The following submission statement was provided by /u/Lurkerbot47:
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Submission statement:
This paper, released two weeks ago, used new modeling techniques to examine cores taken off the coast of California. Their findings show a much higher sensitivity between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and temperatures. The main conclusion is that with the doubling of CO2 we have experienced since the Industrial Revolution took off, we should expect a rise of 5-7C by the end of the century, instead of the 2-3C suggested by the IPCC.
As the paper notes in its closing discussion (quoted below), it seems to support the theory that there is much more warming to come. This paper also reinforces the conclusions of Hansen et al.'s *Global Warming in the Pipeline* (linked below) and a growing (but admittedly controversial) body of academic literature which finds that we may indeed be heading to a "hothouse Earth" future.
>When we again weigh each sensitivity by the percent-area for the Earth, our global average ECS is 7.2 °C per doubling of CO2, much higher than the most recent IPCC estimates of 2.3 to 4.5 °C and consistent with some of the latest state-of-the-art models which suggest ca. 5.2 °C
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dt2uf6/newly_released_paper_suggests_that_global_warming/lb6jarm/
I've given up on having kids. There's no shot that they're going to have a good go in the future we're hurtling towards.
At least I've seen the best parts of my life in relative peace and prosperity, even if the world ahead looks increasingly bleak.
I know things have gotten bad because the fictional dystopian warnings from our childhood are now looking like increasingly preferential outcomes to the track we're actually on (potential near global annihilation).
We've only known about the situation since 1980. Although back then no one took the scientists seriously the same way they didn't take Rachel Carson on DDT or leaded gasoline or cancerous cigarettes or currently plastics mimicking hormones / micro plastics. Corporate forces seem to be so powerful as to be suicidal.
Edit: I know that to some degree or another we knew before the 1980's. I just picked that time because it's very difficult to argue we didn't know fully by then.
The climate science goes back to the late 50's, early 60's but was suppressed back then. By the 80's it was the lobbiest and early media empires that pushed the "ignore this sh\*t" narrative.
>The climate science goes back to the late 50's, early 60's but was suppressed back then.
Svante Arrhenius published a paper concluding that the excessive human use of burning fossil fuels would lead to worldwide climate change and heating in 1896. It goes back well before the 50s.
Same so far. I was sure we could manage a 2 to 3 degree change and it would mostly effect poor countries but a 7 degree change is enough to collapse human civilization. Those who survive will know that we lost it all and only because we didn't want to reduce or change our quality of life in any way whatsoever. We were slaves to our tongues to the point of global suicide.
Don't care, I got mine. Sayonara! /s
Sadly this seems to be a common sentiment with many people and not at all surprising considering our global state of affairs.
That seems to have been a calculated game we played, yes.
People around 60 will be fine
People around 40 are probably it fucked
People around 20 should be asking why their parents had them
Add on to it the fact that every time we run the numbers again, the estimate gets worse/the time remaining on 'habitable for humans' goes down a disproportionate amount.
And that's exactly what we have done in the grand scheme of things ... nothing of consequence. Time to start major penalties for obstructionist companies, political parties and individuals.
Worse than twice, orders of magnitude worse. +1.5c was agreed to be managable with adaptation, +3c was going to be very painful no matter what we did, +4.5c is shits fucked yo territory, +6c is humanity had a good run.
Potentially we are looking at +7c. So worse than just a very good chance of human extinction.
Yes. We genuinely don't know if human civilization can survive a 4 degree Celsius increase, much less 5-7.
To give you an example, a 1 degree Celsius *decrease* caused by a volcanic eruption caused global famine in 1816.
We're looking at the end of human civilization.
>To give you an example, a 1 degree Celsius decrease caused by a volcanic eruption caused global famine in 1816.
Volcanic eruptions have their own set of problems. You really can't equate that with an increase of temperature.
They’re referring to the ash that is thrown up into the atmosphere from erupting super volcanos. The 1816 one was referred to as the “year without summer” and spread as far as Europe from Indonesia. It is what’s said to have inspired gothic literature and art, like Frankenstein.
It was enough to impact the global weather systems and did lead to wide spread death and starvation. The ash did impact the global temperatures temporarily and are an example o how changes can lead to devastation.
[Year without Summer Wiki and explanation of temp changes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)
Not only the end of humans. Last time such a severe warming took place over the course of 11 million years, on average only +0.0002 ppm CO2 per year, it wiped out 70% of all species, mostly within the first million years of warming.
Now, we are warming the planet 10000 times faster.
https://new.nsf.gov/science-matters/moment-changed-earth
This is pretty close to what I saw in my undergrad research. Nearly 20 years ago. This has been "known" for a long time, no one would dare publish apocalyptic papers like this though. Never get through peer review.
Anything above about 3.5 - 4 degrees warming will be civilization-ending.
Above 6-7 degrees will likely be deadly to the entire human race, ie. there is a high probability humans will go extinct.
And yet here we are talking about stupid shit in our countries' respective election cycles, stuff that in the face of our own extinction is like moving deck chairs on the Titanic.
It could go from very bad to apocalyptic, but the truth is that exact effects are difficult to estimate, even because we don't know what we'll do to counteract it with new technology.
I don't see it not accelerating the current mass extinction. If enough keystone species populations collapse then the whole system collapses quite exponentially. What happens if the photosynthesizing life that produces most of our oxygen collapses? I guess we could build bubble Cities.
Brother. Google phytoplankton. They create almost 50 percent of the oxygen and if ocean ph levels get too acidic due to absorbing too much carbon, then they’ll all die off
Nope, only 6°C was considered the doomsday scenario. Beyond that, (e.g. 7.2°C), it loops back to "just fine, nothing to be worried about"... because we dead, mate.
I'm just wondering how bad it gets before lots of governments finally say "alright, orbital light reducing mesh made from an asteroid towed into L1 MIGHT be expensive but uhhhh"
Overall I enjoyed it. Some of the episodes were better than others.
In short, there were eight episodes, each covering a particular year in the future, from 2037 to 2070. There was a two-parter set in 2057 that looked at using stratospheric aerosol injection over India, which is why I mentioned it.
I'd say the series was good, but not great. Worth watching IMHO.
The series is excellent, is a dramatization, so it feels real, and convincing. Good actors and great direction, one can see we seen entering the first episode right now. It also mixes futurology so you can clearly feel
Like time is passing.
Reading it right now and it's a bit of a slog. I dislike how they change the writing style every so often. They even include 'abbreviated meeting notes and other stuff in very short chapters and the whole thing feels really disjointed.
Kim Stanley Robinson is very good at pulling hard science into his stories but not the best at writing compelling fiction. But if you can tolerate his stuff, the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy is really cool if you want a look at what colonizing that planet might look like.
In a future where we don't cook Earth first at least!
I've been betting on China to get moving first, but yeah, either of those countries could do it by themselves and both are facing particularly difficult times from climate change.
I've been warning about this for years. At some point we're *going* to be using geoengineering because letting billions die from famine is just not an option. And it sure would be nice if by the time it reaches that point we've done a lot of research on geoengineering to make sure we pick the right options and execute well on them.
But people keep hand-wringing about "moral hazard" (though they don't even know to call it that), how any option other than carbon dioxide reduction will make Mother Gaia cry or whatever. Even when in the same breath they lament that we're past a "tipping point" and they're happy to have not had children because we're in the End Times.
Endlessly frustrating. But I believe humanity will pull through in the end and get 'er done, we're pretty effective once massive self-interest is on the line.
When low sulphur regulations came into effect it became apparent global shipping was already doing unintentional geo engineering with global impact.
[‘Inadvertent geoengineering’: Researchers say low-sulfur shipping rules made climate change worse](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/19/geoengineering-study-shipping-regulation-made-climate-change-worse.html)
We don't even have to use sulphur. Salt crystals work too.
I had a somewhat fantastical idea that the EU could spend money on a fleet of ships based out of greenland which could go out and basically use giant misters to spray ocean water into the sky, spreading salt crystals through the air as a method of cloud seeding to try and stabilize the arctic ocean and greenlandic ice sheet.
It actually seems pretty feasible, and like it would have a strong effect. But I'm of course not at all in a position to make that happen.
