From what I read, this is not a real surprise to many Climate Scientists. Most researchers have been worried about this, but I heard due to political and institutional interference, they moderated their papers.
Now with a 2nd Term, I am sure by 2100 we will hit 4C, and my unscientific prediction is the Pollyanna one.
Young people in the US need to be out protesting for their future. First get the US to eliminate all fossil fuel subsidiaries. And then maybe add a huge tax on the use of fossil fuels. That is the only way at this point to get change to happen quick enough to prevent 3C.
We can’t transition everyone consumption to "clean energy" and make every consumption "green". What we have today is because coal and oil are cheap and efficient and we’ll need a substancial level of consumption reduction to remove those from our toolbox.
Dollars are great to incentive some consumption shift but the hard work is to be done in the consumption quantity.
Solar and wind are far cheaper than fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are cheaper in Texas than pretty much any where else in the world, and they don't subsidize green, yet Texas installs far more solar and batteries than new fossil generation.
It's our billionaires; the people who own our media and our politicians.
The overwhelming majority of scientists agree we need action.
Even with billions spent on propaganda, the majority of citizens believe we need action.
A tiny minority of our corporate media and politicians believe we need action, and their bosses/owners are happy to fire them if they speak up too well. Look what happened to Greta once she started talking about capitalism - instant blackout on coverage.
So again, this isn't a species problem. It's very much a billionaire problem, and they are not like us. Billionaires realize this, and we need to realize it as well.
You sound like someone who hasn’t been to dozens of city council meetings where the vast majority of liberal urban dwellers would rather remove all transportation alternatives if it would make it easier for them to park their second car in front of their house.
These are just excuses for why people won't bother.
In reality, only mass behavioral change by individuals will make a difference. There is no political change without mass individual behavioral change. There is no pressure on the rich or corporations without the masses giving a crap.
Your excuses are exactly the message corporations and the rich love to hear because it means their propaganda is working.
Yes the issue is the species. Billionaires are a product of our species. What you describe is a similar thinking that murderers, drug addicts or queers are somehow dissimilar to the general population. This is not the case. The issue is a product of how a human mind works, and it presents this way because humanity improved thinking faster than how fast ecosystems could adapt. The result is a dominant species that behaves very similarly to how invasive species work.
Yes, what you say is technically true, billionaires have infinite more power than you and I, and they could very well take care of a lot of bad things in the world, if they somehow chose to. And so, this power comes with responsibility as well, or so some think. Maybe we indeed could design a system that takes care that no individual rises to these unnatural heights. But, the incentives are not there. The incentives in the human say that more = better. Not in everyone, and people can certainly grow in character, a LOT - but we are talking a big number of people here, as long as there will be some that are highly functional, and also have a craving for infinite power, there will be such power imbalances in the world.
So again, the issue boils down to species. And if we survive ourselves, I expect this trend to continue.
Let me also bring up another species problem: Look at how much friction giving up straws caused. Fucking straws, man. I don't think it can get any more petty than that.
Tackling climate change would've required people to potentially change their lives, possibly drastically and in doing so likely have a lower standard of living.
And they didn't want to.
They don't want to drive less, they don't want to fly less, they don't want smaller houses, they may say they want to do something about climate change but only so long as it doesn't actually meaningfully effect them.
The environmental movement between 1970-1990 made great changes in the way people lived. What stopped it was all out effort by the fossil fuel industry to ensure nothing would affect their profits.
I bet you can think of ways to reduce carbon output without changing square footage or miles driven.
You look at the history of the sierra club. They went from an organization fighting dams and the army corp, to a group fighting neighborhood development and densification in Marin county.
You can be an environmentalist (I am) and realize that much of the 'environmentalist movement' is self-serving nonsense; e.g., plastic recycling. It doesn't mean you don't care... it just means the world is less altruistic than you thought.
The fact that they changed behavior is immaterial to whether they improved or damaged the environment on net.
You look at California’s sprawl in the face of climate change, and you have to condemn a significant amount of the cliched 70’s environmentalism movements as as much about aesthetics as they were genuinely concerned about the environment.
I mean, maybe? Media stations are the first target in most coups... Cutting off alternative voices limits opposition, which is probably why Musk, Ellison, and whatever Saudi princes bought Twitter; and why TikTok was neutered.
