Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climatechange scenarios
pnas.org
pnas.org
If you're going to explore worst-case, so you can think through preparedness, then you should also consider the trivial case to make sure we aren't over-responsive either.
I think it's still worth discussing the likelihoods and severities of future catastrophes.
What I did say is that a lot of bad effects are already happening. Talking about climate science used to be like being the mythical Cassandra. But now it’s worse: the mass deaths and migration has already begun, and people still deny the evidence all around them that the predictions have already come true.
If there was an industrial accident where a chemical got released and a million people around the factory all died, that would be a catastrophe, right? Okay, a million people scattered around the world die from air pollution every year. Does the point source make it somehow a bigger tragedy in the first example? Yes, I know that without energy even more people would die, but a million deaths that we have all the technology to avoid is still a catastrophe. Regional famines leading to civil war and migration have already happened. Heat deaths in the thousands in Europe this year. Maybe I’m weird that my threshold for catastrophe is so low.
Case example: the Pinatubo explosion (1991) resulted in a bit less than a decade of steady temperatures, as predicted by climate models at the time:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11976452/
I suppose if we had a Pinatubo every ~5 years for the next 100 years it would result in the lowest plausible warming scenario, without destroying global agriculture.
Russian gas infrastructure has a high chance of collapse within the next 12 months.
China has a high chance of societal collapse within the next 60 months
It is likely 500,000,000+ people will see food scarcity before then end of 2022.
Go back and read the prediction threads here from December 2019 about the oncoming 2020 decade. There's NO hint of the pandemic.
By its nature however, mere predictions don't get a whole lot of news.
This bet is from 2017: “A bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 02020.”
Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25368379
Moreover, the possibility was well canvassed by those intimately connected with the sars2 outbreak, e.g. Peter Daszak.
They've got a Covid vaccine that doesn't work, so they're trying Covid Zero as a policy. This is effecting their production, ports, etc.
They've got issues with their pork industry. They've culled more pigs than the rest of the world has total in the last few years. They're food insecure.
They have demographic problems due to the "1 child" policies of the past.
(2019) "Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0
> "The palaeo-record shows global tipping, such as the entry into ice-age cycles 2.6 million years ago and their switch in amplitude and frequency around one million years ago, which models are only just capable of simulating... Now we are strongly forcing the system, with atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature increasing at rates that are an order of magnitude higher than those during the most recent deglaciation."
The central issue for human civilization is just how fast these changes are going to happen. Currently it takes about ten years for the warming signal to overrule the natural variability, for example a running 5-year average shows clear warming if you center each average ten years apart, i.e. 2008-2012 is clearly warmer than 1998-2002 and so on. Can humans adapt to this rate of warming over the next 100 years without enduring some degree of civilizational collapse, population reduction, etc.? Who knows. That's what's in the pipeline though, no longer any doubt about it. The real uncertainties are whether there might be any radical spikes in extreme weather or warming rates along this trajectory.
> "Atmospheric CO2 is already at levels last seen around four million years ago, in the Pliocene epoch. It is rapidly heading towards levels last seen some 50 million years ago — in the Eocene — when temperatures were up to 14 °C higher than they were in pre-industrial times. It is challenging for climate models to simulate such past ‘hothouse’ Earth states."
The rational thing to do, given our current state of knowledge, would be to institute a crash program to replace 3% of global fossil fuel use per year with a similar production of renewable energy capacity per year, which would require global coordinated industrial production at a truly massive scale, but humans are not rational actors, as economists have demonstrated.
"Correction - The figure ‘Too close for comfort’ in this Comment incorrectly synthesized and interpreted information from the IPCC. The graph labelled the temperatures as absolute, rather than rises; misrepresented the levels of risk; misinterpreted information as coming from a 2007 IPCC report; extrapolated the focus of a 2018 report; and was not clear about the specific sources of the information. The graphic has been extensively modified online to correct these errors."
This is a top level publication, an article by the leading scientists in the field of climate change. It is so frustrating to see these errors happening on that level. One such little error generates more damage than 100 fake reports produced by the oil industry. Very sad.
No matter what we do, what energy source we use, we cannot meet these exorbitant demands for energy.
e.g. you'd have to build 1031 nuclear reactors per year for 45 years starting today to generate 300 petawatt-hours.
Build the nuclear plants.
Past performance isn't indicative of future gains. At some moment prices will plateau, or even rebound (e.g. the same was said for batteries, and now prices are up due to too much demand and raw material shortages).
Not to mention that at some point you will run out of suitable locations either due to actual space limitations or just lack of desire from people to have wind turbines nearby or solar panels taking up valuable land. (Of course offshore wind and rooftop solar kind of mitigate this).
You can't really beat the energy density of nuclear reactors per land taken, so they shouldn't be discarded.
Not only can we probably do meet them (nuclear, renewables), but we have to. Energy demands today are what they are with significant amounts of the world's population living in poverty and/or pretty poor conditions compared to what developed countries are used to. It's extremely unfair to deny those people the opportunities, not to mention that few in the developed countries would want to scale back and limit their lifestyle to the extent that it would matter. That doesn't mean no such avenues needs to be explored (e.g. LEDs, optimising transit networks, etc.) but that shouldn't be the main focus.