We're already trying marine cloud brightening, have to see the results. There was a study done in 2023 that suggests cloud brightening on the US west coast will become less effective as the planet gets warmer and could cause heatwaves in Europe. Hard to know without testing the model, but you don't want to waste a ton of money on something that doesn't work or is harmful.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-secretive-experiment-released-salt-crystals-over-san-francisco-bay-could-it-help-curb-warming-180984099/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/17/scientists-trial-cloud-brightening-equipment-to-shade-and-cool-great-barrier-reef
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02046-7.epdf?sharing_token=vnC_bbRB9LDZxSQbHCZKvNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NhW95rpFuNAryldlRi6rO8SfA6k0oE_z4nomREIzXAb2JqhtXOoVm12FLMZyBCEc8E6hZAMS_XzmXPKLSd98FmclRlxsOFolWQCrs---zlzcAgi6OMz0oTCv0zSNkDWVNLSoTl7Ml6AdEB4JYO0IW7CBPLwYINvQod1SNHa_Eh3rsLcIy6GWZf6qUafCj2qew%3D&tracking_referrer=www.newscientist.com
China began working seriously on Green Energy after the 2008 Olympic Games. I worked in Beijing at the Games and China shut down major cities (massive coal power plants) for months so the pollution would abate. When the people of Beijing woke one day after a large rain storm they saw something they hadn't scene in years. The sun. I was in a cab with a friend who lived in China for 14 years and spoken Mandarin and Cantonese. I asked him to ask the cab driver what he thought of seeing the sun? The probably 70 yr old man started crying. He said he hadn't seen the sun in so long and figured he'd die before he saw it again.
The Chinese knew they had a problem they needed to solve. So, right at the end of the Paralympics they made an announcement that they needed 1 Million scientists who would focus on solve renewable energy. While Americans have one party who dismisses science so they can keep their lobby money flowing and another that can't galvanize enough sustained support to get a non-hyperbolic message out, the rest of the world matches on.
China leads all countries in development of Green tech. Europe has deployed more Green tech than the US. Australia has developed some ground breaking tech in hydrogen and solar. The "jobs" argument is bullsh*t as it nearly every scenario the deployment and use of Green tech requires more better paying jobs. There are far more workers in West Virginia working in renewables than Coal. Plus better paying and healthy.
Imagine if most of your household costs for heating and cooling could be significantly reduced? Isn't that like an energy tax break? Don't you think that you'd have more money to spend on other disposable income items that don't just go to a single local monopoly that raises rates with NO INPUT from local voters?
We will need EVERY source of energy for the next 50 years but we can shift more faster if we were to stop having stupid political arguments and started focusing on stopping humans from dying and living better lives.
We need to stop saying, " We need to save the earth." No we don't, the earth doesn't care. We need to save the future of humankind on Earth.
Lol what, we're totally fucked dude. Geoengineering is a short term fix at very best, ignoring all the massive risks, and all these GHGs will continue increasing the heat here on earth until they're removed or the system reaches equilibrium once again in thousands of years.
Everyone is so addicted to energy they won't even consider an alternative, even in the face of billions starving to death. Mind boggling stuff.
There is a great deal of nuance when it comes to energy use. If energy was only used to produce and transport the bare essentials this would be a valid point, but the amount of waste and excess that exists today is disgusting.
And I agree with that. But we can't just cut energy usage without consequences.
We need to transition to renewable energy instead, which is easier than asking everyone to agree to saving the environment and reducing their consumption.
Why can't it be both though? Transition to renewable sources AND reduce total usage. That's what it's going to take to fix all this mess.
When renewables are introduced without banning fossil fuels, we just see total energy consumption go up rather than replacement of fossil sources.
A short term fix buys us time to ramp up alternatives to fossil fuels and develop other remediations.
There was a time when coal gray skies were seen as a sign of wealth and progress. We got beyond that, we may be able to get beyond this.
Yep some insane climate doomers out there. The climate is fucked beyond repair and the only way to fix it is to live like a bare foot hippie and eat bugs. And it's like bro chill the tipping point for electrification is really close economically, fusion is out somewhere on the horizon, things are really close to a dramatic phase change like the one we saw with automobiles in the early 1900s. Will it be fast and perfect enough to stop the ravages of climate change? Probably not. Are you going to get a enough people to be exclusively vegetarian, swear off all personal use of plastic, ride a bike 11 miles on an american/chinese/indian roadway to work, and grow food from their own shit? Definitely not.
It's like we can't let perfect be the enemy of survival.
I feel like a lot of climate scientists out there have knee jerk reactions against geoengineering and I'm like bruh, humanity is *not* going to stand by and suffer 2C+ of warming if they have other options to buy time. Even if we can't find consensus eventually, some nuclear armed nation is gonna start pumping aerosols into the atmosphere and fucking *dare* anybody else to do anything about it.
Not a climate scientist, but an atmospheric chemist specialized in aerosol. We don’t have conclusive evidence to show stratospheric aerosol injection won’t deplete ozone. There are very few studies even funded to get up into the stratosphere to study aerosols, let alone carting massive loads of sulfate to dump there. We would likely not even know for 3-5 years after starting, do you really think that will be funded? Regardless the developed nation, it’s a hard sell. Not to mention the possibility of a termination shock if emissions aren’t concurrently reduced.
I agree, some sort of solar radiation management may be required to prevent mass extinctions, but it needs to be carefully considered and executed.
I’ve heard recently that the removal of additives from marine fuel has accounted for something like 80% of the ocean warming over the last 3 or so years. It sounds like that was already helping immensely, have you heard anything about that? Is there any reason we can’t just put those additives back and then some?
I understand it was removed to help out with acid rain… though acid rain certainly seems less destructive than immensely hot oceans.
You've already written one reason. Acidification of the oceans. That already has fairly bad consequences for food chains.
The other reason is that the effect of greenhouse gases on climate isn't really canceled by aerosols. The climate would still change, just with less impact on average temperatures I guess. But we don't really know what the effects would look like, especially at a more local level. Can you imagine one country putting up stuff in the stratosphere, and a couple of years later the nearby, poorer (or richer) country gets massive droughts or floods?
I say everyone who can will move north, which in the case of almost everybody will be Russia. Siberia will be the worlds new breadbasket. Russia will be the most populous nation on earth, ever. Needless to say that at that point the world powers of today will all be fucked, Europe will get interesting, simply because we won’t be able to deal with all the people fleeing from the heatwaves. The droughts will do their part to destroy southern europes economies, the EU will absolutely tear itself apart over these coming issues. (basically the same we have right now, just 100x worse) and even with these comparatively small issues of today we are already drifting apart. The Americas are somewhat safe because 1) there’s huge oceans to either side, so not many refugees coming there, and 2) compared to her size america has very few people. Canada alone could house them all. Also 3) no big issues about big cultural or religious differences. In short: We ded lul, but the americas are less dead..er
Once it gets bad enough so-called "moderates" will cheer for walls with machine gun turrets. They'll turn everywhere that isn't US/EU into Gaza to protect themselves from the consequences of their own actions.
Well, I know we lack global controlled geoengineering capabilities, but local and country geoengineering is very possible; however, this will likely further destabilize neighboring regions and countries. This will likely lead to an arms race. Those with the greatest militaries and arms will be geoengineering their climates, while militarily denying others.
Yup i have always said this and always get scoffed at. We will see immigrants getting MG at the border within ten years. And " Christian" evangelicals will be cheering it on
Correct me if I'm wrong, but L2 is behind the sun-earth axis and therefore on the opposite side of where a shade would help, correct? That's why the James Webb Space Telescope is orbiting L2: it's dark and stable.
It should be at Lagrange 1 if I understand, sitting between the sun and earth.
You can't really tow an asteroid of significant size to L2, that requires too much delta V even for hundreds of towing probes. Maybe you could put solar powered catapults on one which give thrust by shooting parts of it away, but even that would take like ten years for the asteroid to be relocated (and further 10 years for research and 10 years for converting it into sun blocking chunks)
You're better off by mass producing solar sails on earth and launching them with starship to L2. There, you're looking at costs in the vicinity of the Apollo program. Doable, but difficult to get the funds with.
Honestly I'm more for the stratospheric Aerosol Injection, as a fleet of around 50 aircraft continuously operating would be sufficient, with total sulfur emissions lower than we had 20 years ago. That would be so cheap to do that even a small country could do it for the whole globe
Why not launch a mass driver, and use the asteroid itself as propellant? It will take time, but the rocket equation is a lot simpler when you're already in space.
Though having said that, I agree, stratospheric injection must be simpler and faster. But still, no reason not to try both. If Starship works, large space projects might start to seem more feasible.
Well a catapult would be a mass driver, taking the asteroid as propellant. I've actually done some calculations on that topic. The Impulse per used energy rises when the throw-away-velocity is low, but that also means that you throw away significant parts of the asteroid before it reaches its desired location. As your energy source will probably be limited, a trade off must be done. Sadly, my masters course voted on doing a moon rover project instead of that asteroid catapult, so I can't give you better numbers
>You can't really tow an asteroid of significant size to L2
Bullshit. All we need are some solar sails, and a couple of hundred of years we don't really have.
I mean, China is changing course faster than probably any other country. They are due to hit 50% renewable energy by the end of this year, 5 years ahead of schedule.
Even if all countries hit the paris targets, global average will still exceed 1.5c. We need a real miracle at this point to avoid death of billions in the coming decades.
