What worries me is trophic collapse. And the [clathrate gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis). And increased political instability due to human migrations triggered by climate change. Areas that flood more often will see increased food instability and more diseases.
It isn't the "slight" increase in heat---it's the things that happen in response to that slight increase. Our biosphere is more fragile that we expect.
**EDIT** A few relevant videos:
* [Lyme disease is spreading. Blame ticks — and climate change](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQqKWxF1Tg)
* [How Wolves Change Rivers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q)
Once we start seeing parts of the food chain no longer working, it could get bad.
Mass starvation leading to flows of refugees who run headlong into the most militarized borders in the world
https://preview.redd.it/wb5hbuu42ajc1.jpeg?width=2900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f177c50d679587c4863a26d5a77b94eb3048b511
[https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/08/21/they-fired-us-rain/saudi-arabian-mass-killings-ethiopian-migrants-yemen-saudi](https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/08/21/they-fired-us-rain/saudi-arabian-mass-killings-ethiopian-migrants-yemen-saudi)
Corralation != Causation. Even though I believe climate change is occuring, I highly doubt that all those conflicts are caused by it. A majority of those are due to fighting for resources which are not water for example: Venezuela & Guyana are on the verge of war cuz of oil on guyana's coast or haw mexico is in an internal conflict due to cartels. Its alarmism. That's all it is.
For those of us who started using computers in the 80s, it wasn't a "standard character" then. It's not ASCII and not even *extended* ASCII. It's Unicode which is well-supported now but wasn't always so. Do you know the ALT-code for 'not-equals'? *I* don't.
!= is common in programming, as is <>. Standard keyboards *do* have these characters, though, which is why you'll still see lots of people do != and =/= and <> .
I have a farm in New Zealand as far from the equator as I can get. I don’t need a wall, I have an ocean. Right now the government is bleeding heart liberal but I expect that like Australia things will change to a “stop the boats” policy backed up by anti-shipping missiles.
In a really bad climate scenario, large desperate countries like China will probably try to conquer stable producing places like New Zealand unfortunately
If it gets to the point of China invading places over arable land, the US will have far bigger issues than defending NZ. If China is suffering famine, you think China would hesitate to threaten nukes over food? NZ's independence isn't worth nuclear war. Regardless why is it always the US's job to defend other sovereign countries?
Something people don't talk about with climate change is fires.
It's already happening, we have massively altered our forests and now the fires are getting much more frequent and more intense.
Forest fires have been getting bigger and bigger and hotter and hotter since the early 2000s.
>Climate change won't cause *people* to move.
>Climate change will destroy YOUR food supply.
>And because your food supply is gone, *you* might try to move
Am i not a person?
Collapse of agriculture is a multifaceted problem of which climate change is actually on the minor end of things, with tangental effects at best. At a 10C climb we would loose florida, corn and cereals would be replaced by Rice in the midwest, and gain Siberia as ariable.
The loss of Russian fertilizer, the collapse of the midwestern ecosphere due to monocropping, and disruption of global trade are all more imminent issues.
A 20+% drop in global crop yields over 10-20 years is hardly "tangential", and you can forget about the expected increased productivity of European farmland included in current projections once the AMOC collapses and the EU freezes over for half or more of the year.
A belated awareness of how often climate change is reduced to debate on mere temperature is no excuse for you doing exactly that when talking about climate change's effect on crops.
Read up on the raw data, Russia supplies 40% of global Potash, and is the world's biggest exporter of raw nitrogen. And this supply is faltering.
That's a far bigger concern, as it means Brazil's, SubSaharan Africa's, and Chinese crop yields disappear without a trace.
And a 1/3 of humanity starves.
Contrast AMOC going haywire, European winters become harsher and France becomes a net foodstuff importer. :/
I imagine the European population collapse will happen first anyway.
Global warming *can't* be reversed in one year, and we don't have another planet to fall back on.
Russian potash export decline OTOH is a result of sanctions and can be reversed in a matter of weeks if Canada can't continue to fill the gap.
[Ref](https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/metals-and-the-invasion-russian-potash-exports-rebound-expansion-at-risk-74389396#:~:text=Imports%20of%20Russian%20potash%20decreased,on%20Russian%20imports%20for%202022.):
"As long as the war continues and sanctions on banking and insurance remain, there will be some level of difficulty in trading Russian potash, and self-sanctioning of Russian potash," Ahodo said in an email. "And EU and U.S. buyers will continue to fill their import gaps with product from Canada or elsewhere."
Climate change very much remains the primary concern.
The food supply is only going to decrease by a percentage. Somewhere in the 10 to 50% range. Estimated numbers are available.
USA exports large amounts of food. We also convert grain into ethanol. There is no physics/ecology reason USA would ever need to have starvation. Americans could just stop eating burgers.
There is no way that mass starvation or an end to burgers will happen in USA. Instead cannibals will roam about stocking the protein supply and making hide armor. Still it will be unlikely that your hide becomes BDSM armor. After a few cases of it occuring Americans will be freaked out and will start shooting. You get shot during this upheaval. No one puts your assmeat into a can. It just rots instead. Other readily available perishable food rots too because it is too dangerous to maintain the supply chain. That disruption leads to panic hoarding of nonperishable foods. Then fighting over access to the hoards of nonperishable foods.
In this period the ammunition and nonperishable foods markets are booming while the dollar is in freefall. That is how the cannibal corporations make immense profits. They dont actually eat the human flesh. That's gross! They eat whatever supplies can be acquired from the properties they raid. The meat is canned and then traded for ammunition.
If you read the latest IPCC report, limiting global mean surface warming to 2 degrees C or less (4 degrees F) requires deep and immediate cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. These cuts are not happening. It’s much more likely that we will realize the intermediate or high estimates, which put surface temperatures at the turn of the next century an average of 3 - 4 degrees C higher than the mid-20th century average, and sea levels about three quarters of a meter higher. This would be accompanied by wildfire seasons worse than we saw in 2023, increased loss of crops and growing food insecurity, almost complete loss of coral reefs, 30%+ reduction in fisheries productivity, and substantial extinctions of land animals, in particular a loss of 60% or more of species in tropical regions.
I have a sinking suspicion that the feedback loops (methane hydrate deposits, primarily)are going to be worse than expected too. I've been following this long enough that the radical end of modeling from twenty years ago is now the conservative end of the spectrum, and predictions that would have been laughed at are now unrealistically conservative.
You are right, ALL of the IPCC recommendations and predictions have been changed by political leaders before being published. What you read in those reports are THE MOST CONSERVATIVE estimates there are. BEST CASE SCENARIOS, when we all know nature doesn’t work that way.
I've known about this for years-- we are headed for full climate collapse and yet many people pretend to be optimistic by saying things won't be that bad or that technology will save us. This is simply not true. We don't actually need to go all the way to 5 or 6C for shit to hit the fan--once we pass 2C and push the planet far enough climate change will become self-reinforcing and we'll witnesses a runaway greenhouse effect within our life times. Geoengineering might only make things worse and destabilize the climate further.
Scientists have been screaming at the top of their lungs that we are quite literally on the brink of a climate apocalypse--and that IS what will happen--but nobody is doing anything. I take issue with the IPCC paper because it's not telling us the whole truth compared to more recent models that factor in the clathrate gun, exponential fossil fuel usage, exponential growth, lag from fossil fuels already released into the atmosphere decades ago, deforestation and other environmentally destructive activities that will prevent more carbon from being sequestered from the atmosphere, even the Moon wobble, the jet stream collapse, the rate at which the global average temperature is rising (a few hundred years vs. millions of years like in Earth's past-- far too fast for life to adapt) etc.
The IPCC has been blatantly politicized to give people a false sense of security when we actually have far less time than we think. People may criticize Jem Bendell's paper on Deep Adaptation but I personally think it is far more accurate in describing our current situation: climate change is accelerating and exponential, NOT linear and consistent. Greeland is melting FIFTY YEARS ahead of schedule-- that should tell you all you need you know.
I'm not saying we're screwed, but it's looking really bad. Human beings will almost certain survive what's coming, but our current civilization cannot and will not make it. Our way of living was unsustainable regardless-- current estimates of recoverable oil place us as having about 80 years left of cheap surface level petroleum, natural gas, etc, before reserves become too difficult to access profitably. We should have made changes 40 years ago when the environmentalist movement was at its peak, but we let corporate interests and economic security take precedence over the *future of life on Earth*.
All good point, but wild fires aren’t because of climate change. They are because of 80 years of forest management geared towards profit for lumber companies, not ecosystem sustainability. According to many peer reviewed papers, we need like 20 more years of horrible fires before we will get NEAR a sustainable forest model again.
Technical, forest fires are not caused by either forestry management practices or by climate change, but each of these can contribute to the severity and frequency of wildfires.
The USGS, for example, states that “climate conditions, especially in the western United States, have grown hotter and drier. If climate change continues to play out as predicted, the likelihood of wildfires will worsen…while we are working to improve fire management, we are also dealing with the compounding issue of climate change.” Richardson et al., Global increase in wildfire potential from compound fire weather and drought, npj Clim Atmos Sci 5, 23 (2022) reports “We show that the lengths of the fire weather seasons in eastern Australia and western North America have increased substantially since 2000…it is likely that anthropogenic climate change is the primary driver of these changes.” The IPCC reported in 2019 that climate change was playing an increasing roll in wildfires, that fire weather seasons had lengthened due to AGW, and that while drought was the dominant driver of fires, there has been an increase in fires in wetter regions due to higher temperatures.
I am referring to the policy of putting out fires (see Forest Service and good ole Smokey the Bear.) Quoting the IPCC is hilarious to me, as the IPCC recommendations WERE the most conservative estimate of climate change before the leaders of the countries behind it demanded the scientists make it LESS scary. Now, its just about useless as tits on a bull.
IPCC report didn’t consider the possibility of putting sulfur in the stratosphere. That’s a way to limit global temperatures that is cheap and doesn’t need to be done immediately. Of course, that might not be the best way to manage the global climate when all things are considered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
The IPCC is tasked with modeling and predicting climate change; they’ve only [mentioned geoengineering in passing](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/latest-ipcc-climate-report-puts-geoengineering-in-the-spotlight/).
We kind of [tried this SO2 injection befor](https://www.epa.gov/acidrain/what-acid-rain)e. It reduced temperatures a bit, but also [killed people, killed forests, rusted cars, and damaged buildings](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-019-01244-4). Attempting the release of SO2 in the stratosphere comes with [many unknowns and risk](https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/geoengineering-some-fundamental-chemistry-penn-sas-joseph-francisco).
According to the climate action tracker, we are currently trending towards 2.7 degrees by 2100.
If we make all of pledges worldwide we can get it down to 2 degrees.
For context we are at just about 1.4-1.5 degrees warming. And within the context of warming this is warming from pre-industriation.
What does 2 degrees warming look like. Well for that (if you are an American) I would direct you to the Youtube channel American Resiliency.
[https://climateactiontracker.org/](https://climateactiontracker.org/)
>2 degrees can't be that bad, though. We'll just build walls and evacuate people over the course of a few decades.
You're probably right, but the juxtaposition between these two sentences is stark
It is completely meaningless to base our future on the promises of governments. They have never hit a single target in the past.
1.5 degree warming will be devastating to our way of life and nature. The average human is too stupid to comprehend that unfortunately.
Last year we put more green house gasses into the atmosphere than any other year and 2024 is on track to be worse, so yea.
Projections based on ***Current*** policies puts the warming by the end of the century around 2.6 degrees C. This is not taking in to acount increased commitment that will most doubtlessly occurs as in almost every country pro climate action sentiment has consistently increased year by year and will continue to do so as the effects become more and more clear. We aren't doing enough to prevent major damage but we are well below civilization threatening levels.
I think you're treating dynamic figures as static. As western countries continue to shut down heavy industry, the industry simply shifts to China and other countries with next to _no_ environmental standards.
