IMHO hydrogen cars is the future. It gives the storage medium that is needed for wind turbines (and solar) to become ecologically positive. It gives a smoother transition path for fossil energy.
Well, it is pretty doom and gloom if you look at the numbers for the Arctic region and realize that we are on the trail that was considered the worst case scenario. Climate Change (at that time natural, less abrupt) contributed to the end of the Roman Empire, and while few of mankind may survive, billions are unlikely to.
Not changing behaviors and just hoping for magical, unproven technology is plain stupid in my view. We are going to need that investment in technology, but it‘s not the magic solution. Many ecosystems aren’t even fully understood, so we can’t really tell what will result of their imminent collapse.
Consensus on a carbon tax that is consistent with the marginal cost of abatement and staying below 2C is $50 or so per tonne by the late 2020s and up to $180 by 2050 to get all the way to net zero. The idea is that you set a tax that goes up predictably so that you incentivise capital decisions leading to emissions reductions over the life of the capital asset.
That might seem like a lot but based on US average consumption based emissions (production based emissions taxation is for chumps) that's $850 annually by the late 2020s. Of course, all or most of that can be returned to people through other tax reductions. I can't be the only one who looks at that number and thinks, "Is that fucking it? Jesus, just do it then."
Of course it is. Even if we actually start sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere – which would require investments in the order of trillions of dollars – the damage has been done.
Not sure why this was downvoted. Everyone is in a perpetual state of "we should start worrying about this". People knew about this problem in the 70s. Many of us would not have been born when actions should have been first taken.
From here onwards it is damage control. It is not the end of the world, we just require intellectual honesty about the situation.
It's possible the origins of this reside in the first Industrial Revolution.
what is the meaning of "too late"? the planet will survive, the organisms will adapt, humanity will die so what? maybe some amebas will evolve into something more peaceful that the savages we have become.
I take it to mean for the human race to continue its existence in roughly the same way we've become accustomed over the past century or so (though the time frame will vary according to people, I suppose.
>maybe some amebas will evolve into something more peaceful that the savages we have become.
that could well be the case or we might be in this situation in a few billion years
Siberia is already very hot in the summers. Like 40C+ in the summers and -40-50C in the winter. That range is not going to be 'Mediterranean' anytime ever.
How many people are going to live there? Supported by what infrastructure? How is the infrastructure going to be maintained? Where are all the machines that you need to repair and replace the infrastructure? Where are the plants to produce the machines? Who is going to maintain the infrastructure, the machines and the plants? How do you decide who's going to get to Antarctica? How are you going to prevent other from going there themselves? How are you going to stop the rest of the world from nuking Antartica in retaliation? How are you going to stop the USA and China from going to war over that last habitable piece of earth? How are you going to provide food and oxygen to the few survivors?
Siberia is vast, checking one town for it's climate is not representative. While most of the southern part of Siberia is relatively mild (like nothern central US) there are huge regions that are known for more extreme temperatures, in particular Sakha (Yakutiya): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakha#Climate
The context of the point is that Climate change's max increase is only another 0.5celcius and at worst the currently too cold places will become warm enough to live comfortably.
We're currently on-track for a +5°C increase in temperature by 2050. Besides wreaking havoc to all existing ecosystems, it's also very likely that this will kill off most of the phytoplankton in the oceans. That's the stuff that makes most of the O2 for us.
There's no way we (humans) are going to survive this scenario.
Al Gore is of the opinion that it's not. You can take that with a grain of salt because Al Gore's predictions have been quite incorrect. He claimed the Icecaps would be completely gone 6+ years ago. He claimed Florida and India would be under water today.
>We're currently on-track for a +5°C increase in temperature by 2050.
RCP8.5 was never an expected prediction, it was a theoretical worst case of some unknown huge increase in carbon emissions. When in reality, humanity has done some amount of decrease. The RCP8.5 claim is basically considered wrong now. In fact we are on track for RCP4.5 despite not doing what IPCC says we need to do to reach this. This is great news.