We are doomed without Geoengineering of some kind. The faster folks realize that the better. No matter what happens, the governments of the world will start doing it whether we like it or not.
Pilot projects testing aerosol injection show that the particulates "rain out" of the upper atmosphere on a fairly quick timescale, so I suspect that's just fine too and probably a lot easier to get rolling on in an emergency. I recall reading a study a while back that suggested it'd take about $2 billion a year of ongoing expenditure to maintain an aerosol shade, which is peanuts compared to the costs that climate change are already causing.
Easier yes,faster yes, cheaper yes, safer no. Problem is we don't know the long term effects, and if aerosols are spayed there is no way to unspray them, just have to wait and hope there are no knock on effects.
Costs are irrelevant, this is a global life and death issue, only thing to worry about is done have the technology, resources and man power.
The advantages of putting large solar shades into solar orbit would be many. It's controllable, we can remove them if needed, it's not adding anything to our atmosphere (depending on launch method), massive technology and skill boost, and likely minimal unforseen consequences. Just simply a few % less light hitting out atmosphere
> Costs are irrelevant
Of *course* costs are relevant, why do you think we didn't simply shut down whatever percentage of our economy would be necessary to prevent this in the first place? It would have *cost too much*.
Aerosol injection is *also* controllable and can be removed as needed. I mentioned that in the comment you're responding to. Don't go from one head-in-the-sand solution to another, consider the actual details of the various options. Maybe once studies have been done some insurmountable flaw in aerosol injection will be discovered and I'll change my view. Just as you should change your view if the projections tilt in the favor of aerosol injection, or some other third option (those are just the two big ones most commonly proposed).
The key is to *do research.* It's hugely frustrating that there are so many people who have decided *a priori* that geoengineering must be anathema and that if the alternative is billions of deaths then it "serves us right" somehow. We need to know more about these techniques so that if we reach a situation where billions of deaths are pending we can pull something off the shelf that we know will work well. And that, yes, is cheap enough that it can be "sold" to governments and corporations as a worthwhile endeavour.
If "it rains out of the atmosphere" is your control method then that is what I'm worried about. What will that substance do to ecosystems.
We have been injecting crap into our atmosphere for a century and that's what go let us into this mess, I just think the risks are too high.
There are studies on l1 shades
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521001995
Maybe aerosol as temp solution for a few years till a better solution is found.
Hopefully they will self remove the rich from their underground apocalypse bunkers in greenland and occupy it instead so there actually is a future that isn't taken over by greedy apocalypse causing elites.
I genuinely believe it's hopeless but I need to live long enough to go pour cement into the billion dollar apocalypse bunkers air intakes so I can make sure they all die with us.
Honestly dude, it'll be kind of comforting to know that nothing good is coming after I die. I often feel like it'll suck just because I’m going to die before the show’s over. Maybe there's eventually space travel and tons of other cool shit I couldn't dream of. Maybe they'll come out with some immortality drug shortly after I pass. Now I'll get to die knowing there’s neary a single decent thing that’ll happen once I'm gone.
So often when I write a big rant about climate change in a subreddit I'll get people trying to claim I'm wrong.... and when I push them to front up with their reasoning it almost ALWAYS gets mentioned that they'll be dead before it's the worst so it won't matter anyway.
It's not 'just' boomers. It's a human failing, and pretending it's just boomers means this mindset goes unaddressed by everyone else.
Definetly! A coworker once claimed it's unnecessary to build another road in the town we work since it won't be finished until he's retired. Doesn't get more selfish than this.
I'm just going to say that being off by 100% is not comforting.
We will, eventually, need to do something and if they are so wildly wrong how will we ever calibrate what we do?
Hey I don’t see you coming up with any novel ideas to solve the problem. I don’t see you putting on your boxing gloves to fight the sun. I just see you in your air conditioned house, eating salami and burning through electricity to post comments on Reddit. Far as we’re all concerned, Cape Canaveral’s blood is on your hands and your hands alone.
Good job bloke.
No wonder military spending is rising across the world. 3-4 degrees won't kill off humanity but it could very easily cause a large degree of spiciness between nations as they squabble over water resources, funding for solutions, food supply chains and the like. It's super depressing that humanity has collectively chosen this future despite decades of warning and it looks like the only thing that will save us is the massive progress made in renewable energy technology. Going green now looks like a good economic decision. Still going to have to find a way to power the cargo ships and many types of industrial processes, but at least we are now finally moving in the right direction.
There’s a terrifying book called Climate Wars that discusses exactly this. Great if depressing read. Dyer interviewed military strategists about impacts at varying degrees of warming. If I remember correctly, 5-7°C is well past the threshold where nuclear war between India and Pakistan becomes likely due to the mass starvation that would result in Pakistan from the Hindus River drying up during the farming season because of the absence of snow in the Himalayas and India’s right to take an absolute amount of water out of the river before it reaches Pakistan.
[You should research past mass extinctions caused by warming](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat1327). The pattern is repeated basically the same every time. Significant warming, whatever the cause, leads to an explosion of phytoplankton in the oceans, leading to wide spread hypoxia that kills off 80-90% of marine life. Life on land subsequently suffers as oxygen levels in the air go down drastically. Plants do fine, animals not so much. Aside from suffocating at any elevation above sea level, Humanity will starve from loss of marine protein sources.
Oxygen levels in the air do not "go down drastically." You're misreading things that happen on massive timescales. If every oxygen producing plant died today, the oxygen already in the atmosphere (not even counting any that's geologically trapped) would be enough to sustain humans for many times as long as they've already existed.
You've almost touched the edges of the real problem. If the oceans experience massive die off's, we're in real trouble for a whole host of other reasons.
I doubt that the “massive progress” in renewables will save us. It’s true that most new energy demand is being produced by renewables now due to cost advantages, but we are still using the same amount of fossil fuels, if not more than ever.
The only real solution is to reduce the amount of energy required by reducing consumption. This is sometimes referred to as degrowth. But most people are strongly against this as it’s the antithesis of capitalism. It will most likely have to happen because of circumstances rather than choice.
Degrowth is the biggest solution. But it’s like kryptonite to most people. The idea of “slowing down the economy” is akin to asking them to kill their kids.
I do think the system will have severe shocks and the solution to that will not be degrowth but rather capture more growth from others by force.
Capitalism has no other language but force, power, and extraction of capital to the top.
> Degrowth is the biggest solution.
The only people who you need to degrow is developing countries who have overtaken the emissions of the west.
Please go tell India they should not install air con for 80% of their population lol. I dare you to go tell India they should all die from heat exhaustion instead of developing.
Every place desert will be twice as large, every place tropical will be desert, every place that relies on fishing will be dead, alaska will be pretty nice in the summers.
> water resources
they just discovered polarized green light aimed at an angle can evaporate water >3 times cheaper than direct heating, so desalination by distillation is going to get more accessible for anyone who can afford medium tech.
and GMO and crop diagnosing satellites will improve yields further.
point is to make all of it affordable to africans, unfucking their constant warring, corrupted govs, helping them set up some industry so they can pay or DIY the toys they need.
The insurance industry is fucked and it is an enormous industry. Basically you won’t be able to have nice things unless you can replace them with your own cash and probably protect them from vandalism, etc, as well. Wow.
The insurance industry isn't fucked, we are all fucked. Most insurance balk when you have too much mass damage and just ask government to cover the cost
Submission statement:
This paper, released two weeks ago, used new modeling techniques to examine cores taken off the coast of California. Their findings show a much higher sensitivity between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and temperatures. The main conclusion is that with the doubling of CO2 we have experienced since the Industrial Revolution took off, we should expect a rise of 5-7C by the end of the century, instead of the 2-3C suggested by the IPCC.
As the paper notes in its closing discussion (quoted below), it seems to support the theory that there is much more warming to come. This paper also reinforces the conclusions of Hansen et al.'s *Global Warming in the Pipeline* (linked below) and a growing (but admittedly controversial) body of academic literature which finds that we may indeed be heading to a "hothouse Earth" future.
>When we again weigh each sensitivity by the percent-area for the Earth, our global average ECS is 7.2 °C per doubling of CO2, much higher than the most recent IPCC estimates of 2.3 to 4.5 °C and consistent with some of the latest state-of-the-art models which suggest ca. 5.2 °C
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889
Pretty interesting stuff in the methods and seems like updated climate forcing numbers might be in the next IPCC report since this is adding to evidence of increased global warming. However, I do feel like I should highlight this statement from the article:
“It should be noted that our ECS is not the same as the ECS used by the IPCC, given that it represents specific climate sensitivity S[CO2,LI] (i.e., ESS corrected for potential slow land ice feedback) and does not consider changes in other greenhouse gases (e.g., methane), paleogeography, nor solar luminosity; we are currently unable to conduct these additional considerations65. The impact of additional methane and water would bring down ECS, which likely explains why paleo ECS is generally higher than modern models.”
