With evidence mounting on the failure to limit global warming to 1.5C, do you think global carbon emissions will be low enough by 2050 to at least avoid the most catastrophic climate change doomsday scenarios forecast by the turn of the century?
I am somewhat hopeful most developed countries will get there but I wonder if developing countries will have the ability and inclination to buy into it as well.
We’ll not meet the goal limit, climate will change, the poor will suffer all the consequences, the rich will be mildly inconvenienced. Habitats will be destroyed, species will go extinct, life will go on.
So what you’re saying is that life, uh, finds a way?
Pretty much. The outcome is simple. By 2050, the rich will start moving their houses north-er than they already do, south asia and europe will be considered pre-tropical. America will start hearing the words “desertification” but people on the south border will still vote against their interests.
By 2150 the rich, whose numbers will already be severely culled, will run out of North to run to.
By that time, Antartica will be the place to go.
life will go on.
It’s the new normal
species will go extinct, life will go on
Bro did you just contradict yourself on the same sentence?
Species also went extinct when that rock killed the dinosaurs, life still went on. Took a few years to recover, but it went on.
Only question is, will humanity go exting before we pump too much CO2 into the atmosphere to end up like Venus.
Lives of the surviving species and life of the remaining people, I guess.
No, there are more than one species in the planet.
It depends on if the super-wealthy can figure out how to make money off of it. If they can then all the politicians will fall in line because you don’t say no to your main source of income.
This is exactly the reason we are not going to succeed. I’ve already come to terms with it. We’re fucked.
We can go the french way of solving disputes with politicians.
Lol, no. Considering the three largest sources of emissions as far as countries are concerned are about 50% of the global total, refuse to take action, nothing is going to change.
I daresay India and China will be CO2 free before the western states. The West is too concerned with not loosing an inch of the status quo of current behavior. It’ll shoot itself in the foot by electing fascists with their go-back-to-the-good-old-days-without-migrants promises.
But the developing countries also will be much too late.
I don’t think 2-2.5 degrees are realistic. I mean for 2050, probably yes, but it won’t stop there. There are several tipping points that’ll help shoot far beyond that.
I think the world will settle between 4 and 5 degrees late this century and it will be a world with quite a smaller number of humans than we have nowadays.
It wouldn’t have to be that way. Siberia could become farmland and take on half of the African population, for example. But Russia won’t stand for that.
But how can we make saving the planet a profitable business venture? -the west
Siberia could become farmland
Molten permafrost is bog. Good luck growing anything significant on that except mosquitoes.
Would not be the first swamp mankind dried up to have more farmland.
4 degrees is the apocalyptic scenario. The vast majority of oxygen in the atmosphere is provided not by trees or any plants, but by the algae and cyanobacteria in the ocean. At the 4 degree threshold, they can’t do aerobic respiration anymore, so they switch to anaerobic respiration. This means they stop producing oxygen, drastically reducing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere and drastically increasing the carbon dioxide. This does two things: kills any large fauna, humans included, and the additional carbon dioxide continues to act as a greenhouse gas, accelerating the effect even further. Eventually, after almost all oxygen breathing life is dead, we reach equilibrium, assuming your definition of 'we" includes insects, because that’s basically all that would be left. If there’s a risk of reaching the 4 degree threshold, we would be forced into taking our chances with the literal nuclear option of deliberately inducing a nuclear winter.
Yep in the UK.the electorate just punished a party in a by-election for brining in controls.om.vehicle.emiasions.(ULEZ) in one of the most connected cities on the world. The area of.uxbridhe and Ruislip has no less.than 3 tube lines another mainline rail and busses with wait.times measured in minutes. But no when the. Chips.were.down the mayor is bad for.trying.to clean air.
World wide? No.
I think you’ll see pockets of good choices and efforts being made, perhaps down to cities, that may or may not mitigate some of the damage, or allow for a more resilient response to ongoing events.
Catastrophic level collapses that take decades will be survivable, but not at the quality of life that most are accustomed to, leading to those on the bottom dying and suffering in greater numbers. Life expectancy will continue to drop. The world will be changed, it’s just a matter of how much civil unrest this engenders as resources become scarce and global markets less reliable or available.
