It's long been known that the IPCC reports tend to be too conservative.<p>Nevertheless politicians take the numbers for the least dramatic predictions and turn them into promises that they then don't keep.<p>I guess that it won't be long before some country or other embarks on a unilateral geoengineering experiment. Perhaps when river basins in India start reaching lethal wet-bulb temperatures regularly. Let's just hope that it won't make things worse.
No one wants to pay the cost of tackling this problem.<p>Especially not the for-profit corporations that are responsible for some of the worst pollution in the world.<p>Ironically, they own the biggest capital and resources to be able to tackle the problem that they are creating.
One of the memes on <a href="https://reddit.com/r/collapse" rel="nofollow">https://reddit.com/r/collapse</a> is "faster than expected," referencing the frequent articles mentioning how climate change's effects are kicking in much sooner than expected.
I think given the current political climate (sic), scientists tends to be overly cautious on these subjects. They know they can be berated for any not fully proven detail or tiny error. All in all I don't think this is a bad thing, forces against real changes are such that incremental actions are the norm anyway.
>"Elsewhere we have documented a pattern we label "erring on the side of least drama." By this we mean that scientists often have a tendency to avoid dramatic findings, because drama is associated with emotion, feelings, irrationality, and even femininity, qualities that have traditionally been viewed as at odds with scientific rationality. We have shown that in several domains related to climate change, scientists' estimates of various threats - CO2 emissions, Arctic Sea ice loss, Sea level rise - have tended to be low relative to actual outcomes. Scientists considered such underestimates to be "conservative" because they are conservative with respect to the question of when to sound an alarm or how loudly to sound it. (It is of course not conservative when viewed in terms of giving people adequate time to prepare.) The history recounted here is consistent with this finding: That WAIS assessments underestimated the threat of rapid ice sheet disintegration, because most of the scientists who participated were more comfortable with an estimate that they viewed as "Conservative" than with one that was not." (Discerning Experts, 2019. Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson, Keynyn Brysse, Jessica O'Reilly, Matthew Shindell, and Milena Wazeck)
Dr. Gwynne Dyer gave a talk, "Geopolitics in a Hotter World" – Sept. 2010<p>> So when the Hadley Centre put these numbers out they were incorporating (which the IPCC does not) the early impacts of positive feedbacks, as well as just how much carbon dioxide will we put into the air by 2060. First time that had been done, but it gives you a really frightening number…and then they did the map. Which is again, something that’s not normally done, and the consequence is we don’t have a lot of time. We’re in deep trouble. And the military know this; the military know this everywhere.<p>> the rule of thumb is that you lose 10% of global food production for every 1 degree Celsius higher average global temperature.<p>> So food becomes the critical issue and the countries most impacted are tropical and subtropical and this is where the geopolitics comes from.<p>> “people always raid before they starve.”<p>> There’s already a well established pattern: when you’re in deep trouble and you can’t feed your family, head north.<p>> But the dirty secret is that you can only shut a border if you’re willing to kill people.<p>> No government that cannot feed its population survives.<p>> We’re going to go through the point of no return (and probably a good deal further) in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Almost certain.<p>> And there is maybe a way to cheat: and that is geoengineering.<p>> “we’ve crunched the numbers and we figure we could get one degree Celsius of cooling average worldwide just by painting all the roads and the roofs white.”<p>> I talked–actually, the head of the Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies about this (you didn’t even know that existed, did you?). Well, there is one, it’s quite serious–run by a General, bright guy. I said, “have you heard about geoengineering?” and he smiled–seraphically–and he said, “Mmm. Yes. Your question?”<p>> And I asked the question, “Do you think that this is something the Bangladesh government might want to do a little bit, before, let’s say, the US government or the Chinese government?”<p>> He said, “yes it has crossed our minds.”–and then he stopped talking.<p>...<p>Talk: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY</a><p>Transcribed: <a href="https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geopolitics-in-a-hotter-world-ubc-talk-transcribed-sept-2010/" rel="nofollow">https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...</a>
Doesn't water cool when it changes state? Ice melting should be pulling down temps for the time in that spot? More heat would evaporate more water and thus cool more?
Except methane is the cause and intentionally so as it will dissapate in less than a decade but make it appear as if the world is warming more quickly than estimated.<p>It's a trick and people eat this shit up hook line and ignorant sinker.
What if humans collectively decided to not have any new kids anymore and maximize quality of life for the humans that already are living on planet earth?<p>I would love to see this thought experiment thought out in detail. What decisions would we make? Where would we invest? Would climate control still be an issue?