> Rather than collapse into despair, getting real about 1.5°C should mean we are able to hold open a space of grounded, realistic optimism.
So what does that realistic optimism look like? "We're never gonna make 1.5, we've already blown past it, hundreds of millions of people are going to suffer and die because of the choices of the wealthy. But, on the bright side..."
I don't think many people, especially politicians, can honestly be realistic AND optimistic. You can't put optimism into this conversation until you've first had acceptance. And you can't have acceptance until you have at least understood the significance of the situation and probably gone through some kind of grieving process. We're way off from that. People are still booking international vacations and buying brand new full size SUVs to do groceries.
And there's no need to collapse into despair either.
I think you're mischaracterizing the nature of the problem. Take a look at [1] for example - US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been dropping for a while now. The same is true for the EU as a whole [2]. So where is the increase in CO2 emissions each year coming from then? The developing world that wants a western world standard of living. Take a look at India for example [3]. It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG. Would you like to tell people that?
By all means, we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem.
> It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG.
No, we should tell them to leap frog the energy systems of the West and go straight to more efficient, cheaper (in medium to long term) energy sources like nuclear and solar. The same way many developing countries skipped over land lines and went straight to cellular for communications technology.
We should tell them with tariffs and economic sanctions if necessary. Renewables are cheaper (even when firmed with battery storage), there is no reason not to use them versus fossil fuels. You have to internalize the carbon emission costs into the economic system to encourage the desired outcome, otherwise humans will do the human thing: pollute with wild abandon when there is no cost to do so.
South Africa just commissioned a new coal plant expected to operate until 2075, one that will never turn a profit (for various reasons). It should be extremely economically painful for them to make such a decision, so much so that they revisit the depreciation schedule of the asset and alternatives.
Electric cars and renewable energy are cheaper in the long term than gasoline cars and fossil energy, but gasoline cars and fossil energy require less capital up front.
The problem is that the third world is short of capital. So lend them the capital at really good rates (0% for example). That'll make the adoption of green solutions a no brainer for them.
If the new renewable energy sources were really as good as advertised - not only cleaner than fossil fuels, but also so much cheaper as well - then this would indeed be both obvious and inevitable. China in particular has a lot of the world's capacity to produce renewable generation equipment, they shouldn't need to rerun the pollution of western countries to have prosperity and this would solve both their massive pollution problems and their need to find new infrastructure projects to fund in order to prop up the economy, both major political headaches domestically. Yet they keep on pointing to the West's emissions as justification for why they should increase CO2 output instead. They also don't have the NIMBY problems of some Western countries.
My general conclusion is that the reason for this is that switching to green energy is neither as easy nor as cheap as advertised. Sure, on paper the cost per GWh is great and you can even realise much of that for the first few projects, but the cost of dealing with a lack of dispatchability and of intermittency from sources like solar and wind ends up massively outweighing that in practice. So no-one actually wants to switch to an all-renewable grid.
Growing economies might install as much solar as they're able, but they can still be tempted to burn fossil fuels on top of that, to grow even faster. Limiting climate change is going to require moderation, which is a tough ask for capitalism...
The reason why the West emissions are (slowly) decreasing is not because it's getting more sober or efficient, but because it is exporting emitting activities to the rest if the world.
We are shuffling emissions around, which at a global scale is pointless.
You don't need to tell them that. Rich countries could subsidize clean energy projects in poor countries. That's only fair given that most carbon emissions per capita have come from rich countries. Like a retroactive carbon tax.
Talking beyond your snark to anyone else reading this -- obviously I mean solar, wind, nuclear or hydro installations either in the poor country, or in the rich country and piped into the poor country via HVDC at discount rates.
Anything less is quite morally unfair if you think about it. Rich countries have imposed this massive externality on poor countries and they haven't compensated the poor countries for doing so. If you make money by dumping waste into my backyard, the least you can do is give me a small slice of the profits.
Subsidizing clean energy in poor countries is a way to satisfy this moral obligation while also solving the problem you raised.
You mean wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electrolysers? Because we have them available right now. In fact, we had them for the last couple of decades.
we have them yes, and at this moment, the richest country in Europe is rationing hot water and restarting coal power plants due a temporary disruption of supply of another fossil fuel.
Europe + North America is 10% of the world population, and we can barely carry our own burden.
I don't see your argument. Everybody knows that we're not deploying carbon free technology sufficiently quickly. That's why we're reading these articles.
in your reality, we're a type 1 civilization with unlimited resources, so obscenely rich that providing the rest of the world with free clean energy is a matter of political will
in my reality, we're 95% dependent on fossil fuels, dams and nuclear power stations cost tens of billions and take decades to build, there are no viable energy storage technologies, and even the few somewhat viable renewable energy technologies we possess still rely on a limited supply of expensive things like lithium. also, in my reality, double digit percentage of our population lives in poverty, and about half lives paycheck to paycheck, and our richest country is 30T in debt
We spend literal trillions on waging war. Every rocket fired in Ukraine today would pay for solar panels for a house or two. It's not a matter of money. Look how well we managed to to switch literally all industry to building weapons during the last world war. If we wanted to we could do the same for renewable energy. It's a matter of priorities.
But in actuality, it's much easier to do than that, because renewable energy is not all that expensive or hard to build. In many scenarios it's profitable to build it today, but bureaucracy is in the way. The proper market incentives and a bit of legislation would probably be enough to have private industry take over.
> Every rocket fired in Ukraine today would pay for solar panels for a house or two.
But it's more important that we stop Putin from just taking whatever territory he wants and killing as many civilians as it takes to do that than it is to put solar panels on a few more houses.