What I'm really 'implying' (ie, saying explicitly) is that we have a billionaire problem. They're strip-mining our future, and using every tool money can buy to do so. This includes the tools in the media and political class. It's blatant and in our face now, after years of being behind the scenes.
It's not a billionaire problem. It's an America problem.
The symbolic moment when humanity lost the fight against climate change was July 25, 1997. US Senate passed the Byrd–Hagel Resolution 95–0, effectively saying that it would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Because the only superpower did not take the lead in the fight, it was doomed to fail.
People are struggling and everything is expensive. The last thing people want is for energy to become more expensive which drives the cost of everything. It’s political suicide as well. What’s needed is more energy supply which drives down relative demand lowering the costs of nearly everything.
Protesting or w/e doesn’t solve that problem. People struggling today don’t care about some abstract outcome.
My point is this isn’t a practical political issue today outside a fringe. It can be one day. But it’s not today. You’re literally saying the strategy is to make inflation worse and make everyone worse off by making todays energy infrastructure more expensive to operate.
The longer we delay the transition, the more we pay for energy.
So why don't we move forward with the transition? Partisan politics and mass delusion. Some people are literally so brainwashed by their politics that they can not even look up basic facts.
Right now, China is most likely peaking in their fossil fuel use, according to the IEA, a very fossil fuel friendly organization:
China is going to experience a cheaper energy system than the US for at least a decade unless we correct course.
All this talk about "people are hurting" as a way to avoid the transition is actually all about extracting just a few more years of high energy prices out of the US population to benefit the fossil fuel companies.
The infrastructure isn’t there. We need to flood our system with fossil fuels as that’s the existing infra and it makes for cheaper food, shipping, consumer goods, etc.
The input might be cheaper but the infrastructure to support it needs to be built. Solve that problem first.
Fossil fuels carry an environmental debt that you won't be repaying. Perpetuating the use of fossil fuels is basically saying "fuck you" to the next generation.
Same goes for beef consumption, plastic consumption, etc. We pay artificially reduced prices now while saddling the next generation with the debt of our selfishness.
The infrastructure is being built right now. It's there and growing.
Flooding our system with fossil fuels is not going to lower prices, we are already an energy exporter.
China built them both at the same time, and so should we. Enough delaying with BS excuses, we need to get out of the way of building the infrastructure by saying "there's not enough infrastructure".
Here’s a piece of reality to show you how far away we are. There are 10s of millions of homes in the USA with < 100 amps and in many cases < 75 or 50 amps of service. The transformers that route this power into these homes are often 40+ years old.
In order to discontinue gas (many still run on oil!) these homes need service upgrades. If every electrician in the country was dedicated to this task it would take over 30 years to do.
There are a lot of problems like this. The scale of the infrastructure is massive. I’m not saying it can’t be done or shouldn’t be done. In fact it is getting done. But it’s at least 40-50 years away.
In the meantime it makes sense to make energy inputs as cheap as possible.
Oh come on, the free market is far more creative than that. You have a view of a part of the country with high winter energy needs and are basing the entire transition on that.
If we were to get out of the way and let innovation rip, these things would get solved soooo quickly. The problem is that HVAC and grid folks are not used to adopting new tech and tend to be about 20-30 years behind what's available. We have had a massive, multi-year shortage of transformers in this country because the entire industry is so conservative that nobody on the supply side is willing to build out a tiny bit extra of capacity, and nobody on the buy side is willing to guarantee their demand enough to make the supply side invest in capacity. Just a bunch of absolute cowards in the industry.
So please don't be so condescending about how far away from reality I am when you are not even giving me an accurate view of the situation.
You're also treating it as an "all or nothing" when all of it is incremental. When EVs are in everybody's home, they suddenly have 50+ kWh of storage when they are home, which solves all sorts of other problems.
> That is the only way at this point to get change to happen quick enough to prevent 3C.
Given the poor track record of political protests in general and the relatively weak response to climate change by governments the world over, I’m not sure why you hold out a political response as the “only” way to prevent 3c.
A technological breakthrough, while unlikely, seems like a more plausible path to prevent 3c.
> Young people in the US need to be out protesting for their future
The changes you are outlining aren't going to happen from protesting. What we need is a general strike, but there is no appetite to do that in the numbers necessary to actually make any change.