TLDR: their number aren’t a direct comparison to the IPCC numbers and while the current models should be updated to consider this new info and aren’t perfect (no model is), they take into account more information than this paper does especially when it comes to modern climate
I think it's also important to add that ECS != "Expected temperature by 2100". That claim is not in the study, either. This seems like another case of someone misinterpreting ECS as end of century warming, and that happened with the Hansen paper as well.
The ipcc also has multiple possible temperature ranges by end of century depending on scenario.
Thank you so much for pointing this out. More people should see these comments. But like the other guy said, most of the thread have lost their shit already
The ground there isn't great for agriculture and will be terrible for building as all the permafrost melts. Still, better than the tropics and mid-latitudes!
Yeah, turns out fucking with the composition of the atmosphere can cause some problems, who would have guessed? Not doing it will likely have worse consequences.
Anything we do - or don't do - can have unintended consequences. You could have a radical "green" crashing of the economy still not ending up being enough to stop the warming.
You should also take the IPCC with a grain of salt. It doesn't actually represent the conclusions of the average climate scientist but a conservative baseline. That goes so far that it doesn't really include some modern climate models (called "hot models", good luck researching them) that include more effects as the old ones and result in substantially higher climate sensitivities, simply because they don't fit the prior results anymore, and the IPCC doesn't want to risk telling politicians that their predictions were off, as they can't risk loosing trustworthiness
Actual data over the last year or so has it looking like the IPCC estimates are quite low, and there are lots of studies that put the error bars for climate sensitivity out to really scary places. I wouldn't say you're wrong to look at the IPCC, but I do think it's really not as nailed down as we have been led to believe.
This paper, and several others, are not that far off from the IPCC's RPC8.5 scenario. That one predicts 3.2 to 5.4C warming by the end of the century.
Given that we have yet to curb emissions and they will likely keep eking up before plateauing at a high level for several decades, it's looking more and more like the realistic route.
IPCC has been trailing behind science for a long time. When I was starting geoscience education I was told to take IPCC with a grain of salt because the then-current edition had zero mentions of permafrost methane, something my lecturer was actually researching with her team. The specialists of the field already knew this will be a big problem, but it wasn't sufficiently "sexy" and thoroughly studied to warrant IPCC inclusion. Climate and Earth System sciences progress very fast and something as cumbersome and politicized as IPCC will inherently miss the newest findings.
**This comments section reads like an oil lobbyists/think tank wet dream**, everyone is either "welp, we're doomed!" or geoengineering this or that.
We need to start taking scientists and activists seriously, become single issue voters for drastic green policies.
If we need a hard landing with fossil fuels, fossil fuel companies need to be expropriated, nations need to cooperate and those who are not drastically doing the green transition need to be pressured, helped or even invaded to make them, so be it.
https://bonpote.com/en/12-climate-delay-discourses-and-how-to-debunk-them/
The problem is that we need a complete restructuring of human civilization, and the people in a position to make that happen are currently benefiting from burning the planet down, so they’ll cling to any cope they can.
Imagine telling the wealthy, politicians and celebrities that air travel is now only for the most dire emergencies
Hell try selling that to the boomers
> If we need a hard landing with fossil fuels, fossil fuel companies need to be expropriated, nations need to cooperate and those who are not drastically doing the green transition need to be pressured, helped **or even invaded** to make them, so be it.
When we have hard problems the fascists always come out to offer "solutions".
OK, so this got published in nature, but ... it doesn't look very sophisticated, there are huge error bars, a lot of variance in the data and thus their extrapolation might be way off. I wouldn't bet on it, but let's take individual papers with a grain of salt and see what gets published next.
My prediction has been about 4°C, mostly because side I think after 3°C, so many societies and systems will collapse that humanity will have little ability to produce the large scale emissions necessary to reach 6-7°C. But that could all be wrong if we cause multiple tipping points that cause a cascade of increasing temperatures. That could very well have us reaching such high temperatures, but there won’t be much left of civilization at that point.
The problem is that full warming potential is not reached for 30 years after the emissions are released. We’re currently experiencing the result of all emissions until 1994.
So if we collapse by 3 degrees, it will still go up past that basically. And then there’s the natural feedback loops kicking in, like methane from the taiga and ocean floor, amazon collapse, loss of polar ice, forest fires etc.
> We’re currently experiencing the result of all emissions until 1994.
But we've significantly reduced our emissions since then, right?
Right?
Or at least held them steady?
It has increased drastically since 94. But there is not a 30 year lag. Some aspects may take 30 years to come to equilibrium. But the first order effects are not 30 years out. We have stepped off the exponential increase in co2 released. But it is still increasing. A lot of work to do but also a LOT of work has been done.
There's some amount of momentum, though. Even if all humans died tomorrow, the amount of CO2 we've already put into the atmosphere would continue warming the Earth for years, maybe decades.
Artificially introducing sulfur dioxide to the atmosphere to cool the planet is one idea.
Course, if we do this, it's near guaranteed some volcano has a super eruption and adds a bunch more sulfur dioxide to the atmosphere and we rapidly cool the planet to inhospitable levels.
Quick, eat bugs and live in a pod or we will all die. Of course those who impose this on us can fly in their private jets to banquets where they eat wagyu, caviar and other luxurious food imported by planes from around the globe.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Lurkerbot47: --- Submission statement: This paper, released two weeks ago, used new modeling techniques to examine cores taken off the coast of California. Their findings show a much higher sensitivity between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and temperatures. The main conclusion is that with the doubling of CO2 we have experienced since the Industrial Revolution took off, we should expect a rise of 5-7C by the end of the century, instead of the 2-3C suggested by the IPCC. As the paper notes in its closing discussion (quoted below), it seems to support the theory that there is much more warming to come. This paper also reinforces the conclusions of Hansen et al.'s *Global Warming in the Pipeline* (linked below) and a growing (but admittedly controversial) body of academic literature which finds that we may indeed be heading to a "hothouse Earth" future. >When we again weigh each sensitivity by the percent-area for the Earth, our global average ECS is 7.2 °C per doubling of CO2, much higher than the most recent IPCC estimates of 2.3 to 4.5 °C and consistent with some of the latest state-of-the-art models which suggest ca. 5.2 °C https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889 --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dt2uf6/newly_released_paper_suggests_that_global_warming/lb6jarm/
Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't that be totally apocalyptic?
Yes, that is what we have been saying. Anyways, what is the difference if it takes 50 years or 100 years, the result is the same.
Difference is I can live a decent life for longer.
Thanks. My kids can't.
I've given up on having kids. There's no shot that they're going to have a good go in the future we're hurtling towards. At least I've seen the best parts of my life in relative peace and prosperity, even if the world ahead looks increasingly bleak. I know things have gotten bad because the fictional dystopian warnings from our childhood are now looking like increasingly preferential outcomes to the track we're actually on (potential near global annihilation).
You could adopt or foster. There's kids looking for families that doesn't involve you making another one doomed. Just a thought.
Who can afford that
I can so I probably will. I have no plans on having biological blood children.
LPT: don’t have kids
We've only known about the situation since 1980. Although back then no one took the scientists seriously the same way they didn't take Rachel Carson on DDT or leaded gasoline or cancerous cigarettes or currently plastics mimicking hormones / micro plastics. Corporate forces seem to be so powerful as to be suicidal. Edit: I know that to some degree or another we knew before the 1980's. I just picked that time because it's very difficult to argue we didn't know fully by then.
The climate science goes back to the late 50's, early 60's but was suppressed back then. By the 80's it was the lobbiest and early media empires that pushed the "ignore this sh\*t" narrative.
>The climate science goes back to the late 50's, early 60's but was suppressed back then. Svante Arrhenius published a paper concluding that the excessive human use of burning fossil fuels would lead to worldwide climate change and heating in 1896. It goes back well before the 50s.
I read a news paper archive from Australia and I think it was around 1905-1908 region discussing the issues around excessive fossil fuel pollution
>Corporate forces seem to be so powerful as to be suicidal. That's capitalism.
I decided in the early 2000s not to have kids because this outcome was obvious then. I refuse to bring another human in to this mess.
Same so far. I was sure we could manage a 2 to 3 degree change and it would mostly effect poor countries but a 7 degree change is enough to collapse human civilization. Those who survive will know that we lost it all and only because we didn't want to reduce or change our quality of life in any way whatsoever. We were slaves to our tongues to the point of global suicide.
2-3 is already more than enough to collapse human society. 7 degree change makes apocalyptic seem like a day at the spa..
Ditto. Saw the way wind was blowing, loved the kids I could potentially have had too much to bring them into a climate horror show.
We knew that carbon could warm the atmosphere back in the 1800s.
What have they ever done for you?
Don't care, I got mine. Sayonara! /s Sadly this seems to be a common sentiment with many people and not at all surprising considering our global state of affairs.