If you don't spend any money on your military except when you need it, it will take so long to get it back up to speed that you'll probably lose the war in the meantime.
And if you don't spend any money on renewable energy life for a large fraction of our species will become much harder.
And it's not like military spending is really necessary either. The US for example spent a lot of money in Afghanistan and Iraq even though the country wasn't under reasonable threat from those actors.
You interpret little action and a lack of political will as evidence for "too hard and too expensive", when it's mostly ideological possession and corruption by anti-renewable conservatives, and to a smaller extent anti-nuclear greens.
Solar and wind costs are roughly on par with fossil fuels now. Variability doesn't matter when you can pipe excess amounts into poorer countries. It's all excuses.
"double digit percentage of our population lives in poverty"
So you're taking the moral high ground huh. Will you be happy to accept a hundred million immigrants from SEA when the pollution from your country has made their region too hot to be liveable? Or will there be a convenient excuse to not do that?
Nobody forces developing countries to go through the same process as developed countries for raising the standard of living. We have the technology to achieve a very good standard of living with very low carbon emissions. It's not that much more expensive than burning fossil fuels either.
Before asking people in developing countries not to have a proper house, we could try to forbid private planes and reduce military spending by half, for instance.
The military use of fuels is just ridiculous. If we are not able to stop "small" and superfluous things like that, then, simply there is not hope.
> When I say the military, I mean, all the military, that's the minimum we the citizens of the world should be requesting.
You can ask, but you won't get it. Disarmament, and I don't just mean nuclear, requires a level of trust that simply does not exist, because a relatively small group defecting (in the game theory sense) would be able to conquer the world.
It has been done in the past and can be done in the future. If we can't even do something like that forget about other changes. And I'm not talking about nuclear.
In fact, if your goal is really only defend your territory, you could keep nuclear and downsize all those war airplanes and tanks burning oil, and you would not be worse for it.
This is so misleading it's not even funny anymore.
The USA and Europe have both delegated most high CO2 footprint industries to the developing nations through globalisation. It wouldn't be going down if we hadn't.
The issue isn't the evil developing nations which want to get the same quality of life. That contributes too, obviously... but making it sound as if the developed world has already gotten on the right track is incredibly misguided
It doesn't look like the links you provided show enough evidence to support the claim that CO2 emissions per capita are the result of poorer countries increasing their standard of living (it could be the result of industries that trade with wealthy countries to increase their std of living), but I would really like to see that idea explored and properly proven
If you look at history, you don't economically catch up to the top dogs of the world by aping their technology. You catch up to them by leapfrogging them in technology--the newer technology allows you to undercut them, while throttling them of the cash necessary to retool to use newer technology. This is most historically most prominent in something like steelmaking.
Populations will not accept limitations on energy availability, no matter what goal is lauded. Look at Sri Lanka: the president fled and the people took over his opulent home. This will happen everywhere given enough pressure.
All artificial energy restriction scams are doomed to fail for this very reason. They will all usher in even lower-trust societies than exist now.
1. Breaking this down by country doesn’t make much sense. Per capita emissions makes more sense, from a humanitarian point of view.
2. India/China are ramping up solar and wind but it is a relatively poor country. Such investments should be funded by countries that have already “developed” and have the ability to fund such change.
Interesting post. You are very much aware that it's the wealthy who do most of the damage, yet you somehow blame the so called developing world but don't want to be the to tell them to fuck off.
I think they’re saying economic development in other places will create emissions that dwarf any mitigation achievable in today’s economically developed regions. Any plan that doesn’t address this likely scenario probably won’t work.
First thing you need to understand about India — it's not the same as everybody else. The country is unique unlike any other country in the world. What works in other places might not work there.
> elect politicians who build renewable power instead of electing politician who build coal plants.
I think politicians across party lines want to switch to renewable.
Please understand that this switch to renewables can't be done overnight. And there's a huge population who can't be kept in the dark during the transition period.
Also, India is the 3rd largest producer of renewable energy (and 3rd largest consumer) in the world, behind USA and China [1]. They're making an effort.
Roughly 5 Billion people, or more, rely on the Haber process to turn hydrocarbons in nitrogen fertiliser so they can eat.
Carrying capacity of the earth before this mass manufacture of artificial fertiliser was maxxed out at around 1.5B, maybe with better plant strains that could be edged up, but not by 500% you would think.
We are still a fair way off from green steel, we are going to need metallurgical coal for some time, unless you like driving a wooden car pulled by a horse.
And alumina and lithium are both gas heavy in refining at the front end, needing calcination at 1000 DegC, plus or minus.
Then there is plastic, from lighter fractions of liquid hydrocarbons in many cases (condensate) - I can't believe you are still allowed to buy water in a plastic bottle or food in a plastic container that's a once use, that's crazy.
Hydrocarbons aren't going to become non-existent parts of the industrial landscape if any kind of life as we know it is to continue - we just need to start by stopping stupid waste in transient use cases like once use water bottles and food containers, decorative wrapping, short lived non repairable consumer appliances and goods, and synthetic fabrics that are made into clothes that could last for years or even decades, but get disposed of after 10 or 20 wears because of "fashion" or poor manufacture renders them useless in this time.
Growing up in New Zealand in the 70's, if someone had tried to warn that in the future you would be paying for drinking water (any water actually), by the half litre and more expensive than petrol in some cases, and you would get a free bottle that you immediately discarded when you finished drinking from it, you would have been ignored as a fringe lunatic at best, and may well have been taken in for some kind of assessment. And yet some decades later, here we are.
Indians have other ecological problems on our hands. Unchecked pollution (air, water, soil), poorly designed cities, burning stubble, etc. On per-capita CO2/CH4, India is doing great.