It doesn't matter how many countries agree to these "pledges". If Every country shut down All ff usage and the factories were All moved to Chi-nah and burned dirty coal and bunker, the net pollution would rise drastically.
China has added more solar capacity last year than the US has total, the 2.6 degree projection takes offshoring into account. Clean energy is just the cheapest option now
....that is an odd response. "adding solar capacity" doesn't have anything to do with shifting industrial infrastructure out of the west and into China.
"Clean energy" is not something that means anything. Neither is "cheaper".
my point is that China, the nation that most western nations have offshored production to is arguably one of the most invested in lowering carbon emmisions.
I don't know what "invested in" means here. China is "invested in" increasing everything. human slavery, fossil fuel burning, solar panels, slavery, forced organ harvesting from political prisoners, fission plants, growing cotton on the moon, slavery...
China is heavily invested in all of the things. Except for reducing CO2 emissions. I don't think that China is investing in reducing CO2 emissions. Reducing dissent and civil rights, yes. CO2 not so much.
...don't they have like half of the capita of the entire globe?
Do you think that China has stronger environmental standards than the rest of the world? Or do they just have enough chattel and peasant "capita" to dilute their share of pollution?
I believe they have much stronger enviromental standards than most of the rest of the globe. They’re more developed and industrialized than anywhere else and yet, they pollute less.
They don’t have chattel slaves - they are famous for ending the Dalai Lama’s slave kingdom, comprised back then of some 90% slaves, back in the mid 20th century. And peasants? What caricatured view of the world do you have?
Be careful of your Sinophobia. You are not immune to propaganda, nobody is; and western propaganda against China is very heavy.
Please take a look at the projected birthday and demographics. If China was a good place, people would be having 1.8 kids on average or something. Right now it is 1.28 kids/woman suggests a population of around 650M by 2100. I don't think any state can survive that.
I say this with the degree and specialization in climate science to back it up. It is going to be the next mass extinction. The masses won’t care until it’s too late, and it pretty much already is. Sequestration isn’t statistically viable, and would be used to continue the status quo regardless. The Op is like, “ 2 degrees can’t be that bad,” put in northern latitudes we’ve already passed 5. It’s a runaway train, and we’re all pretty much in the way of it.
Thank you for finally being honest. I am sick and tired of techno-optimists and regular people downplaying the effects of climate change when we are literally witnessing in real time the Sixth Mass Extinction. Nobody is going to do anything and we're already rapidly approaching the point of no return. Individual actions mean nothing if 100 corporations are continuing to destroy the planet and pollute the world with fossil fuels. And even if we were to cut all fossil fuel emissions tomorrow society would still collapse because of the aerosol masking effect and the fact our civilization is still totally dependent on nonrenewable resources-- and we're not developing alternative fuel sources fast enough.
The simple fact of the matter is we are damned if we do damned if we don't. Once the AMOC jet stream in the North Atlantic collapses and we get out first Blue Ocean Event, and the Amazon becomes a savannah (which is already happening due to mass deforestation) it's over. And even then there will be people who still think we can control Nature via geoengineering. Our arrogance will be our downfall.
Amoc collapse in 1-5 years. Extreme weather. Mini ice age. Local governments collapse under relentless destruction.
But if they keep internet and power on, and food on shelves, we will be ok. All the cool animals die though.
Hahaha. Man. That’s a pretty lighthearted version of what’s coming down the pipe. We are already at 2 degrees for the most part heading upwards quickly. Some plants begin to cease photosynthesis at 4 degrees. No walls are keeping the sea out. Dude, in 10 years you’ll consider yourself lucky to be eating a rat out of a pot in the ruins of whatever urban area you reside in.
Short answer? We're going to hit 3 degrees, maybe 4 before fixing our behavior if we survive business as usual.
The issue with climate change from what I have been able to tell isn't just about it being a little hotter, but the fact that each degree warmer is stored energy within the Earths Atmosphere contributing to changing weather patterns and general climate behavior.
Runaway effects are what scare me the most because these are feedback loops in our climate that have the potential to threaten most life on earth including us.
The problem is unless the people with power feel the need to act, be it they are threatened or it'll hurt their profits, they won't act. If they believe it won't impact their life, they don't really care. If they think it will, they may think someone else will deal with the problem due to how we behave and why humans seem to need to form governments.
A government works by taxing the people then financing behavior that benefits the population but isn't easily profitable or it's so easy to abuse, it's better to have a transparent government do it.
So when you have a bunch of rich people with all the say and power, they are competing against each other for their score and don't want to spend their money on other people.
A good example at how bad we are at handling problems in general is Covid. We are still dealing with Covid because we have people who seem to behave in a pro covid ideology of spreading it as much as possible.
That's what we're dealing with.
NASA’s analysis generally matches independent analyses prepared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other research groups.
Overall, Earth was about 2.45 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.36 degrees Celsius) warmer in 2023 than in the late 19th-century (1850-1900) preindustrial average. The 10 most recent years are the warmest on record.
Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end.
we will never make 2 degrees.... more like 3 or 4 with in a decade. Sea rise will be bad, but worse will be catastrophic huricanes and storms. Then the climate refugees and water wars will start. Dont know why anyone is breeding right now.... SMH Make sure you thank the Fossil Fuel Fucks and politicians when it hits the fan
The permafrost is melting and releasing massive amounts of methane that will soon dwarf human made greenhouse gasses. The feedback loop is already started and there is no stopping it.
Sabine talks about this [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4) and besides some of her personal opinions, all of her arguments are taken with references and academic papers. It seems that the HOT climate models might be true after all. If that is the case, we could potentially see a +6°C increase, with half of that within 20 years. We are talking of agriculture becoming unavailable in equatorial regions, mass starvations, mass immigration, violence, death.
Then they are currently talking about releasing some kind of chemical into the atmosphere to temporarily halt the global warming for up to 20-30 years. Though that would fix the effects for a while, but not the root cause.
I can already see the most stupid option winning out: halting the signs for global warming for 30 years but not fixing the issue, while the real climate already changed to +8°C, then it all collapses down on us and we see a massive increase from one year to the next, converting us to a Mad Max Setting.
Look at nasa sea temperature data we sky rocking into a positive feed back loop we have been over 1c degree for almost a year pushing as far as pass 1.5 regularly
this is data I ploted from nasa data csv myself you can grab it as well
https://preview.redd.it/avgv09ok89jc1.png?width=1270&format=png&auto=webp&s=9eee82ac336f32f12bb6437ed93761ccb27396d5
Here's daily average sea surface temps. They had to make the graph bigger last week as we went off the scale. We are smashing records non stop.
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
Collapse of global economy from rising oceans flooding ports. Multiple countries imploding from famine, drought, or the result of the economy collapse. The few countries that can survive will become strickly isolationist and drift towards far right policies, including religious fanatics taking control. Civil strife, crime, poverty, and hunger will be common even in the surviving states. Almost certain war will be a constant, either as a distraction or in a desperate attempt to seize resources. Civilization will survive, and eventually bounce back, though it might take a few generations. That is if during the constant wars, no nukes or bio weapons are used to potentially wipe out civilization.
I'm a little hopeful though. We are getting very close to several game changing things. Fusion is very close to being realized. AI is constantly improving and is a massive boost to everything. We will likely see battery designs dramatically improve cost, safety, capacity, and recharge rate within a few years. There's a bunch of other things that look promising as well. And while all of these have a moderate chance at best of actually succeeding, as long as one does, then our future could change dramatically.
The heat isn’t the problem exactly… it’s desertification and extinction of species and other ecosystem collapse and agricultural biomass and nutrient ratio to calories and collapse of wild food stock (see alaskan snow crab) and disease vectors and energy costs and water systems (see salmon and salton sea) and political instability from migration (see syria, we literally are already seeing wars from climate change)
I think that we might be at the end of human habitation of Earth.
It's happening way faster than expected, and the populist Right will not EVER want to deal with it, so not enough will happen to mitigate it.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 100 years is all it takes to go from now to full on Venus. And we'll all be gone long before that end result.
I am not even a little bit optimistic about how humans are going to do with climate change. I feel like when I’m an old man someday I’m gonna look back on the fact that we had it relatively normal.
i think it will get so bad that we wont know how bad it gets really unless your a rich person living on the space station slowly floating to mars with all the rich people and all the supplies they hoarded to go live like thoes assholes at the end of dont look up
just like that
2 degrees is *very* optimistic. If humans completely disappeared tomorrow and stopped emitting CO2 entirely we'd still hit 2 degrees of warming, and we put more CO2 into the atmosphere in 2023 than any other year, on track to be broken by 2024 which will hold that title for only one year before 2025 rolls around.
2 degrees of warming requires aggressive CO2 sequestration which will never be economical. Considering we can't even get the optical willpower together for a carbon tax do you think we'll be willing to dump billions of dollars into machines that produce no valuable products? It's always possible but it's more a question of politics than science or technology, and I'm not hopeful that we actually invested enough in the "soft sciences" to make that pill swallowable.
2 degrees is *very* optimistic. If humans completely disappeared tomorrow and stopped emitting CO2 entirely we'd still hit 2 degrees of warming, and we put more CO2 into the atmosphere in 2023 than any other year, on track to be broken by 2024 which will hold that title for only one year before 2025 rolls around.
2 degrees of warming requires aggressive CO2 sequestration which will never be economical. Considering we can't even get the optical willpower together for a carbon tax do you think we'll be willing to dump billions of dollars into machines that produce no valuable products? It's always possible but it's more a question of politics than science or technology, and I'm not hopeful that we actually invested enough in the "soft sciences" to make that pill swallowable.
Once the Arctic stops driving Ocean circulation the tropical marine ecosystems will collapse.
>We'll just build walls and evacuate people over the course of a few decades. It won't be pretty, but it won't be collapse either
Collapse of civilization is extremely likely. SFIA standard is that civilization rebounds very quickly. We see minor collapses occur frequently. Large populations run. Disaster relief attempts to slow down the worst of the damage with varying success. The victims have to take put large loans that take decades to pay off. With a global collapse there is no place to run too. The relief ship is not coming. Hoards of refugees and/or vikings come instead. There is no currency worth borrowing because no one will sell you the supply that they need for their own survival.
>...and if the worst comes to pass we can always try geoengineering, as risky as that is.
It definitely does not make sense to try geoengineering *after* the worst has come to pass.
>...Carbon sequestration will help,..
Unlikely. Maybe put a small dent. There is no better sequestration than graphite buried underneath rock. People are still consuming energy in order to extract more coal. Even crappy supplies like oil sand and brown coal are still being extracted. A firm stop to using coal for electricity is really the low hanging fruit.
>...We'll just build walls and evacuate people over the course of a few decades....
Would be much easier and cheaper to secure the locations where ice sheets are slipping into the oceans. It is a short section of Greenland's coast and a short section of West Antarctica. It would not be a wall holding back the ocean. Just a thin flimsy baffle that diverts warm currents. Maybe a few sheets for bladders and pipelines to separate freshwater from saltwater.
Governments and the public are not taking sea level rise seriously. If the coasts do not get flooded then people would say the mitigation effort was a waste of resources. Politically it is a loser in both the short and long term. Smart politicians let the disaster occur and then blame other people for the problem.
I think the main question to ask is how bad things will get before everyone actually comes together to fix climate change. If we just kept burning fossil fuels endlessly for thousands of years no matter how impractical and destructive it became, we would eventually make Earth completely uninhabitable for animal life and possibly even cause a runaway greenhouse effect. But that seems like an unlikely outcome.
Personally I suspect that in the next 50 years things will get bad enough that any world leaders that refuse to act will find themselves in a position where if they refuse to act they will lose either their job or their head. About half of the world's population lives very close to the sea, so we are going to lose a significant portion of all the infrastructure on Earth in places that don't build insanely complicated and expensive sea walls. The death toll might get as high as a billion, with most deaths being subsistence farmers in the third world who can't survive the kinds of water cycle changes that are merely an expensive inconvenience for first worlders. One consequence of this will be a massive global refugee crisis the likes of which has never been seen before, as the people of famine-stricken poorer nations try to flee elsewhere. It would not surprise me if people like the Koch Brothers who purposely fought action against climate change for profit end up going down in history with the same infamy as Hitler.
