 priority for reducing climate change (and fixing almost all our problems, from housing affordability to obesity) is zoning reform.

Because no one is willing to change those things. No politician who would be willing to go this far would be voted in because of the intermediate issues this would cause for people. And doing a super slow transition would be too late at this point, especially since we're way past schedule already in regards to our emission models. It even starts with the simple fact that people are simply not willing to get rid of their cars, even if public transport was good and completely free. So you'd be left with enforcing people not to drive, which is obviously also not going to happen for the same reasons.

The #1 priority for reducing climate change (and fixing almost all our problems, from housing affordability to obesity) is zoning reform.

Only in countries like the US, who have a disproportional large portion of transport emissions. But a lot of our emissions in the West simply come from the production of our goods that we buy and give us our comfy lives.

It even starts with the simple fact that people are simply not willing to get rid of their cars, even if public transport was good and completely free. So you’d be left with enforcing people not to drive, which is obviously also not going to happen for the same reasons.

Induced demand can work in reverse. Stop expanding roads. Redesignate some lanes to public transport only. Why take the car and sit in a queue for 2 hours when a bus can get you to work in 30 minutes without any queues?

That's a decades long process. We need proper action done within this decade.

Why take the car and sit in a queue for 2 hours when a bus can get you to work in 30 minutes without any queues?

You'd be surprised how many people would take that over a ride with other people.

That’s a decades long process. We need proper action done within this decade.

We don't know that. If it turns out that the actual ECS value is higher than predicted we're already fucked because whatever faction we might take today should've already been taken decades ago. If a global humanitarian crisis is mere decades away, no changes we'll feasibly make today or in the near future will stave it off.

You’d be surprised how many people would take that over a ride with other people.

An alternative is also that those who can, do their job remotely. Covid proved the feasibility of that. You couldn't pay me enough to start commuting or doing my own grocery runs again. I only go outside for enjoyment and none of it involves vehicles. Unless said vehicle is a bicycle, because my dog really enjoys cycling.

We don't know that.

We do, because the opposite effect took that long. It's likely even worse for the reasons mentioned.

we're already fucked because whatever faction we might take today should've already been taken decades ago.

That's true either way with where we're at. That's why we call for drastic actions to be taken, especially since governments can't even agree to implement what's asked for by scientific advisors, who are already very conservative in their predictions in order to not push those politicians too extremely.

If a global humanitarian crisis is mere decades away, no changes we'll feasibly make today or in the near future will stave it off.

That's not correct, because it can always get even worse. The more and sooner we get rid of our emissions, the better are our chances. That's also why, on a fixed time scale, it is important to do the bulk of the work as early as possible, instead of doing it towards the end. The longer those greenhouse gasses are in the air, the more damage it will cause for us in the long run. But right now literally all of our measurements taken are still causing us to shoot far beyond our set targets (which turns out, were already too conservatively set too).

That’s true either way with where we’re at. That’s why we call for drastic actions to be taken

So what exactly is the end goal for these drastic actions?

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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!

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.

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.

Sounds like a shitty B movie, but this is what I truely believe we will end up with.

And we'll deserve every bit of it.

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.

I 'like' the part where they acknowledge and plan for it yet everyone is still squabbling about if it's even happening

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.

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.

Then we get inside people to give them 1/4 of their catered food that they ordered so they can be warmer AND hungrier.

Let. Them. Fight.

More like +10.5°C in room A and -8°C in room B.

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

Well it looks like a bunch of have a lot of self defense-ing that needs doing

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.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-continental-drift-was-considered-pseudoscience-90353214/

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.

There's definitely some in there that think 2.5C is optimistic.

To be fair we don’t know what the bottom climate scientists think. They be closer to 100%.

I've been living in coastal Southeastern Texas for 44 years. Im 46. In 2017 my county rezoned us as a flood zone because of the Havey flooding caused all the poor planning. An entire section of the state reclassified because "interstate highway" needed to be bigger.