Take a look at history, general strikes are very effective. But my point was that we're very far from actually having one because there isn't enough public support. People just don't care. If they did, they would have voted against Trump.
I don't think many people in US understand that the "voting" that will happen next is the same "voting" that happens in every dictatorship ever. "Get out and vote! Just this time. You won't have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed"
We don’t know exactly what will happen but we have good reason to believe it won’t be dramatically different from last time (systems don’t change easily) and we know defeatism won’t help.
Left-leaning people need to do the hard work of convincing people to their side, and that work needs to start now.
> Where "strike" means some kind of domestic terrorism level interference with infrastructure.
"Strike" usually means "refuse work", not some sort of violence that you seem to be advocating. It's possible to get real policy change through peaceful demonstrations, strikes and similar actions, as history will kindly remind you of.
Do you believe this could realistically be enough pressure to sway politicians driven by corporate financial incentives? Step-by-step reform and gradual carbon reductions just aren't feasible like they have been 20 years ago.
Without strong economic disruptions right now the unimaginable destruction in the future seems very likely to be disregarded in favor of short-term thinking, as illustrated perfectly not only by the current administration but also its weaker-than-ever opposition (e.g. Harris strongly advocating for fracking in 2024).
My point was that a strike won't be enough. Climate action has failed to gain traction for, what 30+ years?
I wasn't intending to encourage personal violence, but saying that violence against infrastructure (not people) is the only way to force the level of attention necessary.
I mean, the US has recently pivoted in the opposite direction. You think a strike would change the minds of those who made that decision?
I am kind of expecting 4C by 2050... given the current AI boom.
Most protesting is not going to be effective (in the sense that they won't get people's attention). Effective protests will be hated by general public (e.g. Just Stop Oil). So I am very pessimistic in general.
China will. They’ll keep exporting clean energy systems (renewables, batteries, EVs) to the world. The transition is inevitable, but young people need to stay motivated as older folks with power keep aging out every year.
> At least 49 cases have been confirmed. Health officials — who are scrambling to get a handle on the vaccine-preventable outbreak — suspect 200 to 300 people may be infected.
There's a book called "I Want A Better Catastrophe", which is about the role of hope in climate activism. (It's a little uneven, but interesting to see the breadth of perspectives from the people he talks to in the climate space).
One doomer he speaks to expects us to hit 6 degrees (which is also apparently backed up by one of the IPCC climate scientists he talks to), and describes the scenario this way:
* By 2050, we're expecting to hit a global population level of 10 billion
* By 2150, the carrying capacity of the planet (given degraded food production capacities, etc, in the 6 degree scenario) will be 2 billion
* Imagine what that century would be like to live through
2.5 degrees is obviously a much "less worse" scenario, hence the title of the book.
Another book along the same lines is "Ministry of the Future", also quite uneven, but an interesting enough read.
I think it's important to be non-avoidant and really contemplate what the higher-degree scenarios would look like, since we're clearly heading in that direction.
I struggle with this recommendation. I am anything but non avoidant. I’ve gone vegan, I rarely drive, I know that mass famine, immigration and war are highly likely before I die.
Realistically people like me cannot make change. I question the value of continuing to soak myself in the understanding that there is a strong chance the future will be shit.
I recently abandoned a reread of Parable of the Sower. I don’t need a reminder of what’s possible.
Would a better catastrophe cause people to take things seriously? Honestly after covid I doubt it.
I am sure we will reach 3 degrees, given what's going on in the world. Deniers will always come up with some arguments that this is somehow not real.
The question is at what temperature we will see cliff edge like effects, i.e. stopping of Gulf stream and the like.
Until the pain hits the wallet and stomach of the American middle class nothing is going to change. The ruling class and their media machine have people whipped into line and parroting back the talking points of the ultra wealthy.
It’s going to take pain of a seismic level to break the hold on the minds that of the people.
China's exports (and by extension, carbon emissions) are driven by American and European demands for cheap products. Drastically decreasing industrial demand would lead to Asian carbon emissions shrinking by a large margin.
At least China is also doing some good things, like building massive amounts of solar energy, and exporting cheap electric vehicles all around the world. Meanwhile the regime in America is actively attacking climate science and denying the whole issue.
Compared to Trump's administration the Chinese Communist party is quite okay from environmental perspective.
> Compared to Trump's administration the Chinese Communist party is quite okay from environmental perspective.
