This is maddening to read. The science has not changed. What has changed is that an enormous amount of effort to transition society away from fossil fuels has accelerated in the last decade, and because of that, we have bent the curve on future emissions such that RCP8.5 is no longer “business as usual.”
This is very much a scenario like the Y2K problem — if the doomsday scenario does not occur it will be because people dug in and did the hard work to avoid it.
Clueless people like the author of this article, who apparently only experience the very real crisis of climate change as a media spectacle, will continue making dumb comments like “ha ha, remember when those dumb scientists said the sky was falling?” all along the way to eventual drawdown of CO2, while those of us engaged in the problem are up to our necks in the muck, actually doing the work.
I mostly agree with your comment, but I don't think we've really "bent the curve" all that much. RCP8.5 was always the highest accelerating emission scenario, not BAU (flat or low emissions growth). In fact, global emissions of CO2 have never been higher, and are still growing. The world is by no means "transitioning away from fossil fuels". We're tracking towards the middle or high middle of the emissions scenarios. We're still not pointed the right direction.
Just for context, to justify my above comment, according to [1], 2022 emissions were, as expected, a record high, but grew less than normal, partly due to Ukraine and other energy crises. Of the 37 gigatons of CO2 output, about 0.5 of additional emissions were avoided by having renewables. That's less than 2%. Also worrying is that coal emissions actually started growing again.
RCP 8.5 was never realistic, because there’s a point when accumulated disasters will limit industrial output (and therefore emissions), due to resource wars, famine, and instability.
The problem is that the IPCC doesn’t factor in climatic tipping points. When we pass 2°, chances are, we’ll accelerate toward 3-5 and beyond.
> When we pass 2°, chances are, we’ll accelerate toward 3-5 and beyond.
Yeah, buckle up, because it looks like there's not a lot of dampening forces; only bad surprises ahead. I think the methane in permafrost is going to be very problematic.
Just curious, why do you think they want to destroy nations? It seems like if banks want to destroy the economy they have the means to do more effective things than trying to get governments to embrace green policies.
If dealing with climate change is turning an oil tanker, then we've started to brake and turn, but are still moving mostly in the original direction. Which isn't great, but is better than accelerating into the rocks ahead.
This is the "declare a victory and go home" approach to losing that's become too popular. That term comes from the Vietnam war, and more recently applies to Afghanistan, COVID, and now, perhaps, global warming.
Misplaced optimism is deadly. Climate change is one area where we're in dire need of realists.
1. People need to be aware of the science of climate change. Some of it is quite basic and has been known since the 19th century.
2. People need to be aware of the largest CO2 sources.
3. People need to be aware of human psychology and how people respond to threats. To wit, look what happened with toilet paper during the pandemic. Anybody who has spent any time studying people knew that was totally predictable - yet the people who should have known better seem to have been taken by surprise by so many people buying years' worth of toilet paper.
4. Likewise, people need to be aware of how civilization works. How have civilizations collapsed before? What were the causes of collapse? How did human psychology expedite the collapse? How did human psychology ensure the collapse couldn't be avoided?
5. Finally, what are the causes of war?
There's a high probability the "declare a victory and go home" crowd are going to be caught off-guard. Even worse, their kids and grandkids are going to take the brunt of their wishful thinking.
Global warming isn't likely to end the human race (sure, there's always the chance, but it's not likely). What's far more likely is the civilization we know today will undergo a dramatic, i.e. stressful for everyone involved, change. It may even be a change for the better (okay, now my optimism is showing!). But we're just fooling ourselves if we think the change won't have significant impacts to everyone enduring it.
There may be a light at the end of the tunnel but not everybody is going to make it through the tunnel. That's the hard reality we face.
We’re in need of pragmatists. There is an optimal balance between climate action and business as usual. Calls for extreme curtailment of fossil fuel usage for example would lower quality of life beyond what global warming will do.
There are many optimal balances, depending on how you choose to discount long-term outcomes. Also, as Europe has just learned, sudden forced changes to energy infrastructure are less destructive than many people would have predicted.
> would lower quality of life beyond what global warming will do.
Source on this? Climate crisis could quite possibly lead to extinction of humans and most life on Earth [0].
Now I do want to emphasized the word could. Extinction events are certainly "on the table", but certainly not a certainty.
However this is the true essence of the reason why we'll never stop climate change. The immediate cost of stopping or even slowing is high, and certain. The cost of not stopping it, is often considered higher, but is always probabilistic and less certain in nature.
Compounding this is that the more we rely on non-renewable hydro-carbons, the more painful it is to reverse or even slow our march towards catastrophic climate change, while at the same time the cost of not stopping it becomes less uncertain.
For example in 1900 it would have been incredibly easy to slow economic progress in order to prevent climate change, but the uncertainty around the cost of not slowing progress was very high, so the perceived expected value of stopping our march toward climate change was much lower than the present time expected cost.
It is strange to see calls for moderate pragmatism when our current state has been accelerating CO2 emissions. We're, quite literally, stepping on the gas to meet whatever future awaits us.
0. See Peter D. Ward's "Under a Green Sky" for one example scenario.
What about Peter Ward's research do you find unconvincing?
Of course it's absurd to treat it as a certainty, but the geological evidence of the destruction to life caused by past period of rapid CO2 escalation are at the very least a bit concerning.
> Calls for extreme curtailment of fossil fuel usage for example would lower quality of life beyond what global warming will do.