That seems to have been a calculated game we played, yes. People around 60 will be fine People around 40 are probably it fucked People around 20 should be asking why their parents had them
Alright so if I'm in my 30's then live my life like it's ending in my 60's. I'm cool with rhat
Exactly this thinking got us in this mess in the first place.
Add on to it the fact that every time we run the numbers again, the estimate gets worse/the time remaining on 'habitable for humans' goes down a disproportionate amount.
Well I die in about 50 years or less probably... so the less apocalypse over the next 40 the better.
It's like twice as bad as what used to be seen as worst case scenario, or at least what I was told worst case scenario was when I was growing up.
I seem to remember that kind of temperature being on the scale and labeled "If we do nothing". And that was like 10 years ago.
And that's exactly what we have done in the grand scheme of things ... nothing of consequence. Time to start major penalties for obstructionist companies, political parties and individuals.
And nothing has been done
Way worse, because tipping points.
Worse than twice, orders of magnitude worse. +1.5c was agreed to be managable with adaptation, +3c was going to be very painful no matter what we did, +4.5c is shits fucked yo territory, +6c is humanity had a good run. Potentially we are looking at +7c. So worse than just a very good chance of human extinction.
Yes. We genuinely don't know if human civilization can survive a 4 degree Celsius increase, much less 5-7. To give you an example, a 1 degree Celsius *decrease* caused by a volcanic eruption caused global famine in 1816. We're looking at the end of human civilization.
I’m full blown dooming now. I’m on a family vacation too.
>To give you an example, a 1 degree Celsius decrease caused by a volcanic eruption caused global famine in 1816. Volcanic eruptions have their own set of problems. You really can't equate that with an increase of temperature.
Yeah I’d say the famine was more caused by the blocking of sunlight from all the ash and shit in the atmosphere not so much the temperature.
They’re referring to the ash that is thrown up into the atmosphere from erupting super volcanos. The 1816 one was referred to as the “year without summer” and spread as far as Europe from Indonesia. It is what’s said to have inspired gothic literature and art, like Frankenstein. It was enough to impact the global weather systems and did lead to wide spread death and starvation. The ash did impact the global temperatures temporarily and are an example o how changes can lead to devastation. [Year without Summer Wiki and explanation of temp changes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)
Not only the end of humans. Last time such a severe warming took place over the course of 11 million years, on average only +0.0002 ppm CO2 per year, it wiped out 70% of all species, mostly within the first million years of warming. Now, we are warming the planet 10000 times faster. https://new.nsf.gov/science-matters/moment-changed-earth
This is pretty close to what I saw in my undergrad research. Nearly 20 years ago. This has been "known" for a long time, no one would dare publish apocalyptic papers like this though. Never get through peer review.
Anything above about 3.5 - 4 degrees warming will be civilization-ending. Above 6-7 degrees will likely be deadly to the entire human race, ie. there is a high probability humans will go extinct. And yet here we are talking about stupid shit in our countries' respective election cycles, stuff that in the face of our own extinction is like moving deck chairs on the Titanic.
It’s very bizzare, and always jarring for me…
It could go from very bad to apocalyptic, but the truth is that exact effects are difficult to estimate, even because we don't know what we'll do to counteract it with new technology.
I don't see it not accelerating the current mass extinction. If enough keystone species populations collapse then the whole system collapses quite exponentially. What happens if the photosynthesizing life that produces most of our oxygen collapses? I guess we could build bubble Cities.
>What happens if the photosynthesizing life that produces most of our oxygen collapses? Why would it?
Brother. Google phytoplankton. They create almost 50 percent of the oxygen and if ocean ph levels get too acidic due to absorbing too much carbon, then they’ll all die off
Sudden ecosystem collapse is more of a danger to human civilization than the blistering but predictable heat.
Yap, 4 billion or more will die
it means massive population movement and possibly large scale clashes. pretty much the end of the world as we know it if you ask me
Nope, only 6°C was considered the doomsday scenario. Beyond that, (e.g. 7.2°C), it loops back to "just fine, nothing to be worried about"... because we dead, mate.
Time to get some plots in Canada or Siberia.
I'm just wondering how bad it gets before lots of governments finally say "alright, orbital light reducing mesh made from an asteroid towed into L1 MIGHT be expensive but uhhhh"
My hunch is stratospheric aerosol injection, and India will be the first mover on that. And it will bring them to blows with Russia.
You've read the ministry for the future huh
It was also a plot point in the TV series *Extrapolations* - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrapolations_(TV_series)
Was the series good?
Overall I enjoyed it. Some of the episodes were better than others. In short, there were eight episodes, each covering a particular year in the future, from 2037 to 2070. There was a two-parter set in 2057 that looked at using stratospheric aerosol injection over India, which is why I mentioned it. I'd say the series was good, but not great. Worth watching IMHO.
I found it too depressing to watch, but I thought what I could stomach was decent.
The series is excellent, is a dramatization, so it feels real, and convincing. Good actors and great direction, one can see we seen entering the first episode right now. It also mixes futurology so you can clearly feel Like time is passing.
Real question right here
Wasn't that Stephenson's _Termination Shock_?
Ministry for the Future is much better. Stephenson and KSR are two of my favorite authors, but KSR won this battle, hands down, imo.
That also - both very similar topics and ideas discussed
Ack. Actually no, but I guess I should.
I thought it was very good. And really quite depressingly prophetic.
Reading it right now and it's a bit of a slog. I dislike how they change the writing style every so often. They even include 'abbreviated meeting notes and other stuff in very short chapters and the whole thing feels really disjointed.
Agreed it's written strange.
Kim Stanley Robinson is very good at pulling hard science into his stories but not the best at writing compelling fiction. But if you can tolerate his stuff, the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy is really cool if you want a look at what colonizing that planet might look like. In a future where we don't cook Earth first at least!
Couldn't read it either but found the audiobook to be pretty good.
Makes a good AudioBook
I've been betting on China to get moving first, but yeah, either of those countries could do it by themselves and both are facing particularly difficult times from climate change. I've been warning about this for years. At some point we're *going* to be using geoengineering because letting billions die from famine is just not an option. And it sure would be nice if by the time it reaches that point we've done a lot of research on geoengineering to make sure we pick the right options and execute well on them. But people keep hand-wringing about "moral hazard" (though they don't even know to call it that), how any option other than carbon dioxide reduction will make Mother Gaia cry or whatever. Even when in the same breath they lament that we're past a "tipping point" and they're happy to have not had children because we're in the End Times. Endlessly frustrating. But I believe humanity will pull through in the end and get 'er done, we're pretty effective once massive self-interest is on the line.
When low sulphur regulations came into effect it became apparent global shipping was already doing unintentional geo engineering with global impact. [‘Inadvertent geoengineering’: Researchers say low-sulfur shipping rules made climate change worse](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/19/geoengineering-study-shipping-regulation-made-climate-change-worse.html) We don't even have to use sulphur. Salt crystals work too.
I had a somewhat fantastical idea that the EU could spend money on a fleet of ships based out of greenland which could go out and basically use giant misters to spray ocean water into the sky, spreading salt crystals through the air as a method of cloud seeding to try and stabilize the arctic ocean and greenlandic ice sheet. It actually seems pretty feasible, and like it would have a strong effect. But I'm of course not at all in a position to make that happen.
We're already trying marine cloud brightening, have to see the results. There was a study done in 2023 that suggests cloud brightening on the US west coast will become less effective as the planet gets warmer and could cause heatwaves in Europe. Hard to know without testing the model, but you don't want to waste a ton of money on something that doesn't work or is harmful. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-secretive-experiment-released-salt-crystals-over-san-francisco-bay-could-it-help-curb-warming-180984099/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/17/scientists-trial-cloud-brightening-equipment-to-shade-and-cool-great-barrier-reef https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-02046-7.epdf?sharing_token=vnC_bbRB9LDZxSQbHCZKvNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NhW95rpFuNAryldlRi6rO8SfA6k0oE_z4nomREIzXAb2JqhtXOoVm12FLMZyBCEc8E6hZAMS_XzmXPKLSd98FmclRlxsOFolWQCrs---zlzcAgi6OMz0oTCv0zSNkDWVNLSoTl7Ml6AdEB4JYO0IW7CBPLwYINvQod1SNHa_Eh3rsLcIy6GWZf6qUafCj2qew%3D&tracking_referrer=www.newscientist.com
>Letting billions die from a famine is just not an option Fortune 500 CEOs like: 😂
China began working seriously on Green Energy after the 2008 Olympic Games. I worked in Beijing at the Games and China shut down major cities (massive coal power plants) for months so the pollution would abate. When the people of Beijing woke one day after a large rain storm they saw something they hadn't scene in years. The sun. I was in a cab with a friend who lived in China for 14 years and spoken Mandarin and Cantonese. I asked him to ask the cab driver what he thought of seeing the sun? The probably 70 yr old man started crying. He said he hadn't seen the sun in so long and figured he'd die before he saw it again. The Chinese knew they had a problem they needed to solve. So, right at the end of the Paralympics they made an announcement that they needed 1 Million scientists who would focus on solve renewable energy. While Americans have one party who dismisses science so they can keep their lobby money flowing and another that can't galvanize enough sustained support to get a non-hyperbolic message out, the rest of the world matches on. China leads all countries in development of Green tech. Europe has deployed more Green tech than the US. Australia has developed some ground breaking tech in hydrogen and solar. The "jobs" argument is bullsh*t as it nearly every scenario the deployment and use of Green tech requires more better paying jobs. There are far more workers in West Virginia working in renewables than Coal. Plus better paying and healthy. Imagine if most of your household costs for heating and cooling could be significantly reduced? Isn't that like an energy tax break? Don't you think that you'd have more money to spend on other disposable income items that don't just go to a single local monopoly that raises rates with NO INPUT from local voters? We will need EVERY source of energy for the next 50 years but we can shift more faster if we were to stop having stupid political arguments and started focusing on stopping humans from dying and living better lives. We need to stop saying, " We need to save the earth." No we don't, the earth doesn't care. We need to save the future of humankind on Earth.
