1.5*C ? What kind of fictional reality are living in? We are way past 2.4*C projection and are actually on track for 2.9*C or so.
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/09/cop26-sets-course-for-disastrous-heating-of-more-than-24c-says-key-report" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/09/cop26-se...</a>
We are too politically polarized to solve problems in this class, which requires political unity because of the scale, cost, and speed requirements.<p>All of our major political forces play games, constantly make moves in bad faith, talk out of both sides of their mouths publicly vs privately, so we are screwed.<p>The reality is that IF climate change science were a big hoax (sadly, it's not) there WOULD be a team using it for political games, so there will always be a large class of people who believe that's what's going on.<p>Maybe if we didn't spend decades politicizing every microscopic issue including in science, technology, and medicine, we could have policy makers advocate for positions based on science and everyone would trust it. That's not the world we live in and unfortunately, it looks like we never will.
Not a surprise, since co2 is an oxide, and therefore very stable in the athmosphere. It would take a huge amount of energy to remove it, and we don't even stop putting it in there.<p>Janvici had a nice way to put it: the 1.5C are already signed for, which means we won't ever see the climate of today again in the next 5000 years.
An assessment of climate tipping points that are likely to be triggered at 1.5C degrees of warming: <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950</a><p>The main threats would be near-term coral reef die-offs and ice sheet collapses.
There is no chance of removing existing CO2 from Air to make any sort of difference.<p>There is no chance of meaningfully reducing CO2 emissions, because outside of Nuclear (and hydro/geothermal but only if you have the geography for it) there is no alternative to replacing fossil fuels. At some point the public will realize the lie of solar/wind as a replacement. We lost 50 years of greatly reduced emissions had nuclear power continued to be rolled out at the same rate as it did in the 60s/70s.<p>There is possibility of geoengineering (e.g. emitting some sort of sun-light reflecting gas into the atmosphere to cool the climate) but that suffers from a potential "law of unintended consequences".<p>It seems like we're going to have to deal with it.
No surprises here. We've known for years we're going to shoot beyond 2C with very high certainty.<p>Even if a miracle happened and we reached zero emissions today, the climate will keep warming at least for some more decades due to climate lag and feedbacks.
I used to be really depressed about this sort of thing. It caused me to severely limit my lifestyle out of a desire to "do the right thing". I didn't own a car. Very low consumption and minimal waste (no takeaway food, coffee etc., very frugal, didn't use things like paper towels and napkins). I cycled and walked everywhere. Didn't go on holidays abroad or even very far away.<p>Then I looked around and noticed that everyone else was enjoying themselves at my expense. Worse, I was often a second-class citizen as my bicycle couldn't stand up to their cars.<p>So I said fuck it, bought a car, fly several times a year, use paper towels, drive to the air-conditioned gym so my body looks like it's useful, don't care about my waste as much. Can't beat 'em, join 'em. I still reckon I use and waste less than the average person (certainly less than the average American), though.<p>I can be happy with this because I'm not going to reproduce. I honestly don't care if humans die out a few generations after me. I used to care but I just don't think we are worth it any more.
> This analysis finds that new efforts to cut carbon would see global emissions fall by less than 1% by 2030, when according to scientists, reductions of 45% are needed to keep 1.5C in play.<p>I'm reminded of that scene in Dumb & Dumber when Mary has just told Lloyd his chances of ending up with her are one in a million:<p>"So you're telling me there's a chance. YEAH!"
Let me just leave a Unicode ‘degree’ symbol here for anyone who needs one:<p>°<p>(on iOS and possibly MacOS you can get one of these by pressing and holding ‘zero’ until the alternate characters appear)
Neal Stephenson's most recent novel, <i>Termination shock</i> describes a near-future world where climate change's effects are becoming more visible and obvious. Without spoiling too much, it explores the politics of aerosol (sulpher) injection into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the planet.
So, this challenge asks for rapid transformations of society.<p>The unfortunate thing is, we've shown that we can change behavior rapidly, but only if we think we think we're personally in danger, and we'll only willingly keep that transformation for a little while. Carbon emissions dropped in 2020, but it took people actually being scared into staying in their homes, and stopping whole sectors of the economy. What if the most effective climate plan is a long, deep, global depression? In addition to curbing emissions, high unemployment would reanimate the "green new deal" concept. The bad news is climate and geopolitical instability might just give us what we need.
> "We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over," said Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP, who produced the study.<p>> "Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster," she said.<p>I don't see that happening, and my guess is neither do they. Plan C needs to be a massive geoengineering project that would have seemed crazy even ten years ago, may worry some people as irresponsible even now. The nightmare scenario is that we can't even do <i>that</i> in time, because we're too busy arguing about it.