Depends on whose quality of life you mean. A lot of people (who were never using a lot of fossil fuels to begin with) will be deprived of water, food and shelter.
There is a lot of uncertainty concerning tipping points, etc. It seems conceivable to me that in a hunderd years we'll wish we had banned fossil fuels completely this very decade, even starting from now, despite the dramatic effects this would have on economies worldwide. As things are looking now, global civilization collapse as a result of climate change, leading to starvation, migration and war for resources, seems to me a very realistic scenario. You have to discount the future an insane amount to argue today's profits are worth even a small chance of this.
> As things are looking now, global civilization collapse as a result of climate change, leading to starvation, migration and war for resources, seems to me a very realistic scenario.
This is pure conjecture and climate fear mongering.
Yes, conjecture. Nobody knows for sure what will happen (although some claim they do).
As someone else pointed out,
> Calls for extreme curtailment of fossil fuel usage for example would lower quality of life beyond what global warming will do.
is also conjecture. If you were to insist on adding a pejorative to that, I suggest "pure conjecture and climate denialism". However, continuing the discussion like this is clearly a waste of time.
You probably think your conjecture is more plausible than mine. But you haven't argued that it is or why you think that. And even if it is more plausible, a cost-benefit analysis also takes into account the cost. How unlikely does my scenario have to be to counterbalance the potential insane loss of value?
It's also not clear what you mean by "extreme". Some people still think "phasing out fossil fuels ever" is extreme. Is "net zero by 2050" extreme? I absolutely think the word is appropriate, but that a desperate situation requires extreme measures.
Most people are pretty "down" on life extension, from a social consequences phase, but one consequence that might be interesting is having to deal with the end results of policies fifty years hence. Government archives and court records get unsealed after decades and the culprits are largely ignored: they're probably dead or so incapacitated that they would not stand trial. Imagine, though, that it wasn't just elderly guards of some concentration camp being prosecuted for the crimes of previous centuries, but people responsible for Tuskeegee, for telling us that cigarettes are good for our health, for burying the truth about climate change.
Humans are short-sighted, although not as much as compared to the other animals, but imagine how much further we might look if we couldn't just count on dying out of investigations. Perhaps some of those nuns might be called to account for those mass unmarked graves of children and infants behind "care homes" in Canada and Ireland and so on.
> Humans are short-sighted, although not as much as compared to the other animals, but imagine how much further we might look if we couldn't just count on dying out of investigations.
I seriously doubt this is the case. Maybe a few septuagenarians have YOLO'd something because they expect to die soon, but few young people are considering their mortality when assessing the consequences of their actions.
Your comment was extremely offensive. Let me take but one example: How many unmarked graves of children and infants behind "care homes" in Canada are there? How does that have to do with nuns?
(yes, Tuskeegee, and syphilis is a known example of very bad behavior. However, that does not include Canada or Ireland)
Please apologize for that comment. Or, back it up with data.
A Canadian Indigenous group said Wednesday a search using ground-penetrating radar has found 182 human remains in unmarked graves at a site near a former Catholic Church-run residential school that housed Indigenous children taken from their families.
A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday.
Let us take the word as published by the CBC (pick another source). The idea (tldr) is that "At this point, no mass grave has been discovered, but more than a thousand potential unmarked graves have already been located, with many more Indigenous Nations just beginning their investigations."
Like I said, offensive, and apologies are in order. I do not know the issue in Ireland. Since I am a first-generation immigrant to Canada, I have no stake in this. But "denialism"? Since when is a demand for proof a denial? Especially for something as sensitive as making the accusation that a Religion is Genocidal. I am not Catholic. I am not Muslim. Nor am I Jewish (no, I am NOT going to bring my own faith into this discussion). But I would not level that accusation against any believer.
"The concern for Pierre is that the term “unmarked grave” is now so closely associated with victims of Canada’s residential school system.
“To just assume that every unmarked grave inside a graveyard is already tied to a residential school, we’ve got to be a little bit more respectful of our people who are buried in our graveyards,” Pierre said.
The graveyard near Cranbrook originally dates back to Christian missionaries who settled in the area in the early 1800s, prior to the construction of the school. A church and a hospital were also built in the area.
It eventually became a graveyard for the community, which it remains to this day."
There is no suggestion of "foul play" here. Wooden markers will disintegrate. Mass grave? Burial yard? Yes, words do matter.
Pope Francis made a penitential visit to Canada in 2022. That's a "haha, yeah, we screwed up" trip. You could have looked that up for yourself but ... denial, instead.
They're Catholic care homes, of course they were run by nuns.
Do some research, look into the Catholic care homes for unwed mothers in Ireland. I have no idea what sources you'll accept and which ones you will reject, so I won't bother doing any pick and shovel work for you.
If you're offended, well, you're going to stay offended, largely because you want to.
No. If you insist on it, though, you can find countless other sources with information on the countless other atrocities that have been committed.
I have no stake in this. But "denialism"?
What are you talking about? Did you get lost in the comments?
Anyway, it's hilarious that you'll refuse to read one news source, ignore all the other articles, but latch on to one article trying to spin a weird narrative that, what, natives were burying their own en masse, coincidentally next to residential schools? Or that the abused women and children in Ireland just happened to be buried in the basement in astonishingly high numbers?
Finally, you seem to be hung up on the concept of wooden markers disintegrating while ignoring that so many children shouldn't be dying in the first place, and that there are first-hand accounts of intentionally starving babies that couldn't be "adopted" (i.e. sold) out of the Irish facilities.
