UN chief says fossil fuels 'incompatible with human survival,'

You forgot:

0) Since the troposphere has actually warmed only 0.5C in the last forty years, and the world is rapidly reducing human CO2 emissions (which turn out to be a smaller fraction of the total than previously thought), there is little to worry about, and we should direct our efforts at resolving more important issues.

right, but the purpose of the news is not to tell you the future but to make you feel anxious about it and to push forward political agendas of the people who pay for it. i just pay as little attention as possible to any of this shit beyond entertainment value.

Science communication and trying to appropriately communicate risk has a lot of issues, yeah. I don't really blame them because there's been more than two decades of very obvious failure to get sufficient numbers of people sufficiently politically engaged to change enough to avoid catastrophic outcomes. In general, if you're a relatively high information person, you should probably be looking up the actual reports themselves by organisations like the IPCC.

As to your 1/2/3 scenarios, 1 is basically impossible at this point unless every major country starts extremely rapid decarbonisation, like zero carbon within 15 years sort of thing. We think we are on track for option 2, and with predictable mitigations (countries successfully pull off all pledged reductions) it's still pretty much 2, just potentially less severe. By "less severe", I mean we can try to prevent at least some of that sea level rise which means there will be some cities that become coastal but don't get catastrophically flooded. But like, Miami for example, that city won't exist by the end of the century without a hypothetical and unproven seawall (people always say seawalls, sure it's a decent idea, but we don't know if it's even feasible for us to build them to the necessary standards. It's like asking every coastal city to build something more complex and safety critical than Hoover Dam).

An important thing to think about is that the difference between 1 and 2 is class based. When I said 1 was impossible, I meant that it was impossible for like "most people", because we're on track for billions of people to become refugees because of climate change, likely leading to wars and significant political issues. But obviously if you're wealthy enough, you are basically insulated from those outcomes because you can just keep moving away from the coast (even if millions of other people are trying to move there at the same time) and the only real impact on you is the broader economic impacts on the country you live in, and even those are muted. So for the wealthy, it's always really been a question of "Is it going to be 1 or 3?", which is a big part of the reason why it has been so immensely hard to see significant political change to prevent anthropogenic climate change.

We don't really understand the science of 3 well enough to understand what the tipping points would be to start a runaway greenhouse effect, so no one knows for certain. We need more science on it. I think a very reasonable guess is that it won't happen until our greenhouse gas heat retention is at least as high as it was during the various times in Earth's history when the polar ice caps didn't exist, which gives us significant runway to work with. Beyond that, we just don't know.

I totally agree with you. For this reason, I don't follow mainstream outlets about climate change. The most balanced source I have found so far is this substack by Hannah Ritchie. Here is one of those balanced article - https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/15c-warming-tempor...

Our world has dramatically increased in living standards during the period of increasing global average temperatures.

All of the IPCC future scenarios - including their worst case outcomes - still project a world where living standards keep increasing.

To restate this: the economic and scientific consensus (as presented by the IPCC) is that our world will be better off in the future even in their worst scenarios. The claims about humans being unable to survive are not supported by science.

Currently necessary, yes.

But also neither sustainable nor worth the ongoing problem with emissions.

The statement highlights the pressing need to move to alternatives.

luxury hotels, personal automobiles and one-time use plastics are a lot more common in the world I see

If you read the context, that UN chief got trolled and lost his cool. An oil executive is planned to chair this year’s international climate talks in Dubai, and this executive suggested that fossil fuel firms can keep up production if they find a way to capture carbon emissions. Which if you know anything about chemistry or physics doesn't make any sense. The only way it makes sense is if they are planning to do something sneaky later like only capture some of the emissions or just not comply or roll it back or redefine emissions to mean only particulate emissions or something like that. So when the UN guy was arguing against this obvious attempt at deception by this oil exec who is going to chair the climate talks, the UN guy said that fossil fuels themselves were the problem and when he was trying to emphasize that point he said they are incompatible with humanity. Probably that rhetoric gaffe made the day of the oil exec lol he is probably worth his salary to that oil company even if its millions of dollars he made the climate-supporting UN chief sound so dumb. And of course that's the quote that the AP picks as their headline lol.