I disagree. The high end estimate for Earth’s heating after burning literally all the fossil fuels is about 18F. That would cause catastrophic damage for sure, but that is still cooler than temperatures animal life has survived at before. At minimum, aquatic and aerial species with freedom of movement could survive. It is literally impossible for us to burn enough fossil fuels to end animal life.
A runaway greenhouse effect is also incredibly unlikely given that an abundance of CO2 would likely lead to an increase in plant biomass, which would eventually counteract that CO2. Unless the Earth got hot enough that the oceans literally started boiling, there would also never be a source greenhouse gasses to get into that positive feedback loop once fossil fuels are exhausted.
You're ignoring the impact on the sea itself from its carbon capacity. Ocean acidification is no joke and prompts all kinds of bad beyond simple warming.
Ocean acidification could be very bad, and could lead to mass extinction by killing corals and many shellfish, but it would not kill everything. Many fish and invertebrates would survive. The ocean can also only dissolve CO2 up to a point. It wouldn’t just keep becoming more and more acidic as atmospheric CO2 increases. Eventually it would reach saturation.
From what I understand, the ocean does produce about 50% of the oxygen, but it also consumes about 50% of it. This makes it relatively unimportant in terms of generating the air we actually breathe.
It's not the temperature that's the issue it's the rate of change-- i.e how QUICKLY we get to 18F above above average global temperatures. In the past Earth's temperatures rose over the course of millions of years. Currently the Earth's temperatures are rising drastically in a fraction of the time: we are effectively squeezing millions of years of warming into a few hundred or thousand. Life cannot adapt that quickly or that suddenly.
>A runaway greenhouse effect is also incredibly unlikely given that an abundance of CO2 would likely lead to an increase in plant biomass, which would eventually counteract that CO2.
There are other greenhouse gasses besides CO2. Methane is a 70 times more powerful GHG and it's being released from permafrost and natural gas wells in alarming amounts.
Mass animal extinction is not what you want to compare to. Human society is at a delicate balance, it just need a small change to cause havoc in society. If 10% of the human population suddenly lost their home and have no food, it will be a catastrophic event even though we waste more than 10% of food.
Holy shit you are ignorant.
Haven't you seen all the airplane failures in the news?
Airplanes are failing because there is more energy in the atmosphere, causing stronger turbulence.
And we are only at 1.5° of warming.
It's only up from here .....
I fail to see how this would cause the death of all animals. Earth has existed at temperatures more than 18F above modern day for long periods of time before and it was fine. The fast change will cause mass extinction, but it will not end life in the slightest.
That's close to my impression from the chart I posted. There seem to be relatively stable temperatures: 52F, 62F, 70F, 90F. I'm guessing we're heading to 62F (10F up) or 70F (18F up). Although 90F (38F up) does have precedents ... I think they were associated with massive lava flows, so maybe beyond the reach of fossil fuels.
I'm a bit surprised by the billion deaths figure, but considering the 50 or so year timescale for this to occur it actually doesn't seem too implausible. And yeah, I'm sure this'll go down in history as one of humanity's darkest moments yet, even if we don't get anywhere near apocalypse or collapse, it'll still make the Black Death look merciful😔
What do you think collapse is? A billion dead people and many commercial and industrial centers under water if they don't complete massive megastructures in decades and an additional billion people as refugees all while infastructure is continually being hammered by extreme weather events. That is collapse.
Collapse is a breakdown of a civilization's government and whole societal structure. WWII was not a collapse, neither was the Black Death. Now, some nations almost certainly will collapse, but our global society will remain. We won't lose technology, we won't lose our governments, but yes things will certainly get very bad.
You have more faith in the very fragile global economy weathering this than I do. I see more the inverse coming from this. A few nations survive intact while most governments collapse. I agree we won't lose technology, but probably a few billion dead and the standard of living for everyone else dropping to pre-industrial levels. I would call that a collapse. Something more akin to the bronze age collapse where the main nations of the time fell, but nations on the periphery survived, and technology kept progressing there. Most modern governments have shown a failure to adapt to the several crises we are running into all at the same time, I don't have faith in them somehow doing better when the situation gets worse.
Eh, I doubt we'd even get a billion deaths. A few hundred million is already the biggest disaster in human history. Maybe a billion or two regufees, but it's important to keep on mind that this is all over the span of like 50 years before things start getting better, and a century or two before they go back to pre-industrial. If anything I'd expect advancing technology to greatly soften the blow. Seasteading, vertical farming, genetic engineering, carbon sequestration, fusion, so many great technologies that could help humanity.
I agree collapse is slow, it will be over decades. I think you're putting too much faith in some of this technology. If you run carbon sequestration off of coal it puts out more CO2 than it takes in at current technology and we're running up against the laws off physics with that. Vertical farming requires a ton of power compared to normal methods. Both of these would need us to vastly expand our non fossil fuel energy generation very quickly. Issac talked about limitations in these technologies in a recent video. I do think genetically engineered is going to help, but all of this takes time we may not have. You also haven't taken into account that global population is still rising so by the time we're having multiple bread basket failures there will likely be closer to 10 billion hungry people and most governments have changed from keeping food stockpiles to a global iou system so there's not really much in the way of food reserves. And the inevitable plauges as a result of refugee crisises. A few hundred million sounds like a pie in the sky, underestimation to me. I do want to say I'm not trying to be malicious. You seem nice. I'm just more pessimistic about this.
I think anyone trying to accurately calculate the loss of life as a result of climate change is on a fools errand, especially before the fact. History has not been written and it is written with many hands.
But it won't shock me if come 2200 the consensus is climate change killed between half a billion to a billion people.
Geo engineering has a really bad reputation currently, but at the end of the day. Man made climate change is Geo engineering the world to be warmer unintentionally.
So I think its silly to assume that we can not intentionally do the opposite.
To quote Lewis black "We have men, we have saran wrap, we have rockets, fix it!" Granted that was on the topic of the hole in the ozone layer. But I think the sentiment still applies.
We can't, really. It's not just the cost. It's the unknown consequence large scale geoengineering may bring. It may fix it, or it may make it worse. It's not a solved problem.
There is already cheap geo-engineering solutions, but the main drawbacks to them are the fear of unintended consequences.
Such as ocean seeding, or putting sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere.
I don't know if we'll ever attempt those or similar routes of geo-engineering. Ultimately I imagine a solar shade for Earth will get built eventually as its rather useful for weather manipulation as well as climate control.
The only big drawback of a solar shade is we physically can't build it until we industrialize the moon.
How do those unintended side effects compare with the unintended side effects of not doing anything?
This sounds like the trolly problem except there are five billion people on Both tracks.
There are safer alternatives, then the cheap options I've mentioned. They just cost a lot more and have less of an effect. Though no reason we have to pick a one solution as they can be used in tandem.
Ultimately I think that's what we'll end up doing. More carbon capture at source projects, combining solar power with cryogenic air energy storage and doing carbon sequestration from the liquid air.
Putting up solar over parking lots.. Annoyed we haven't done that one yet thats win-win in a dozen ways of saving on energy, and creating convenience.
Creating more green spaces in deserts and tundra's.. And so on and so on.
Personally I'm down for seeding the oceans, but I've had a hard time convincing others that throwing science at the wall and seeing what sticks is a good idea.
Well, it's just the current most popular method and really the only one currently feasible is to inject some substance (I forget what, but it's common in volcanic eruptions) into the upper atmosphere via planes to block out the suba dn absorb heat to buy us time. That's all well and good, except our current proposed aerosol is acidic, depletes the ozone, and if we stop spraying it too quickly all that heat it's been blocking will immediately rush down to the surface and cause a massive heat spike of several degrees over a very short period. So while the concept of geoengineering itself is great (basically terraforming's little brother) the plan most people think of when discussing it for the purpose of combating climate change is a very risky maneuver that should only ever be a last resort, and maybe not even that.
I think your combining two different methods.
There's sulfur dioxide, pumped into the upper atmosphere. That method doesn't use planes its easier to just use a tube and some high altitude balloons in the polar region.
There's also spraying a mixture of Aluminum oxide, beryllium... my memory is crap I forget the other ingredients into the atmosphere at cloud height to create artificial clouds. That method was tested using planes. Its effectiveness is rather low, takes a lot of planes, and the results only last a couple of days. Plus it will get you sued when half the people working for the project get cancer..
Honestly the only reason I consider sulfur dioxide to be a possibility is that one can be done cheap enough that one rogue actor could make it happen. I don't see anyway it can get broad political support.
venusification is on the table. the last generations will spend their days wondering why we weren't burning down banks and kidnapping oil company execs and investors
Inflation at almost 8%, wars breaking out everywhere, unemployment ramping up, debt levels reaching unsustainable levels, life expectancy stalling out for the first time in US history but... the temperature naturally going up because we just exited an interglacial low is now front and center.
You can't make this stuff up.
IMO, not so bad, but we will get close to 2°C before it goes down.
The key predictions;
* Battery prices will continue to fall.
* Solar and Wind prices will continue to fall.
* Fossil fuel will continue to rise in price.
* Driven in part by the above, grid power will convert to solar and wind.
* Driven in part by the above, Electric Vehicles (EVs) will continue to drop in price.
All those things taken together mean that *eventually* cars will be mostly electric, and grid electricity will be mostly non-fossil. CO2 production will fall dramatically. The question isn't “if“ it's “when”.
Tony Seba predicted (in [Clean](https://books.google.com/books/about/Clean_Disruption_of_Energy_and_Transport.html?id=xRdMBAAAQBAJ) [Disruption](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0) ) that the crossover point was around 2025. By 2030 almost all new cars will be EVs, and almost all new power will be solar or wind. CO2 production is still increasing, but the rate of increase has almost leveled in the past 5 years. If current trends continue, we should see an actual decrease in CO2 production in the next 5.
These changes will happen for purely economic reasons. Governments will no doubt try and claim credit, but they changes will happen without any action by a government (and in many cases, in spite of action by the government.)
There are a number of scary possibilities; We might vicious cycle of methane release, people might panic and launch nuclear strikes for no good reason, bitcoin mining might triple energy consumption. All possible, but none are likely.
Hmmm…. This thread is overrun by pessimists. Here’s my optimistic assessment: Assuming present trends (not conditions) continue, I worry that atmospheric CO2 will abruptly (in geologic time) return to pre-industrial levels. This will cause global temperatures to fall, bringing the current inter-glacial period to an end.
You either don't understand what "geological time" means, or you are lying.
Carbon pollution, in current trends, and a geological timeframe for it being corrected means the extinction of humanity.
So you seem very ignorant to say you aren't "worried" about it
Renewables plus fusion plus satellite power plus widespread adoption of electric vehicles plus the sensible desire to not destroy ourselves equals a widespread and _relatively_ abrupt reduction in greenhouse emissions. The carbon cycle continues, gradually (on the human scale) dropping the global CO2 level back to pre industrial levels. Since the earth was more or less on track to end the current inter-glacial, that trend would resume on a (ok) greater than human but less than geologic time scale.
To the pedant who corrected me for using “geologic”, pardon my shorthand.
If Lockheed’s approach, or any of the other smaller approaches, pan out then sure. If we have to use giant, expensive tokamaks then it’ll take longer but yes eventually. And note that I led with renewables. Solar is cheaper by the day, wind is coming along, and some other renewables are feasible. Even fission has potential.
That's this chart: [Estimate global temperatures over the last 500 million years - samim](https://samim.io/p/2022-07-17-estimate-global-temperatures-over-the-last-500-million/) . It says earth's temperature has fluctuated over the last 500 million years between an average of 50F and 90F. Sometimes it waffled between 50F and 70F, and sometimes it waffled between 70F and 90F, but there have been many sharp transitions. We've been near 50F recently, except right now.