As for being offensive, I don't care at all if you are offended by any of this. Your feelings about the atrocities mean nothing to me.
[0]Doesn't say anything about nuns in particular so the poster may have been over extrapolating and conflating nuns with the actions of the Catholic church but mass and unmarked graves did happen under at least the auspices of the church
Journalists with cushy jobs and comfortable urban lifestyles are grappling with cognitive dissonance.
They know that proper mitigation would spell the end of their comforts (no more flying, for instance), but they can’t bring themselves to admit it to the public.
> In the following months, a new mode of environmental reporting bloomed: the age of climate optimism was upon us. Elizabeth Weil captured the shift in a 2022 New York magazine story…
This is not something I recognize here in Sweden. Here the doom and gloom has only intensified over the last few years.
As ever, our shortsightedness is our undoing. The media stopped covering when it stopped being profitable to do so, which is precisely what motivated us to dump gigatons of carbon into our atmosphere to begin with. And it seems no one can make any efforts to halt the damage, unless, of course, it is justified in profit. It all paints a grim portrait of our species.
Interesting that the subtitle on the cover shown beside the article is "How the Media Stopped Worrying about Climate Change", while that of the actual web article is "How the climate catastrophists learned to stop worrying...". Still, I don't think
>[...] the banal (palm trees growing in London, wind turbines off Coney Island) to the bleak (bleached coral reefs, desertification) to the already happening (a line of silhouetted migrants fleeing their homelands).
and other such quotes justify drawing a smiley on the globe, maybe a "neutral face" emoji...
I don't really understand the point this is trying to make.
It's saying climate catastrophe journalism was overblown (apparently starting in 2016 when Trump was elected?) but that now it's gone too far the other way, and is too optimistic because our already achieved level of warming is going to lead to some bad stuff.
But given the many feedback loops involved, and the uncertaintities of prediction, I don't see how the catastrophes can be considered not in line with the science? They're still a possibility if we hit tipping points.
According to the IPCC's sixth assessment report avoiding catastrophes is the unlikely possibility. Heck, just this month the Argentinian heatwave has cut their wheat and soybean harvests by almost a third.
Crop yields have been on a century long increase (we produce about 5x more corn per acre than 100 years ago) in part due to CO2 fertilization, in part due to improvements in technology:
Thank you. And... as a note. The following statement has been down-modded in the past (this is truly an "uncomfortable truth"): If we go with no-CO2/no fossil fuel policy, we will reduce farming production, leading to famine and the likely death of (many) people. Of interest is that solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear cannot help.
Strawman of some kind, so I'm not gonna give you an in-depth response.
Across all of the possible temperature distributions that Earth's surface could have, there is some temperature distribution that is optimal for the flourishing of human civilization as we know it.
The Earth has been, in the recent past, fairly close to that distribution but one of the consequences of changing the CO2 fraction of the atmosphere from around 0.025% to well over 0.04% is a change in albedo that changes Earth's surface temperature distribution towards an equilibrium that is not remotely near the optimum.
where's the strawman? you said that a heatwave ruined crops in Argentina, and it logically follows that said heatwave is the direct result of human actions negatively affecting the planet's climate, as it's the only possible cause of such a disastrous event.
The climate boogeyman is starting to get less scary by the day which has led to it losing its effectiveness as a policy stick to prod the populace with. There have just been too many dire warnings, too many cries of the wolf coming to the door without the beast showing up. Whatever the climate will do is just too abstract, too far away and too big for any single individual to feel he or she has any influence over it. This is not changed by yet another scary report from the IPCC nor by yet even more dire predictions of coastal flooding, equatorial roasting and other doomsday foretellings.
This has led to some politicians setting the climate stick aside to reach for another one, e.g. in the Netherlands 'climate' has had to make way for 'nitrogen' as the main cause for our coming demise. Seeing how as cows farting methane did not rile up the populace enough to force the farmers to get rid of the beasts - they like their cheese and milk after all and feel some national pride in the farmer's prowess in producing ever more of it - politicians in need of a stick thought to have found one in the fact that they not only fart methane but also dump a significant amount of nitrogen [1] - i.e. 'fertiliser' - in the soil and air. And lo, the more you look, the more nitrogen you find, nitrous oxides produced by internal combustion engines (including jet engines) being a major source. With this new-found stick they started whipping up the populace, this time they really meant it, cows-be-gone and don't you dare build a house because that involves diesel-driven machinery which would exceed the nitrogen budget for the area [2]. It seems though that the population, tired of yet another doomsday scare, is not planning on cooperating [3] this time. What is a politician to do when not even a good righteous scare can push the voters in the desired direction?
Whoa that's a lot of words to say "Hey! Complacency is bad." Considering the outcomes fall in the range of catastrophe to even more catastrophe, and considering the horrifyingly high rate of climate change means all the surprises are likely to be downside surprises, why bother relitigating "catastrophists?"
Climate doomerism (on full display in these comments) is an incredibly toxic form of brain rot. These people literally and earnestly believe we are on a path towards extinction, and most believe it’ll happen in their lifetimes. It’s completely unhinged.
> These people literally and earnestly believe we are on a path towards extinction
There might be a few people who believe that. However, a little coaxing and question asking will bring most people around to understanding that we're merely severely fucked.
Even this minor step then admits to the possibility of some mitigation, and that's a good thing.