They've been building the same 50ish miles for at least 27 years. All they've managed to do is ruin what was naturally occurring barriers and eroded our ability to maintain habitation. Or to expect a reasonable ability to protect against a disaster.

We're leaving 3.4 acres my grandfather bought in 1986, and gave my sister and I in 2007.

And that's just MY story. We had 375 neighbors in my area and at least 30% have moved on since 2017.

And that's just one coastal city, in one state, in one country, on one continent.

I don't have a lot of fantasy about humanities future.

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.

What we need is a Ministry for the Future without a killer heatwave killing millions.

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.

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.

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

That won't happen, CO2 and warming has been much, MUCH higher than it is now or probably will ever be.

What will happen is that loads of animals will die because they won't be able to adapt quick enough. Thought that we had many extinctions now? Try a hundred times more.

What will happen is mass crop failures due to extreme weather, and water shortages. Humans being the assholes that the are will not focus on an actual solution, they'll just start wars over the scarce resources to make it even worse.

Humanity actually might go extinct if we let it ge tbad enough.

There are still many people out there claiming it's all fake. Can we please just make them extinct?

It begins with wiping out the brainwashed. Theoretically, this should allow democracy to correct the problems, but i suspect the owners will just stop pretending they operate within the bounds of democracy at that point and go all out authoritarian to prevent themselves from being dethroned. Then we wipe them out.

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?

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. At least we won't die of hunger.

At least we won’t die of hunger.

The powerful among you won't die of hunger.

I think you misunderstood me. What I was saying is that we will go shoot each other before the hunger deaths set in. As in, we won't last long enough to die of hunger.

Hum, you won't do that either. The people that will have the food will also have all the guns, and they are not eager to go shooting each other.

Collapse is not as action-packed as it happens in movies. (Unless it's about toilet paper shortage in the US, it seems. WTF is up with that?)

What I'm guessing at is less open warfarey, more kristallnachtey.

It's not like anyone's going to do anything about it.

Someone will. We will. Our current trajectory is unsustainable.

It’s only unsustainable if you want everyone to survive. Too many people are quietly okay with losing a few billion strangers due to their certainty they’ll be fine.

That's what I said a good 25 years ago when I learned about climate change. It went through a bunch of name changes, there have been multiple world meetings about it to see how much further we could push it up to sustain "our economies" and the few little suggestions that came out of that were completely ignored so that we could have the next world economic forum or whatever.

If any politician would actually do something REAL, I'd support it. I have not seen anything beyond "well let's try to change cars to electrical over a 20 year period but also dump nuclear power so effectively all electrical cars still run coal". We. Need. To. Stop. Using. Cars. Car use needs to drop by 95%, THAT would make a difference. Start converting 90% of car infrastructure to park, bicycle infrastructure and public transportation like trains and busses. Convert cargo trucks to electrical, start investing like crazy in nuclear power plants. Push companies to either let employees work from home or pay tripple tax. Tax the shit out of anyone earning more than 10 times the average. Start adding sulfur solutions to kerosine so that airplanes can start spewing it in the atmosphere to lower temperatures... Any of those are solutions, I haven't seen any of it.

Nobody is going to do anything because politicians are dumb egocentric assholes that only care about their own reelection.

We're fucked in the next 30 years or so

If Trump gets elected, we'll be fucked within 10. I'm honestly thinking at this point that maybe we should just all vote for trump. Get it over with, kill this world, humanity is a failed experiment.

Stopping meat eating would have a bigger impact on climate change than removing cars, and that's doable for everyone. Also EV cars do reduce the co2, and as grids get cleaner cars do too. Additionally many put solar on their houses to charge Evs.

Whist i agree car numbers should definitely be reduced, people should work from home far more for example, but meat is a greater problem that we could all address immediately without dismantling infrastructure.

Yeah, the "stop eating meat is doable" is not doable. Ppeoli simply won't do it. What you can (should) do is increase taxes on meat. If meat becomes twice as expensive, people will eat it less. Use the extra tax income to subsidize meat alternatives, make those more attractive.