I’m not sure how much ecofascism we’ll actually see, though, as the people who lean/are fascist are the ones least likely to believe climate change exists, and given how conspiracy style thinking has flourished with Covid, I really can’t be sure that they’ll ever “snap out of it” and start clamoring for the change that’ll actually do anything. I think it’s more likely to see increasingly angry people who demand more for their homes and less for others, which I guess could be ecofascism? But without actually believing climate is changing; it just happens to be dumping a ton more rain for whatever reason.
this why i’m skeptical of reports that people will stop voting republican in the united states. primarily because it’s been said before but also because climate change makes like harder and history has proven that whenever life gets tough; people become more xenophobic/racist/etc.
Well said.
Today on npr they mentioned 1.5 being likely within 10 years and could result in catastrophic consequences. Um ah. So half of north america being on fire and the other half along with europe and china have weeks of record breaking heat is not catastrophic along with all the drought!!!
Unfortunately, no it’s not catastrophic. I think we’ll run out of adjectives before this is over, so we need to ration them now.
Nope. Net-zero emissions by 2050 is a vague sham of a goal supported by the fossil fuel industry. Big oil actually plans to INCREASE fossil fuel production and use “planting trees” and “carbon capture” to justify expansion of resource consumption.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16072020/oil-gas-climate-pledges-bp-shell-exxon/
I think we are heading headlong into worst case scenario territory.
And I think we’re going to see a lot of terrible effects by 2050 if not earlier.
I feel that places like the Marshall Islands will be uninhabitable by 2050.
I feel we’ll see wars break out in developed nations over water rights by 2100.
The world is on fire and those with the power to enact change are unable or unwilling to do so.
And with the rise of the far right all over the world it’s only going to get worse.
The world will be unrecognizable in 2100 to the people alive today provided we live that long.
I still hold onto some hope that we may be able to pull off a turn around and actually save humanity. But the longer everything goes on the more that hope feels like a delusional fantasy.
Hug your loved ones, try to push for a better world, be kind to others, and enjoy the time we have. For tomorrow is not guaranteed, but the least you can do is allow love to enter your heart.
I do what I can to prevent the worst case scenario, but when anyone asks how I think this is going to go, I always answer “I objectively think we are all going to burn and die, but I’m not going down without a fight.” That’s all it is. I don’t think we are going to save the world, but I want to go down swinging.
I want to be able to say I’m going down swinging, but at this point I have no idea how we’re supposed to do that aside from like… Blowing up pipelines or whatever. Having a year’s world of recycling be undone by one minute of a coca cola plant operating normally doesn’t exactly feel like swinging lol.
As long as conservatives have any say in the matter, we can expect the most destructive, deadly outcome possible.
We should expect no reasonable progress when conservatives (including neo-liberals) are able to intervene.
I feel like you’re asking two questions.
Are we going to meet the 2050 climate goals, and can we limit global warming to 1.5C?
Imho, probably not, and definitely not.
Fossil fuel companies are still touting natural gas as having a role in addressing climate change goals, and we’re still consuming more fossil fuels. Hell nah are we limiting global warning to 1.5C.
As for meeting 2050 climate goals…lol. Same evidence. Our main current sources of information routinely mention wildfires, hurricanes, severe thunderstorms, etc, without contextualizing it. Why should I expect that to change? The current economic incentives seem to be opposed to meeting climate goals.
For example, Shell says they’re going to be net-zero by 2050. But that’s not a binding declaration on their part. If they can make more money digging up the arctic, then that’s what I expect them. It’s going to take someone with a heavy regulatory hand to tell them otherwise, then it’s going to take a not shitty court system to uphold that regulation.
Every article about weather should say “this event is made more likely due to climate change” and “this event will cost the taxpayer $X to repair” and “so far we have spent $Y total on climate related disaster relief”
Whatever the worse possible outcome is +15%.
I don’t think humanity is doomed. What I do see happening is a lot of areas that are landlocked becoming wayyyyyyy too expensive for normies to live in. You’ll see the coasts become stupid expensive to live as domestic climate refugees roll in. You’ll see tensions between locals and newcomers. And you’ll see it on the macroscopic scale with wars and tensions over resources like water rights, jobs, immigration, and racial tensions. You’ll see the rise of idiotic nationalism and people waving their country flag as justification for the “good old days”.
We’ll make it halfway, but we will still see devastating climate events often. Big floods, big drought, big hurricanes, skyrocketing insurance, weird stock issues on certain things like some medications, olive oil, cotton, etc. Humanity will be distracted by some of the dumbest shit imaginable while the grownups (scientists) try to focus on drawing down carbon to stay on target.