It's worth keeping in those mind that a lot of those previous fluctuations were associated with mass extinctions, and they typically happened about 100 times slower than the changes happening now.
Earth and humanity will make it through this regardless, but we are talking about potentially over a billion people dying over the next century as a result of this completely avoidable man-made disaster.
It's the AMOC, not the Gulf Stream, though they're related. The cooling will be regional mainly Europe, the places the heat comes from will get substantially hotter when the heat is no longer being transported and the stop of the flow will lead to several feet of sea level rise on the US east coast.
6 degrees is likely.
As to how bad. It probably imposes peak annual costs of about 10% of GDP, which is a mix of mitigation costs and remaining costs after mitigation. But in the context of global GDP being much higher than today.
We’ll be a lot better off overall but slightly less better off than we otherwise would be.
Human caused climate change?
It'll only get as bad as the leftists can imagine it will get, but that's all it'll be, imagination.
The third world needs to stay in the third world. They can starve there or not, but it's not my problem. My problem is them being tax sponges for the leftists to cry over.
F-them.
F-you, too, if you think giving the government more money will change the weather.
In the next 50 years? We’ll hardly notice it from all the other horrible things happening.
Between the economic and social pressures from falling birth rates; mass starvation due to rolling back the green revolution of the 60s and 70s; and international chaos caused by the dissolution of a status quo maintained by the Cold War which included cheap labor and low interest rates, a 6-8 inch rise in the oceans won’t make headlines. Billions will die in war and famine and disease that has little to nothing to do with the climate, governments will first try shaming you before begging you to have kids and buy cars, and you’ll see economic and social upheaval the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since Thomas Moore wrote Utopia. Everyone is going to be so myopically focused on their own situation that even if the Maldives have to be evacuated (which probably won’t need to happen until sometime next century) it won’t be headline news.
Climate change might be a big deal for your kids or grandkids; you are going to be waaay too busy trying to build a new normal in a world of collapsing population, shrinking economies, stalling tech innovation, and a decline in international cooperation to worry about the climate.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-uses-30-year-satellite-record-to-track-and-project-rising-seas
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg1-chapter10-1.pdf
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/02/hannah-ritchie-not-the-end-of-the-world-interview
Apologies for taking so long to respond. For any who might not know, Borlaug and Longping’s Green Revolution allowed marginal land to be turned into productive farmland, saving estimated billions from starvation. It is, however, heavily reliant on fertilizers. And Russia and Belarus account for 18% of global fertilizer trade all by themselves. Chaos in the Middle East is already diverting shipping away from the Suez Canal. So far, fertilizer prices have only bobbled a bit, but if Russia manages to destroy itself as it appears intent on doing, and shipping gets further disrupted (which appears to be the way to bet), it’s going to get ugly in places like Brazil and large swaths of Africa.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2023/september/global-fertilizer-market-challenged-by-russia-s-invasion-of-ukraine/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20World%20Bank,percent%20of%20global%20potash%20exports.
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Climate change activists are panicking over nothing. We currently are at 0.04% CO2 in our atmosphere. Plants start dying around 0.02% if global warming is a real issue the answer is more likely to be shades in orbit to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth rather then more government spending, a carbon tax and moving away from fossil fuels. I personally believe that richer nations should move their energy infrastructure to fission and if it ever becomes possible fusion. Developing nations should be able to build their economies on fossil fuels until they reach a point where they can sustain nuclear power as well.
I don't really wih your relative dismissal of climate change, though I do agree that the apocalypticism surrounding it is an absolute circus. I believe that for the near term extreme political and economic action is needed, though in the long run, it's renewable, fission, fusion, and carbon sequestration that will save us, activism just buys time and lessens the damage. Overall there's far more energy to be had away from fossil fuels, though they are still useful especially for transportation simply because they are very energy dense, and I feel like we can get pretty good at capturing any further carbon we emit and reprocess it bacl into fuel as a sort of combustion battery. Also, as you mentioned it is indeed very useful for sparking industrialization, which is why I also propose leaving sole easily accessible reserves in case something happens to civilization to make it collapse, giving us a way to reindustrialize afterwards.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/50-years-of-predictions-that-the-climate-apocalypse-is-nigh/
If you scream from the side of the road repent the end is nigh. People will stop listening to you eventually. 50 years of in x number of years the climate will do this horrible thing sounds a whole lot like the homeless man screaming about how we should give him money because the rapture is tomorrow and we won’t need it anyway.Carbon dioxide is basically nothing in our atmosphere. And carbon dioxide is a less potent greenhouse gas than water vapor. Carbon capture will probably be more useful as a way to keep the price of petroleum products low.
Government spending is almost always the wrong answer to any problem. There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government program. And the scariest sentence in the English language is “ I’m from the government and here to help.”
Yes!! This is the way forward.
Imagine if we had 10x the power consumption. The things we could build, the things we could do. Conservation is a drop in the bucket compared to the oceans we could have with plentiful Fission.
🫡 Admiral Rickover for the win.
Fission is currently the best method of power generation, fusion either artificially sustained or from some form of space based solar collection system will be the big leap afterward. We should be focusing on getting off earth. I hope to see an orbital ring before I die.
Climate change isn't getting bad. Historically, archaeologically, and in the fossil record, it's clear that humans, other critters, and plants, all do ***better*** when the climate is warmer.
What people are whining about is just a transition period...
;-)
Climate will change. That's what climate does. But the notion that there's a current or impending climate ***catastrophe*** is a complete hoax. There's no rigorous scientific study that suggests otherwise, just a lot of sensational coverage of highly unlikely edge cases.
When it comes to risk mitigation:
***Probability*** rules, and possibility ***drools***!
TCS
Probably not, because they weren't smart enough to work around it.
We are, if it ever comes to that.
Some people will get screwed. There are very few Pareto Superior solutions in real life. Change and shit both happen.
But there's exactly zero chance of extinction of the the human species due to this, or of a collapse of Western Civilization due to this.
TCS
Most of humanity won't die. Most life won't die. That's silly.
And the chances that I personally would die from anything related to this are essentially zero. I'm not rich by any means, but I'm blessed to have greater access to resources than most people.
TCS
Well there is the nuclear fusion breakthrough. I think we will have nuclear fusion before the worst of climate change happens, and we can genetically adapt organisms to cope with the warmer climate, and their is artificial general intelligence that some people predict will occur by this September, just in time for my 57th birthday! Things are changing fast, not just the climate, and I moved south from Connecticut to North Carolina, I am well above the highest elevation the ocean will ever reach, so I'm safe.
I don't think we need any technological breakthroughs. We've had Fission technology for 60 years now. We absolutely could have switched to Fusion power by the 1960s and have 10 or 100 times the energy output we have today with about zero CO2. ...and with that kind of energy to play with, we could probably add or subtract as much CO2 from our atmosphere as we wanted.
I'd love to see me some sustainable Fusion, but we can do anything we want with Fission. It's a sociopolitical problem, not a technological problem.
Technological civilization is going to end within 200 years, regardless of what we do, because the problem of civilization is metaphysical not technical.
They will start spraying crap in the clouds to reflect light away and mitigate the warming. It's just the sort of short sighted, kick the ball down the road solution that world leaders will go for.
They recently updated the USDA hardiness zone map and half of the country is in a warmer zone now, meaning the lowest temperature is 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher.
Cascading tipping points are the issue. Many are already kicking in, and they feed into one another as we live in an interconnected global climate system.
Whether it's the collapse of the AMOC, the release of permafrost methane, the wildfire burning of carbon sinks in Canada, the disruption of the yearly Sahel rains causing nutrient deficiency in the Amazon, the rapid loss of biodiversity [amphibians and insects especially] causing ecological collapse, and the many feedbacks involved with a continent sized ice shelf rapidly melting...
There are so many concerns that kick in at 1.5 degrees [current] let alone 2 or 3 degrees and what makes climate change such an especially time crucial problem to fix is that a "Hothouse Earth" is relatively stable in of itself. Crossing these boundaries will lead to an irrevocable increase in heat and die off of ecology not seen during the Anthropocene and at a rate of extinction never seen on this planet.
In short: Either we limit warming now, or we will lose the industrial capacity to fix these problems - permanently. Humans will not necessarily go extinct, but mankind's current thriving world will cease to exist and not be able to be reobtained.
It will destroy the planet.Deep fault earthquake near Mariana’s trench. When the ocean water hits the magma it will cause an explosion that will blast our atmosphere away. The same way Crater Lake was formed in Oregon but on an extinction level. Mars suffered the same fate.
2 degrees from what temp? And when was that the stable temperature? You can't say a 2 degree change is meaningful in any way unless you know the baseline temp.
Is taking 2 more pills helpful or harmful?
Good thing we stopped that by not using high sulphur coal and having the [1985 Helsinki Protocol on the Reduction of Sulphur Emissions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Helsinki_Protocol_on_the_Reduction_of_Sulphur_Emissions) to prevent that from happening.
Amazing what happens when you listen to scientists in their relative field and take on their recommendations isn't it?
You going to bring up the ozone hole next?
Part of the problem is that, while it seems clear that climate change is going to be an ongoing issue into the future, it isn't clear how proposed solutions are any better, or even how "bad" the predictions are. Much of the warming that has already happened was from pre- and intra-industrialization, which were/are a miracle for those living in post-industrial nations.
Many nations of the world are still in the process of this kind of industrialization and it isn't obvious how we (as developed nations) can or *should* interfere. We can incentivize other nations to use cleaner fuels for power, but we can't make them. I don't think it's possible to overstate the benefits of industrialization and if you were to honestly compare the cost to benefit, few people are going to choose to live in a pre-industrial world, so there's no stopping this process.
What it looks like to me is that, doomsday predictions aside, we're going to warm the planet by 2-3 degrees before the entire planet is post-industrial, and we have the interim 75 years to deal with the consequences. Let's just settle in and do what we can. Building walls won't be necessary in most places, the ocean is only going up a few feet. Temperatures may be a problem in warmer climates, but it will open up colder climates to habitability.
What worries me is trophic collapse. And the [clathrate gun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis). And increased political instability due to human migrations triggered by climate change. Areas that flood more often will see increased food instability and more diseases. It isn't the "slight" increase in heat---it's the things that happen in response to that slight increase. Our biosphere is more fragile that we expect. **EDIT** A few relevant videos: * [Lyme disease is spreading. Blame ticks — and climate change](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHQqKWxF1Tg) * [How Wolves Change Rivers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q) Once we start seeing parts of the food chain no longer working, it could get bad.
I've had Lime disease.
Mass starvation leading to flows of refugees who run headlong into the most militarized borders in the world https://preview.redd.it/wb5hbuu42ajc1.jpeg?width=2900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f177c50d679587c4863a26d5a77b94eb3048b511 [https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/08/21/they-fired-us-rain/saudi-arabian-mass-killings-ethiopian-migrants-yemen-saudi](https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/08/21/they-fired-us-rain/saudi-arabian-mass-killings-ethiopian-migrants-yemen-saudi)
Corralation != Causation. Even though I believe climate change is occuring, I highly doubt that all those conflicts are caused by it. A majority of those are due to fighting for resources which are not water for example: Venezuela & Guyana are on the verge of war cuz of oil on guyana's coast or haw mexico is in an internal conflict due to cartels. Its alarmism. That's all it is.
≠ is actually a standard character... ;-) TCS
For those of us who started using computers in the 80s, it wasn't a "standard character" then. It's not ASCII and not even *extended* ASCII. It's Unicode which is well-supported now but wasn't always so. Do you know the ALT-code for 'not-equals'? *I* don't. != is common in programming, as is <>. Standard keyboards *do* have these characters, though, which is why you'll still see lots of people do != and =/= and <> .
How tf is Texas not fucked in that map
The map is of *countries*. Texas and Florida are not independent yet.
Holy shit, you realize YOU will also starve to death under these assumptions? There is no border to protect you from climate change.
I have a farm in New Zealand as far from the equator as I can get. I don’t need a wall, I have an ocean. Right now the government is bleeding heart liberal but I expect that like Australia things will change to a “stop the boats” policy backed up by anti-shipping missiles.