We also know fossil fuels mostly run out in around 2050-2060. A simple reality that even if we don't do anything, we simply run out and must adapt to life without fossil fuels.
So we are going to peak about 1.4celcius warmer. We are around 1celcius already. Therefore, we don't have much more to go.
>There's no way we (humans) are going to survive this scenario.
The reality is that climate change is impossible to stop; in fact it's probably a disaster to try to stop climate change. In the past 50 million years the earth has dropped 14 celcius. Between 20,000 years and 10,000 years ago we have increased 7 celcius.
> We also know fossil fuels mostly run out in around 2050-2060.
We don't know that, it will just get more expensive to extract it. And given that beneath the ice shelves of the arctic are untapped vast reserves of oil, we cannot even expect that to remain true anymore. Norway and Russia are already preparing exploitation of these reservoirs.
> So we are going to peak about 1.4celcius warmer.
At about 1.5 to 2°C we're going to see the methane in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf starting to be released. We were expecting this to start in the 2040ies, but guess what; it already started and we've seen the increase in CH4 ppm from 2018 through 2020. And while CH4 quickly degrades in the atmosphere, the release will very likely trigger a feedback loop that at about 3.0 to 3.5°C will start melting the suboceanic frozen CH4. This will then kick us easily up to 5°C (or above).
The IPCC models don't include any trigger points or feedback loops because our models are just not sophisticated enough.
> The climate changes, we shouldn't try to prevent it.
The climate change we're currently experiencing is human-made. It's orders-of-magnitudes faster than anything we see in the records. To say that this is just the same as the natural fluctuations of climatic behavior over tens of thousands of years is false equivalence. We definitely must do something about it or face extinction as a civilization (and possibly even as a species).
>We don't know that, it will just get more expensive to extract it. And given that beneath the ice shelves of the arctic are untapped vast reserves of oil, we cannot even expect that to remain true anymore. Norway and Russia are already preparing exploitation of these reservoirs.
The cost - benefit scenario and amortization reality. IPCC's position seems to be saying CO2 peaks around 2040 and then declines. Though I believe I was adding slightly to those figures saying 2050-2060. I'm not sure it's that plausible to predict that far in advance anyway. There's a very long history of bad predictions that harm the climate change movement.
>At about 1.5 to 2°C we're going to see the methane in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf starting to be released. We were expecting this to start in the 2040ies, but guess what; it already started and we've seen the increase in CH4 ppm from 2018 through 2020.
The Eemian was 2-4celcius warmer; but there was no extinction despite it coming on very rapidly. There was migration. Florida people might prefer Michigan for example. Michigan might like Manitoba but overall life will very much flourish greatly; just like it did during the Eemian.
>And while CH4 quickly degrades in the atmosphere, the release will very likely trigger a feedback loop that at about 3.0 to 3.5°C will start melting the suboceanic frozen CH4. This will then kick us easily up to 5°C (or above).
Admitedly I'm not sure I followed. Like the link I provided. IPCC is predicting only 1.4c increase. Could you point to where the IPCC got that wrong?
>The IPCC models don't include any trigger points because our models are just not sophisticated enough.
I feel like this is a bad argument because if the IPCC models are bad, then I question the beginning assertions that climate change is even happening.
>The climate change we're currently experiencing is human-made. It's orders-of-magnitudes faster than anything we see in the records. To say that this is just the same as the natural fluctuations of climatic behavior over tens of thousands of years is false equivalence. We definitely must do something about it or face extinction as a civilization (and possibly even as a species).
50 million years ago during the Eocene, the world was 14 celcius warmer. Life thrived. Yes, humans would not survive during this period. However, nobody is saying that we will reach that much warmer via our industrial endeavours.
You can also see like the Eemian, every 125,000 years temperature spikes on Earth and then slowly cools until the last glacial maximum and then spikes again. We should expect a similar spike.
Yet even with human caused warming, the predicted rise isn't as high as the Eemian.
In fact, we will never really know but between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago the world warmed 6 celcius. Then over the last 10,000 years it has fluctuated +- 1 celcius like the IPCC is predicting.