Your post contains three sources, but I respectfully have to say I consider it completely misleading.
There is no real evidence "decoupling", that is GDP growth combined with stagnation or decline in resource consumption and emissions.
All studies that are widely cited claiming that European and other western industrialized nations have achieved any measurable reduction in per-capita emissions and resource consumption have, to my knowledge, been debunked.
> US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been dropping for a while now. The same is true for the EU as a whole
Economic growth depends on very material and observable effects on the physical world.
I admit that I only looked closely at your first link, but arguing against this trope again and again is tiring.
So far I feel that all of these statistics have gaping logical holes, the worst and most obvious being considering "territorial emissions". Your first link seems to suffer from that too, at least at first glance.
It is outrageous to me that questioning "Green capitalism" is still considered a fringe position.
I can recommend e.g. this read (don't focus on the relatively tame headline):
> we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem.
I agree, at least in part.
But your conclusions are off to me.
Solar panels on the roof should mostly a net-positive thing (or net negative after a couple of years, in terms of emissions). The more widely deployed, the better.
What a pity that they are not widely deployed. Seems to be a systemic problem, fracking and coal are more lucrative.
Also they can ot offset an ever-increasing resource demand, eco-blind urban planning etc in their own.
That's a problem with most of the "eco products" out there.
We don't
just need a new product, we need new politics.
As far as I know, western countries have not effectively reduced their per-capita emissions or resource consumption. At best, temporarily in times of recession, but the overall trend remains upwards. .
Even countries with stagnating population numbers keep on broadening the trail of destruction they impose on the world.
The way we delude ourselves into being "ahead in green progress" compared to developing nations sounds to me very neo-colonialistic and delusional.
Your comment hints at this fact, but only in a away that most people seem to paraphrase with "India matters, while us accelerating the global depletion of NNRs and raise of emission does not".
I feel like most coverage of climate change and environmental is purposefully framed in a way that implies there was no alternative to growth and capitalism. Also downplaying the scale of the problem and how we continue to perpetuate it.
The spurious statistics mostly reward countries that let others do the "dirt work" for them, sustaining absurd excesses of the rich and the population clashing over the "trickle-down" remains.
> People are still booking international vacations and buying brand new full size SUVs to do groceries.
And an awful lot of people are still acting as though "end users" can materially affect the situation with their personal choices, and implying that they are bad people for making them. I'm sure the American oligarchy and the leaders of China appreciate your efforts.
I don't know how you got the idea that I was implying people are "bad" for their lifestyle choices. I was talking about how far away we are from widespread acceptance and realistic acknowledgement of the problem.
When I see people acting like nothing is wrong, doing things that contribute to the problem, I do think that indicates a lack of acceptance and realization. Now I may be wrong. It could be possible that people are fully aware of the problem and are YOLO'ing their way through it. Or they share your opinion that nothing they do can materially affect the situation anyway, so they just go full throttle on carbon emission. But I suspect that for most people, that's not the case. I think that most people are unaware of the severity of the situation, and that if they were aware, they probably wouldn't be doing those things. Again, I could be completely wrong about what people know and how they would choose to behave. But at no point was I implying that there are good people and bad people and that personal carbon footprint is a decent way to measure that.
People are generally aware that their actions contribute to climate change, unless they choose to deny it for ideological reasons. They are just unwilling to make lifestyle sacrifices because of it. Most people value their personal comfort and the comfort of their family above the (statistical) lives of strangers.
You see exactly the same phenomenon every time a professional chooses to live in comfort instead of donating most of their income to charity. That's how people work, that's what they value, and that's why collective action is the only way of dealing with large-scale problems.
Yes, I'm one of those people and I'm not sorry. I think big corporations are evil, but I also think they exist because ordinary people buy their products, usually out of convenience.
There would be not much use for so much fossil burning if we didn't use huge cars to transport us for half a mile instead of walking, or building houses in the freakind desert, or watching TV, or illumiating whole towns and changing night time into daylight, or constantly buying new clothes when we could still wear the old ones, or stuffing ourselves with food until we explode, etc.
So yes, no one personal choice will "materially affect" the situation. But the effort has to start somewhere. Blaming others, "oligarchs" or Chinese leaders doesn't help. It's just a cheap excuse.
Suggesting that I give up -- admit it -- a LOT of personal freedom and convenience, when Chinese companies spew emissions equal to HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE -- and have no real incentive to change -- is like trying to empty the ocean with an eyedropper, while someone else is emptying buckets into it. Your "cheap excuse" is precisely the kind of "bad person" inference that I was alluding to. People like you seem to value altruism at MANY orders of magnitude than the people you are disparaging. And, hey, that's great, and all, but we just think you're bad at math.
I'm talking about the wealthy west. So I do include myself. I agree that developed countries got us here.
I'm not sure an alternative could have been be very likely. We found a cheap, easily consumed polluting energy source that massively increased output. The negative effects are felt in decades or centuries, while the positive effects are felt almost immediately. This is a tough position to be in. Even though some people in the 19th century were well aware that this was a recipe for disaster, it would have taken an enormous amount of control and discipline to avoid the situation we're in now, if it were avoidable at all. Even today we haven't begun to reduce [global co2 emissions] and we have more awareness than ever.
Making this a moral issue is completely counter productive. People inventing the internal combustion engine and the amazing improvements to the quality of human life enabled by fossil fuels, did not set out to bake the planet.
Climate change is a technical problem in need of technical solutions, along with the economic insights and political will to make it happen.
We are all in this together now. Figuring out who to blame accomplishes nothing.
that would only be true if there weren't a group of people who firmly believe we are not in this together and are fighting those of us who do tooth and nail.