Yet the Chinese government is blocking the export of inputs for Battery and Solar technology to India [0], which incentivizes India to remain using coal and natural gas as a stopgap, as those are sourced from domestic and close allies (Saudi Arabia and now the US) respectively.
And China itself has begun expanding coal power capacity at the highest rate in almost 10 years due to energy security concerns [1]
Ironically, the Trump admin just gave a massive cash and tech injection into India's civilian nuclear and battery tech industries by starting to ToT American nuclear power plant designs, as well as subsidizing India's critical minerals industry (materials that are used to manufacture batteries and intermediate parts for PEVs) [2]
Reality is, no state or leader of a large country actually cares about environmental factors because they can afford to paper the effects, and the brunt of the suffering will affect poorest countries/LDCs that lack that capacity [3]
The pain is already happening. Food scarcity - and inflation - will happen before financial collapse and government collapse.
It's already localised - currently coffee and cocoa - but at some point staples will affected. Which is when it gets interesting.
This is the most incredible time in recorded history. There's never been a civilisation facing so many extreme existential threats at the same time.
And all of them are self-inflicted, and would have been sidestepped or mitigated by a rational planetary culture - climate change, war (possibly nuclear), pandemics, catastrophic economic destruction, and AI.
Unfortunately, the average consumer has no idea that high coffee or chocolate prices have anything to do with the climate change. Apparently the average economical understanding is at the level of believing a president can magically make grocery prices come down.
It’s not in my head. Going back as far as 1992 George Bush was saying “The American lifestyle is non-negotiable” at an international gathering focused on climate change.
This has proven true. It’s also spread across the globe and is a major contributor to green house gas emissions.
I wasn’t clear, even if American middle class would make a change, by that time, developing countries would be at the stage where they could and would have our luxury lifestyle. And that population outside US/EU is much much larger.
Yep, the potential tipping points are terrifying. If the gulf stream collapses, my country will basically turn into Siberia, and our agriculture will collapse. It's kind of hard justify taking a typical mortgage that takes 20 years to pay back, when I'm not sure if the country will be habitable by the time I would own the house fully.
Maybe geoengineering will save us, and we'll spray the atmosphere full of stuff that reflects sunlight to lower global temperatures. But it's best to prepare for the worst. I expect birth rates to continue collapsing as more young people realize they're probably doomed.
It will not, it will be a bit or more warmer on average then now and you may get regular snow in the winter. Winters will probably be similar to New Brunswick now. But no, not Siberia.
> it will be a bit or more warmer on average then now
Averages don't matter as much as extremes for agriculture and infrastructure. The changes in extremes, particularly in winter, will completely upend the way of life for 10s of million of people. Parts of Norway will drop 20C.
Yet you will still live, like millions do in similar temperatures across Canada and the US.
The true brunt of the global climate catastrophe will be bore by the the global poor in LDCs which do not have the economies of scale or capital to mitigate some of the worst aspects of a degrading climate.
Considering climate was generally defined as a 30 year window when I took earth sciences classes in the early 2000s I don’t think it’s a sleight of hand. Pretending that every minor outlier year in the span of 200 out of tens of thousands of years is an Armageddon-signalling catastrophe in order to secure more funding is far less genuine.
I'm calling for someone, anyone to take responsibility for promises made that were not kept.
How can any agreement of this sort be taken seriously in the future when it seems that some people sign it, applaud each other, then some other people are expected to abide by it without any enforcement mechanisms?
Matters of existential importance should be taken with great seriousness and not just for short term benefits to those wielding the pens.
No one wants to be responsible for anything. It's the same way at companies. Everything is constructed so that any failure can be blamed on the organization as a whole, and thus no one has to feel like they personally contributed to the failure.
When the politicians lie about everything and then do not get called out for it by either the media or the populace, the problems are even deeper than the serious problems caused by our not honoring such well-intentioned and well-designed agreements.
The two most important human concepts are compassion and truth. Our losing touch with those most important values has pushed our world society to the brink of misery.
What's important for the people here at HN, however, is that their investments in energy-wasting tech are protected from people realizing that PG et al are not at all different than IBM in 1930's Germany: "We are just making the adding machines."
"We're just investors." The world needs to wake up to the likes of the callously cruel. PG is asleep at the wheel of the machines his machine has helped produce.