Climate change is not going to wipe out humanity or life on earth. It could, however, completely reset or destroy what we currently consider "civilization", and for most people (especially those who particularly enjoy the comforts of said "civilization") there may not be not be much of a distinction between that an extinction. In addition, while losing only 1-2B people due to climate change is a far cry from human extinction, it is still a very big number. Even 400M would still be a very big number, with very substantial consequences for migration, resource control etc. You think people living in the tropic-to-tropic latitudes are going to just sit back while the outer latitudes live it up? I don't think so.
As for the timeline, that's always hard to say, but I'm almost 60 and I find it likely I'll see some severe disruption in the tropic-to-tropic zone before I'm done with this mortal coil.
Climate change is just one aspect of the problem of ecological overshoot. The biodiversity crisis is a bigger deal, but it receives very little attention.
Global industrial civilization is driving the sixth mass extinction on earth. Every species that goes extinct is gone, forever. If you’re a member of one of those species (or depend on them for your survival), it’s an existential problem.
No one believes it's human extinction. That's fiction which only exists for comments which try to dismiss the problem by an Argument from Incredulity fallacy (using a strawman to support it).
Other than many of the equatorial areas of the planet becoming too hot for agriculture and life, and most of the river deltas being flooded, what's the problem?
The huge increase in immigrants to the US from central America is driven by climate change. Agriculture there can't feed the people there any more.[1]
I call bullshit on this. It has become de jure to claim that just about any migration from the developing world to the north is due to climate change for all sorts of convoluted reasons, but the patterns of migration from many developing countries have far too many variables for anyone to assert that.
Among these variables are also trends in terrible government, horrible land policies and infrastructure problems that make certain industries in which millions work unsustainable. All of these are human problems of politics instead of literal climate and all of them could even benefit from more development, instead of hand waving about climate change to fit a fashionable narrative.
Your own link references several very human, very global political trends that have little or nothing to do with climate change as being responsible for central american migration. It doesn't reference any literal notable climate changes that somehow made agriculture in central america worse.
I'm not saying that climate change has nothing to do with migration in the world, but to call it a main cause is tenuous in the extreme and dishonestly symptomatic of flogging this specific thing in all contexts to the point of just making absurd arguments..
"Encounters (Border Patrol/ICE) soared in fiscal 2021 for some countries that have not historically been common sources of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. The number of encounters involving people from Ecuador, for example, increased more than eightfold, from 11,861 in fiscal 2020 to 95,692 in fiscal 2021. There were also stark increases in encounters involving people from Brazil (from 6,946 to 56,735), Nicaragua (from 2,123 to 49,841), Venezuela (from 1,227 to 47,752), Haiti (from 4,395 to 45,532) and Cuba (from 9,822 to 38,139)."
Some of that is political, but those are all different countries. All are near the equator.
The peak fro Cuban migrants was 120,000 in 1980, 38k is paltry by comparison but is recently driven by the absolute breakdown in services in Cuba. Agricultural output in Cuba has been trending down since the collapse of the USSR but was briefly buoyed by free oil from Venezuela. Venezuela is a failed state, and obviously not because of climate. The decimation of agriculture there had more to do with government intervention and expropriations.
Nicaragua is in the midst of a decade of political turmoil and Ortega is actively deporting dissidents. People are fleeing persecution in droves, not a climate disaster.
Haiti is literally without a functioning government, which is why people are leaving.
I thought the equatorial areas were some of the least affected by climate change (at least in terms of temperature)? If it were the primary driver of migration from central America you'd expect to see it in other parts of the world at similar latitudes surely, e.g. Indonesia or equatorial Africa (*). I certainly agree climate change and rising sea levels will be responsible for mass migration (as it has been many times in human history), but it's not clear it's such a key factor currently.
Interestingly I just read that Singapore is one near-equatorial location where temperatures have risen more than expected (and more than the global average), seemingly largely due the UHI effect. Needless to say, Singapore is not a common source of refugees.
* South sudan is definitely a case where severe weather events including flooding has driven up emigration, but most of the refugees have ended up in Uganda which is on the equator!
Thank you for that insight. I wish to mention that I live in the North and have been told by the "power" that I have to reduce my carbon footprint by 50% -- actually more like 75% to accommodate immigration (between now and 2100). If I am no longer allowed to burn stuff for heat, I will have to come south. I will be a climate migrant. I assume that Florida is willing to accept me? Perhaps somewhere in South America? Or Mexico?
The weather here just wants to kill people a lot of the time...
This is maddening to read. The science has not changed. What has changed is that an enormous amount of effort to transition society away from fossil fuels has accelerated in the last decade, and because of that, we have bent the curve on future emissions such that RCP8.5 is no longer “business as usual.”
This is very much a scenario like the Y2K problem — if the doomsday scenario does not occur it will be because people dug in and did the hard work to avoid it.
Clueless people like the author of this article, who apparently only experience the very real crisis of climate change as a media spectacle, will continue making dumb comments like “ha ha, remember when those dumb scientists said the sky was falling?” all along the way to eventual drawdown of CO2, while those of us engaged in the problem are up to our necks in the muck, actually doing the work.
I mostly agree with your comment, but I don't think we've really "bent the curve" all that much. RCP8.5 was always the highest accelerating emission scenario, not BAU (flat or low emissions growth). In fact, global emissions of CO2 have never been higher, and are still growing. The world is by no means "transitioning away from fossil fuels". We're tracking towards the middle or high middle of the emissions scenarios. We're still not pointed the right direction.
