https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...
The climate change "hype" comes from journalists and editors. The actual research papers are generally very conservative in their estimations, and we've been exceeding the predicted outcomes for decades without making any real changes to improve our situation.
As an analogy - Imagine I told you that if you ate an extra 3000 calories of junk food every day you'd gain a lot of weight. You disagree, for whatever reason, and we carry out the experiment. If a journalist wrote an article on our experiment, and their editor titled it "Ajmurmann about to be 100kg heavier!", when would we be able to tell if they are correct or not? You might be able to make it a week while still being within normal weight fluctuations, but two weeks? Three weeks? A year? And when would we be able to determine the "correctness" of the 100kg number?
Comparing that situation to the Earth's climate - We're still in the first month of the experiment, and shoveling junk food into our metaphorical mouths as fast we can.
Most scientists can still have historically been overly conservative even if you can find a few that made over the top predictions. It should be perfectly obvious that the presence of a few outliers doesn't invalidate the median of the sample.
I am trying to understand if there is some chance that this estimate could perhaps be an outlier.
For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#/media/File:Pee...
How can I know whether this prediction will end up being one of the blue line or one of the red line.
And if it isn't I'm sure they'll just magically figure out economically viable fusion or spray some aerosols into the atmosphere or somehow just magically fix everything.
I'm sure everything will be fine. That's why I'm not having kids.
/s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series)
Majority of people will live in "dystopia lite", and top 1% and people they need ("slaves"?) will live in a better environment.
Europe has increased both, regardless of their rhetoric. China of course has increased both as well with more coal plants being built.
Most of the reduction in the US is thanks to fracking/nat.gas displacing coal. Which a lot of people are against.
Focusing on nuclear could get us a lot farther in displacing fossil fuels with nuclear as the baseline energy source.
Unfortunately most people just want to nag each other or cat-o’-nine-tails themselves or yell doomsday on loop instead of pushing for things that actually matter.
Meanwhile, back in the real world: https://ip-quarterly.com/sites/default/files/styles/dgap_tea...
But include them if you can. The graphs look the same.
We might have to contemplate things like geoengineering or whatever but thinking the future is bad is not enough. There has to be a positive vision, too.
That cannot the best we can do - there has to be more we can get out of an energy transition. For example, could have an explicit policy of wanting lower energy costs in high cost places.
Pushing down energy costs is certainly possible when switching energy sources (and also quite visible in data on effective costs per MWh for different technologies), however, it is rarely made an explicit target.
>"More than half of the 16- to 25-year-olds in the Lancet survey said they believe humanity is doomed. And close to 40 percent said that fears about the future have made them reluctant to have children of their own." [1]
We gave an entire generation anxiety and depression, and it's going to wreak havoc on the fertility rate in a decade or so.
[1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/for-gen-z-climate-change-is-a...
Think of the children?? Lol, as if the environment being 20 degrees hotter isn't going to "fuck up the kids". The kinds should be worried. Many of them actually are worried and try to do something about it, it's the adults that won't listen or curb behaviors, or in many cases try at all - and at worst they call climate change "a hoax".
>We gave an entire generation anxiety and depression, and it's going to wreak havoc on the fertility rate in a decade or so.
That's a good thing, and is exactly what the planet needs - less humans. Every human added to the planet generates a non-zero amount of carbon. Adding more humans isn't the answer to anything, and it won't make anyone less worried for their future.
As a kid in Canada in the 80s I was taught to hide under a desk in case of nukes, and also I was taught about the greenhouse effect and it's relationship to our actions.
My guess is it's pretty close to 50% - otherwise they probably would've studied those variables.
But predicting the future is basically impossible. So who knows.
We're all basically guessing.
There's a misconception that the biosphere is a delicate machine that will have a catastrophic internal failure if we don't follow the maintenance bibl^H^H^H^Hmanual, which apparently some experts have access to.
In reality, it is a highly dynamic, self-repairing living organism, which we are a part of. There are at least as many negative feedback loops as positive ones. And we should act to maintain our survival, but doomsaying is not part of that. Doomsaying and fearmongering is about power.
Because every warning is about power dynamics, and obviously not about things being dangerous. We should get rid of that "can cause death if ingested" cartel that's putting all of those warnings on household products while at it.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/151188/a-massive-se...
For all seaweed that washes up on the shore, the effect reverses: It rots and releases CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. [4]
So if it's a negative feedback loop, then a very weak one, if at all: CO2 emissions cause increased seaweed growth, but increased seaweed coverage doesn't meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas concentrations and in fact can even increase them.
[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/06/09/245935...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
Organisms are self-repairing (to a certain extent) because they evolved to be so due to natural selection. The Earth as a whole and its climate are not subject to evolutionary pressure (they don’t reproduce) and thus are nothing like that.
This is the only planet that supports life (that we know of). That's because it's natural properties endured through billions of years to support life.
It's not exactly an arms race. And it's a different, but similar mechanism. But I think the underlying principles are the same.
In this case, evolution won't look like the earth changing over time. It's more like, there are billions of potential earths out there, and over billions of years, some of them will more subtly change to support life.
So, we may destroy our earth, but that doesn't impair the ability for other earths to evolve. We just may not see it.
That the earth "will survive" is not in question. What is relevant is ensuring the survival of all the creatures that are evolved to the current status quo, which includes us and our current way of life.
The question is whether humanity will continue to exist within it.