I think it looks radical, literally: we have to expect, in a world that has well and truly tackled climate change, things like car travel becoming a thing of the past, replaced by bikes, cargo bikes, trains, and airships.
(As an aside, "climate change" is just the beginning, we have entered the so-called Anthropocene Age, and that comes with vast responsibilities. E.g. what to do about "non-native invasive" species? Shall we garden the whole Earth?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene )
Expanding on the no-more-cars thing: EVs are a stop-gap, it doesn't make sense to put batteries in cars. But even if the whole fleet of ICE vehicles were to be converted to battery-powered EVs we still have to deal with the tire pollution! We can't have all that vulcanized rubber grinding against all those millions of kilometers of asphalt. It's one of the single largest sources of particulate pollution. Go check. It's fucked up.
We're going to have to seriously re-imagine and reconfigure our economic systems over the whole globe. We might could have a resurgence in sail-powered cargo shipping: https://postcarbonlogistics.org/https://www.sailcargo.inc/
(As opposed to the current very cheap but very polluting system.)
I believe we can live in harmony with nature (that is, increasing life rather than destroying it by applying ecological science), and that we can do it and maintain our populations (no genocide or mass starvation or any of that) and maintain a decent standard of living for the everybody. We just have to apply the technology and resources we already have efficiently. We will still be subject to the human condition, but at least we would have time to work out all our other problems, eh?
My dear brother of Climate, I am so glad you have you accepted Climate into your heart and have been born-again through your commitment to dedicate your life to leaving a lighter footprint. Continue to seek forgiveness for your sins against Climate, dear believer. One day we shall rejoice in the carbon-free heavens of Climate.
Praise be to Climate, for it provides for all. Amen.
The world will not end when we warm beyond 1.5°C. What will happen is that more people will suffer and die along with countless other species we share the biosphere with. Some tipping elements in the climate system may be activated such as the disintegration of Greenland and Western Antarctic Ice Sheets."
I'm going to make some predictions, bold, dystopian predictions yet ones I feel at least rather confident in coming to be.
1) Political action will stay under the threshold necessary for real change on human behaviors to realize limits on human-caused warming. We're gonna heat the planet and politicians will remain anti-aligned and selfishly focused on partisan/regional /short-term gains with the support of their votership.
2) As we heat and resources exhaust, some populations are going to wither, some will adapt, and some will attempt to migrate towards cooler regions (the poles). This will cause political strife. As one particular example, draw a line from China's western extent straight north to the pole, and see how what is present-day Russia defends against "the iron will of 1.4B people" who are struggling to live where they are (China already views itself as an Arctic power). Another: USA pushing north beyond the 49th parallel.
3) Population control is topically political suicide in democracies; no one in power will dare broach it in seriousness at a national or multilateral level. Few such people will even give voice to relating resource levels with population levels. Instead, the mitigation strategy will find its loci in migration control and containment (keeping-their-problems-in-their-own-Stans) like we do today with Bangladesh.
I truly hope I'm wrong, but I have a hunch I'm not ..
Yes, the footprint per capita. My post was already becoming uncomfortably long..
Ex: A religious person goes to a developing country, promotes birth control, and comes back to be rewarded for preventing excess births to the degree of 100 children. They then proceed to have 2 children of their own. Given that the developing country has a footprint per capita two orders of magnitude less than that of the proselytizer (i.e. 5 versus 800, to use circa 2000 numbers), that person has in effect only slightly mitigated the cascading impact of their own actions.
It's more about raising everyone alive not just to our collective higher standards of living but also in reducing footprint.
The big problem is that due to feedback effects, there is no stopping at 1.5C unless we engage in highly risky mitigation techniques such as blocking sunlight with aerosols. Once permafrost begins to melt, fire season expands, and the planet's albedo shrinks, then warming begets more warming. We are already well along this path, and the feedback effects are now accelerating.
"We need to stop pretending we can prevent the imminent collapse of civilization."
Maybe it will collapse when rising ocean acidification causes the base of the ocean ecosystem to collapse, eliminating a billion peoples' access to protein, leading to global war.
Maybe it will collapse when, in multiple regions, agriculture fails, and just being outside on certain days is fatal, so 200M people who happen to live there are obliged to go where other people already live, crossing borders and triggering rise of fascist governments, thus shortly global thermonuclear war.
Any other imminent inevitable global collapse scenarios as consequences of failure to contain global climate catastrophe? One suffices. So whichever is first matters. Events after will be much less predictable.
Certainly some people will survive the collapse, most likely even millions, maybe even a billion or more. But anyway major releases of CO2 would cease along with international trade and concrete construction.
Getting existing excess CO2 back out of the atmosphere would be beyond the capabilities of the remnant population, but waiting a couple of centuries would take care of that.
This has been a known fact for quite a while ago. Unfortunately, big corporates are like the few stubborn kids with candies they got at the beginning of the party and now not agreeing to part with even when their friends have come to the party. Almost all solution we have so far has been to coax these kids that they will get better and more candies at the end of the party if they do spend them.
Almost every company taking Climate Actions aims to be on the right side of history but with much quantifiable profit. Unfortunately, the current and future costs of correcting their past mistakes run into multi-trillion dollar propositions, and the ROI is unsure.
Yes, there is customer and stakeholder pressure for companies to act, but that is too minuscule for now. If they spend a dollar on climate, a company will pay twice that to go and tell the world they did, to uplift their brand image.
So, it will be tough to sustain and stay cool unless that is what makes more money.
The exploitative globalist economic systems that move resources and wealth long distances to the few with accompanying pollution will not be undone willingly by those few. They are buying citizenship and bunkers in New Zealand and have captured our governing bodies. Many people are too pacified and confused to fight against this. You are correct that as long as profit is the motive, nothing will change.