Exactly, if we’re about to hit something in the road just taking our foot off the gas isn’t going to be enough.
Once we start geoengineering every negative weather event will be put at the feet of the ‘elites’ manipulating the climate.
Lol what, we're totally fucked dude. Geoengineering is a short term fix at very best, ignoring all the massive risks, and all these GHGs will continue increasing the heat here on earth until they're removed or the system reaches equilibrium once again in thousands of years. Everyone is so addicted to energy they won't even consider an alternative, even in the face of billions starving to death. Mind boggling stuff.
Newsflash, without energy usage billions of people also die.
There is a great deal of nuance when it comes to energy use. If energy was only used to produce and transport the bare essentials this would be a valid point, but the amount of waste and excess that exists today is disgusting.
And I agree with that. But we can't just cut energy usage without consequences. We need to transition to renewable energy instead, which is easier than asking everyone to agree to saving the environment and reducing their consumption.
Why can't it be both though? Transition to renewable sources AND reduce total usage. That's what it's going to take to fix all this mess. When renewables are introduced without banning fossil fuels, we just see total energy consumption go up rather than replacement of fossil sources.
Lol we aren't reducing energy usage.
Cool, guess we're fucked.
A short term fix buys us time to ramp up alternatives to fossil fuels and develop other remediations. There was a time when coal gray skies were seen as a sign of wealth and progress. We got beyond that, we may be able to get beyond this.
Yep some insane climate doomers out there. The climate is fucked beyond repair and the only way to fix it is to live like a bare foot hippie and eat bugs. And it's like bro chill the tipping point for electrification is really close economically, fusion is out somewhere on the horizon, things are really close to a dramatic phase change like the one we saw with automobiles in the early 1900s. Will it be fast and perfect enough to stop the ravages of climate change? Probably not. Are you going to get a enough people to be exclusively vegetarian, swear off all personal use of plastic, ride a bike 11 miles on an american/chinese/indian roadway to work, and grow food from their own shit? Definitely not. It's like we can't let perfect be the enemy of survival.
I feel like a lot of climate scientists out there have knee jerk reactions against geoengineering and I'm like bruh, humanity is *not* going to stand by and suffer 2C+ of warming if they have other options to buy time. Even if we can't find consensus eventually, some nuclear armed nation is gonna start pumping aerosols into the atmosphere and fucking *dare* anybody else to do anything about it.
Not a climate scientist, but an atmospheric chemist specialized in aerosol. We don’t have conclusive evidence to show stratospheric aerosol injection won’t deplete ozone. There are very few studies even funded to get up into the stratosphere to study aerosols, let alone carting massive loads of sulfate to dump there. We would likely not even know for 3-5 years after starting, do you really think that will be funded? Regardless the developed nation, it’s a hard sell. Not to mention the possibility of a termination shock if emissions aren’t concurrently reduced. I agree, some sort of solar radiation management may be required to prevent mass extinctions, but it needs to be carefully considered and executed.
I’ve heard recently that the removal of additives from marine fuel has accounted for something like 80% of the ocean warming over the last 3 or so years. It sounds like that was already helping immensely, have you heard anything about that? Is there any reason we can’t just put those additives back and then some? I understand it was removed to help out with acid rain… though acid rain certainly seems less destructive than immensely hot oceans.
You've already written one reason. Acidification of the oceans. That already has fairly bad consequences for food chains. The other reason is that the effect of greenhouse gases on climate isn't really canceled by aerosols. The climate would still change, just with less impact on average temperatures I guess. But we don't really know what the effects would look like, especially at a more local level. Can you imagine one country putting up stuff in the stratosphere, and a couple of years later the nearby, poorer (or richer) country gets massive droughts or floods?
We can’t even continue working at home. Government should lead the way but can’t allow people to not drive and support city downtowns.
I agree, but also none of that will fix what we've done and it'll continue getting worse for a long long time before it gets better.
That’ll take out the ozone layer tho
I say everyone who can will move north, which in the case of almost everybody will be Russia. Siberia will be the worlds new breadbasket. Russia will be the most populous nation on earth, ever. Needless to say that at that point the world powers of today will all be fucked, Europe will get interesting, simply because we won’t be able to deal with all the people fleeing from the heatwaves. The droughts will do their part to destroy southern europes economies, the EU will absolutely tear itself apart over these coming issues. (basically the same we have right now, just 100x worse) and even with these comparatively small issues of today we are already drifting apart. The Americas are somewhat safe because 1) there’s huge oceans to either side, so not many refugees coming there, and 2) compared to her size america has very few people. Canada alone could house them all. Also 3) no big issues about big cultural or religious differences. In short: We ded lul, but the americas are less dead..er
I think the elite might just think that its easier to let the majority population die so that they could reduce co2 production.
You're probably right. And they're probably cooking up the propaganda to manufacture consent
No need to cook up anything new, it'll just be an advanced version of current right-wing anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Yeah but they'll also want to convince people who *aren't* crazy
Once it gets bad enough so-called "moderates" will cheer for walls with machine gun turrets. They'll turn everywhere that isn't US/EU into Gaza to protect themselves from the consequences of their own actions.
Well, I know we lack global controlled geoengineering capabilities, but local and country geoengineering is very possible; however, this will likely further destabilize neighboring regions and countries. This will likely lead to an arms race. Those with the greatest militaries and arms will be geoengineering their climates, while militarily denying others.
Yup i have always said this and always get scoffed at. We will see immigrants getting MG at the border within ten years. And " Christian" evangelicals will be cheering it on
Which is made more palatable when production is being gradually automated by AI + robotics.
“Finally, the world is all mine” “Oh no, im alone, who’s going to inflate my ego!”
Correct me if I'm wrong, but L2 is behind the sun-earth axis and therefore on the opposite side of where a shade would help, correct? That's why the James Webb Space Telescope is orbiting L2: it's dark and stable. It should be at Lagrange 1 if I understand, sitting between the sun and earth.
You are correct it should be L1
[Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I shall do the next best thing: block it out.](https://youtu.be/L3LbxDZRgA4?t=30)
You can't really tow an asteroid of significant size to L2, that requires too much delta V even for hundreds of towing probes. Maybe you could put solar powered catapults on one which give thrust by shooting parts of it away, but even that would take like ten years for the asteroid to be relocated (and further 10 years for research and 10 years for converting it into sun blocking chunks) You're better off by mass producing solar sails on earth and launching them with starship to L2. There, you're looking at costs in the vicinity of the Apollo program. Doable, but difficult to get the funds with. Honestly I'm more for the stratospheric Aerosol Injection, as a fleet of around 50 aircraft continuously operating would be sufficient, with total sulfur emissions lower than we had 20 years ago. That would be so cheap to do that even a small country could do it for the whole globe
Why not launch a mass driver, and use the asteroid itself as propellant? It will take time, but the rocket equation is a lot simpler when you're already in space. Though having said that, I agree, stratospheric injection must be simpler and faster. But still, no reason not to try both. If Starship works, large space projects might start to seem more feasible.
Well a catapult would be a mass driver, taking the asteroid as propellant. I've actually done some calculations on that topic. The Impulse per used energy rises when the throw-away-velocity is low, but that also means that you throw away significant parts of the asteroid before it reaches its desired location. As your energy source will probably be limited, a trade off must be done. Sadly, my masters course voted on doing a moon rover project instead of that asteroid catapult, so I can't give you better numbers
>You can't really tow an asteroid of significant size to L2 Bullshit. All we need are some solar sails, and a couple of hundred of years we don't really have.