Geoengineering research needs to happen ASAP if we care about preventing runaway positive feedback effects. Calcium carbonate in upper atmosphere is a very promising solution. So is bringing back containership ship tracks via fuel additives or salt-based marine cloud brightening.
The unknown unknown risks of these solutions is not a good reason for ignoring the known risk of unarrested heat imbalances. And it is a fantasy to think that governments will stop fossil fuels consumption to the degrees needed. Clean energy is the future, but we need a stop gap before the permafrost melts.
Stopping fossil fuels isn’t about punishing evil mankind for consumption, it is about stabilizing a climate. And there are other more politically feasible ways of accomplishing this need.
The funny thing is we have all the technology to stop climate change today, and it's cheaper than burning fossil fuels.
So I suspect that geoengineering will face the same problems: a political party that refused to acknowledge the problem and deal with it, because it's politically incorrect to acknowledge climate change.
Look at Texas, pretty much the only energy system that is capitalist with people trying to make money by producing energy cheaper than the competition. It's allllll solar and batteries going in, because it's the cheapest energy source.
If people were pragmatic and cared about money, that's what would be happening everywhere. Instead, most utilities make more money when energy costs more, so they go with the old fossil fuel tech and keep old infrastructure in place.
If you're on HN and don't know how cheap renewables and storage are, that's a really bad sign, and proof that people are not very pragmatic and fundamentally lazy. There's a massive technological shift going on and nobody even seems know about it.
Renewables are getting built at a massive rate. Doubling every 3 years. It’s not a replacement yet, though. That’s because existing energy infrastructure is cheaper (eg gas), as is, than replacing it.
Don’t be mean, we are after the same thing. Further, fundamental laziness leads to pragmatism. If you really want to be lazy, you do the cheap and easy thing.
I am very concerned about global warming, but we need to find solutions and plans that can include everyone from all political spectrums, and that do not disproportionately affect the poorer sections of society. And if the poor people have to make sacrifices, then other sections of society have to bear the burden too. The rich, but also the state bureaucracies that are only using the crisis to increase their size and spending.
This does not work when there are parts of the political spectrum that won’t even believe there’s a problem, and which reject the scientific consensus out of hand, and which even threaten to defund the scientific research entirely.
Then science and education must adapt to the times and do better to educate and convey their message to a wider audience, everyone must do their part, including scientists and educators. If you exclude half the population from your plans before you even start, you will very probably fail.
Then propaganda and misinformation must adapt to prevent science and education from swaying that half of the population away from profitable fossil fuel extraction.
I think is a very good point and in my opinion one of the reasons for the backlash against green measures across the world. When people just survive, it is hard to justify to pay more for electricity to switch away from fossil fuels, or buy expensive heat pumps etc. I think the green switch should have been planned in such a way to protect poorer people.
> we need to find solutions and plans that can include everyone from all political spectrums
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
What you are delicately saying is that Republicans are children and somehow we must all change to coddle them and their snowflake beliefs.
No, just no. We need accountability and responsibility. Every single Republican that is actually responsible needs to be holding their fellow Republicans to account for the lies they spread.
I have tried every strategy under the sun with my family. When it comes to politics, they just want somebody to tell them they can act like children, which is what today's Republican part gives them.
I understand why you feel this way, but saying it is impossible is too defeatist. People arent horses and their beliefs can change. Isn't it worth the sacrifice to acknowledge the concerns and political views of the opposing side if it means a chance of saving planet earth? We should find common grounds and start a fresh dialogue about climate change. I'm sure there are opportunities to do so.
> acknowledge the concerns and political views of the opposing side if it means a chance of saving planet earth
How in the world will acknowledging their concerns save the planet? Pretending like they have not had their concerns acknowledged and listened to and addressed is also a bit condescending.
I'm not defeatist, but you are definitely not understanding the situation.
The common ground starts with truth, the common ground starts with Republicans being willing to acknowledge me as a human with beliefs too. There's a deep deep deep sickness in the information sphere of the Republican party that needs to be addressed.
The Democratic party has sever information problems on its fringe. But the Republican information problem is coming from the top, from the very leaders that run everything.
> No, just no. We need accountability and responsibility. Every single Republican that is actually responsible needs to be holding their fellow Republicans to account for the lies they spread.