Just for context, to justify my above comment, according to [1], 2022 emissions were, as expected, a record high, but grew less than normal, partly due to Ukraine and other energy crises. Of the 37 gigatons of CO2 output, about 0.5 of additional emissions were avoided by having renewables. That's less than 2%. Also worrying is that coal emissions actually started growing again.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022
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RCP 8.5 was never realistic, because there’s a point when accumulated disasters will limit industrial output (and therefore emissions), due to resource wars, famine, and instability.
The problem is that the IPCC doesn’t factor in climatic tipping points. When we pass 2°, chances are, we’ll accelerate toward 3-5 and beyond.
> When we pass 2°, chances are, we’ll accelerate toward 3-5 and beyond.
Yeah, buckle up, because it looks like there's not a lot of dampening forces; only bad surprises ahead. I think the methane in permafrost is going to be very problematic.
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Just curious, why do you think they want to destroy nations? It seems like if banks want to destroy the economy they have the means to do more effective things than trying to get governments to embrace green policies.
Why would flat or low emissions growth be Business as Usual? Historically they've been roughly a straight line on a logarithmic scale:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_co2_emissions...
If dealing with climate change is turning an oil tanker, then we've started to brake and turn, but are still moving mostly in the original direction. Which isn't great, but is better than accelerating into the rocks ahead.
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This is the "declare a victory and go home" approach to losing that's become too popular. That term comes from the Vietnam war, and more recently applies to Afghanistan, COVID, and now, perhaps, global warming.
Misplaced optimism is deadly. Climate change is one area where we're in dire need of realists.
1. People need to be aware of the science of climate change. Some of it is quite basic and has been known since the 19th century.
2. People need to be aware of the largest CO2 sources.
3. People need to be aware of human psychology and how people respond to threats. To wit, look what happened with toilet paper during the pandemic. Anybody who has spent any time studying people knew that was totally predictable - yet the people who should have known better seem to have been taken by surprise by so many people buying years' worth of toilet paper.
4. Likewise, people need to be aware of how civilization works. How have civilizations collapsed before? What were the causes of collapse? How did human psychology expedite the collapse? How did human psychology ensure the collapse couldn't be avoided?
5. Finally, what are the causes of war?
There's a high probability the "declare a victory and go home" crowd are going to be caught off-guard. Even worse, their kids and grandkids are going to take the brunt of their wishful thinking.
Global warming isn't likely to end the human race (sure, there's always the chance, but it's not likely). What's far more likely is the civilization we know today will undergo a dramatic, i.e. stressful for everyone involved, change. It may even be a change for the better (okay, now my optimism is showing!). But we're just fooling ourselves if we think the change won't have significant impacts to everyone enduring it.
There may be a light at the end of the tunnel but not everybody is going to make it through the tunnel. That's the hard reality we face.
We’re in need of pragmatists. There is an optimal balance between climate action and business as usual. Calls for extreme curtailment of fossil fuel usage for example would lower quality of life beyond what global warming will do.
There are many optimal balances, depending on how you choose to discount long-term outcomes. Also, as Europe has just learned, sudden forced changes to energy infrastructure are less destructive than many people would have predicted.
> would lower quality of life beyond what global warming will do.
Source on this? Climate crisis could quite possibly lead to extinction of humans and most life on Earth [0].
Now I do want to emphasized the word could. Extinction events are certainly "on the table", but certainly not a certainty.
However this is the true essence of the reason why we'll never stop climate change. The immediate cost of stopping or even slowing is high, and certain. The cost of not stopping it, is often considered higher, but is always probabilistic and less certain in nature.
Compounding this is that the more we rely on non-renewable hydro-carbons, the more painful it is to reverse or even slow our march towards catastrophic climate change, while at the same time the cost of not stopping it becomes less uncertain.
For example in 1900 it would have been incredibly easy to slow economic progress in order to prevent climate change, but the uncertainty around the cost of not slowing progress was very high, so the perceived expected value of stopping our march toward climate change was much lower than the present time expected cost.
It is strange to see calls for moderate pragmatism when our current state has been accelerating CO2 emissions. We're, quite literally, stepping on the gas to meet whatever future awaits us.
0. See Peter D. Ward's "Under a Green Sky" for one example scenario.
The climate crisis won’t lead to human extinction. Hard to take anything you say seriously after that first statement.
What about Peter Ward's research do you find unconvincing?
Of course it's absurd to treat it as a certainty, but the geological evidence of the destruction to life caused by past period of rapid CO2 escalation are at the very least a bit concerning.
> Calls for extreme curtailment of fossil fuel usage for example would lower quality of life beyond what global warming will do.
Depends on whose quality of life you mean. A lot of people (who were never using a lot of fossil fuels to begin with) will be deprived of water, food and shelter.
There is a lot of uncertainty concerning tipping points, etc. It seems conceivable to me that in a hunderd years we'll wish we had banned fossil fuels completely this very decade, even starting from now, despite the dramatic effects this would have on economies worldwide. As things are looking now, global civilization collapse as a result of climate change, leading to starvation, migration and war for resources, seems to me a very realistic scenario. You have to discount the future an insane amount to argue today's profits are worth even a small chance of this.
> As things are looking now, global civilization collapse as a result of climate change, leading to starvation, migration and war for resources, seems to me a very realistic scenario.
