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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
Whatever the worse possible outcome is +15%.
Fucked.
We’ve already experienced the hottest three weeks in recorded history. It does not get better from here.
It is possible but we not gonna change peaceful
I think some humans might be able to survive on the tropical Antarctic archipelago…
I expect them to shift burden of responsibility through some new alternative to carbon trading while the developing world becomes an unpleasant mix of droughts, floods , hurricanes .
Like today, but worse. We’ll have five-sigma events occurring once a week, but we’ll still insist on calling them “five-sigma” instead of “new normal”, and the denialists will still be denying that it’s any different than it’s ever been, and utopianists will still be screeching about how the technology that will save us is just “a few years” away, and lots of people will die of prosiac, totally preventable things like famines and droughts while the super-rich will have retreated to the bunkers they started building back in 2012 exactly for this scenario.
Well, the most dramatic scenary is that everyone is going to die. So, yes, we will avoid that.
But realistically, I think we wojt do 1,5C, but are going to have more like 2,5-3C. So horrible, but still survivable for at least half of the humans now.
Hopefully the food we eat survives with us