Let's say you're right. How do you plan to do that without "finding solutions and plans that can include everyone from all political spectrums"? How are you going to get some Republicans to hold other Republicans accountable if you haven't found a solution that includes that first subset of Republicans? I suppose you could aim for autocratic top down governmental control, but I think if you look around at the current state of the US government you might see some flaws with that plan.
It's easy to be frustrated and angry and rant at people. It's easy to dismiss them and write them off as not worth the effort. But in the end, the question to have to ask yourself is whether it's more important to be right and that other people do things for the right reasons, or more important to accomplish your goal, and other people do the right things even if its not for the right reason.
We are frogs that sit in a pan of increasingly hotter water. We see some disasters left and right, of course. But linking that by yourself to climate change - one generally doesn't, they need scientist and researchers for that. If they even believe them and haven't been told by the PM that is all fake.
Then we have that abstract figure of 1.5C - not understanding that it is an average. A scientist or mathematician understands that - but for the average person it is too abstract. Even for me, someone who doesn't doubt man-made climate change, 1.5C is still... odd. We should communicate in expected maximum temperatures w/ durations, droughts, disasters this causes. Yet the media keep repeating "1.5C" more often than any alternative.
Honestly I’m starting to wonder if all the bluster around acquiring Greenland and annexing Canada is all focused on having land available for the United States when the southern and central states become uninhabitable.
I think any smart strategist would have to consider that value, yes. Also Arctic mineral rights / maritime boundaries.
The current administration definitely has some smart strategists inside it. This is not new or unique of course, but the willingness to consider such ideas publicly is unusual.
And in a different expansionist colonial age, both Greenland and Canada would be easy and valuable wins, justified by Manifest Destiny or American Exceptionalist Prosperity Gospel or somesuch garbage mythology.
Going back to that age would have winners and losers.
I cringe to say this, but there's a defensible argument that in a time of shrinking resources, it is logical and appropriate to go back to that kind of world order. It's even net-beneficial, as a really strong argument can be made that Canada and Greenland and the Arctic zones are not being utilized to their current or future potentials.
The minor problems of sovereignty etc, are very minor problems if the stakes are high enough to accept global trade disruption.
The only reason the US hasn't rolled over Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and all the Central American countries including Panama and the Canal Zone already is, well, the politeness of our age. And the corresponding stability advantages of preferential trade over conquest. The US is bursting at the seams of economic dominance in the North American zone.
The age of politeness and free-ish trade might be ending.
I'm personally opposed to living in that kind of new (old) age, but certain ground truths feel uncomfortably obvious.
I'm not sure who "us" is here, but I would suspect that the US could occupy Canada, Greenland, or Mexico with only small regional skirmishes. No nukes (detonated) at all.
I hope I'm very wrong -- or that if I'm right, the US public too polite to tolerate it.
Exactly. For all their bluster the Trump Admin is making novel moves that wouldn’t be tolerated if they were in their own. They are hidden by the outcry around USAID.
I know that. I read the paper published in Joule, stating that Bitcoin was responsible for 0.2% of global carbon emissions via 0.4% of global energy usage. That, to me, does not sound significant enough to claim it has a measurable impact on warming, as worldwide electricity usage surely increases by more than 0.4% each year.
With that said, I agree that cryptocurrencies are largely unnecessary and their usage should be regulated, together with other more effective measures.
I hope this turns out to just be an anomaly, but I know that's likely not the case. The kicker is that global warming isn't even terribly hard to prevent, just give up your car and you've pretty much done your part.
At what point should we believe in climate change?
When the first islands disappear under the raising sea levels?
When the first cities become uninhabitable because of rising temperatures?
When the first wars begin over of resources that aren't there anymore?
Or when the there are no container ships to bring cheap products from China, or long distance air travel becomes prohibitively expensive, or climate refugees start knocking at our doors? I.e. when it is us who are personally affected?
Most of humankind will select option four, we shouldn't wonder.
Oh, I'm not denying climate change, I'm just saying that we can't say for certain whether or not we passed the Paris Agreement threshold, even though it's likely that we did.
Now with a 2nd Term, I am sure by 2100 we will hit 4C, and my unscientific prediction is the Pollyanna one.
Young people in the US need to be out protesting for their future. First get the US to eliminate all fossil fuel subsidiaries. And then maybe add a huge tax on the use of fossil fuels. That is the only way at this point to get change to happen quick enough to prevent 3C.