We haven't quite gotten to previous maximums before; but predicting that we are facing extinction because of these interglacial periods seems far fetched.
> Admitedly I'm not sure I followed. Like the link I provided. IPCC is predicting only 1.4c increase. Could you point to where the IPCC got that wrong?
From the report:
"This report uses mainly RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 in its assessment, reflecting the available literature. RCP2.6 represents a low greenhouse gas emissions, high mitigation future, that in CMIP5simulations gives a two in three chance of limiting global warming to below 2ºC by 2100. By contrast, RCP8.5 is a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario in the absence of policies to combat climate change, leading to continued and sustained growth in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations."
In my estimation, you too easily dismiss RPC8.5 and take the RPC2.6, the high mitigation, low emission scenario, as the default one. We're not currently on path for RPC2.6 and given that no industrial nation responsible for any significant proportion of our CO2 output is anywhere near meeting the necessary reductions, I dare say we're rather nearer somewhere a high-emission, low mitigation scenario.
> I feel like this is a bad argument because if the IPCC models are bad, then I question the beginning assertions that climate change is even happening.
> The Eemian was 2-4celcius warmer; but there was no extinction despite it coming on very rapidly. There was migration. Florida people might prefer Michigan for example.
A change in 2° C will already result in migrations that will put a never-before pressure on our political systems. We've seen the effects of a 'small' migration wave during the more active phase of the Syrian civil war, where we had some 6 million refugees. The refugees from the changing climate will number in the hundred of millions. We can expect some quite volatile situations to arise from this.
> maybe some amebas will evolve into something more peaceful that the savages we have become.
That's very unlikely. Our behavior is rooted in our biological need to consume resources and reproduce. Our failure to moderate our behavior is the same as the rabbit that's unable to reproduce once the environment's carrying capacity has been reached.
I'm pretty sure that this fundamental biological behavior (compete for resources to reproduce) is the Big Filter. So I reckon that every species going planetary apex will make the same mistake.
Why? Clearly we have more resources than we need, and a bunch of energy sources we can start to master. If even one of those pans out (and even if it doesn't Nuclear fuel reserves will get us well into 3000 even with exponential growth)
So how do you know your prediction is any different from John Malthus' ? You're assuming quite a lot of efforts will fail. I don't understand how you justify that assumption.
Especially since, if those efforts succeed and we massively increase the energy resources available to the human species, we can trade energy for just about any other resource (including reducing co2, or purifying water, or ...). At that point having hundreds of billions of humans becomes realistic.
Not enough time. Life on Earth, as we know it, has less than a billion years left.
Now, cockroaches might evolve impressively!
More seriously, humans will soon escape this particular rock, and things will look a LOT different. Smart people are optimistic.
There is a workable, brute-force solution to climate change if needed - orbital sunshades. We'll also have enough energy to supply the galaxy with diamond semiconductor substrates, carbon fiber, nanotubes, buckyballs, and the myriad other useful substances and items made from carbon extracted from the atmosphere. Again, if needed.
Market forces, with a nudge from government, are moving things in the right direction (electric cars, renewables, nuclear power, natural gas). China and India are the main worries at this point, as they have a lot invested in coal at the moment.
We'll have a better idea about negative feedback from existing natural systems over the next few years, there's some reason for optimism there. This is a highly nonlinear system.
In a free market doing something bad for the planet while being able to avoid paying the cost of cleaning up is an advantage. Companies don't move operations to places with less strict emissions rules and fewer labor laws for fun - they do it to increase their profit. As soon as governments start making corporations really pay for carbon it'll give any country that wants to grow its economy a competitive advantage by giving corporations incorporated there a lower rate, or even making it free to pollute entirely.
Unless you can persuade consumers to avoid companies that pollute (virtually impossible because companies will greenwash what they're doing) or unless you can get all the governments on Earth to agree (virtually impossible because governments want to do what's best for them) then there is no answer.
Climate change cannot be stopped while capitalist profit and growth chasing are what drives people to do things.
