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I'm willing to remain optimistic on this front, because even if nothing meaningful is accomplished with this specific accord, it does not rule out more in the future. Getting all of these nations on board to do something about climate change (even if that simply means acknowledging its presence and their contributions to it) is a step in the right direction toward solving the problem meaningfully. The wheels of international politics turn slowly without economic or military consequences to fuel them, and sometimes (unfortunately) as the lowly ones we have to take what we can get.

I'm getting more optimistic too, but I remain worried that there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between scientists and the bureaucrats.

Science will find out that within some small error bar we need to do exactly X, but bureaucrats see everything as a negotiation and will negotiate some number smaller than X. Now we're still slowly getting boiled to death (bad) albeit at a slower rate (good).

Sadly, the "bureaucrats", or politicians are the ones in the right, and the scientists are not.

In little scientific echo chambers like Hacker News, we generally put science and rationality above human emotion. Unfortunately the world at large is not a technocracy, a good majority of people see science as an equivalent worldview to religious dogma, most are not particularly educated, and they primarily live to create their own families and provide them with sufficient resources for evolutionary success.

With things like climate change, you are attempting to change a mass behavior of people that often do not see the change as being in their best interest. This requires both negotiation on a regulatory level, as well as a lot of new level-setting within those communities. It is extremely possible that the best we will ever get is to be slowly boiled to death until it's too late to fix it.

Yes I realize what it takes, but as Feynman quipped "nature cannot be fooled". At some point the piecemeal dilution of what we actually need to do will come back and bite us badly.

No amount of negotiation between the hypothetical scientist and the bureaucrats about not cutting down the last tree on Easter Island that doesn't 100% go in favor of the scientist will come out well. The trees will still be extinct.

> a good majority of people see science as an equivalent worldview to religious dogma

Is this also common outside of the US?

It's more ridiculous. I've seen people claim that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the West to stunt economies of developing countries.

Now only if they could talk to global warming "skeptics" in "the West" and engage in some kind of verbal death match...

The two parties agree to a large extent, although they would emphasize different points.

Those who expect dire events should attempt to empathize with "the other" enough to imagine a convincing argument to e.g. forego the diesel generator that would allow children to do homework at night, rather than write off such concerns as "ridiculous". The other option, of course, is brutal occupation, which is why one sees the bloody fingerprints of the military-industrial complex all over much of the recent warming hullabaloo.

I can only speak to this anecdotally, but in my observations, yes, especially so when you're in areas of far less socioeconomic success than that of Western Europe, financially-driven city-states like Singapore (or Hong Kong, if you can call it one still), or Japan. Whether it is organized religion or superstition, there is a lot of folk knowledge that people still hold as equivalent and valuable, probably due to confirmation bias or the pain of cognitive dissonance in recognizing that an old adage is incorrect.

Look at a good chunk of the Mideast as it exists today geopolitically; even wealthy areas like the UAE exist under pretty much strict Sharia interpretations.

I have also observed this appears to be the case for a large chunk of the Muslim world, a decent part of Africa, Central America, and the Philippines, from my interactions with people natively from those areas outside of a scientific or professional atmosphere. I have a strong tendency to talk to anyone and everyone I can about their cultures, whether I am in their native land or they are in mine.

There should really be something to change the old organisation scientists -> politicians -> population.

Education should double down on creative ways to make kids click on subtle abstractions in order for them to see issues and proactively discuss, seek and enjoy working toward solutions.

> Now we're still slowly getting boiled to death

That's exaggerating. Science doesn't predict such a dire outcome.

http://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

Yeah, but the truth doesn't appear to be that much better. It doesn't seem likely that it will be 100% fatal, but with runaway climate problems, you're potentially looking at mass flooding, natural disasters, crop failures and starvation, and potentially the collapse of many societies in the ensuing unrest. It seems likely that it will result in large changes in the makeup of vegetation and wildlife, potentially to the point of mass extinction, if the food chains in the oceans and on land break down. Our social systems are not set up to deal with this kind of event, at all. The planet's ecology will rebound as it always does, but that happens on timescales not very compatible with human lives.

Then again, maybe it will happen slowly enough for us and the ecosystem to adapt. I hope that's the case.

How much of that scenario are actual scientific predictions? Sources?

>> It doesn't seem likely that it will be 100% fatal, but with runaway climate problems, you're potentially looking at mass flooding, natural disasters, crop failures and starvation, and potentially the collapse of many societies in the ensuing unrest. It seems likely that it will result in large changes in the makeup of vegetation and wildlife, potentially to the point of mass extinction, if the food chains in the oceans and on land break down. Our social systems are not set up to deal with this kind of event, at all.

> How much of that doomsday scenario are actual scientific predictions? Sources?

I believe there are a large number of studies looking at individual impacts. E.g. "flooding" / "crop yields in sub saharan Africa" / etc. For studies that look at the grim end of the spectrum (i.e. +4 degrees C global warming or higher), there was a conference in 2007 that considered the consequences of a +4 degrees C world - not a bad place to start reading: http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/events/4degrees/

Similarly, there are studies regarding mass extinction. Current estimates of species extinction rates are way above what the estimates of "normal" rates are-- this won't all be due to climate change - as a species we are changing a lot more than just the climate (e.g. destroying ecosystems to make way for agriculture, etc). Do a google scholar search for words like "current mass extinction event" and you'll no doubt find many things to read.

I am not sure if we are capable of making "actual scientific predictions" regarding the cumulative impact of all these different threads - e.g. "collapse of many societies" / "ensuing unrest". Personally I reckon such things would be fairly plausible and unsurprising consequences of +4 degrees global warming.

