Could Four Billion People Die at 3°C?
safeclimate.org.au
safeclimate.org.au
The question here is not if it will surely happen, but if we keep doing what we are doing worth the risk, and that risk should not be measured just by raw amount of anonymous deaths.
Personally, I don't feel comfortable pushing a system with so many positive feedback loops on warming, some even recently discovered. Then that has been a major factor in the process of disruption or change on some used-to-be-stable features of our climate system, like the polar vortex, gulf stream, and maybe El Niño, And then there are not properly evaluated fragility in the food production system, global distribution, economy, politics and society/culture. The pieces are there, will they ensemble in the worst way. I suppose that in hindsight it will become evident, but then there will be nothing to do.
Even at night it wouldn't cool down to roughly 18/65 as was normal my whole life.
ACs were famously not at all wide spread in Europe. This is rapidly changing now, people buying them like crazy. Pretty sure it will be normalized in higher income household in just 5 years.
The world is knee deep in the process. If that's only the early beginning, we are all in for a wild ride.
The reality is we are on track to break 2C by 2050, and there is nothing that can be done about it. 3C is a real risk later in the century.
Tens to hundreds of millions will be impacted so a realistic range needs to be calculated such that risk mitigation can begin.
Probably. I'm seeing 2C being baked into capex planning for infra projects that are expected to finish by 2036-2040.
No
Of course all people die in the end no matter what happens but that is not what this site is trying to push. A longer answer would be Malthus called and wants his prophecies back since both he as well as the current prophets of doom miss(ed) (or ignore) the technological developments which will lead to the avoidance of their dire predictions.
... and what exactly would those be?
As far as I am aware, we are not even at the point where we undo what we have done. We are still struggling decreasing the acceleration so what you write to me sounds like blind trust "will work out somehow, somebody's gonna do something"
https://www.plantmaps.com/en/de/climate/extremes/c/germany-r...
As I said, read some books instead of knee-jerking that down-vote button. To use an oft-heard phrase in reverse: "Educate yourself", then act. Don't just cry 'Wolf!', do something and with that I do not mean wear a silly dress and walk with the other theatre kids of XR. Playing Malthus and declaiming the end of civilisation doesn't help either, neither does attempting to shout down those who call for action (not activism, nor political action and certainly not the umpteenth doomed-to-fail attempt at implementing Marx's ideas).
What it is I do you asked? Well, I haven't flown anywhere for close to 24 years. I never had a car. I haven't lived in a fossil-fuel-heated home for more than 30 year. I hardly ever buy anything new - including computing hardware - 'cause I try to get everything second-hand or repair things which have been thrown away (which includes most of my computing hardware including the MacBook Air running Linux which I'm using right now). We hardly produce garbage on our farm due to the fact that we tend to shun 'products' and instead go for 'produce', i.e. fresh things sold by the piece without packaging. We live a good life without needing to have the latest (or any) fruit factory gadget or trendy whatsitsname and without hollering at clouds about the doom of the planet due to scary climate things. Instead of doomcrying we act, not 'for the climate' but because it makes sense. Try it, get out of the consumption rat race and live life for yourself instead of for whatever you've been talked into living it for.
That is my part of the current plan to stop the development, whatever you mean by that. What is yours, other than cries of doom?
All your talk and all your narrative-confirming rhetoric won't do a damn thing when it comes to actually achieving something worthwhile. It has less value than the indulgences sold by the Catholic church in the middle ages since those at least were used to support charities while all this doomcrying leads to nothing but despair and nihilism. Grow up, grow a pair and start doing something.
Alternatively I know some history - real history, not Howard Zinn and the likes - and see what happens when there is an incentive to do something about a real problem. I also know a bit about weather and climate and am not wont to fall for the latest doom predictions. As an aside, did you know that it is autumn in north-west Sweden? That this region has not had a summer because it was too cold to be called such [1]? That autumn came really early due to the low temperatures? Should anyone draw conclusions from the absence of summer temperatures in this region where they normally do arrive? Last winter was unusually cold as well. For some reason this never seems to cause a stir.
Tell me, why do you think your reaction is rational while mine was wrong? I consider my stance to be far more productive than the doomcrying which I'm seeing again.
[1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/sapmi/fjallet-blev-utan-sommar-gi...
At 3C ? Probably and maybe more, but it is hard to know. But I think we are headed to 4C with the way things are playing out.
But there is one variable, Nuclear War. I expect that will happen as the climate gets worse and worse. That war could drop us into a cold streak. After that ? Everyone gone ?
This book could give us a kind of a preview into what we are headed for. But in your mind replace nitrogen with CO2
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1189676.The_Nitrogen_Fix
Not possible anymore (if it ever was possible - even that is debated). Nuclear winter predictions were based on Hiroshima (not Nagasaki) and WWII carpet bombing. City houses were made of wood => soot => sun blocking => winter. This isn't valid anymore. Most buildings are concrete now and fire prevention materials are everywhere. There can't be a firestorm after a bombing. No soot. No winter.
End game would be the same, but accelerated: the collapse of human systems across the board, which is where big lethality numbers come from. The faster that collapse, the deadlier it is, the more human systems go down for the count. Humans survive in a changed world, but they've largely deindustrialized, and very possibly revert all the way to hunter-gather-scavenge.
Hydrocarbon reduction, it's needed of course, but we're way past that. We've known for a literal century, after all. Today the only way out without systemic collapse is to adopt big industrial cooling methods. Basically doing nuclear winter, but in a controlled fashion to smooth out the warming to its new optimum, combined with hydrocarbon throttling. The "Space Parasol" is my favorite of these methods, as it's easy to turn off, unlike the "Let's Add Lots of Exotic Dust to the Upper Atmosphere That Might Or Might Not Come Down". Or any of the many bio-engineering solutions that, uh, have ample room for "nightmare", like the idea of covering the planet in Super Bamboo[1] - causing possibly the worst ecosystem crash since the Cambrian. There's such a thing as too much oxygen, you know . .
Rich guys should be clocking each over the head for the chance to build the Space Parasol, because if you make the place liveable, you can charge the entire planet rent. "Oh, you don't think it's worth it? Weeellllll . . . ."
Long term, it's not like the planet's especially hot right now, geologically speaking - Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) Antarctica didn't get colder than 16{deg}C - it's just all the liberated volatiles from the frickin' Carboniferous making it hotter faster than Holocene natural systems can compensate. Whether our technological systems do any better than natural systems, heh heh heh, that'll be the question, won't it?
[1] If I am being honest, if we do pull through all this crap, the bioengineered future seems the most likely one. I have a very diminished faith in humanity pulling off megaprojects like a Space Parasol.
I do not like how they have to use circumspect language say the emperor has no clothes...
"The four billion figure is an educated worst-case estimate, not a robust scientific projection."
The only reason "educated" is plausible here is because the people making the silly wild ass guesses have been edumacated; too bad it's not pertinent to the guess.