A free market without government doesn't prevent lawsuits against polluters that are ruining the air / water / climate / resources shared by everyone arbitrated by third parties and backed by rights enforcement agencies (on both sides).
Capitalism is not the root of the problem. If anything I'd say big companies lobbying big governments is the cause for no-one fixing this in 50 years.
Didn't watch the video, but my personal feeling is that it is never too late--but people won't like the solution. We either do a voluntary contraction, the most humane way being to simply stop reproducing (not entirely, but drastically), and for those that remain, to live simply, with fewer things, traveling far less. Essentially, we would move toward an agrarian economy (plus internet). No more suburbs. Cities would change drastically in the US (perhaps not so much in Europe).
Another option is an involuntary contraction caused by the effects of climate change, as fresh water supplies dwindle, soil erodes, and ecological collapse causes famine, war, and death. We are, say, 5% along this path.
In the worst case, technology can surely sustain at least a small human population indefinitely, even on a decimated planet Earth - dome living, and so forth. You know, the kinds of things we once imagined for settling distant planets. With any luck they will be scientists and engineers, working diligently to find a path back to our historical equilibrium that supported so much diverse life for so long. But that seems desperate, and hopeless, since achieving breakthroughs seems to require a certain population density and technology level.
What is striking to me is how reckless Americans are in consumption. Having lived in Germany a few years, I'm struck by how much more efficient and frugal life is there. Public transportation is easy and ubiquitous, healthcare is rational, simple, cheap, yet of high quality. "Stuff" is certainly more expensive, and you have fewer readily available options. People repair rather than replace. Many don't own a car. America could at least aim for something like that as part of a "voluntary contraction"! But I think we will continue to live recklessly, stuffing our bodies and homes and minds with junk until we die, bloated in every possible way, wondering why the world hates us for being free.
or... we can just introduce a $100/tonne carbon tax, which would not even cause more than short dip in economic growth.
Consumption isn't bad, carbon is bad. All the modern conveniences can be produced by low-carbon technology or offset by direct air capture, and for relatively low cost. An anti-growth mindset is religious thinking.
Energy moves atoms around, at all levels of scale, and a lot of our energy comes from unwinding the chemical springs in fossil fuels that leave those flacid springs in the air. Making and shipping stuff requires a lot of atoms to move, at each phase of the supply chain, and all of that motion requires a lot of energy. This is in addition to the energy required to run and maintain the machinery in a modern American household!
So yeah, I think consumption is bad because it drives a great deal of carbon release, both at production and during operation.
As for growth, I guess I'm in favor of quality over quantity, of both stuff and people. It seems to me that Earth would be better off with, like, 1B people gardening and sustainable farming, reading and writing books on paper, with perhaps one or two high-tech cities where people work on things like particle physics experiments, do space missions (especially planetary defense and exploration).
I wish it weren't so. Part of me wishes I lived in the 19th century, when so much of the world was still new, and to be explored, and the forests seemed endless and forbidding. And, unlike earlier times, there was technology available to exploit all those endless resources. People were blessedly ignorant of the externalities of their actions, and TBH the tech was relatively inefficient, so truly massive harm wasn't even possible. But I would say that to have a "pro-growth" mindset is itself a religious view, one that stands in opposition to the simple truth that we live in the very thin, very precious skin that is the entirely unique and valuable biosphere of Earth.
So what if we could profitably do carbon recapture for $100/ton which was funded by a $100/ton carbon tax and start an entire industry that reverses carbon in the atmosphere, would you still be against consumption then?
The USA has a similar level of taxation (when not higher) than European countries, so I would argue America's freedom is basically free speech and right to own weapons. You're slaves like the rest of us here in Europe and the government allows you to keep some of the profits you make.
Everything you mentioned is the result of badly spent public money:
- Ridiculous spending on politics causing society polarization
- Army overspending and warmongering
- Poor education leading to people making poor choices (and live the wasteful lives you described)
- Inflated cost of health care because of insurance companies lobbying the government
- Terrible public transport
You're not free but 200 years ago you were the closest thing to free we had in the world.