Pragmatically, we just have to make the best decisions we can now with what information we have available. Certainty is a luxury and is not necessary to make decisions or take action, particularly when we're time constrained, and it takes a while for the consequences of our actions to manifest.

Here's an analogy from one of the decks of slides from the 4degrees conference.

> We are walking in Florida. > You find you have just been bitten on the hand by a snake. > We did not see the snake. > If it was the deadly carbonblack snake, the bite will kill you in a painful way, unless you cut off your hand within 15 secs. > I have a hatchet. > You have 5 seconds left. > Did you cut off your hand? > > How would a society learn to make such decisions? > > Luckily with climate change we have more than 15 seconds. Without knowing exactly how much more...

http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/events/4degrees/ppt/8-1smith.pdf

A great book on the impacts of climate change is Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, who read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on climate change effects and summarized them, with extensive references. A lot of it is based on what's happened in previous warming periods. The book has six chapters, one for each degree of warming.

Ericd's comment is a good description of the effects at three to four degrees, depending on how widespread a collapse he's talking about.

That alone underestimates the risk. Many scientists worry that somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees, positive feedbacks will kick in and take the planet several degrees further even if we stop emissions entirely. Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren has a good account of the geological evidence for that.

> ... mass flooding, natural disasters, crop failures and starvation, and potentially the collapse of many societies in the ensuing unrest...

As I like to think of it, life as a whole and humans in particular have evolved to be amazingly good at not going extinct. But the way nature fixes problems can be exceedingly unpleasant. If 7 billion humans are too many, nuclear war and mass starvation both solve that, but current and future humans would probably prefer other solutions.

I'm unconvinced that we have any idea what a temperature rise will do. We've already had mass flooding, natural disasters, crop failures, starvation, and societal collapses for thousands of years. People apparently survived during the Ice Age, which was quite a bit colder than 4 deg, so I'm guessing the +4 deg is handleable, too. The lush plant growth and large animals of past hot ages makes me think it must be pretty livable. I doubt the food chains in the ocean or land will break down; we've seen plenty of robust food chain in previous hot ages. If the ocean can support huge dinosaurs and giant ammonids in hotter ages, seems like the food chain will do just fine.

People might have to move and change their habits, though. And national borders might change or societies collapse if people don't move/change.

What I think most people miss, is most people don't live near the equator for a wide range of reasons and most infrastructure can't be moved. Also, there is less sunlight when you move further north so worm does not mean good farmland.

Yes, civilization will survive, but it might cost ~20% world GDP which is far more than swapping to non CO2 energy.

PS: Just stare at the read line on this map for a little while: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/World_ma...

Well, warmer in the north means longer growing seasons than at present, so that makes the land capable of growing better crops. Plus, there is less sunlight in the winter, but a lot more sunlight in the summer, which happens to coincide with the growing season.

What is the cost of swapping to non-CO2 energy? I don't think that number exists. Also, I'm not entirely convinced that switching to completely non-CO2 energy is even practical at present. Could we provide our energy needs with full solar / wind, even if we were willing to pay the price, given current efficiency and availability of supply? What do we do when it is dark or not windy?

I totally don't understand your point about the red line on the map. I was already familiar with the location of the equator, which is what it seems to emphasize. The reason most people don't live at the equator is that most land is not at the equator. A lot of the land there is desert, but that is not the equator's fault. The people that are in the watered parts get all sorts of diverse plants and animals to live in, and yummy tropical fruits. I'll take more of that up north, thanks!

You get longer days, but less sunlight overall. It's an angle thing and even with 24 hours of sunlight it never gets hot at he poles. Also, there summers are much shorter.

As to swapping out from C02 energy wind is near parity with coal, and raw energy is not that large a chunk of the worlds economy.

> People apparently survived during the Ice Age, which was quite a bit colder than 4 deg, so I'm guessing the +4 deg is handleable, too.

As far as I'm concerned, the point isn't about what temperature is objectively best, it's about the degree of change, and the cost of adaptation. Modern industrial civilization is built up progressively in certain geographical locations, with absolutely enormous sunk investments. If we had built our cities, our towns, our power plants, and ports during a climactic equivalent to the last ice-age, we would be absolutely fucked if the climate shifted in a short period of time to where it is now. During the last ice age there was a land mass which linked Britain to Norway, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, and sea levels were 100m lower than they are today. The northern ice cap covered everything north of London, and the Sahara was fertile. To go from that climate to the climate today would involve a level of cost that it is difficult to comprehend.

You have a good point, thanks

Cheers!

That four degrees meant that during the last ice age Chicago was under a mile of ice. It's livable if you survive it.

Reading it more closely, the nations are required to reconvene every 5 years to report on progress and discuss the next round of tightening. So it's a partial victory with a ratchet mechanism. The mechanism isn't guaranteed to work, but as the consequences of global warming become more impacting, urgency will increase.

Note that the ratchet won't start clicking until 2030. There is a real risk of countries postponing increases in emission cuts until then. Hopefully they won't.

Another interesting point is wrt. financial aid to developing nations. IIUC, developing nations will not be compensated for damage due to climate change, but they will receive funding for efforts to cut their emissions while continuing to develop.

The VW scam was actually better for climate.

Their engines released less CO2 and more NOx as a trade off. NOx is bad for humans and has slight cooling effect. CO2 is not dangerous and has heating effect.

"Less polluting" can mean several completely different things. People often don't get this.

NOx also contributes to acid rain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_rain

Do you have a source for the "less CO2" part?

It's cause for celebration as better than many expected to happen, but for sure many reasons to still be both skeptical about implementation and the results even if targets are hit. It's progress, at least.