> Does this mean that we should fall back to 2°C? Or just give up?
Have we not given up already?
I see no hint of anyone changing their behavior in the least, esp. as regards to cars, heating, air conditioning, etc.
Many comments blame "politicians", but politicians are voted in by people. Nobody on the planet is willing to give up an inch of comfort today in the hope of avoiding disaster in the distant future.
In a way, this is the ultimate installment of the tragedy of the commons.
Cars have become massively more efficient in recent years. Mid-size SUVs that got 15-20mpg a couple decades ago are pulling 30-40 now (with definite tradeoffs to get there!). And EVs are finally entering mainstream (and will moreso once automakers figure out how to actually get semiconductors).
Household energy consumption has gone way down too - LED lighting, efficient appliances, and better insulation drove that move and heat pumps are promising to drive that even further downwards.
Behavior change is hard - but it is happening. Just slower than is ideal.
EVs are not, in fact, "zero emissions" when running. It very much depends on how electricity is produced. In the US for instance, over 60% of electricity is produced by burning fossil fuels [0]. It's hard to see how they're even part of the solution, given the enormous amounts of energy needed to produce them.
And the whole concept of "SUV" is absurd. Most trips involve just one person. It would be better to just use a small car -- preferably an old one, that already exists.
> And the whole concept of "SUV" is absurd. Most trips involve just one person. It would be better to just use a small car -- preferably an old one, that already exists.
This! Building zillions of new EVs and ditching old cars is not some magic recipe for a better world. We should instead limit our consumption in every way.
To what? What level of consumption will make all these problems disappear? Going back to pre-industruial lifestyles is arguably worse for the average person than climate change is.
Byline Times is, uh, very much the "stop voting evil lizard people into power" kind of news outlet rather than thr "global warming is not even happening" kind.
The problem there is we need hope or we won't do anything.
Given a hopeless outlook, 90% of people give up destructively, and the future of our species requires us to be better than that; to try. Together we will make some difference and that might make enough of a difference.
Just like we stopped pretending we can limit it to 0.5°? Or to 1°? When does this process stop? Should we just give up completely and party like it's 1999 until fossil fuels run out?
What would if all new development was stopped, and every structure retrofit with reliable but SotA high-efficiency solar along with efficient-minded environmental upgrades and electrical audit to get the power consumption down, such that ultimately almost every structure generated most if not all of it's own power, many contributed to the improved grid, and all transportation, shipping and planes included, was replaced with green electrical equivalent or even if compromised, obviously dismantled all coal and oil use and speculation, and somehow we got the global population under control, and we stopped contributing to Climate Change altogether?
How much hotter, globally in average, is it likely to get if we suddenly somehow stopped all the major anthropological contributors to Climate Change?
Because I'm starting to suspect we'll start to see large "spots" temporarily appear on the surface of the Earth, perhaps drag across, and everything on the surface in that spot will have a high chance of immediate mortality. Someone chill me out.
When I first read about the 1.5C target in the papers I laughed out loud.
For me, the 1.5C target is the same as budget targets for a new big construction project. Politicians say it'll take N million to get it to pass, but they all know it'll end up costing at least 2-3x as much.
Nobody, and especially not politicians, want to do what's required to keep it below 1.5C.
> Nobody, and especially not politicians, want to do what's required to keep it below 1.5C.
This is essentially the crux of the issue, no matter what anyone says. If we all wanted to, we could easily stop the pollution, at a possibly great expense to our privileged standard of living, yet that's just not happening.
Even if society wasn't all on the same page in regards to this decision, there are still plenty of actions that could result in such an outcome - think along the lines of protests at an unprecedented scale, both inside of the industries and outside of them, civil disobedience etc.
Yet that clearly won't happen until the living conditions get really tough and people are pushed over the edge in one way or another (consider the protests around 2008 in many countries, or something like Euromaidan in a different context). Until then, it's easier for companies and politicians to ensure that they won't be held responsible through lobbying and misinformation (as an example, consider what the tobacco industry did in the last century) and for most people it's easier to share whatever pro-environmental posts they like on social media to feel good, without actually doing anything.
The problem is that the legal things that you can do to oppose this trajectory are relatively limited (voting isn't entirely working) and many like myself would prefer not to do the illegal things (protests, depending on jurisdiction might be illegal) to not throw away their careers or not risk their livelihoods.
On a more positive note, there are initiatives out there where you can at the very least donate some money towards improving the climate situation: https://www.wren.co/ (can't comment on their integrity in detail, though)
Of course, this probably doesn't matter much when large corporations can just pollute more than private individuals will ever be able to make up for in any meaningful way. It's kind of sad to see this, here's hoping that better people are voted into the office, but sadly I'm too cynical to genuinely believe that.
A little known fact is that we likely already crossed 1.5C.
Latest IPCC reports a likely cool down due to aerosols of 0.4C. But aerosols are a serious health issue (responsable of several millions premature deaths). And most of aerosols come from incomplete fossil fuels (hopefully we'll get ride of them), whereas their lifespan is less than a few years. So their cool down effect is only temporary.
Also, it's quite unknown that Europe has already at +2C. Far from Equatorial + being in a continent are factors for warming faster.
Yeah, well not saying that there are not problems, but there are problems down at the IPCC, seeing they seem to have yet to have made an accurate prediction.
There is a little more possible hope if you go and look at the ReThinkX people and their predictions for energy generation and use transformation, they've been making accurate predictions for over a decade now and offer a little more realistic view into the possible range of outcomes in the future.