It's sad to see that the minarchist experiment of the USA failed over time: the USA is the largest employer in the world and spends 13bln per day.
Hopefully the next experiment won't make the same mistake.
This is simply not going to happen - there's a preponderance of historical evidence indicating that's not how the human race behaves. Either we're going to rise to the challenge and save ourselves with our technology and ingenuity or we're going to flame-out. As we've gone global the stakes have risen higher - instead of a single civilization flaming-out as has happened in the past now we're facing the prospect of the entirety of civilization flaming-out.
Note too that "the end of civilization" is not "the end of humanity." As you point out even in the worst-case scenario there will still be humans, but life will bear little semblance to what life is like today.
I think our COVID-19 response offers a glimpse as to how climate change is going to affect us. There's denial that a problem even exists, people start dying by the hundreds of thousands, there's still a denial that a problem exists, we develop treatment therapies and vaccines (we hope!) significantly reducing the risk and life goes on. You can see global climate change has been on the same trajectory and getting the same response - largely denial with a few people rolling up their sleeves and figuring out what we can do about it. Sadly, tens of millions of people will probably die - and there will still be people denying there's a problem - and we'll (hopefully) hit on a solution. I really don't see things progressing any other way.
Ok, so climate change is an existential threat. So why instead of talking about how we should stop reproducing and live frugally- which we all know it's not going to happen- we don't replace 100% of our non-renewable power generation with nuclear? Because it is expensive? But who cares? Or because it is dangerous? But again, 100 Chernobyls are better than complete destruction, right? So where are the climate activists' rallies for nuclear power?
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadDon't listen to the doomsayers that just talk and don't propose any practical solutions.
At least there are those who are developing the tools, technologies and policies that will slow it down or make a significant impact in stopping it.
Not changing behaviors and just hoping for magical, unproven technology is plain stupid in my view. We are going to need that investment in technology, but it‘s not the magic solution. Many ecosystems aren’t even fully understood, so we can’t really tell what will result of their imminent collapse.
That might seem like a lot but based on US average consumption based emissions (production based emissions taxation is for chumps) that's $850 annually by the late 2020s. Of course, all or most of that can be returned to people through other tax reductions. I can't be the only one who looks at that number and thinks, "Is that fucking it? Jesus, just do it then."
From here onwards it is damage control. It is not the end of the world, we just require intellectual honesty about the situation.
It's possible the origins of this reside in the first Industrial Revolution.
I take it to mean for the human race to continue its existence in roughly the same way we've become accustomed over the past century or so (though the time frame will vary according to people, I suppose.
>maybe some amebas will evolve into something more peaceful that the savages we have become.
that could well be the case or we might be in this situation in a few billion years
But from a common sense angle: the world can get a hell of a lot hotter before siberia is less habitable than arizona is now.
Not really.
It doesn't seem to be.
We're currently on-track for a +5°C increase in temperature by 2050. Besides wreaking havoc to all existing ecosystems, it's also very likely that this will kill off most of the phytoplankton in the oceans. That's the stuff that makes most of the O2 for us.
There's no way we (humans) are going to survive this scenario.
Al Gore is of the opinion that it's not. You can take that with a grain of salt because Al Gore's predictions have been quite incorrect. He claimed the Icecaps would be completely gone 6+ years ago. He claimed Florida and India would be under water today.
>We're currently on-track for a +5°C increase in temperature by 2050.
I'm happy to tell you that it's not. The source of this is the IPCC report from 2014. The claim comes from RCP8.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P...
RCP8.5 was never an expected prediction, it was a theoretical worst case of some unknown huge increase in carbon emissions. When in reality, humanity has done some amount of decrease. The RCP8.5 claim is basically considered wrong now. In fact we are on track for RCP4.5 despite not doing what IPCC says we need to do to reach this. This is great news.
We also know fossil fuels mostly run out in around 2050-2060. A simple reality that even if we don't do anything, we simply run out and must adapt to life without fossil fuels.
So we are going to peak about 1.4celcius warmer. We are around 1celcius already. Therefore, we don't have much more to go.