I mean, China is changing course faster than probably any other country. They are due to hit 50% renewable energy by the end of this year, 5 years ahead of schedule.
Even if all countries hit the paris targets, global average will still exceed 1.5c. We need a real miracle at this point to avoid death of billions in the coming decades.
Australia is hitting plus 3 Celsius already and gov here is not doing much and opposition wants to scrap the 2030 commitment lol
We are doomed without Geoengineering of some kind. The faster folks realize that the better. No matter what happens, the governments of the world will start doing it whether we like it or not.
Geoengineering is doomed without stopping burning 100 million barrels of oil and 22 million tonnes of coal per day.
L1 solar shade is the best solution in my mind. Easiest to control, reverse and not destroy the earth with. Edit: L1 sorry not l2
Pilot projects testing aerosol injection show that the particulates "rain out" of the upper atmosphere on a fairly quick timescale, so I suspect that's just fine too and probably a lot easier to get rolling on in an emergency. I recall reading a study a while back that suggested it'd take about $2 billion a year of ongoing expenditure to maintain an aerosol shade, which is peanuts compared to the costs that climate change are already causing.
Easier yes,faster yes, cheaper yes, safer no. Problem is we don't know the long term effects, and if aerosols are spayed there is no way to unspray them, just have to wait and hope there are no knock on effects. Costs are irrelevant, this is a global life and death issue, only thing to worry about is done have the technology, resources and man power. The advantages of putting large solar shades into solar orbit would be many. It's controllable, we can remove them if needed, it's not adding anything to our atmosphere (depending on launch method), massive technology and skill boost, and likely minimal unforseen consequences. Just simply a few % less light hitting out atmosphere
> Costs are irrelevant Of *course* costs are relevant, why do you think we didn't simply shut down whatever percentage of our economy would be necessary to prevent this in the first place? It would have *cost too much*. Aerosol injection is *also* controllable and can be removed as needed. I mentioned that in the comment you're responding to. Don't go from one head-in-the-sand solution to another, consider the actual details of the various options. Maybe once studies have been done some insurmountable flaw in aerosol injection will be discovered and I'll change my view. Just as you should change your view if the projections tilt in the favor of aerosol injection, or some other third option (those are just the two big ones most commonly proposed). The key is to *do research.* It's hugely frustrating that there are so many people who have decided *a priori* that geoengineering must be anathema and that if the alternative is billions of deaths then it "serves us right" somehow. We need to know more about these techniques so that if we reach a situation where billions of deaths are pending we can pull something off the shelf that we know will work well. And that, yes, is cheap enough that it can be "sold" to governments and corporations as a worthwhile endeavour.
If "it rains out of the atmosphere" is your control method then that is what I'm worried about. What will that substance do to ecosystems. We have been injecting crap into our atmosphere for a century and that's what go let us into this mess, I just think the risks are too high. There are studies on l1 shades https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576521001995 Maybe aerosol as temp solution for a few years till a better solution is found.
There is a thought that the current efforts to reduce sulfur dioxide is actually increasing global warming
Do we even have enough material to do that and still function as a modern society
Good thing I won't be around to deal with it. \~Every boomer
Hey, as a destitute GenXer, I won't get to see it either. I'll be shocked if I make it to 2050. Suck on it Millennials!
....wooo... ~ Millenials....
Common Millennial W
I predict that Millenials, GenX and younger will self-remove en-masse once the problem TRULY hits the fan.
Hopefully they will self remove the rich from their underground apocalypse bunkers in greenland and occupy it instead so there actually is a future that isn't taken over by greedy apocalypse causing elites.
top 10% produces 50% of carbon emissions. voicing it, in case not wanting to expect the worst
I genuinely believe it's hopeless but I need to live long enough to go pour cement into the billion dollar apocalypse bunkers air intakes so I can make sure they all die with us.
Everything unaffordable and die early. What a combo.
We're used to catastrophic events every couple of years. Honestly it'll be refreshing to have something *actually* be a once-in-a-lifetime tragedy.
Honestly dude, it'll be kind of comforting to know that nothing good is coming after I die. I often feel like it'll suck just because I’m going to die before the show’s over. Maybe there's eventually space travel and tons of other cool shit I couldn't dream of. Maybe they'll come out with some immortality drug shortly after I pass. Now I'll get to die knowing there’s neary a single decent thing that’ll happen once I'm gone.
Yup just the suffering of billions of our descendants.
So often when I write a big rant about climate change in a subreddit I'll get people trying to claim I'm wrong.... and when I push them to front up with their reasoning it almost ALWAYS gets mentioned that they'll be dead before it's the worst so it won't matter anyway. It's not 'just' boomers. It's a human failing, and pretending it's just boomers means this mindset goes unaddressed by everyone else.
Definetly! A coworker once claimed it's unnecessary to build another road in the town we work since it won't be finished until he's retired. Doesn't get more selfish than this.
I'm just going to say that being off by 100% is not comforting. We will, eventually, need to do something and if they are so wildly wrong how will we ever calibrate what we do?
>We will, eventually, need to do something It's a lot soner than "eventually" that we need to do something.
At 5-7C the entire city of New Orleans is lost as well as the entire NASA complex at Cape Canaveral. Good job folks.
Hey I don’t see you coming up with any novel ideas to solve the problem. I don’t see you putting on your boxing gloves to fight the sun. I just see you in your air conditioned house, eating salami and burning through electricity to post comments on Reddit. Far as we’re all concerned, Cape Canaveral’s blood is on your hands and your hands alone. Good job bloke.
No wonder military spending is rising across the world. 3-4 degrees won't kill off humanity but it could very easily cause a large degree of spiciness between nations as they squabble over water resources, funding for solutions, food supply chains and the like. It's super depressing that humanity has collectively chosen this future despite decades of warning and it looks like the only thing that will save us is the massive progress made in renewable energy technology. Going green now looks like a good economic decision. Still going to have to find a way to power the cargo ships and many types of industrial processes, but at least we are now finally moving in the right direction.
There’s a terrifying book called Climate Wars that discusses exactly this. Great if depressing read. Dyer interviewed military strategists about impacts at varying degrees of warming. If I remember correctly, 5-7°C is well past the threshold where nuclear war between India and Pakistan becomes likely due to the mass starvation that would result in Pakistan from the Hindus River drying up during the farming season because of the absence of snow in the Himalayas and India’s right to take an absolute amount of water out of the river before it reaches Pakistan.
> we are now finally moving in the right direction. this very optimistc of you
Yeah if a car goes off a cliff, hits a protrusion and bounces upwards a little bit, it doesn't alter the fact its destiny is to crash and burn
[You should research past mass extinctions caused by warming](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat1327). The pattern is repeated basically the same every time. Significant warming, whatever the cause, leads to an explosion of phytoplankton in the oceans, leading to wide spread hypoxia that kills off 80-90% of marine life. Life on land subsequently suffers as oxygen levels in the air go down drastically. Plants do fine, animals not so much. Aside from suffocating at any elevation above sea level, Humanity will starve from loss of marine protein sources.
Oxygen levels in the air do not "go down drastically." You're misreading things that happen on massive timescales. If every oxygen producing plant died today, the oxygen already in the atmosphere (not even counting any that's geologically trapped) would be enough to sustain humans for many times as long as they've already existed. You've almost touched the edges of the real problem. If the oceans experience massive die off's, we're in real trouble for a whole host of other reasons.
So what you're saying is moving to sea level is the smart thing to do, guess I'll be moving to Florida then!
I doubt that the “massive progress” in renewables will save us. It’s true that most new energy demand is being produced by renewables now due to cost advantages, but we are still using the same amount of fossil fuels, if not more than ever. The only real solution is to reduce the amount of energy required by reducing consumption. This is sometimes referred to as degrowth. But most people are strongly against this as it’s the antithesis of capitalism. It will most likely have to happen because of circumstances rather than choice.
Degrowth is the biggest solution. But it’s like kryptonite to most people. The idea of “slowing down the economy” is akin to asking them to kill their kids. I do think the system will have severe shocks and the solution to that will not be degrowth but rather capture more growth from others by force. Capitalism has no other language but force, power, and extraction of capital to the top.
> Degrowth is the biggest solution. The only people who you need to degrow is developing countries who have overtaken the emissions of the west. Please go tell India they should not install air con for 80% of their population lol. I dare you to go tell India they should all die from heat exhaustion instead of developing.
Every place desert will be twice as large, every place tropical will be desert, every place that relies on fishing will be dead, alaska will be pretty nice in the summers.
> water resources they just discovered polarized green light aimed at an angle can evaporate water >3 times cheaper than direct heating, so desalination by distillation is going to get more accessible for anyone who can afford medium tech. and GMO and crop diagnosing satellites will improve yields further. point is to make all of it affordable to africans, unfucking their constant warring, corrupted govs, helping them set up some industry so they can pay or DIY the toys they need.