If you want a quick start you can get a walk thru at "Just Have a Think" and then make your own mind up as to whether IPCC are the holder of all and every truth card, or not. Link:https://youtu.be/UUySXZ6y2fk
Thinking it's all too late already is a problem on its own, don't give up too easily, do something, anything - one thing is start solar cooking some days, it's easier and better than most people think.
The best we can do is lower our own CO2 emissions as much as possible (no flights, recycle/upcycle) and vote wisely. Don't get stuck in the issue of the day, but look forwards when choosing your representative.
Kids consume more energy pound for pound than adults with regards to food. There’s also all the associated products that go along with raising children, many of which aren’t handed down, etc.
Kids do have a lot fewer pounds though. Also humans live around seventy to eighty years. So stopping procreation right now would bring us to carbon neutrality in about that time. That means that in about twenty years stopping procreation would have reduced carbon emissions by about thirty percent or so. That's a lot, but far from what's needed to prevent catastrophic warming.
The only reason I care about the Earth at all is that our future generations will need to live here. If we all stop having kids and humanity goes extinct, I don't care if Earth's atmosphere gets hotter than Venus's after that.
no, but I did notice the uptick of "Japan must open itself to immigration or it will not survive" kind of articles from the very same outlets who chastise us for the carbon sin and promote having fewer or no children as one of the ways to atone for it. same in NA and Europe
>United Nations projections indicate that over the next 50 years, the populations of virtually all countries of Europe as well as Japan will face population decline and population ageing. The new challenges of declining and ageing populations will require comprehensive reassessments of many established policies and programmes, including those relating to international migration.
>Focusing on these two striking and critical population trends, the report considers replacement migration for eight low-fertility countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States) and two regions (Europe and the European Union). Replacement migration refers to the international migration that a country would need to offset population decline and population ageing resulting from low fertility and mortality rates.
>How is the presence of these kinds of articles any kind of argument or input into thinking about the matter?
well, I don't know about you, but I find it peculiar that the Venn diagram of 'entities who say that we need to have fewer children to reduce our carbon footprint' and 'entities who say we need unlimited mass migration to prevent our economy from collapsing due to our low birth rates' is just one circle
Right, populate trends have effects. That should go without saying.. but that’s not at all related to a country “not surviving”.
There are many times in life where change is needed even though that change creates trade offs and new problems to solve.
So really in the context of this thread the question should be, “which problem is easier to solve or less dire: climate change or gradual population stagnation?”
I can’t say I have the answer, but a stable society without requiring population growth does not seem off the table to me.
Maybe once politicians start to settle for first class on commercial flights instead of taking private jets to climate summits, then I'll start to replace my coach flights with ground transportation.
Then it will be that we need to stop pretending that we can limit global warming to 1.8ºC, then 2.0ºC, 2.5ºC, 4ºC, that we can avoid billions to die and that we had since the start clear that the survivors will have to live in this bunkers.
We still have to do everything in our hands to limit the damage, as aggressively as possible. It is an existential threat if left unchecked, or letting the biggest offenders keep with their business as usual.
Yes, we can take also measures to adapt or mitigate to some of the incoming (or present) consequences. But that should not take out the urgency nor resources that must be giving to switching to alternative energy sources, lower emissions in general, and massive carbon capture proyects.
who even is? the article does not quote one of their supposed straw man politicians arguing '1.5 is still alive'.
everybody knows 1.5 is dead. rather than treating that like the literal mass grave/funeral it is, people are inventing some kind of naive-false-prophet science/politician figure to 'dunk on' about it so they can feel more savvy and in-the-know. the framing is one of winning a debate, not losing millions of lives. its gross.
> A 2021 survey by the science journal Nature found that a majority of world-leading climate scientists believe that we are heading towards a catastrophic 3°C of warming by the end of the century. Only 4% surveyed said they thought limiting warming to 1.5°C was likely
I don’t know of many (any?) American politicians who are being honest about this. Maybe there are more forthright folks abroad. I think it’s just too politically costly.
> the article does not quote one of their supposed straw man politicians arguing '1.5 is still alive'.
I'd point to the UKs Boris Johnson and his endless finger gang signing of one finger (on one hand) and five digits (on the other) at the last COP event.
He is however a dead man walking today .. although still the UK's PM for now.
Make average human lifespan 150 by solving aging and we'll solve the climate problem tomorrow. Otherwise there is no incentive for people to conserve anything.
Most people alive today will experience catastrophic effects of global warming. This is not something that will start happening in a hundred, or even in fifty years. The first effects are already visible.
Its fascinating that Russia is the biggest country in the world and its mostly cold. Seems a like it could fit a billion climate refugees in there, I'm sure its just a matter of time.
This is how I have always thought of the geopolitics of climate change, that Russia would have a massive advantage. Then I did some research on it, and it turns out that it’s not exactly true. The currently fertile land in Russia would desertify, creating lower crop yields. And the areas north that might enter the fertile zone do not necessarily have the ecology to support mass food cultivation. At the very least, it would still require mass artificial fertilization and a huge population migration that would essentially imply a global refugee crisis.
Russia is 50% forests, they could easily add more farmland if they needed to. The country isn't some infertile tundra, most of it is just normal northern forests, similar to Scandinavia where you can farm just fine as long as it is warm enough.
Converting forest to mass farmland isn’t trivial. A lot of these forests are actually wetlands and peatlands that take lots of time and work to convert.
Sure - they may have to import food, but many countries in the world do this already. Moving food importers from Egypt to Russia doesn't need more food production in Russia.
Where would Russia import from? It's not as though an equivalent amount of equally productive soil receiving favorable rainfall would materialize immediately.
It's a bad idea underneath the surface. Literally.