>There's no way we (humans) are going to survive this scenario.
The reality is that climate change is impossible to stop; in fact it's probably a disaster to try to stop climate change. In the past 50 million years the earth has dropped 14 celcius. Between 20,000 years and 10,000 years ago we have increased 7 celcius.
Just 125,000 years ago the Earth was 2-4 celcius warmer than today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#Global_temperatures
Humans didn't affect any of these events. The climate changes, we shouldn't try to prevent it.
We don't know that, it will just get more expensive to extract it. And given that beneath the ice shelves of the arctic are untapped vast reserves of oil, we cannot even expect that to remain true anymore. Norway and Russia are already preparing exploitation of these reservoirs.
> So we are going to peak about 1.4celcius warmer.
At about 1.5 to 2°C we're going to see the methane in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf starting to be released. We were expecting this to start in the 2040ies, but guess what; it already started and we've seen the increase in CH4 ppm from 2018 through 2020. And while CH4 quickly degrades in the atmosphere, the release will very likely trigger a feedback loop that at about 3.0 to 3.5°C will start melting the suboceanic frozen CH4. This will then kick us easily up to 5°C (or above).
The IPCC models don't include any trigger points or feedback loops because our models are just not sophisticated enough.
> The climate changes, we shouldn't try to prevent it.
The climate change we're currently experiencing is human-made. It's orders-of-magnitudes faster than anything we see in the records. To say that this is just the same as the natural fluctuations of climatic behavior over tens of thousands of years is false equivalence. We definitely must do something about it or face extinction as a civilization (and possibly even as a species).
The cost - benefit scenario and amortization reality. IPCC's position seems to be saying CO2 peaks around 2040 and then declines. Though I believe I was adding slightly to those figures saying 2050-2060. I'm not sure it's that plausible to predict that far in advance anyway. There's a very long history of bad predictions that harm the climate change movement.
>At about 1.5 to 2°C we're going to see the methane in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf starting to be released. We were expecting this to start in the 2040ies, but guess what; it already started and we've seen the increase in CH4 ppm from 2018 through 2020.
Right, just like what we saw during the Eemian period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian
The Eemian was 2-4celcius warmer; but there was no extinction despite it coming on very rapidly. There was migration. Florida people might prefer Michigan for example. Michigan might like Manitoba but overall life will very much flourish greatly; just like it did during the Eemian.
>And while CH4 quickly degrades in the atmosphere, the release will very likely trigger a feedback loop that at about 3.0 to 3.5°C will start melting the suboceanic frozen CH4. This will then kick us easily up to 5°C (or above).
Admitedly I'm not sure I followed. Like the link I provided. IPCC is predicting only 1.4c increase. Could you point to where the IPCC got that wrong?
>The IPCC models don't include any trigger points because our models are just not sophisticated enough.
I feel like this is a bad argument because if the IPCC models are bad, then I question the beginning assertions that climate change is even happening.
>The climate change we're currently experiencing is human-made. It's orders-of-magnitudes faster than anything we see in the records. To say that this is just the same as the natural fluctuations of climatic behavior over tens of thousands of years is false equivalence. We definitely must do something about it or face extinction as a civilization (and possibly even as a species).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
50 million years ago during the Eocene, the world was 14 celcius warmer. Life thrived. Yes, humans would not survive during this period. However, nobody is saying that we will reach that much warmer via our industrial endeavours.
You can also see like the Eemian, every 125,000 years temperature spikes on Earth and then slowly cools until the last glacial maximum and then spikes again. We should expect a similar spike.
Yet even with human caused warming, the predicted rise isn't as high as the Eemian.
In fact, we will never really know but between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago the world warmed 6 celcius. Then over the last 10,000 years it has fluctuated +- 1 celcius like the IPCC is predicting.
I don't think we understand the interglacial periods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial#/media/File:Ice_A...
We haven't quite gotten to previous maximums before; but predicting that we are facing extinction because of these interglacial periods seems far fetched.