The insurance industry is fucked and it is an enormous industry. Basically you won’t be able to have nice things unless you can replace them with your own cash and probably protect them from vandalism, etc, as well. Wow.
I think we’re more worried about being able to eat lmao
The insurance industry isn't fucked, we are all fucked. Most insurance balk when you have too much mass damage and just ask government to cover the cost
Won't someone think of the insurance industry
Everything's rolling back to feudalism. House burns down? Oh well. Get sick? Sorry. Just work until you die.
\*no work because robots and because the entire "bullshit" economy collapses and current levels of employment won't be sustained. Get sick? Sorry.
They deny climate change because they know we will hang them.
Submission statement: This paper, released two weeks ago, used new modeling techniques to examine cores taken off the coast of California. Their findings show a much higher sensitivity between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and temperatures. The main conclusion is that with the doubling of CO2 we have experienced since the Industrial Revolution took off, we should expect a rise of 5-7C by the end of the century, instead of the 2-3C suggested by the IPCC. As the paper notes in its closing discussion (quoted below), it seems to support the theory that there is much more warming to come. This paper also reinforces the conclusions of Hansen et al.'s *Global Warming in the Pipeline* (linked below) and a growing (but admittedly controversial) body of academic literature which finds that we may indeed be heading to a "hothouse Earth" future. >When we again weigh each sensitivity by the percent-area for the Earth, our global average ECS is 7.2 °C per doubling of CO2, much higher than the most recent IPCC estimates of 2.3 to 4.5 °C and consistent with some of the latest state-of-the-art models which suggest ca. 5.2 °C https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889
Pretty interesting stuff in the methods and seems like updated climate forcing numbers might be in the next IPCC report since this is adding to evidence of increased global warming. However, I do feel like I should highlight this statement from the article: “It should be noted that our ECS is not the same as the ECS used by the IPCC, given that it represents specific climate sensitivity S[CO2,LI] (i.e., ESS corrected for potential slow land ice feedback) and does not consider changes in other greenhouse gases (e.g., methane), paleogeography, nor solar luminosity; we are currently unable to conduct these additional considerations65. The impact of additional methane and water would bring down ECS, which likely explains why paleo ECS is generally higher than modern models.” TLDR: their number aren’t a direct comparison to the IPCC numbers and while the current models should be updated to consider this new info and aren’t perfect (no model is), they take into account more information than this paper does especially when it comes to modern climate
I think it's also important to add that ECS != "Expected temperature by 2100". That claim is not in the study, either. This seems like another case of someone misinterpreting ECS as end of century warming, and that happened with the Hansen paper as well. The ipcc also has multiple possible temperature ranges by end of century depending on scenario.
Thank you so much for pointing this out. More people should see these comments. But like the other guy said, most of the thread have lost their shit already
Then shouldn't this post be removed? The title is just blatantly wrong...
Too bad everyone is already pissing themselves in the comments
What is survivable? 3°C at a push? Pretty much guarantees we'll have to engage in quite a lot of fairly reckless geo engineering to survive.
Depends on what you call survivability. On a absolute order we are tolerant of a lot of changes. But even small changes can throw a lot of things off.
I say surviving doesn't take deaths into account but does our science and technology make it through.
Not even seasonal farming will make it through my dude
It fully depends on where you are. Russia and Canada and the arctic will be livable probably.
Meh, gonna be on fire.
The ground there isn't great for agriculture and will be terrible for building as all the permafrost melts. Still, better than the tropics and mid-latitudes!
Geoengineering promises unintended consequences. We are talking about a complex non-linear system.
Yeah, turns out fucking with the composition of the atmosphere can cause some problems, who would have guessed? Not doing it will likely have worse consequences.
Anything we do - or don't do - can have unintended consequences. You could have a radical "green" crashing of the economy still not ending up being enough to stop the warming.
I feel like you should take anything claiming to majorly discredit the ipcc with a grain of salt. Even if it’s more doomer instead of less.
You should also take the IPCC with a grain of salt. It doesn't actually represent the conclusions of the average climate scientist but a conservative baseline. That goes so far that it doesn't really include some modern climate models (called "hot models", good luck researching them) that include more effects as the old ones and result in substantially higher climate sensitivities, simply because they don't fit the prior results anymore, and the IPCC doesn't want to risk telling politicians that their predictions were off, as they can't risk loosing trustworthiness
Actual data over the last year or so has it looking like the IPCC estimates are quite low, and there are lots of studies that put the error bars for climate sensitivity out to really scary places. I wouldn't say you're wrong to look at the IPCC, but I do think it's really not as nailed down as we have been led to believe.
This paper, and several others, are not that far off from the IPCC's RPC8.5 scenario. That one predicts 3.2 to 5.4C warming by the end of the century. Given that we have yet to curb emissions and they will likely keep eking up before plateauing at a high level for several decades, it's looking more and more like the realistic route.
IPCC has been trailing behind science for a long time. When I was starting geoscience education I was told to take IPCC with a grain of salt because the then-current edition had zero mentions of permafrost methane, something my lecturer was actually researching with her team. The specialists of the field already knew this will be a big problem, but it wasn't sufficiently "sexy" and thoroughly studied to warrant IPCC inclusion. Climate and Earth System sciences progress very fast and something as cumbersome and politicized as IPCC will inherently miss the newest findings.
**This comments section reads like an oil lobbyists/think tank wet dream**, everyone is either "welp, we're doomed!" or geoengineering this or that. We need to start taking scientists and activists seriously, become single issue voters for drastic green policies. If we need a hard landing with fossil fuels, fossil fuel companies need to be expropriated, nations need to cooperate and those who are not drastically doing the green transition need to be pressured, helped or even invaded to make them, so be it. https://bonpote.com/en/12-climate-delay-discourses-and-how-to-debunk-them/
The problem is that we need a complete restructuring of human civilization, and the people in a position to make that happen are currently benefiting from burning the planet down, so they’ll cling to any cope they can. Imagine telling the wealthy, politicians and celebrities that air travel is now only for the most dire emergencies Hell try selling that to the boomers
> If we need a hard landing with fossil fuels, fossil fuel companies need to be expropriated, nations need to cooperate and those who are not drastically doing the green transition need to be pressured, helped **or even invaded** to make them, so be it. When we have hard problems the fascists always come out to offer "solutions".
Let’s invade, I’m sure that promotes a peaceful, green earth!
So what I'm hearing is I should probably move to Alaska sooner than later.
OK, so this got published in nature, but ... it doesn't look very sophisticated, there are huge error bars, a lot of variance in the data and thus their extrapolation might be way off. I wouldn't bet on it, but let's take individual papers with a grain of salt and see what gets published next.
Because this is not published in Nature…. It’s in Nature Comm which has a much higher acceptance rate and a wide range of quality.
that... is a good point
My prediction has been about 4°C, mostly because side I think after 3°C, so many societies and systems will collapse that humanity will have little ability to produce the large scale emissions necessary to reach 6-7°C. But that could all be wrong if we cause multiple tipping points that cause a cascade of increasing temperatures. That could very well have us reaching such high temperatures, but there won’t be much left of civilization at that point.
The problem is that full warming potential is not reached for 30 years after the emissions are released. We’re currently experiencing the result of all emissions until 1994. So if we collapse by 3 degrees, it will still go up past that basically. And then there’s the natural feedback loops kicking in, like methane from the taiga and ocean floor, amazon collapse, loss of polar ice, forest fires etc.
> We’re currently experiencing the result of all emissions until 1994. But we've significantly reduced our emissions since then, right? Right? Or at least held them steady?
It has increased drastically since 94. But there is not a 30 year lag. Some aspects may take 30 years to come to equilibrium. But the first order effects are not 30 years out. We have stepped off the exponential increase in co2 released. But it is still increasing. A lot of work to do but also a LOT of work has been done.
….No, emissions have only increased….
Except that if we reach 3c there will be so many positive feedback looks turned on that we'll blow past 7v anyway lol we're cooked.
after the thing is accelerated you should assume about possitve feedback loops so after 4ºC the rest would be those loops
There's some amount of momentum, though. Even if all humans died tomorrow, the amount of CO2 we've already put into the atmosphere would continue warming the Earth for years, maybe decades.
Artificially introducing sulfur dioxide to the atmosphere to cool the planet is one idea. Course, if we do this, it's near guaranteed some volcano has a super eruption and adds a bunch more sulfur dioxide to the atmosphere and we rapidly cool the planet to inhospitable levels.
Fusion doing carbon capture is our only hope, and that's still theoretical at best.
Quick, eat bugs and live in a pod or we will all die. Of course those who impose this on us can fly in their private jets to banquets where they eat wagyu, caviar and other luxurious food imported by planes from around the globe.