Here's why:
1. Two thirds of Russia sits on permafrost consisting of frozen organic material.
2. If permafrost melts, microbes in the soil feast on the aforementioned organic matter. As part of digestion, carbon dioxide and methane are released.
3. Permafrost has already started to melt.
4. Once it melts, greenhouse gases are released (due to microbe feasting). This causes further increase in temperature, which causes further melting, which causes further release of greenhouse gases, and so on. It is a positive feedback loop; the process seems to have started, and will likely accelerate in the future.
5. Nobody really knows what to do about this.
If everybody moved to Russia, that'll probably accelerate the warming process.
To know more, check out [1], about which there was an HN discussion at [2].
IMVHO we need to stop pretending give numbers, especially in very short range to nature. Talking about a certain amount of temperature is like saying that today here there are 7h of sunlight so my p.v. should have produced a certain amount of energy and self-consumption should be better than the 5h of yesterday. Such numbers even if real they are meaningless because for instance in the above example yesterday there was less Sunny hours but those was continuous and fully sunny so far better for self-consumption than yesterday. Similarly at another scale it's meaningless talking about how many millimeters of rain hit a certain area per year, if they hit all in few weeks this area is not that nice respect of a dryer one but with regular alternation of sun and rain. Long story short instead of play with meaningless math let's try a more realistic path.
Today we have ONE energy production tech witch constant and not much pollutant in normal conditions, witch is nuclear fission. We can't improve it in less than 10 years IF and only IF is the public who do that at 100%, no private business involved (otherwise 20+ year if we ever arrive to something usable). In the meantime the less pollutant is methane. p.v. can do much in certain area and to use it for sure we need to erase the idea of tall buildings and apartments pushing people toward single-family modern homes (insulation, p.v. etc) with investments on energy saving (for instance big water heaters with classic resistance BUT also a heat-pump for non-sunny days, big enough to withstand a day or two without Sun and without energy need keeping water hot enough) and LOCAL smart MICRO-grid like wishing machines, dishwashers, ovens etc who can talk a simple modbus-alike protocol to talk to an inverter and decide how to run to maximize self-consumption for instance. Such kind of evolution is possible and far quicker than new nation-wide electricity grids and mega-projects.
In ten years we can have remote workers and retirees in such setup, witch might be not so much, but it's a thing. In others ten years others people have migrated, nuclear is fully on-line, renewable have replaced methane enough. Society is changed sufficiently to reduce the need of methane-made fertilizers, and agrobusiness was annihilated for the sake of humanity so we start to have less pollutant and more sustainable agriculture, a new western society is seeded. Others will adapt in another ten years. In 50 years we have done enough to survive the change without a world war and a mass genocide.
That's pretty out there. "Habitable" is a pretty low bar, but saying that climate change will cause a collapse of global civilization by 2100 isn't nearly as ridiculous.
I think that has been a reasonable possibility (on the order of large asteroid collision) since the invention of the atomic bomb. And it became much more likely after they were actually used in war. And even more likely with the insane proliferation. Now we can add climate denialism and global climate state tipping points into the mix. It's getting worse. An opinion shared by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
"The [doomsday clock]'s original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. It has since been set backward eight times and forward 16 times for a total of 24, the farthest from midnight being 17 minutes in 1991, and the nearest being 100 seconds, from 2020 to the present."
If someone tells you that we’re closer to nuclear doom now than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I don’t think you should take their analysis particularly seriously.
I believe the claim is that all risks combined now are slightly greater than the average nuclear risk during the 1953-1960 period.
Regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis in particular, the Wikipedia page says:
> The closest nuclear war threat, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, reached crisis, climax, and resolution before the Clock could be set to reflect that possible doomsday.[citation needed]
Saying we won’t have a habitable planet by century's end specifically because of climate change is definitely a falsehood (except for the technical point that 100% and 0% are not real probabilities). Saying some regions won’t be habitable is correct, but it always has been even before the industrial revolution.
I certainly expect things to get worse before they get better, but “by century’s end” is too far away for even better/worse to be predictable to high certainty: there are 78 years from now to 2100, and it was only about 73 years between the president of the Royal Society, Lord Kelvin, saying “I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the trials we hear of”[0] and Apollo 11 landing on the moon. What’s going to happen between now and then? A crop of GM phytoplankton with super-photosynthesis that stabilises atmospheric CO2 at 200 ppm? Von Neumann machines disassembling the moon and turning it into a ten billion O’Neill cylinders? A bioweapon that turns all humans stupid? Plain old global thermonuclear war? All of the above? No way to tell.
It's only a falsehood if you live in Scandinavia or East Asia. What about the hotter parts of South East Asia which are on the cusp of survivability as is?
How can a prediction be a lie? Worst case scenario places like India become inhabitable. India being a nuclear armed country isn't going to stay in place and die.
Climate was way hotter in the Jurassic period and life survived and thrived. Climate change is much more about impact on our current society than the end of the world. https://sciencing.com/climate-jurassic-era-4932.html
That’s not a very strong argument for human habitability (other arguments exist, just not this), because, for example, we’re not cold blooded lizards and the Jurassic is roughly when Pangaea started to break apart.
He is. There is no disaster so bad you won't find somebody insisting everything will be fine. There is rarely any immediate penalty for being wrong.
People used to privilege have never suffered any hardship from being wrong, so always choose whatever seems most comfortable at the moment. In unfolding disasters hey come out of the woodwork like cockroaches when the water rises, doing whatever they can to prevent any useful action.
>Covid killed 10 million people out of 8 billion in the planet
And that with significant effort in much of the world to slow its spread and minimize the loss of life. Without that effort, more people would've died and they'd have done so in a shorter timeframe, completely overwhelming healthcare infrastructure and causing more deaths from covid and other conditions.