From the report: "This report uses mainly RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 in its assessment, reflecting the available literature. RCP2.6 represents a low greenhouse gas emissions, high mitigation future, that in CMIP5simulations gives a two in three chance of limiting global warming to below 2ºC by 2100. By contrast, RCP8.5 is a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario in the absence of policies to combat climate change, leading to continued and sustained growth in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations."
In my estimation, you too easily dismiss RPC8.5 and take the RPC2.6, the high mitigation, low emission scenario, as the default one. We're not currently on path for RPC2.6 and given that no industrial nation responsible for any significant proportion of our CO2 output is anywhere near meeting the necessary reductions, I dare say we're rather nearer somewhere a high-emission, low mitigation scenario.
> I feel like this is a bad argument because if the IPCC models are bad, then I question the beginning assertions that climate change is even happening.
No need for that. We've seen in the past that the climate models tend to be very 'conservative' in the changes they predict. But there are many known path-dependent variables, feedback loops and tripping points that are missing from most of the models. So, if anything, incorporating these into the climate models would result in much more dramatic changes. (see https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-climate-changes-worsens-a-..., https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/12/climate-change-tippin...)
> The Eemian was 2-4celcius warmer; but there was no extinction despite it coming on very rapidly. There was migration. Florida people might prefer Michigan for example.
A change in 2° C will already result in migrations that will put a never-before pressure on our political systems. We've seen the effects of a 'small' migration wave during the more active phase of the Syrian civil war, where we had some 6 million refugees. The refugees from the changing climate will number in the hundred of millions. We can expect some quite volatile situations to arise from this.
> In fact we are on track for RCP4.5 despite not doing what IPCC says we need to do to reach this. This is great news.
From my current understanding, that's not the case, is it?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200831112101.h...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/after-40-years-resea...
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/33/19656
Good news is that this is extremely unlikely. Bad news is that survival of humanity isn't equivalent to survival of everyone.
That's very unlikely. Our behavior is rooted in our biological need to consume resources and reproduce. Our failure to moderate our behavior is the same as the rabbit that's unable to reproduce once the environment's carrying capacity has been reached.
I'm pretty sure that this fundamental biological behavior (compete for resources to reproduce) is the Big Filter. So I reckon that every species going planetary apex will make the same mistake.
So how do you know your prediction is any different from John Malthus' ? You're assuming quite a lot of efforts will fail. I don't understand how you justify that assumption.
Especially since, if those efforts succeed and we massively increase the energy resources available to the human species, we can trade energy for just about any other resource (including reducing co2, or purifying water, or ...). At that point having hundreds of billions of humans becomes realistic.
Now, cockroaches might evolve impressively!
More seriously, humans will soon escape this particular rock, and things will look a LOT different. Smart people are optimistic.
There is a workable, brute-force solution to climate change if needed - orbital sunshades. We'll also have enough energy to supply the galaxy with diamond semiconductor substrates, carbon fiber, nanotubes, buckyballs, and the myriad other useful substances and items made from carbon extracted from the atmosphere. Again, if needed.
Market forces, with a nudge from government, are moving things in the right direction (electric cars, renewables, nuclear power, natural gas). China and India are the main worries at this point, as they have a lot invested in coal at the moment.
We'll have a better idea about negative feedback from existing natural systems over the next few years, there's some reason for optimism there. This is a highly nonlinear system.
In a free market doing something bad for the planet while being able to avoid paying the cost of cleaning up is an advantage. Companies don't move operations to places with less strict emissions rules and fewer labor laws for fun - they do it to increase their profit. As soon as governments start making corporations really pay for carbon it'll give any country that wants to grow its economy a competitive advantage by giving corporations incorporated there a lower rate, or even making it free to pollute entirely.
Unless you can persuade consumers to avoid companies that pollute (virtually impossible because companies will greenwash what they're doing) or unless you can get all the governments on Earth to agree (virtually impossible because governments want to do what's best for them) then there is no answer.
Climate change cannot be stopped while capitalist profit and growth chasing are what drives people to do things.
> Climate change cannot be stopped while capitalist profit and growth chasing are what drives people to do things.