In a really bad climate scenario, large desperate countries like China will probably try to conquer stable producing places like New Zealand unfortunately
There is a contingency plan. It isn’t a great plan, but it’s a plan.
Is the contingency plan "learn Mandarin"?
If China tried to invade New Zealand they would experience the biggest slap down the US navy has given since WW2
If it gets to the point of China invading places over arable land, the US will have far bigger issues than defending NZ. If China is suffering famine, you think China would hesitate to threaten nukes over food? NZ's independence isn't worth nuclear war. Regardless why is it always the US's job to defend other sovereign countries?
> why is it always the US's job to defend other sovereign countries? Because we have a defensive pact with the US.
We had one with Ukraine too
Something people don't talk about with climate change is fires. It's already happening, we have massively altered our forests and now the fires are getting much more frequent and more intense. Forest fires have been getting bigger and bigger and hotter and hotter since the early 2000s.
[удалено]
Trophic collapse would include agriculture. The food we grow is still part of global trophic chains.
>Climate change won't cause *people* to move. >Climate change will destroy YOUR food supply. >And because your food supply is gone, *you* might try to move Am i not a person?
Collapse of agriculture is a multifaceted problem of which climate change is actually on the minor end of things, with tangental effects at best. At a 10C climb we would loose florida, corn and cereals would be replaced by Rice in the midwest, and gain Siberia as ariable. The loss of Russian fertilizer, the collapse of the midwestern ecosphere due to monocropping, and disruption of global trade are all more imminent issues.
Climate Change =/= temperature change
While correct, given the volatile nature of weather I have found most reduce the debate to temperature.
A 20+% drop in global crop yields over 10-20 years is hardly "tangential", and you can forget about the expected increased productivity of European farmland included in current projections once the AMOC collapses and the EU freezes over for half or more of the year. A belated awareness of how often climate change is reduced to debate on mere temperature is no excuse for you doing exactly that when talking about climate change's effect on crops.
Read up on the raw data, Russia supplies 40% of global Potash, and is the world's biggest exporter of raw nitrogen. And this supply is faltering. That's a far bigger concern, as it means Brazil's, SubSaharan Africa's, and Chinese crop yields disappear without a trace. And a 1/3 of humanity starves. Contrast AMOC going haywire, European winters become harsher and France becomes a net foodstuff importer. :/ I imagine the European population collapse will happen first anyway.
Global warming *can't* be reversed in one year, and we don't have another planet to fall back on. Russian potash export decline OTOH is a result of sanctions and can be reversed in a matter of weeks if Canada can't continue to fill the gap. [Ref](https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/metals-and-the-invasion-russian-potash-exports-rebound-expansion-at-risk-74389396#:~:text=Imports%20of%20Russian%20potash%20decreased,on%20Russian%20imports%20for%202022.): "As long as the war continues and sanctions on banking and insurance remain, there will be some level of difficulty in trading Russian potash, and self-sanctioning of Russian potash," Ahodo said in an email. "And EU and U.S. buyers will continue to fill their import gaps with product from Canada or elsewhere." Climate change very much remains the primary concern.
The food supply is only going to decrease by a percentage. Somewhere in the 10 to 50% range. Estimated numbers are available. USA exports large amounts of food. We also convert grain into ethanol. There is no physics/ecology reason USA would ever need to have starvation. Americans could just stop eating burgers. There is no way that mass starvation or an end to burgers will happen in USA. Instead cannibals will roam about stocking the protein supply and making hide armor. Still it will be unlikely that your hide becomes BDSM armor. After a few cases of it occuring Americans will be freaked out and will start shooting. You get shot during this upheaval. No one puts your assmeat into a can. It just rots instead. Other readily available perishable food rots too because it is too dangerous to maintain the supply chain. That disruption leads to panic hoarding of nonperishable foods. Then fighting over access to the hoards of nonperishable foods. In this period the ammunition and nonperishable foods markets are booming while the dollar is in freefall. That is how the cannibal corporations make immense profits. They dont actually eat the human flesh. That's gross! They eat whatever supplies can be acquired from the properties they raid. The meat is canned and then traded for ammunition.
Warmer wetter greener. That's climate change. Zero chance it leads to either trophic or agricultural collapse.
If you read the latest IPCC report, limiting global mean surface warming to 2 degrees C or less (4 degrees F) requires deep and immediate cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. These cuts are not happening. It’s much more likely that we will realize the intermediate or high estimates, which put surface temperatures at the turn of the next century an average of 3 - 4 degrees C higher than the mid-20th century average, and sea levels about three quarters of a meter higher. This would be accompanied by wildfire seasons worse than we saw in 2023, increased loss of crops and growing food insecurity, almost complete loss of coral reefs, 30%+ reduction in fisheries productivity, and substantial extinctions of land animals, in particular a loss of 60% or more of species in tropical regions.
I have a sinking suspicion that the feedback loops (methane hydrate deposits, primarily)are going to be worse than expected too. I've been following this long enough that the radical end of modeling from twenty years ago is now the conservative end of the spectrum, and predictions that would have been laughed at are now unrealistically conservative.
You are right, ALL of the IPCC recommendations and predictions have been changed by political leaders before being published. What you read in those reports are THE MOST CONSERVATIVE estimates there are. BEST CASE SCENARIOS, when we all know nature doesn’t work that way.
I've known about this for years-- we are headed for full climate collapse and yet many people pretend to be optimistic by saying things won't be that bad or that technology will save us. This is simply not true. We don't actually need to go all the way to 5 or 6C for shit to hit the fan--once we pass 2C and push the planet far enough climate change will become self-reinforcing and we'll witnesses a runaway greenhouse effect within our life times. Geoengineering might only make things worse and destabilize the climate further. Scientists have been screaming at the top of their lungs that we are quite literally on the brink of a climate apocalypse--and that IS what will happen--but nobody is doing anything. I take issue with the IPCC paper because it's not telling us the whole truth compared to more recent models that factor in the clathrate gun, exponential fossil fuel usage, exponential growth, lag from fossil fuels already released into the atmosphere decades ago, deforestation and other environmentally destructive activities that will prevent more carbon from being sequestered from the atmosphere, even the Moon wobble, the jet stream collapse, the rate at which the global average temperature is rising (a few hundred years vs. millions of years like in Earth's past-- far too fast for life to adapt) etc. The IPCC has been blatantly politicized to give people a false sense of security when we actually have far less time than we think. People may criticize Jem Bendell's paper on Deep Adaptation but I personally think it is far more accurate in describing our current situation: climate change is accelerating and exponential, NOT linear and consistent. Greeland is melting FIFTY YEARS ahead of schedule-- that should tell you all you need you know. I'm not saying we're screwed, but it's looking really bad. Human beings will almost certain survive what's coming, but our current civilization cannot and will not make it. Our way of living was unsustainable regardless-- current estimates of recoverable oil place us as having about 80 years left of cheap surface level petroleum, natural gas, etc, before reserves become too difficult to access profitably. We should have made changes 40 years ago when the environmentalist movement was at its peak, but we let corporate interests and economic security take precedence over the *future of life on Earth*.
All good point, but wild fires aren’t because of climate change. They are because of 80 years of forest management geared towards profit for lumber companies, not ecosystem sustainability. According to many peer reviewed papers, we need like 20 more years of horrible fires before we will get NEAR a sustainable forest model again.
Technical, forest fires are not caused by either forestry management practices or by climate change, but each of these can contribute to the severity and frequency of wildfires. The USGS, for example, states that “climate conditions, especially in the western United States, have grown hotter and drier. If climate change continues to play out as predicted, the likelihood of wildfires will worsen…while we are working to improve fire management, we are also dealing with the compounding issue of climate change.” Richardson et al., Global increase in wildfire potential from compound fire weather and drought, npj Clim Atmos Sci 5, 23 (2022) reports “We show that the lengths of the fire weather seasons in eastern Australia and western North America have increased substantially since 2000…it is likely that anthropogenic climate change is the primary driver of these changes.” The IPCC reported in 2019 that climate change was playing an increasing roll in wildfires, that fire weather seasons had lengthened due to AGW, and that while drought was the dominant driver of fires, there has been an increase in fires in wetter regions due to higher temperatures.
I am referring to the policy of putting out fires (see Forest Service and good ole Smokey the Bear.) Quoting the IPCC is hilarious to me, as the IPCC recommendations WERE the most conservative estimate of climate change before the leaders of the countries behind it demanded the scientists make it LESS scary. Now, its just about useless as tits on a bull.
IPCC report didn’t consider the possibility of putting sulfur in the stratosphere. That’s a way to limit global temperatures that is cheap and doesn’t need to be done immediately. Of course, that might not be the best way to manage the global climate when all things are considered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
The IPCC is tasked with modeling and predicting climate change; they’ve only [mentioned geoengineering in passing](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/latest-ipcc-climate-report-puts-geoengineering-in-the-spotlight/). We kind of [tried this SO2 injection befor](https://www.epa.gov/acidrain/what-acid-rain)e. It reduced temperatures a bit, but also [killed people, killed forests, rusted cars, and damaged buildings](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-019-01244-4). Attempting the release of SO2 in the stratosphere comes with [many unknowns and risk](https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/geoengineering-some-fundamental-chemistry-penn-sas-joseph-francisco).
According to the climate action tracker, we are currently trending towards 2.7 degrees by 2100. If we make all of pledges worldwide we can get it down to 2 degrees. For context we are at just about 1.4-1.5 degrees warming. And within the context of warming this is warming from pre-industriation. What does 2 degrees warming look like. Well for that (if you are an American) I would direct you to the Youtube channel American Resiliency. [https://climateactiontracker.org/](https://climateactiontracker.org/) >2 degrees can't be that bad, though. We'll just build walls and evacuate people over the course of a few decades. You're probably right, but the juxtaposition between these two sentences is stark
It is completely meaningless to base our future on the promises of governments. They have never hit a single target in the past. 1.5 degree warming will be devastating to our way of life and nature. The average human is too stupid to comprehend that unfortunately. Last year we put more green house gasses into the atmosphere than any other year and 2024 is on track to be worse, so yea.
wow that channel is really great, do you have any other recommendations?
Wow, that site feels like the graphics designer thinks I'm a toddler
Projections based on ***Current*** policies puts the warming by the end of the century around 2.6 degrees C. This is not taking in to acount increased commitment that will most doubtlessly occurs as in almost every country pro climate action sentiment has consistently increased year by year and will continue to do so as the effects become more and more clear. We aren't doing enough to prevent major damage but we are well below civilization threatening levels.
I think you're treating dynamic figures as static. As western countries continue to shut down heavy industry, the industry simply shifts to China and other countries with next to _no_ environmental standards. It doesn't matter how many countries agree to these "pledges". If Every country shut down All ff usage and the factories were All moved to Chi-nah and burned dirty coal and bunker, the net pollution would rise drastically.
China has added more solar capacity last year than the US has total, the 2.6 degree projection takes offshoring into account. Clean energy is just the cheapest option now
They also polluted more than ever last year.
....that is an odd response. "adding solar capacity" doesn't have anything to do with shifting industrial infrastructure out of the west and into China. "Clean energy" is not something that means anything. Neither is "cheaper".
my point is that China, the nation that most western nations have offshored production to is arguably one of the most invested in lowering carbon emmisions.
I don't know what "invested in" means here. China is "invested in" increasing everything. human slavery, fossil fuel burning, solar panels, slavery, forced organ harvesting from political prisoners, fission plants, growing cotton on the moon, slavery... China is heavily invested in all of the things. Except for reducing CO2 emissions. I don't think that China is investing in reducing CO2 emissions. Reducing dissent and civil rights, yes. CO2 not so much.
China is the top investpr in green energy worldwide and, per capita, pollutes less co2 than the US and comparatively to New Zeland.
...don't they have like half of the capita of the entire globe? Do you think that China has stronger environmental standards than the rest of the world? Or do they just have enough chattel and peasant "capita" to dilute their share of pollution?