This is pure conjecture and climate fear mongering.
Yes, conjecture. Nobody knows for sure what will happen (although some claim they do).
As someone else pointed out,
> Calls for extreme curtailment of fossil fuel usage for example would lower quality of life beyond what global warming will do.
is also conjecture. If you were to insist on adding a pejorative to that, I suggest "pure conjecture and climate denialism". However, continuing the discussion like this is clearly a waste of time.
You probably think your conjecture is more plausible than mine. But you haven't argued that it is or why you think that. And even if it is more plausible, a cost-benefit analysis also takes into account the cost. How unlikely does my scenario have to be to counterbalance the potential insane loss of value?
It's also not clear what you mean by "extreme". Some people still think "phasing out fossil fuels ever" is extreme. Is "net zero by 2050" extreme? I absolutely think the word is appropriate, but that a desperate situation requires extreme measures.
Most people are pretty "down" on life extension, from a social consequences phase, but one consequence that might be interesting is having to deal with the end results of policies fifty years hence. Government archives and court records get unsealed after decades and the culprits are largely ignored: they're probably dead or so incapacitated that they would not stand trial. Imagine, though, that it wasn't just elderly guards of some concentration camp being prosecuted for the crimes of previous centuries, but people responsible for Tuskeegee, for telling us that cigarettes are good for our health, for burying the truth about climate change.
Humans are short-sighted, although not as much as compared to the other animals, but imagine how much further we might look if we couldn't just count on dying out of investigations. Perhaps some of those nuns might be called to account for those mass unmarked graves of children and infants behind "care homes" in Canada and Ireland and so on.
> Humans are short-sighted, although not as much as compared to the other animals, but imagine how much further we might look if we couldn't just count on dying out of investigations.
I seriously doubt this is the case. Maybe a few septuagenarians have YOLO'd something because they expect to die soon, but few young people are considering their mortality when assessing the consequences of their actions.
> magine how much further we might look if we couldn't just count on dying out of investigations.
Those in power would just extend the limit.
Your comment was extremely offensive. Let me take but one example: How many unmarked graves of children and infants behind "care homes" in Canada are there? How does that have to do with nuns?
(yes, Tuskeegee, and syphilis is a known example of very bad behavior. However, that does not include Canada or Ireland) Please apologize for that comment. Or, back it up with data.
Your comment was extremely offensive.
If you think you're offended, imagine how the children and their families felt.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1012100926/graves-found-at-ne...
A Canadian Indigenous group said Wednesday a search using ground-penetrating radar has found 182 human remains in unmarked graves at a site near a former Catholic Church-run residential school that housed Indigenous children taken from their families.
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2021/06/24/...
Over 600 bodies found at another Catholic school for Indigenous children in Canada
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/03/mass-grave-of-...
A mass grave containing the remains of babies and children has been discovered at a former Catholic care home in Ireland where it has been alleged up to 800 died, government-appointed investigators said on Friday.
Let us take the word as published by the CBC (pick another source). The idea (tldr) is that "At this point, no mass grave has been discovered, but more than a thousand potential unmarked graves have already been located, with many more Indigenous Nations just beginning their investigations."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/opinion-residential-schools-...
Like I said, offensive, and apologies are in order. I do not know the issue in Ireland. Since I am a first-generation immigrant to Canada, I have no stake in this. But "denialism"? Since when is a demand for proof a denial? Especially for something as sensitive as making the accusation that a Religion is Genocidal. I am not Catholic. I am not Muslim. Nor am I Jewish (no, I am NOT going to bring my own faith into this discussion). But I would not level that accusation against any believer.
Now to continue:
https://globalnews.ca/news/7996606/cranbrook-residential-sch...
Yes, people died. Quite a few from TB. and...
"The concern for Pierre is that the term “unmarked grave” is now so closely associated with victims of Canada’s residential school system.
“To just assume that every unmarked grave inside a graveyard is already tied to a residential school, we’ve got to be a little bit more respectful of our people who are buried in our graveyards,” Pierre said.
The graveyard near Cranbrook originally dates back to Christian missionaries who settled in the area in the early 1800s, prior to the construction of the school. A church and a hospital were also built in the area.
It eventually became a graveyard for the community, which it remains to this day."
There is no suggestion of "foul play" here. Wooden markers will disintegrate. Mass grave? Burial yard? Yes, words do matter.
Pope Francis made a penitential visit to Canada in 2022. That's a "haha, yeah, we screwed up" trip. You could have looked that up for yourself but ... denial, instead.
They're Catholic care homes, of course they were run by nuns.
Do some research, look into the Catholic care homes for unwed mothers in Ireland. I have no idea what sources you'll accept and which ones you will reject, so I won't bother doing any pick and shovel work for you.
If you're offended, well, you're going to stay offended, largely because you want to.
pick another source
No. If you insist on it, though, you can find countless other sources with information on the countless other atrocities that have been committed.
I have no stake in this. But "denialism"?
What are you talking about? Did you get lost in the comments?
Anyway, it's hilarious that you'll refuse to read one news source, ignore all the other articles, but latch on to one article trying to spin a weird narrative that, what, natives were burying their own en masse, coincidentally next to residential schools? Or that the abused women and children in Ireland just happened to be buried in the basement in astonishingly high numbers?
Finally, you seem to be hung up on the concept of wooden markers disintegrating while ignoring that so many children shouldn't be dying in the first place, and that there are first-hand accounts of intentionally starving babies that couldn't be "adopted" (i.e. sold) out of the Irish facilities.