We can do with a LOT less cars if we wanted to. Same as with meat, we don't want it. Still, most car rides are under 3 miles, which can easily be done by bike but good luck being the politician pushing bikes. Or increased taxes on meat.

No reason we cant do all of these things. Taxing meat is a geat idea too.

There is a big reason we can't do any of that.

The general public is dumb, and politicians happily watch the world burn if they can rule the ashes.

Because of that, no politician will ever push for any of that.

I went through an accelerationist adjacent phase a few years ago, then I realized that what I was accelerating towards would happen regardless. From a utilitarian perspective, I don’t know which path mitigates more human deaths.

I don't like this mindset, because while there are plenty of businesses, billionaires, and governments that keep burning coal to keep their cash flowing, there's plenty of scientists, activists, engineers, governments, and organizations that are making a difference. We shouldn't be discrediting the hard work of people who are trying to save us or at least delay doomsday.

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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.🇩🇰

Yes, I can finally die, hopefully the afterlife is a thing that... exists

I just hope im gonna be as excited to see this „civilization„ fall as I think I am. Humanity is just fucking disappointing.

You really want to live through a "Children Of Men" world? I'd rather be dead.

Shit, do I get to choose? Than hell fucking no. But I don’t, do I?

I hope I’ll have the balls to kill myself when all this shit collapses and our last breaths turn into wars.

if you're going to kill yourself because you have nothing left to lose, why wouldn't you take a few assholes that deserve it with you?

the problem is that we not only doom ourselves with the collapse of civilization but we doom so many innocent creatures who had nothing to do with this. the animals deserve better.

And we'll do nothing about it because everybody is looking at corporations and their government but not at themselves to change.

Look for the main pollution producers and you'll be shocked (or not).

Just a hint: not the individuals.

the main polluters are making products for the individuals you speak of. they don't exist in a vacuum.

It is their responsibility , though it should be at pain of death (of their profits), to innovate in order to supply what we demand sustainability. The problem is they are not compelled to do so by any mechanism - regulatory, or market driven. And worse than that , the biggest and most culpable perpetrators of these crimes against humanity (and all other living species present and future) have actively campaigned to misinform, divide and conquer, politicize, deflect and distract (including shifting all responsibility to the individual) since they've known for decades that this is coming and when they alone had the means and capital to adapt, innovate, research and develop solutions for the good of all, including themselves if they'd only planned for something other than their own pockets this financial quarter.

You like your propaganda a lot, don’t you?

No, I just realize that corporations and governments are not motivated to do anything. I know that what I'm saying shifts the blame, but realistically it's the only way.

But people are even less motivated and we should take away their plastic bottles and cars with laws. Individuals will always choose whats more comfortable for them, thats why we’re in this shit. Capitalists just profit off of it.

Counterpoint: There are millions of vegans taking the initiative to do the right thing when corporations and government obviously will not.

Millions is not billions and all those vegans still work at offices, buy electronic devices, drive cars and pollute in more ways than I can imagine. The problem with climate is that we’ve grown extremely accustomed to the comforts of our extremely unsustainable lives and we’re so far gone into environmental destruction that the steps we would all need to take to stop it are already extreme, and they are only getting extreme…er.

I’m a vegetarian myself, I never ever buy plastic bottles and Im generally conscious about my impact on the environment, but without basically detaching myself from society I can’t even put a dent in the destruction my lifestyle is bringing.

Most people aren’t even vegetarians and still buy plastic bottles, they will never stop until the society tells them to. We need to fundamentally shit (a typo, but I’ll allow it) our civilization to a completely different mode to even stop deepening our graves, but guess what. We can’t even fix the fucking housing market so we’re simply doomed. The corporations will still hoard their pointless profits and we’ll get annual new fucking iphones until the day we won’t even be able to grow our food.

If people don't want to change, how in the world do you think they'll let a [democrat, republican, etc] politician force them to? Do you think cocacola will save us? The answer is not fun.