This is what surprises me. If we are indeed in for a prolonged period of man-made global warming, as politicians tell us (dramatic pause, earnest face, raised eyebrows) then where are the irrigation schemes, the river delta flood defences, the sea walls, the city relocations?
Sorry you got downvoted but it’s a legitimate question. If we’re really on the road to “Manhattan is gonna be underwater” levels of climate change that we can’t prevent, only keep from being worse, then as you said, why aren’t things like seawalls being built _right now_ as a safeguard in case we don’t hit our targets?
> The mayor proposed a series of strategic flood walls, surge barriers, dunes, tidal barriers, and bulkheads built around the coasts strategically, to insulate the coastal areas, as well as building codes to protect homes and businesses against flooding and infrastructure improvements to prevent power, fuel, and telecommunication outages.
Because that would require admitting we're screwed and cost a lot of money without any short term benefit. Both of those things aren't great ideas if you want to get elected.
I wouldnt consider myself a climate sceptic, but I do think we’ve learned something about the utility of governments (poor) when we see that on the one hand they swear “we’ll be swimming to work” while on the other doing nothing about… say… sea defences. This should inform us of their expected usefulness in other types of crisis.
nothing is being done, not because massive disruption isn't heading our way, but because adapting would in the very short term be more disruption to the status quo, also lobbies
Democratic governments are inherently reactionary during times of crisis. There's never enough popular support until some kind of major event (oftentimes made up) kicks up the popular sentiment sufficiently for politicians to actually get off their butts to do something. And there really hasn't been that kind of event for climate change (yet) - at least something that was clear and compelling enough that it rises
above the constant "the sky is falling" fray that we're fed on a daily basis
Pearl harbor --> WW2
10% inflation --> stopping quantitative easing (yes, this was still happening into early this year!!)
It seems you've got things backward: if politicians can't get people onboard to prevent a catastrophe, how do you think they can't get them to limit the consequences of such catastrophe? If they managed to act (or get people to), then they would have plan to mitigate. But in the US, we're still in the denial phase, so…
This will likely be an unpopular opinion here, but the earth has been experiencing “climate change” since its inception and all the folks panicking over it is an overreaction. Humans will adapt to the earth’s conditions. Yes we’ve impacted the climate. I’m not saying we shouldn’t continue migrating to EVs, etc. But by and large, the earth’s climate is such a complex and massive beast that it’s naïve to think that we can really make a meaningful affect what’s coming. If places become uninhabitable, then humans will migrate elsewhere as we always have. The earth will be here long after humans go extinct (probably) and it will be fine with or without us. The sky is not falling :)
I can't think of both "then humans will migrate elsewhere as we always have" and "The sky is not falling :)" as not a cruel joke. Yes, as a species we'll migrate, while a significant part of families die from hunger, riot violence, live in slum conditions, etc. I mean, we're taking millions of people living in extreme conditions or dying within a few generations. That's very much "the sky is falling".
> a significant part of families die from hunger, riot violence, live in slum conditions
You seem to be under the impression that we’re going over a cliff, rather an be a slow decline/collapse. What evidence do you have to support that? I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but we’ve had a long history of predicting eco-doomsday, but we’re still here. https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...
Migrating a few hundred million people over a span of a couple of decades from areas where agriculture becomes impossible is "going over a cliff". Look what a few hundred thousand refugees did to European politics. We have nuclear weapons now. People will not quietly starve.
Yes the Earth has been experiencing climate change forever. But it's extremely obvious that humans are changing the climate in such a way they we will create an unliveable environment across many places on earth. That will most likely lead to billions dying, world wars and maybe collapse of civilization. Of course earth itself will be fine. But that is hardly a benchmark. Even if we nuke every square kilometer of earth it's still fine. it's just a large piece of rock.
So you say yes humans can affect the climate but we can't affect what's coming? That seems ascientific. If the models are right then we did cause the climate to change and we can bend its path into the future.
We've spent what the last 50-100 years affecting the climate significantly...and we think we can stop/reverse it in how long? Just because we wish it, does not mean we can materially affect it in a relatively short horizon.
Beyond the idea that we can somehow reduce our current impact, the human population will continue to increase to what, up to 11-13 billion by 2100. Those people will need food, water, goods and services. I won't be around to see year 2100, but I venture to say it's going to be warmer than it is today and there's not a damn thing we can realistically do about it.
i suggest you go explain your opinion to poor countries experiencing climate related crop failure and famine this year. i'd also suggest you inform yourself with the relevant literature, IPCC's AR6 is a good start.
As a physicist i would be glad you explain me your reasoning a bit further, for instance how the droughts is independent from climate. You look very knowledgeable.
This is borderline climate denial, not "calm and reasonable". If you want to tell yourself that things are somehow gonna be fine, then feel free to go ahead. It just doesn't line up with an absolutely overwhelming scientific consensus.
It is not borderline. It is out-and-out denial. People like that will, ultimately, be personally responsible for collapse when it comes, but they will be better insulated from consequences than their victims.
I denied nothing. I simply stated that climate change is business as usual. Have we as humans impacted it, yes. But we’ll either adapt or die. How is that a denial?
So what does that realistic optimism look like? "We're never gonna make 1.5, we've already blown past it, hundreds of millions of people are going to suffer and die because of the choices of the wealthy. But, on the bright side..."
I don't think many people, especially politicians, can honestly be realistic AND optimistic. You can't put optimism into this conversation until you've first had acceptance. And you can't have acceptance until you have at least understood the significance of the situation and probably gone through some kind of grieving process. We're way off from that. People are still booking international vacations and buying brand new full size SUVs to do groceries.
And there's no need to collapse into despair either.