As for being offensive, I don't care at all if you are offended by any of this. Your feelings about the atrocities mean nothing to me.
[0]Doesn't say anything about nuns in particular so the poster may have been over extrapolating and conflating nuns with the actions of the Catholic church but mass and unmarked graves did happen under at least the auspices of the church
[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243
e.g. "Mission Accomplished"
didnt greta take down her tweet saying we only had until 2023 or it would be too late?
Journalists with cushy jobs and comfortable urban lifestyles are grappling with cognitive dissonance.
They know that proper mitigation would spell the end of their comforts (no more flying, for instance), but they can’t bring themselves to admit it to the public.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but this type of 'climate optimism' sounds like green washed vaporware.
> In the following months, a new mode of environmental reporting bloomed: the age of climate optimism was upon us. Elizabeth Weil captured the shift in a 2022 New York magazine story…
This is not something I recognize here in Sweden. Here the doom and gloom has only intensified over the last few years.
As ever, our shortsightedness is our undoing. The media stopped covering when it stopped being profitable to do so, which is precisely what motivated us to dump gigatons of carbon into our atmosphere to begin with. And it seems no one can make any efforts to halt the damage, unless, of course, it is justified in profit. It all paints a grim portrait of our species.
Interesting that the subtitle on the cover shown beside the article is "How the Media Stopped Worrying about Climate Change", while that of the actual web article is "How the climate catastrophists learned to stop worrying...". Still, I don't think
>[...] the banal (palm trees growing in London, wind turbines off Coney Island) to the bleak (bleached coral reefs, desertification) to the already happening (a line of silhouetted migrants fleeing their homelands).
and other such quotes justify drawing a smiley on the globe, maybe a "neutral face" emoji...
I don't really understand the point this is trying to make.
It's saying climate catastrophe journalism was overblown (apparently starting in 2016 when Trump was elected?) but that now it's gone too far the other way, and is too optimistic because our already achieved level of warming is going to lead to some bad stuff.
But given the many feedback loops involved, and the uncertaintities of prediction, I don't see how the catastrophes can be considered not in line with the science? They're still a possibility if we hit tipping points.
According to the IPCC's sixth assessment report avoiding catastrophes is the unlikely possibility. Heck, just this month the Argentinian heatwave has cut their wheat and soybean harvests by almost a third.
Edit: Corn, too.
Crop yields have been on a century long increase (we produce about 5x more corn per acre than 100 years ago) in part due to CO2 fertilization, in part due to improvements in technology:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US...
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/soyyld...
You'll notice from the charts year to year variability happens (droughts, heat waves, freezes, etc) but the long term trend is up and to the right.
Thank you. And... as a note. The following statement has been down-modded in the past (this is truly an "uncomfortable truth"): If we go with no-CO2/no fossil fuel policy, we will reduce farming production, leading to famine and the likely death of (many) people. Of interest is that solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear cannot help.
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Strawman of some kind, so I'm not gonna give you an in-depth response.
Across all of the possible temperature distributions that Earth's surface could have, there is some temperature distribution that is optimal for the flourishing of human civilization as we know it. The Earth has been, in the recent past, fairly close to that distribution but one of the consequences of changing the CO2 fraction of the atmosphere from around 0.025% to well over 0.04% is a change in albedo that changes Earth's surface temperature distribution towards an equilibrium that is not remotely near the optimum.
where's the strawman? you said that a heatwave ruined crops in Argentina, and it logically follows that said heatwave is the direct result of human actions negatively affecting the planet's climate, as it's the only possible cause of such a disastrous event.
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The climate boogeyman is starting to get less scary by the day which has led to it losing its effectiveness as a policy stick to prod the populace with. There have just been too many dire warnings, too many cries of the wolf coming to the door without the beast showing up. Whatever the climate will do is just too abstract, too far away and too big for any single individual to feel he or she has any influence over it. This is not changed by yet another scary report from the IPCC nor by yet even more dire predictions of coastal flooding, equatorial roasting and other doomsday foretellings.
This has led to some politicians setting the climate stick aside to reach for another one, e.g. in the Netherlands 'climate' has had to make way for 'nitrogen' as the main cause for our coming demise. Seeing how as cows farting methane did not rile up the populace enough to force the farmers to get rid of the beasts - they like their cheese and milk after all and feel some national pride in the farmer's prowess in producing ever more of it - politicians in need of a stick thought to have found one in the fact that they not only fart methane but also dump a significant amount of nitrogen [1] - i.e. 'fertiliser' - in the soil and air. And lo, the more you look, the more nitrogen you find, nitrous oxides produced by internal combustion engines (including jet engines) being a major source. With this new-found stick they started whipping up the populace, this time they really meant it, cows-be-gone and don't you dare build a house because that involves diesel-driven machinery which would exceed the nitrogen budget for the area [2]. It seems though that the population, tired of yet another doomsday scare, is not planning on cooperating [3] this time. What is a politician to do when not even a good righteous scare can push the voters in the desired direction?
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Estimate...
[2] https://nos.nl/artikel/2436935-juristen-voorzien-bouwstop-na...
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-64967513
Whoa that's a lot of words to say "Hey! Complacency is bad." Considering the outcomes fall in the range of catastrophe to even more catastrophe, and considering the horrifyingly high rate of climate change means all the surprises are likely to be downside surprises, why bother relitigating "catastrophists?"