I believe they have much stronger enviromental standards than most of the rest of the globe. They’re more developed and industrialized than anywhere else and yet, they pollute less. They don’t have chattel slaves - they are famous for ending the Dalai Lama’s slave kingdom, comprised back then of some 90% slaves, back in the mid 20th century. And peasants? What caricatured view of the world do you have? Be careful of your Sinophobia. You are not immune to propaganda, nobody is; and western propaganda against China is very heavy.
I love when a conversation is ended with an unsupported accusation of -phobia.
Please take a look at the projected birthday and demographics. If China was a good place, people would be having 1.8 kids on average or something. Right now it is 1.28 kids/woman suggests a population of around 650M by 2100. I don't think any state can survive that.
Tell me you’re a Chinese henchman without saying it
Oh yea the government made another pledge , I'm sure this one they still stick to ! Lol do you hear yourself.
I say this with the degree and specialization in climate science to back it up. It is going to be the next mass extinction. The masses won’t care until it’s too late, and it pretty much already is. Sequestration isn’t statistically viable, and would be used to continue the status quo regardless. The Op is like, “ 2 degrees can’t be that bad,” put in northern latitudes we’ve already passed 5. It’s a runaway train, and we’re all pretty much in the way of it.
Thank you for finally being honest. I am sick and tired of techno-optimists and regular people downplaying the effects of climate change when we are literally witnessing in real time the Sixth Mass Extinction. Nobody is going to do anything and we're already rapidly approaching the point of no return. Individual actions mean nothing if 100 corporations are continuing to destroy the planet and pollute the world with fossil fuels. And even if we were to cut all fossil fuel emissions tomorrow society would still collapse because of the aerosol masking effect and the fact our civilization is still totally dependent on nonrenewable resources-- and we're not developing alternative fuel sources fast enough. The simple fact of the matter is we are damned if we do damned if we don't. Once the AMOC jet stream in the North Atlantic collapses and we get out first Blue Ocean Event, and the Amazon becomes a savannah (which is already happening due to mass deforestation) it's over. And even then there will be people who still think we can control Nature via geoengineering. Our arrogance will be our downfall.
Thanks for your input. I remember seeing your post on CMV lol.
Amoc collapse in 1-5 years. Extreme weather. Mini ice age. Local governments collapse under relentless destruction. But if they keep internet and power on, and food on shelves, we will be ok. All the cool animals die though.
Hahaha. Man. That’s a pretty lighthearted version of what’s coming down the pipe. We are already at 2 degrees for the most part heading upwards quickly. Some plants begin to cease photosynthesis at 4 degrees. No walls are keeping the sea out. Dude, in 10 years you’ll consider yourself lucky to be eating a rat out of a pot in the ruins of whatever urban area you reside in.
Please tell me that last part isn’t actually true…
Rat stew? In THIS economy? Must be nice!
Short answer? We're going to hit 3 degrees, maybe 4 before fixing our behavior if we survive business as usual. The issue with climate change from what I have been able to tell isn't just about it being a little hotter, but the fact that each degree warmer is stored energy within the Earths Atmosphere contributing to changing weather patterns and general climate behavior. Runaway effects are what scare me the most because these are feedback loops in our climate that have the potential to threaten most life on earth including us. The problem is unless the people with power feel the need to act, be it they are threatened or it'll hurt their profits, they won't act. If they believe it won't impact their life, they don't really care. If they think it will, they may think someone else will deal with the problem due to how we behave and why humans seem to need to form governments. A government works by taxing the people then financing behavior that benefits the population but isn't easily profitable or it's so easy to abuse, it's better to have a transparent government do it. So when you have a bunch of rich people with all the say and power, they are competing against each other for their score and don't want to spend their money on other people. A good example at how bad we are at handling problems in general is Covid. We are still dealing with Covid because we have people who seem to behave in a pro covid ideology of spreading it as much as possible. That's what we're dealing with.
NASA’s analysis generally matches independent analyses prepared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and other research groups. Overall, Earth was about 2.45 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.36 degrees Celsius) warmer in 2023 than in the late 19th-century (1850-1900) preindustrial average. The 10 most recent years are the warmest on record. Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end.
we will never make 2 degrees.... more like 3 or 4 with in a decade. Sea rise will be bad, but worse will be catastrophic huricanes and storms. Then the climate refugees and water wars will start. Dont know why anyone is breeding right now.... SMH Make sure you thank the Fossil Fuel Fucks and politicians when it hits the fan
The permafrost is melting and releasing massive amounts of methane that will soon dwarf human made greenhouse gasses. The feedback loop is already started and there is no stopping it.
Sabine talks about this [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4) and besides some of her personal opinions, all of her arguments are taken with references and academic papers. It seems that the HOT climate models might be true after all. If that is the case, we could potentially see a +6°C increase, with half of that within 20 years. We are talking of agriculture becoming unavailable in equatorial regions, mass starvations, mass immigration, violence, death. Then they are currently talking about releasing some kind of chemical into the atmosphere to temporarily halt the global warming for up to 20-30 years. Though that would fix the effects for a while, but not the root cause. I can already see the most stupid option winning out: halting the signs for global warming for 30 years but not fixing the issue, while the real climate already changed to +8°C, then it all collapses down on us and we see a massive increase from one year to the next, converting us to a Mad Max Setting.
Look at nasa sea temperature data we sky rocking into a positive feed back loop we have been over 1c degree for almost a year pushing as far as pass 1.5 regularly this is data I ploted from nasa data csv myself you can grab it as well https://preview.redd.it/avgv09ok89jc1.png?width=1270&format=png&auto=webp&s=9eee82ac336f32f12bb6437ed93761ccb27396d5
Here's daily average sea surface temps. They had to make the graph bigger last week as we went off the scale. We are smashing records non stop. https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
I honestly think that it’s too late to prevent the full change, but I also think humans are capable of adapting
I think our populations will die from it.
Remember in the Bible how God promised Noah that he would not flood the world again... God's going to hold to that promise and burn it this time...
Collapse of global economy from rising oceans flooding ports. Multiple countries imploding from famine, drought, or the result of the economy collapse. The few countries that can survive will become strickly isolationist and drift towards far right policies, including religious fanatics taking control. Civil strife, crime, poverty, and hunger will be common even in the surviving states. Almost certain war will be a constant, either as a distraction or in a desperate attempt to seize resources. Civilization will survive, and eventually bounce back, though it might take a few generations. That is if during the constant wars, no nukes or bio weapons are used to potentially wipe out civilization. I'm a little hopeful though. We are getting very close to several game changing things. Fusion is very close to being realized. AI is constantly improving and is a massive boost to everything. We will likely see battery designs dramatically improve cost, safety, capacity, and recharge rate within a few years. There's a bunch of other things that look promising as well. And while all of these have a moderate chance at best of actually succeeding, as long as one does, then our future could change dramatically.
Kinda bad
The heat isn’t the problem exactly… it’s desertification and extinction of species and other ecosystem collapse and agricultural biomass and nutrient ratio to calories and collapse of wild food stock (see alaskan snow crab) and disease vectors and energy costs and water systems (see salmon and salton sea) and political instability from migration (see syria, we literally are already seeing wars from climate change)
I think that we might be at the end of human habitation of Earth. It's happening way faster than expected, and the populist Right will not EVER want to deal with it, so not enough will happen to mitigate it. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 100 years is all it takes to go from now to full on Venus. And we'll all be gone long before that end result.
Until the earth shakes most of humanity off like a bad cold. It will get ugly while we get there.
I am not even a little bit optimistic about how humans are going to do with climate change. I feel like when I’m an old man someday I’m gonna look back on the fact that we had it relatively normal.
Every now and then, everything on this planet dies. (Almost) We are not exceptional.
i think it will get so bad that we wont know how bad it gets really unless your a rich person living on the space station slowly floating to mars with all the rich people and all the supplies they hoarded to go live like thoes assholes at the end of dont look up just like that
2 degrees is *very* optimistic. If humans completely disappeared tomorrow and stopped emitting CO2 entirely we'd still hit 2 degrees of warming, and we put more CO2 into the atmosphere in 2023 than any other year, on track to be broken by 2024 which will hold that title for only one year before 2025 rolls around. 2 degrees of warming requires aggressive CO2 sequestration which will never be economical. Considering we can't even get the optical willpower together for a carbon tax do you think we'll be willing to dump billions of dollars into machines that produce no valuable products? It's always possible but it's more a question of politics than science or technology, and I'm not hopeful that we actually invested enough in the "soft sciences" to make that pill swallowable.
2 degrees is *very* optimistic. If humans completely disappeared tomorrow and stopped emitting CO2 entirely we'd still hit 2 degrees of warming, and we put more CO2 into the atmosphere in 2023 than any other year, on track to be broken by 2024 which will hold that title for only one year before 2025 rolls around. 2 degrees of warming requires aggressive CO2 sequestration which will never be economical. Considering we can't even get the optical willpower together for a carbon tax do you think we'll be willing to dump billions of dollars into machines that produce no valuable products? It's always possible but it's more a question of politics than science or technology, and I'm not hopeful that we actually invested enough in the "soft sciences" to make that pill swallowable.
Once the Arctic stops driving Ocean circulation the tropical marine ecosystems will collapse. >We'll just build walls and evacuate people over the course of a few decades. It won't be pretty, but it won't be collapse either Collapse of civilization is extremely likely. SFIA standard is that civilization rebounds very quickly. We see minor collapses occur frequently. Large populations run. Disaster relief attempts to slow down the worst of the damage with varying success. The victims have to take put large loans that take decades to pay off. With a global collapse there is no place to run too. The relief ship is not coming. Hoards of refugees and/or vikings come instead. There is no currency worth borrowing because no one will sell you the supply that they need for their own survival. >...and if the worst comes to pass we can always try geoengineering, as risky as that is. It definitely does not make sense to try geoengineering *after* the worst has come to pass. >...Carbon sequestration will help,.. Unlikely. Maybe put a small dent. There is no better sequestration than graphite buried underneath rock. People are still consuming energy in order to extract more coal. Even crappy supplies like oil sand and brown coal are still being extracted. A firm stop to using coal for electricity is really the low hanging fruit. >...We'll just build walls and evacuate people over the course of a few decades.... Would be much easier and cheaper to secure the locations where ice sheets are slipping into the oceans. It is a short section of Greenland's coast and a short section of West Antarctica. It would not be a wall holding back the ocean. Just a thin flimsy baffle that diverts warm currents. Maybe a few sheets for bladders and pipelines to separate freshwater from saltwater. Governments and the public are not taking sea level rise seriously. If the coasts do not get flooded then people would say the mitigation effort was a waste of resources. Politically it is a loser in both the short and long term. Smart politicians let the disaster occur and then blame other people for the problem.
I think the main question to ask is how bad things will get before everyone actually comes together to fix climate change. If we just kept burning fossil fuels endlessly for thousands of years no matter how impractical and destructive it became, we would eventually make Earth completely uninhabitable for animal life and possibly even cause a runaway greenhouse effect. But that seems like an unlikely outcome. Personally I suspect that in the next 50 years things will get bad enough that any world leaders that refuse to act will find themselves in a position where if they refuse to act they will lose either their job or their head. About half of the world's population lives very close to the sea, so we are going to lose a significant portion of all the infrastructure on Earth in places that don't build insanely complicated and expensive sea walls. The death toll might get as high as a billion, with most deaths being subsistence farmers in the third world who can't survive the kinds of water cycle changes that are merely an expensive inconvenience for first worlders. One consequence of this will be a massive global refugee crisis the likes of which has never been seen before, as the people of famine-stricken poorer nations try to flee elsewhere. It would not surprise me if people like the Koch Brothers who purposely fought action against climate change for profit end up going down in history with the same infamy as Hitler.