I hope not, because if we're going to have to change our system before we can tackle climate change we're doomed.
Capitalism is not the root of the problem. If anything I'd say big companies lobbying big governments is the cause for no-one fixing this in 50 years.
In reality? Absolutely.
People have clearly decided, with their wallets and at the ballot box, that climate change is less important than the economy.
Another option is an involuntary contraction caused by the effects of climate change, as fresh water supplies dwindle, soil erodes, and ecological collapse causes famine, war, and death. We are, say, 5% along this path.
In the worst case, technology can surely sustain at least a small human population indefinitely, even on a decimated planet Earth - dome living, and so forth. You know, the kinds of things we once imagined for settling distant planets. With any luck they will be scientists and engineers, working diligently to find a path back to our historical equilibrium that supported so much diverse life for so long. But that seems desperate, and hopeless, since achieving breakthroughs seems to require a certain population density and technology level.
What is striking to me is how reckless Americans are in consumption. Having lived in Germany a few years, I'm struck by how much more efficient and frugal life is there. Public transportation is easy and ubiquitous, healthcare is rational, simple, cheap, yet of high quality. "Stuff" is certainly more expensive, and you have fewer readily available options. People repair rather than replace. Many don't own a car. America could at least aim for something like that as part of a "voluntary contraction"! But I think we will continue to live recklessly, stuffing our bodies and homes and minds with junk until we die, bloated in every possible way, wondering why the world hates us for being free.
Consumption isn't bad, carbon is bad. All the modern conveniences can be produced by low-carbon technology or offset by direct air capture, and for relatively low cost. An anti-growth mindset is religious thinking.
So yeah, I think consumption is bad because it drives a great deal of carbon release, both at production and during operation.
As for growth, I guess I'm in favor of quality over quantity, of both stuff and people. It seems to me that Earth would be better off with, like, 1B people gardening and sustainable farming, reading and writing books on paper, with perhaps one or two high-tech cities where people work on things like particle physics experiments, do space missions (especially planetary defense and exploration).
I wish it weren't so. Part of me wishes I lived in the 19th century, when so much of the world was still new, and to be explored, and the forests seemed endless and forbidding. And, unlike earlier times, there was technology available to exploit all those endless resources. People were blessedly ignorant of the externalities of their actions, and TBH the tech was relatively inefficient, so truly massive harm wasn't even possible. But I would say that to have a "pro-growth" mindset is itself a religious view, one that stands in opposition to the simple truth that we live in the very thin, very precious skin that is the entirely unique and valuable biosphere of Earth.
This is borderline hijacking a post.
The whole point of the video is to point out that its getting dire but its not too late, by breaking down climate change to a basic factors.
Everything you mentioned is the result of badly spent public money: - Ridiculous spending on politics causing society polarization - Army overspending and warmongering - Poor education leading to people making poor choices (and live the wasteful lives you described) - Inflated cost of health care because of insurance companies lobbying the government - Terrible public transport
You're not free but 200 years ago you were the closest thing to free we had in the world.
It's sad to see that the minarchist experiment of the USA failed over time: the USA is the largest employer in the world and spends 13bln per day.
Hopefully the next experiment won't make the same mistake.
Note too that "the end of civilization" is not "the end of humanity." As you point out even in the worst-case scenario there will still be humans, but life will bear little semblance to what life is like today.
I think our COVID-19 response offers a glimpse as to how climate change is going to affect us. There's denial that a problem even exists, people start dying by the hundreds of thousands, there's still a denial that a problem exists, we develop treatment therapies and vaccines (we hope!) significantly reducing the risk and life goes on. You can see global climate change has been on the same trajectory and getting the same response - largely denial with a few people rolling up their sleeves and figuring out what we can do about it. Sadly, tens of millions of people will probably die - and there will still be people denying there's a problem - and we'll (hopefully) hit on a solution. I really don't see things progressing any other way.
Because it would be way too expensive and you could get the same result much cheaper and quicker other ways.
Because even if we did this, it would be less than 20% of what we need to do.