Climate doomerism (on full display in these comments) is an incredibly toxic form of brain rot. These people literally and earnestly believe we are on a path towards extinction, and most believe it’ll happen in their lifetimes. It’s completely unhinged.
> These people literally and earnestly believe we are on a path towards extinction
There might be a few people who believe that. However, a little coaxing and question asking will bring most people around to understanding that we're merely severely fucked.
Even this minor step then admits to the possibility of some mitigation, and that's a good thing.
Climate change is not going to wipe out humanity or life on earth. It could, however, completely reset or destroy what we currently consider "civilization", and for most people (especially those who particularly enjoy the comforts of said "civilization") there may not be not be much of a distinction between that an extinction. In addition, while losing only 1-2B people due to climate change is a far cry from human extinction, it is still a very big number. Even 400M would still be a very big number, with very substantial consequences for migration, resource control etc. You think people living in the tropic-to-tropic latitudes are going to just sit back while the outer latitudes live it up? I don't think so.
As for the timeline, that's always hard to say, but I'm almost 60 and I find it likely I'll see some severe disruption in the tropic-to-tropic zone before I'm done with this mortal coil.
Climate change is just one aspect of the problem of ecological overshoot. The biodiversity crisis is a bigger deal, but it receives very little attention.
Global industrial civilization is driving the sixth mass extinction on earth. Every species that goes extinct is gone, forever. If you’re a member of one of those species (or depend on them for your survival), it’s an existential problem.
Species are going extinct every day.
Already there’s been a 75% decline in insects, over the past 30 years.
When all the pollinators die out, how much longer will humans survive?
No one believes it's human extinction. That's fiction which only exists for comments which try to dismiss the problem by an Argument from Incredulity fallacy (using a strawman to support it).
other comments in this thread—including siblings of yours—prove your first sentence false
Other than many of the equatorial areas of the planet becoming too hot for agriculture and life, and most of the river deltas being flooded, what's the problem?
The huge increase in immigrants to the US from central America is driven by climate change. Agriculture there can't feed the people there any more.[1]
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/06/1120312
I call bullshit on this. It has become de jure to claim that just about any migration from the developing world to the north is due to climate change for all sorts of convoluted reasons, but the patterns of migration from many developing countries have far too many variables for anyone to assert that.
Among these variables are also trends in terrible government, horrible land policies and infrastructure problems that make certain industries in which millions work unsustainable. All of these are human problems of politics instead of literal climate and all of them could even benefit from more development, instead of hand waving about climate change to fit a fashionable narrative.
Your own link references several very human, very global political trends that have little or nothing to do with climate change as being responsible for central american migration. It doesn't reference any literal notable climate changes that somehow made agriculture in central america worse.
I'm not saying that climate change has nothing to do with migration in the world, but to call it a main cause is tenuous in the extreme and dishonestly symptomatic of flogging this specific thing in all contexts to the point of just making absurd arguments..
See these graphs from Pew Research.[1]
"Encounters (Border Patrol/ICE) soared in fiscal 2021 for some countries that have not historically been common sources of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border. The number of encounters involving people from Ecuador, for example, increased more than eightfold, from 11,861 in fiscal 2020 to 95,692 in fiscal 2021. There were also stark increases in encounters involving people from Brazil (from 6,946 to 56,735), Nicaragua (from 2,123 to 49,841), Venezuela (from 1,227 to 47,752), Haiti (from 4,395 to 45,532) and Cuba (from 9,822 to 38,139)."
Some of that is political, but those are all different countries. All are near the equator.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/09/whats-happe...
The peak fro Cuban migrants was 120,000 in 1980, 38k is paltry by comparison but is recently driven by the absolute breakdown in services in Cuba. Agricultural output in Cuba has been trending down since the collapse of the USSR but was briefly buoyed by free oil from Venezuela. Venezuela is a failed state, and obviously not because of climate. The decimation of agriculture there had more to do with government intervention and expropriations.
Nicaragua is in the midst of a decade of political turmoil and Ortega is actively deporting dissidents. People are fleeing persecution in droves, not a climate disaster.
Haiti is literally without a functioning government, which is why people are leaving.
Brazil is multi-factorial.
I don't know anything about Ecuador.
I thought the equatorial areas were some of the least affected by climate change (at least in terms of temperature)? If it were the primary driver of migration from central America you'd expect to see it in other parts of the world at similar latitudes surely, e.g. Indonesia or equatorial Africa (*). I certainly agree climate change and rising sea levels will be responsible for mass migration (as it has been many times in human history), but it's not clear it's such a key factor currently. Interestingly I just read that Singapore is one near-equatorial location where temperatures have risen more than expected (and more than the global average), seemingly largely due the UHI effect. Needless to say, Singapore is not a common source of refugees.
* South sudan is definitely a case where severe weather events including flooding has driven up emigration, but most of the refugees have ended up in Uganda which is on the equator!
Thank you for that insight. I wish to mention that I live in the North and have been told by the "power" that I have to reduce my carbon footprint by 50% -- actually more like 75% to accommodate immigration (between now and 2100). If I am no longer allowed to burn stuff for heat, I will have to come south. I will be a climate migrant. I assume that Florida is willing to accept me? Perhaps somewhere in South America? Or Mexico?
The weather here just wants to kill people a lot of the time...
It had nothing to do with Biden saying they were welcome to come?