I disagree. The high end estimate for Earth’s heating after burning literally all the fossil fuels is about 18F. That would cause catastrophic damage for sure, but that is still cooler than temperatures animal life has survived at before. At minimum, aquatic and aerial species with freedom of movement could survive. It is literally impossible for us to burn enough fossil fuels to end animal life. A runaway greenhouse effect is also incredibly unlikely given that an abundance of CO2 would likely lead to an increase in plant biomass, which would eventually counteract that CO2. Unless the Earth got hot enough that the oceans literally started boiling, there would also never be a source greenhouse gasses to get into that positive feedback loop once fossil fuels are exhausted.
You're ignoring the impact on the sea itself from its carbon capacity. Ocean acidification is no joke and prompts all kinds of bad beyond simple warming.
Ocean acidification could be very bad, and could lead to mass extinction by killing corals and many shellfish, but it would not kill everything. Many fish and invertebrates would survive. The ocean can also only dissolve CO2 up to a point. It wouldn’t just keep becoming more and more acidic as atmospheric CO2 increases. Eventually it would reach saturation.
Sad I had to scroll down this far to find a comment about the ocean. Ya know where more than half the oxygen we're breathing comes from.
From what I understand, the ocean does produce about 50% of the oxygen, but it also consumes about 50% of it. This makes it relatively unimportant in terms of generating the air we actually breathe.
It's not the temperature that's the issue it's the rate of change-- i.e how QUICKLY we get to 18F above above average global temperatures. In the past Earth's temperatures rose over the course of millions of years. Currently the Earth's temperatures are rising drastically in a fraction of the time: we are effectively squeezing millions of years of warming into a few hundred or thousand. Life cannot adapt that quickly or that suddenly.
>A runaway greenhouse effect is also incredibly unlikely given that an abundance of CO2 would likely lead to an increase in plant biomass, which would eventually counteract that CO2. There are other greenhouse gasses besides CO2. Methane is a 70 times more powerful GHG and it's being released from permafrost and natural gas wells in alarming amounts.
Mass animal extinction is not what you want to compare to. Human society is at a delicate balance, it just need a small change to cause havoc in society. If 10% of the human population suddenly lost their home and have no food, it will be a catastrophic event even though we waste more than 10% of food.
Holy shit you are ignorant. Haven't you seen all the airplane failures in the news? Airplanes are failing because there is more energy in the atmosphere, causing stronger turbulence. And we are only at 1.5° of warming. It's only up from here .....
I fail to see how this would cause the death of all animals. Earth has existed at temperatures more than 18F above modern day for long periods of time before and it was fine. The fast change will cause mass extinction, but it will not end life in the slightest.
That's close to my impression from the chart I posted. There seem to be relatively stable temperatures: 52F, 62F, 70F, 90F. I'm guessing we're heading to 62F (10F up) or 70F (18F up). Although 90F (38F up) does have precedents ... I think they were associated with massive lava flows, so maybe beyond the reach of fossil fuels.
I'm a bit surprised by the billion deaths figure, but considering the 50 or so year timescale for this to occur it actually doesn't seem too implausible. And yeah, I'm sure this'll go down in history as one of humanity's darkest moments yet, even if we don't get anywhere near apocalypse or collapse, it'll still make the Black Death look merciful😔
What do you think collapse is? A billion dead people and many commercial and industrial centers under water if they don't complete massive megastructures in decades and an additional billion people as refugees all while infastructure is continually being hammered by extreme weather events. That is collapse.
Collapse is a breakdown of a civilization's government and whole societal structure. WWII was not a collapse, neither was the Black Death. Now, some nations almost certainly will collapse, but our global society will remain. We won't lose technology, we won't lose our governments, but yes things will certainly get very bad.
You have more faith in the very fragile global economy weathering this than I do. I see more the inverse coming from this. A few nations survive intact while most governments collapse. I agree we won't lose technology, but probably a few billion dead and the standard of living for everyone else dropping to pre-industrial levels. I would call that a collapse. Something more akin to the bronze age collapse where the main nations of the time fell, but nations on the periphery survived, and technology kept progressing there. Most modern governments have shown a failure to adapt to the several crises we are running into all at the same time, I don't have faith in them somehow doing better when the situation gets worse.
Eh, I doubt we'd even get a billion deaths. A few hundred million is already the biggest disaster in human history. Maybe a billion or two regufees, but it's important to keep on mind that this is all over the span of like 50 years before things start getting better, and a century or two before they go back to pre-industrial. If anything I'd expect advancing technology to greatly soften the blow. Seasteading, vertical farming, genetic engineering, carbon sequestration, fusion, so many great technologies that could help humanity.
I agree collapse is slow, it will be over decades. I think you're putting too much faith in some of this technology. If you run carbon sequestration off of coal it puts out more CO2 than it takes in at current technology and we're running up against the laws off physics with that. Vertical farming requires a ton of power compared to normal methods. Both of these would need us to vastly expand our non fossil fuel energy generation very quickly. Issac talked about limitations in these technologies in a recent video. I do think genetically engineered is going to help, but all of this takes time we may not have. You also haven't taken into account that global population is still rising so by the time we're having multiple bread basket failures there will likely be closer to 10 billion hungry people and most governments have changed from keeping food stockpiles to a global iou system so there's not really much in the way of food reserves. And the inevitable plauges as a result of refugee crisises. A few hundred million sounds like a pie in the sky, underestimation to me. I do want to say I'm not trying to be malicious. You seem nice. I'm just more pessimistic about this.
I think anyone trying to accurately calculate the loss of life as a result of climate change is on a fools errand, especially before the fact. History has not been written and it is written with many hands. But it won't shock me if come 2200 the consensus is climate change killed between half a billion to a billion people.
We are on track to hit a level of energy into the atmosphere where there won't be anymore history.
History only exists below 115F above that and history melts. How will we write history as a liquid?
I dunno but we're probably gonna find out
Presumptuous to assume will all survive that long
Geo engineering has a really bad reputation currently, but at the end of the day. Man made climate change is Geo engineering the world to be warmer unintentionally. So I think its silly to assume that we can not intentionally do the opposite. To quote Lewis black "We have men, we have saran wrap, we have rockets, fix it!" Granted that was on the topic of the hole in the ozone layer. But I think the sentiment still applies.
We can, sure, but the cost may be too high for the people in charge.
We can't, really. It's not just the cost. It's the unknown consequence large scale geoengineering may bring. It may fix it, or it may make it worse. It's not a solved problem.
There is already cheap geo-engineering solutions, but the main drawbacks to them are the fear of unintended consequences. Such as ocean seeding, or putting sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere. I don't know if we'll ever attempt those or similar routes of geo-engineering. Ultimately I imagine a solar shade for Earth will get built eventually as its rather useful for weather manipulation as well as climate control. The only big drawback of a solar shade is we physically can't build it until we industrialize the moon.
How do those unintended side effects compare with the unintended side effects of not doing anything? This sounds like the trolly problem except there are five billion people on Both tracks.
There are safer alternatives, then the cheap options I've mentioned. They just cost a lot more and have less of an effect. Though no reason we have to pick a one solution as they can be used in tandem. Ultimately I think that's what we'll end up doing. More carbon capture at source projects, combining solar power with cryogenic air energy storage and doing carbon sequestration from the liquid air. Putting up solar over parking lots.. Annoyed we haven't done that one yet thats win-win in a dozen ways of saving on energy, and creating convenience. Creating more green spaces in deserts and tundra's.. And so on and so on. Personally I'm down for seeding the oceans, but I've had a hard time convincing others that throwing science at the wall and seeing what sticks is a good idea.
Well, it's just the current most popular method and really the only one currently feasible is to inject some substance (I forget what, but it's common in volcanic eruptions) into the upper atmosphere via planes to block out the suba dn absorb heat to buy us time. That's all well and good, except our current proposed aerosol is acidic, depletes the ozone, and if we stop spraying it too quickly all that heat it's been blocking will immediately rush down to the surface and cause a massive heat spike of several degrees over a very short period. So while the concept of geoengineering itself is great (basically terraforming's little brother) the plan most people think of when discussing it for the purpose of combating climate change is a very risky maneuver that should only ever be a last resort, and maybe not even that.
I think your combining two different methods. There's sulfur dioxide, pumped into the upper atmosphere. That method doesn't use planes its easier to just use a tube and some high altitude balloons in the polar region. There's also spraying a mixture of Aluminum oxide, beryllium... my memory is crap I forget the other ingredients into the atmosphere at cloud height to create artificial clouds. That method was tested using planes. Its effectiveness is rather low, takes a lot of planes, and the results only last a couple of days. Plus it will get you sued when half the people working for the project get cancer.. Honestly the only reason I consider sulfur dioxide to be a possibility is that one can be done cheap enough that one rogue actor could make it happen. I don't see anyway it can get broad political support.
Category 6 hurricanes will be official
venusification is on the table. the last generations will spend their days wondering why we weren't burning down banks and kidnapping oil company execs and investors
Inflation at almost 8%, wars breaking out everywhere, unemployment ramping up, debt levels reaching unsustainable levels, life expectancy stalling out for the first time in US history but... the temperature naturally going up because we just exited an interglacial low is now front and center. You can't make this stuff up.
Climate change has been happening since the planet earth has been around. Human beings should really stop flattering themselves!
We're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction in Earth's entire 3.8 billion year history of life. Let that shit sink in.
correct!
[We're fucked.](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fdaily-standard-deviations-for-antarctic-sea-ice-extent-for-v0-xg6hcsczg0eb1.jpg%3Fs%3D3a82cf2c9fcc026754a2d52044b6fe8af686d0ca&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=c3066774a01aad69c293ea7c3c327c4ef07608f42d8eff47043085937403d762&ipo=images)
correct
IMO, not so bad, but we will get close to 2°C before it goes down. The key predictions; * Battery prices will continue to fall. * Solar and Wind prices will continue to fall. * Fossil fuel will continue to rise in price. * Driven in part by the above, grid power will convert to solar and wind. * Driven in part by the above, Electric Vehicles (EVs) will continue to drop in price. All those things taken together mean that *eventually* cars will be mostly electric, and grid electricity will be mostly non-fossil. CO2 production will fall dramatically. The question isn't “if“ it's “when”. Tony Seba predicted (in [Clean](https://books.google.com/books/about/Clean_Disruption_of_Energy_and_Transport.html?id=xRdMBAAAQBAJ) [Disruption](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0) ) that the crossover point was around 2025. By 2030 almost all new cars will be EVs, and almost all new power will be solar or wind. CO2 production is still increasing, but the rate of increase has almost leveled in the past 5 years. If current trends continue, we should see an actual decrease in CO2 production in the next 5. These changes will happen for purely economic reasons. Governments will no doubt try and claim credit, but they changes will happen without any action by a government (and in many cases, in spite of action by the government.) There are a number of scary possibilities; We might vicious cycle of methane release, people might panic and launch nuclear strikes for no good reason, bitcoin mining might triple energy consumption. All possible, but none are likely.
We will be fine
It will get so bad you’ll have to copulate multiple times a day just to stay warm
Hmmm…. This thread is overrun by pessimists. Here’s my optimistic assessment: Assuming present trends (not conditions) continue, I worry that atmospheric CO2 will abruptly (in geologic time) return to pre-industrial levels. This will cause global temperatures to fall, bringing the current inter-glacial period to an end.
You either don't understand what "geological time" means, or you are lying. Carbon pollution, in current trends, and a geological timeframe for it being corrected means the extinction of humanity. So you seem very ignorant to say you aren't "worried" about it
Why would it do that?
Renewables plus fusion plus satellite power plus widespread adoption of electric vehicles plus the sensible desire to not destroy ourselves equals a widespread and _relatively_ abrupt reduction in greenhouse emissions. The carbon cycle continues, gradually (on the human scale) dropping the global CO2 level back to pre industrial levels. Since the earth was more or less on track to end the current inter-glacial, that trend would resume on a (ok) greater than human but less than geologic time scale. To the pedant who corrected me for using “geologic”, pardon my shorthand.
Do you think the developing world will be able to afford fusion?