Luckily humans are very adaptable. History will judge companies like BP and standard oil harshly though, for basically fucking up the planet for centuries.
I agree with everything you’ve said and I know big oil has used the “individual responsibility” as a way of dodging their responsibility.
Big oil has a lot to answer for.
But so do we. In almost every country there’s been a “Green” party and choices for electors to make in regards to what regulation we’ve desired.
And the fact is we all have a lot of answer for.
Skyrocketing insurance is already on the way. Places that don’t outright lose access to insurers will continue to see massive increases over the next decade. US Insurers will all be following suit soon. Property insurance got killed last year and is already getting hit hard this year.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2023/07/20/731434.htm
It’s a very bad time to be an insurance company, especially with dead weight like Florida, and parts of Texas (hurricanes + mold/water damage from losing power for a week, lol) that are constantly getting destroyed and rebuilt on the exact same floodplains.
And California. There’s a few reasons why a company as big as State Farm (the largest home insurer in the state) stopped writing new home policies there, largely the natural disaster risk.
https://calmatters.org/housing/2023/05/state-farm-california-insurance/
I think we’ve fucked it. Without some drastic measures being taken we are on track for a minimum of a 2-2.5C rise and that is itself bad but will likely see certain feedback loops (defrosting permafrost, melting deep sea methane deposits, etc) ramp up hard to the point climate change will spiral out of control.
The remnants of human civilisation will be any billionaires with a sufficiently advanced escape plan in place, looking back on a boiling world in their rear view mirrors as they head off to eke out a pitiful existence on a barren rock somewhere out there.
The guards those billionaires hire will be in good shape, especially after they kill the billionaires.
We can always dream, right? But that is about as likely as politicians taking a few million from their main source of income, that being billionaires, and then deciding not to create a new law that would benefit them
Yeah, I doubt industrial society is going to survive for another 100 years. I’d be surprised if things don’t go to shit in the next 20, and that’s not even accounting for some sort of “black swan” event triggered by a feedback loop or something like that, that suddenly kicks off a speedrun to turn Earth into Venus.
We’re fucked, and we’d be fucked even if humanity went carbon negative starting right now. While the human race will likely be fine, this current lifestyle and economic system we’ve got in most of the developed world will go tits up and billions will end up dying, if not from the direct effects of climate change then eg. social instability, war, disease, famine. While we could still make the future slightly less bad for ourselves, it’s simply not profitable and there’s so much inertia in global capitalism that things won’t change without fantastic amounts of violence and social upheaval, and I doubt the next change will be for the better considering how popular far right and conservative parties are in many places around the world right now. They’re gleefully making things worse and then blaming leftists / black people / atheists / science / The Gays / etc
It is very important to understand that the most apocalyptic visions of a climate change future are unlikely. Credible prognoses of the future predict that the world will suffer, and development will slow, but overall humanity will survive and even continue to grow.
I say this not to deny the effects of climate change, but because I sincerely believe that people use apocalyptic predictions to justify slacktivism. By deciding that the world is doomed, and they will go extinct regardless of what they do, people absolve themselves of their responsibility to agitate (including violently) for change. The world is genuinely unrecognizable compared to even 10 years ago, let alone 50. People are far more resilient than the worst predictions give them credit for, and even marginal victories will have real consequences for the future that we will live to see.
I’m one of the people that thinks the world is probably going to shit (mass migration from uninhabitable land, wars over water / farmland etc.) but I don’t use that as an excuse to not do anything. My reasoning is that even though I honestly think everything is going to shit, I might be wrong, so the best I can do is plan to go down fighting to make the world better. Either the world burns, and I can say with integrity that I tried my best, or we somehow pull through and prevent the worst prognosis from becoming reality. Either way, slacking is a bad idea.
Every time I see the optimistic outlook in regards to humanity, I am reminded myself how hard it hinges on a sense of belonging among the “we”. I look for the reason for that optimistic attitude and I am expected, no, borderline mandated to feel a patriotic pride for humanity.
I actually don’t anymore. My mind change one too many time.
Extremely Controversial Counterpoint: Cruel Pessimism. No, it’s not that I don’t care anymore alone. I actually want to see humanity suffer now. I tried to fix it, and in return, the world hurt me and I now want it to hurt itself.
YOU live, not “we”. I’ll have no children, and hopefully die before the worst. Probably not. But whatever. I got not pity and intend to exchange none back.
Fucked.
We’ve already experienced the hottest three weeks in recorded history. It does not get better from here.