The title is somewhat out of context, the abstract says "the international community is falling far short of the Paris goals, with no credible pathway to 1.5°C in place". So it's not saying we can't do it, it's saying we're failing and take action.<p>(Not to downplay it at all, we really need to get things happening right now on the policy decisions level)
I wish someone calculated with some certainty how much the lifestyles in different countries would have to change if the world just had to drop production that emits excess gases. I bet that would show that there's no way people modify their habits for this, especially in the ‘first world’.<p>(As for myself, I'm living on less that 400 bucks a month, including rent, use transport once a month; and most energy I use is probably for central heating in the winter and for pumping water—otherwise it's the fridge and boiling water for tea. But idk about the ‘footprint’, probably still not good.)
Please, continue to add past the 14,200 new temperature reading stations in mostly the exclusively US urban/metro areas since 1973.<p>It is important to stack the average by the virtue of its urban heat (over the cooler but carbon-tax-infused countrysides) and be able to note its mostly upward climate-change trend.<p>And we won't bother with illusive matrix math in smoothing out the newer stations because we got the eLusive hockey stick trend going now (which started in 1973).<p>Let's not ignore these 14,200+ new temp. stations because all data are valid.<p>/sarcasm
What is Deloitte saying about that?
<a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/gx-global-turning-point-report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Docume...</a><p>and a short analysis: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--QS_UyW2SY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--QS_UyW2SY</a>
That this is news reflects only the reluctance of much of world leadership to acknowledge it. Anybody paying attention has known for over a decade that a +1.5C limit is out of reach.<p>The question the world faces now is whether the 3C rise we're actually going to get is enough to trigger non-human forcing through various feedback loops dumping carbon into the atmosphere in the form of CO2 and CH4, to require runaway warming as the future.<p>I'm not optimistic.
Climate change seems to me to be the "gotcha" of liberal democracy. The timescales involved in democracy are so short that there's little incentive to do the things that would improve the situation, since the pain is felt now vs the (greater) pain in the future of climate change.
There was no <i>credible</i> pathway to 1.5 when it was established at COP 21 in 2015.<p>And previous to 1.5, the big number was 1.0.<p>It'll be interesting if the mass media push changes the focus again and starts popularizing 2.0C. Or maybe they'll move the baseline up again at the next COP. What a farce.
> "Into the classrooms, into the boardrooms, into the voting booth, over the dinner table. We cannot let go of climate change."<p>I wonder if this is the right approach. It certainly is the approach we have been following for years. But I think that has just lead to empathy fatigue.<p>Edit: added empathy
It really is starting to feel like the fringe of the environmental movement have really been the bad guys all along. Blocking nuclear starting in the 70s, focusing only on recycling in the 80s and 90s (consumption doesn't matter as long as something could be recycled), blocking natural gas/oil in favor of coal in the 90s-2000s, blocking wind farms ("think of the birds!!"), batteries, and solar panels (too many chemicals/can't be recycled) in the 2010s, and now pushing the plastic straws will kill us all narrative in the 2020s (at the direct expense of the climate narrative).<p>I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, but only a little bit. It's a decades long story of not seeing the forest for the trees and focusing on minor environmental impacts rather than the big climate issue staring us down. Like, this is exactly the strategy I'd take if my goal were to create as much warming as possible without anyone catching on...
The appropriately apocalyptic soundtrack to accompany this article: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi0q0O4V5Qs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi0q0O4V5Qs</a>
> "Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster," she said.<p>Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
Fighting climate change is, and probably always has been, a losing battle. The upside is that one of the remedies to the problems caused by climate upheaval is greater energy independence - which naturally steers us towards renewables. So, we might eventually end up with a net zero carbon economy anyway - but it'll be because of a desire for local stability, rather than to help save poor people in the developing world from environmental collapse.
Such pathways require global cooperation and will fail unless all major nations are on board. In particular, Russia is making no effort, and has no incentive or motivation to make any effort due to their vast tundra landscape. Step 1 is to get Russia on board by some means, without Russia any of these goals are senseless.
Seems that we are already 1C degree above preindustrial levels.<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-pre-industrial-climate-and-why-does-it-matter-78601" rel="nofollow">https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-pre-industrial-climate...</a><p>Doesn't seem unlikely that temperature will increase 1C more. Wonder if it's going to be just as destructive as the first 1C of warming holocaust?
I wish humanity could discard narrow-minded nationalist/short-sighted capitalist tendencies and unite against this threat. Imagine a climate pact between the US, EU, China and India where each society placed a similar focus on pivoting to renewables and developing reliable fusion energy as the Allies devoted to winning ww2 and developing atomic weaponry. Amusingly, the end of our dependency would also resolve many geopolitical concerns. However, governments across the globe are run by people who lack the proper morals or intelligence to see what needs to be done.
Maybe then we should consider not kneecapping our economy and driving people into poverty? The worst thing for the environment is poverty. I'm convinced most of the measures put in place to fight climate change have been a net negative to the environment, when you consider how much they are impoverishing people and thus driving more people to disregard environmental concerns for survival.