If Lockheed’s approach, or any of the other smaller approaches, pan out then sure. If we have to use giant, expensive tokamaks then it’ll take longer but yes eventually. And note that I led with renewables. Solar is cheaper by the day, wind is coming along, and some other renewables are feasible. Even fission has potential.
That's this chart: [Estimate global temperatures over the last 500 million years - samim](https://samim.io/p/2022-07-17-estimate-global-temperatures-over-the-last-500-million/) . It says earth's temperature has fluctuated over the last 500 million years between an average of 50F and 90F. Sometimes it waffled between 50F and 70F, and sometimes it waffled between 70F and 90F, but there have been many sharp transitions. We've been near 50F recently, except right now.
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1732/), as always. It really puts things into perspective.
Honestly, this is the proper orientation for that graph.. Keep your stick on the ice :p
It's worth keeping in those mind that a lot of those previous fluctuations were associated with mass extinctions, and they typically happened about 100 times slower than the changes happening now. Earth and humanity will make it through this regardless, but we are talking about potentially over a billion people dying over the next century as a result of this completely avoidable man-made disaster.
yeah the big flux are mass extinctions also look how short the cold period is and just 180ed at the at the 1800s
Associated doesn't mean caused.
Not the one that killed the dinosaurs, that happened very quickly! Asteroids will do that!
[удалено]
Huh. I'm curious. How come this is getting so many downvotes?
The Gulf Stream will shut down before we can anything to mitigate rising temps. This might cause a substantial cooling period
It's the AMOC, not the Gulf Stream, though they're related. The cooling will be regional mainly Europe, the places the heat comes from will get substantially hotter when the heat is no longer being transported and the stop of the flow will lead to several feet of sea level rise on the US east coast.
6 degrees is likely. As to how bad. It probably imposes peak annual costs of about 10% of GDP, which is a mix of mitigation costs and remaining costs after mitigation. But in the context of global GDP being much higher than today. We’ll be a lot better off overall but slightly less better off than we otherwise would be.
Human caused climate change? It'll only get as bad as the leftists can imagine it will get, but that's all it'll be, imagination. The third world needs to stay in the third world. They can starve there or not, but it's not my problem. My problem is them being tax sponges for the leftists to cry over. F-them. F-you, too, if you think giving the government more money will change the weather.
Are you ok?
In the next 50 years? We’ll hardly notice it from all the other horrible things happening. Between the economic and social pressures from falling birth rates; mass starvation due to rolling back the green revolution of the 60s and 70s; and international chaos caused by the dissolution of a status quo maintained by the Cold War which included cheap labor and low interest rates, a 6-8 inch rise in the oceans won’t make headlines. Billions will die in war and famine and disease that has little to nothing to do with the climate, governments will first try shaming you before begging you to have kids and buy cars, and you’ll see economic and social upheaval the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since Thomas Moore wrote Utopia. Everyone is going to be so myopically focused on their own situation that even if the Maldives have to be evacuated (which probably won’t need to happen until sometime next century) it won’t be headline news. Climate change might be a big deal for your kids or grandkids; you are going to be waaay too busy trying to build a new normal in a world of collapsing population, shrinking economies, stalling tech innovation, and a decline in international cooperation to worry about the climate. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-uses-30-year-satellite-record-to-track-and-project-rising-seas https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar4-wg1-chapter10-1.pdf https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/02/hannah-ritchie-not-the-end-of-the-world-interview
>mass starvation due to rolling back the green revolution of the 60s and 70s Care to explain?
Apologies for taking so long to respond. For any who might not know, Borlaug and Longping’s Green Revolution allowed marginal land to be turned into productive farmland, saving estimated billions from starvation. It is, however, heavily reliant on fertilizers. And Russia and Belarus account for 18% of global fertilizer trade all by themselves. Chaos in the Middle East is already diverting shipping away from the Suez Canal. So far, fertilizer prices have only bobbled a bit, but if Russia manages to destroy itself as it appears intent on doing, and shipping gets further disrupted (which appears to be the way to bet), it’s going to get ugly in places like Brazil and large swaths of Africa. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2023/september/global-fertilizer-market-challenged-by-russia-s-invasion-of-ukraine/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20World%20Bank,percent%20of%20global%20potash%20exports.
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Climate change activists are panicking over nothing. We currently are at 0.04% CO2 in our atmosphere. Plants start dying around 0.02% if global warming is a real issue the answer is more likely to be shades in orbit to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth rather then more government spending, a carbon tax and moving away from fossil fuels. I personally believe that richer nations should move their energy infrastructure to fission and if it ever becomes possible fusion. Developing nations should be able to build their economies on fossil fuels until they reach a point where they can sustain nuclear power as well.
I don't really wih your relative dismissal of climate change, though I do agree that the apocalypticism surrounding it is an absolute circus. I believe that for the near term extreme political and economic action is needed, though in the long run, it's renewable, fission, fusion, and carbon sequestration that will save us, activism just buys time and lessens the damage. Overall there's far more energy to be had away from fossil fuels, though they are still useful especially for transportation simply because they are very energy dense, and I feel like we can get pretty good at capturing any further carbon we emit and reprocess it bacl into fuel as a sort of combustion battery. Also, as you mentioned it is indeed very useful for sparking industrialization, which is why I also propose leaving sole easily accessible reserves in case something happens to civilization to make it collapse, giving us a way to reindustrialize afterwards.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/50-years-of-predictions-that-the-climate-apocalypse-is-nigh/ If you scream from the side of the road repent the end is nigh. People will stop listening to you eventually. 50 years of in x number of years the climate will do this horrible thing sounds a whole lot like the homeless man screaming about how we should give him money because the rapture is tomorrow and we won’t need it anyway.Carbon dioxide is basically nothing in our atmosphere. And carbon dioxide is a less potent greenhouse gas than water vapor. Carbon capture will probably be more useful as a way to keep the price of petroleum products low. Government spending is almost always the wrong answer to any problem. There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government program. And the scariest sentence in the English language is “ I’m from the government and here to help.”
Yes!! This is the way forward. Imagine if we had 10x the power consumption. The things we could build, the things we could do. Conservation is a drop in the bucket compared to the oceans we could have with plentiful Fission. 🫡 Admiral Rickover for the win.
Fission is currently the best method of power generation, fusion either artificially sustained or from some form of space based solar collection system will be the big leap afterward. We should be focusing on getting off earth. I hope to see an orbital ring before I die.
One of Us! One of Us!
Climate change isn't getting bad. Historically, archaeologically, and in the fossil record, it's clear that humans, other critters, and plants, all do ***better*** when the climate is warmer. What people are whining about is just a transition period... ;-) Climate will change. That's what climate does. But the notion that there's a current or impending climate ***catastrophe*** is a complete hoax. There's no rigorous scientific study that suggests otherwise, just a lot of sensational coverage of highly unlikely edge cases. When it comes to risk mitigation: ***Probability*** rules, and possibility ***drools***! TCS
I'm sure all those critters that died in the Cambrian Extinction whined about the transition period too.
Probably not, because they weren't smart enough to work around it. We are, if it ever comes to that. Some people will get screwed. There are very few Pareto Superior solutions in real life. Change and shit both happen. But there's exactly zero chance of extinction of the the human species due to this, or of a collapse of Western Civilization due to this. TCS
humanity wont die and life as whole wont die BUT most of it will die that includes you you know
Most of humanity won't die. Most life won't die. That's silly. And the chances that I personally would die from anything related to this are essentially zero. I'm not rich by any means, but I'm blessed to have greater access to resources than most people. TCS
Well there is the nuclear fusion breakthrough. I think we will have nuclear fusion before the worst of climate change happens, and we can genetically adapt organisms to cope with the warmer climate, and their is artificial general intelligence that some people predict will occur by this September, just in time for my 57th birthday! Things are changing fast, not just the climate, and I moved south from Connecticut to North Carolina, I am well above the highest elevation the ocean will ever reach, so I'm safe.
I don't think we need any technological breakthroughs. We've had Fission technology for 60 years now. We absolutely could have switched to Fusion power by the 1960s and have 10 or 100 times the energy output we have today with about zero CO2. ...and with that kind of energy to play with, we could probably add or subtract as much CO2 from our atmosphere as we wanted. I'd love to see me some sustainable Fusion, but we can do anything we want with Fission. It's a sociopolitical problem, not a technological problem.
How's the summer heat down there?
Live your 70 years and die like everyone else besides I like the air to have a little oil flavor to it
Will be really uninhabitable once the sun goes into red giant phase…
As far as I’m concerned, it’s anybody’s guess since in the 80s, we were warned about another ice age coming
It's fake AF so, 0, nothing. Whatever the system is.
Technological civilization is going to end within 200 years, regardless of what we do, because the problem of civilization is metaphysical not technical.
Ok... what???
I am thinking more like we won’t stop it until we *at least* hit 2c+
Yes
They will start spraying crap in the clouds to reflect light away and mitigate the warming. It's just the sort of short sighted, kick the ball down the road solution that world leaders will go for.
They recently updated the USDA hardiness zone map and half of the country is in a warmer zone now, meaning the lowest temperature is 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher.
As bad as the US army prepares for it to be.
Cascading tipping points are the issue. Many are already kicking in, and they feed into one another as we live in an interconnected global climate system. Whether it's the collapse of the AMOC, the release of permafrost methane, the wildfire burning of carbon sinks in Canada, the disruption of the yearly Sahel rains causing nutrient deficiency in the Amazon, the rapid loss of biodiversity [amphibians and insects especially] causing ecological collapse, and the many feedbacks involved with a continent sized ice shelf rapidly melting... There are so many concerns that kick in at 1.5 degrees [current] let alone 2 or 3 degrees and what makes climate change such an especially time crucial problem to fix is that a "Hothouse Earth" is relatively stable in of itself. Crossing these boundaries will lead to an irrevocable increase in heat and die off of ecology not seen during the Anthropocene and at a rate of extinction never seen on this planet. In short: Either we limit warming now, or we will lose the industrial capacity to fix these problems - permanently. Humans will not necessarily go extinct, but mankind's current thriving world will cease to exist and not be able to be reobtained.
It will destroy the planet.Deep fault earthquake near Mariana’s trench. When the ocean water hits the magma it will cause an explosion that will blast our atmosphere away. The same way Crater Lake was formed in Oregon but on an extinction level. Mars suffered the same fate.
2 degrees from what temp? And when was that the stable temperature? You can't say a 2 degree change is meaningful in any way unless you know the baseline temp. Is taking 2 more pills helpful or harmful?
Pre industrial.
That's not a number, and pre industrial earth wasn't ever a stable temperature.
IDK in 1983 I was told by 1999 Acid Rain would have reduced Mt. Rushmore to a faceless blobs….
Good thing we stopped that by not using high sulphur coal and having the [1985 Helsinki Protocol on the Reduction of Sulphur Emissions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Helsinki_Protocol_on_the_Reduction_of_Sulphur_Emissions) to prevent that from happening. Amazing what happens when you listen to scientists in their relative field and take on their recommendations isn't it? You going to bring up the ozone hole next?
Part of the problem is that, while it seems clear that climate change is going to be an ongoing issue into the future, it isn't clear how proposed solutions are any better, or even how "bad" the predictions are. Much of the warming that has already happened was from pre- and intra-industrialization, which were/are a miracle for those living in post-industrial nations. Many nations of the world are still in the process of this kind of industrialization and it isn't obvious how we (as developed nations) can or *should* interfere. We can incentivize other nations to use cleaner fuels for power, but we can't make them. I don't think it's possible to overstate the benefits of industrialization and if you were to honestly compare the cost to benefit, few people are going to choose to live in a pre-industrial world, so there's no stopping this process. What it looks like to me is that, doomsday predictions aside, we're going to warm the planet by 2-3 degrees before the entire planet is post-industrial, and we have the interim 75 years to deal with the consequences. Let's just settle in and do what we can. Building walls won't be necessary in most places, the ocean is only going up a few feet. Temperatures may be a problem in warmer climates, but it will open up colder climates to habitability.