There has been a consistent effort from the fossil fuel industry to shift the blame from themselves to individuals.

How Big Oil helped push the idea of a 'carbon footprint'

From recycling ♻️ to plastic straws, the ad campaigns put the onus on individual consumers instead of the industry. Americans overwhelmingly want to do something about climate change. But the propaganda prevents action.

THIS propaganda prevents action because you're basically saying that we shouldn't do anything short of a revolution

Correct. It’s the most efficient way to institute degrowth and establish a new sustainable economy.

Literally every projection made about today, 20 years ago, was false. I swear yall have zero pattern recognition.

Was false... because it was optimistic seen from today.

What?

What projections are you looking at? It is a few cherry picked ones? Generally the projections going back to the 80s are in line with what's actually happening, if anything they were optimistic.

Even if you don't agree with projection or that we're actually in-line with them, the correlation between carbon in the atmosphere and global temperature isn't disputable anymore.

So when did all you blowhards go vegan?

oh you didnt?

Ok then.

At this point it's whatever helps you sleep at night. A moral high ground will definitely help though.

Nothing an individual does to reduce is going to make even a droplet in the ocean of pollution.

If everyone on earth went vegan tomorrow we'd still be fucked 15 different ways.

Yeah so your argument is don't even try. Great help you are.

My argument would be that individual actions are useless or even harmful. Collective, smart action is required. This problem is bigger than any one of us but not bigger than every one of us.

The main problem is that even if I myself literally stopped existing right now thus reducing any and all pollution I generate, that would still not change the fact that the largest pollutants are big mega corporations and one single person really has no noticeable effect.

I'm in no way a climate change denier and I too believe that the current path leads us there. However, isn't it normal for 80% of climate scientist actively researching this to think this way? Would they not spend their efforts somewhere else if they would think this isn't happening?

A survey among mathematicians showed that 80% consider that mathematics has the answer they're looking for.

We need to discuss hard data and proper research, not surveys.

Sorry... are you saying that a survey of what experts in a field think is happening is no indication of what is happening?

Apparently those brainiacs with their fancy book learnin' and expertise are useless. We must all sift through hundreds of thousands of pages of raw data before reaching any conclusions. The entire concept of career specialization is wrong! Throw it out!

It's a bizarre claim even for a climate change denier.

Yeah, I used to run into you in r/skeptic a lot, fighting the good fight lol. And we both know the mods of that sub let it be overrun with all types of deniers and insane conspiracy theorists... But at least those trolls put a little more effort into it than just scoffing at experts.

No. I'm saying that "77% of Top ...etc" is a stupid way of conveying the importance of the information.

In what way should it have been conveyed in a simple manner that non-scientists could understand? Because Common Dreams is not a scientific journal.

"I'm not a climate change denier but why does anyone care what experts think?!" 🙄

why does anyone care what experts think?!

That's not what I said at all, is it? I'm simply pointing out that we're reacting to a poorly written article which plays on our emotional side instead of discussing the actual facts. Yes, scientists doing research in an area believe that their research is going to confirm their hypothesis. That's how research works. In this case, I'm surprised it's not 100% to be honest.

The whole premise of the article is stupid. Not global warming, not the fact that we're heading towards more than 2.5C global warming by 2100, not the people answering the questions. What's stupid is the idea of "conducting an opinion poll" in that specific group.

If someone could convincingly scientifically back up their belief that climate change isn't going to be a big deal, they'd be swimming in oil company money to promote their work. There's definitely an incentive to research it if you think the other way.

hard data and proper research

Maybe the answer you expect is not presented in this article?

Or at least the expectation you are presenting is something an exact science would produce?

If they're not the ones to give us that data, who would? Polling experts in the field is different from asking fisherman if they think we should eat fish

What data though? This article doesn't contain data - that's my issue. You're right, it's not asking fishermen if they think we should eat fish. It's asking nutritionists if they like fish.