Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-75481-z
I'm not trying to be a doomer here but the dominos have already started to fall and we are well and truly fucked. Even if the entire world's economy was repurposed to carbon capture and stopping this we would still be fucked.
Indeed, and even if we somehow magically managed to stop that issue (which basically requires magic at this point), it wouldn't stop countless others. Such as topsoil disappearing. Or the biosphere being destroyed fast. And climate change consequences are thus far only a very minor part of what's killing the biosphere, too - ecosystems destruction, overfishing, or the use of pesticides everywhere, to name a few, are doing that on a planetary scale.
There can be no management of the consequences of climate change without massive degrowth of the global economy, right now. Almost the entire cars and air flight industries should be shut down immediately, among many others; large scale deployment of new agricultural approaches (for example massive decentralized permaculture approaches requiring a large amount of workforce) should be attempted; large scale development of public transport as well; a massive push to produce and consume only locally, too. All of this should've been done decades ago. We should still attempt it, but recognize that all this will accomplish at this point is attempt to soften the blow and avoid human extinction.
Of course none of this will happen; if we don't die with a long whimper of darkness and suffering (including fascists governments appearing in many countries worldwide and genocides at the borders of various developed countries), we'll probably manage to off ourselves instead through nuclear apocalypse. On that subject, an interesting talk is geopolitics in a hotter world by Gwynne Dyer (that's a transcript, here if you want the video itself). He does a good job, for example, explaining the issue with the Indus Waters treaty and how the quickly melting glacier that feed the Indus are going to cause incredible tensions in that nuclear-armed region of the world. And that's only there - similar likely points of tension exist all over the world due to decreasing resources.
Personally, I cope with psychedelics. That and the vague hope that after centuries of suffering in a wasteland earth a small amount of still surviving humans might manage to eventually get back up in a sustainable way and remember the lesson. That's likely hopelessly optimistic though, given we're still pumping CO2e gases into the atmosphere like mad year after year and we're already gone over the threshold for many self reinforcing feedback effects.
I like to believe that, as unbelievably horrible as climate change and everything will get, it'll end up forcing the world to adopt communism. I don't think the systems of control that the capitalist class relies on will be enough to keep tens or hundreds of millions of imminently dying proles from open revolt. The imperial core countries that rely on imperialism to prop up their own economies seem like they'll collapse pretty hard, and even the US military won't be able to keep entire continents directly subjugated.
I dunno, I think the only countries that could remain stable will be the ones with the ability to coordinate large-scale central planning and manage catastrophic disasters (e.g., China).
Maybe communists should get into prepping.
I'd like to believe that too but I suspect when climate refugees start moving in the tens of millions, dwarfing any so-called "refugee crisis" we've seen in the past, things will sadly probably move in the other direction.
I'm thinking more about domestic unrest. Climate refugees are probably fucked, unfortunately.
My fear is that many countries will go full fascist when such refugees start coming at the borders, rather than full communist.
I mean, in the global south countries where people are just dying in droves, where presumably there won't be many at the borders. And if they're forced to reorganize their economies, I don't think even a fascist US could hold on to the global empire.
I tend to agree with you, it’s sad that things will likely have to get that bad before they can get better, but hopefully a solidly communist global south will be able to if not thrive, at least mitigate the worst parts of the climate apocalypse and keep people alive
We should still care because the stuff that we need to do to try and avoid extinction/tragedy in the megadeaths range - such as the suggestions above - cannot and will not happen in the current capitalist system. And moreover, doing these things would wreck the current planetary economy, hence it would require massive wealth redistribution at the same time to avoid large swathes of misery and poverty.
We capitalismed our way into this mess, we can capitalism our way out of it!
Carbon capture could stop the worst of this if we go zero in the next decade. We'd still be in for a shitty 150 years or so.
Current international proposals to mitigate climate change now need to include BeCCS and carbon capture in general to pretend 2C or less is still achievable, but don't let that convince you it's a realistic proposal in any way. BeCCS at scale is largely non demonstrated, and most likely a pipe dream; a cop out to keep going and avoid doing what we actually should be doing: stopping emissions immediately, negative growth and consuming less, not differently.
Here is a short piece, for example, that explains why the largest carbon capture facility in the world does in fact shit-all for the climate: it does sequester CO2 but the only way it managed to do that efficiently enough is not by pulling it off of the air, of course, but instead off of natural gas being extracted to, you guess it, be burned as a fossil fuel. More generally, actually deploying true BeCCS plants at scale seems impossible - the scale of the infrastructure required boggles the mind, not to mention the energy required (which is itself currently mostly not clean and climate-damaging). And this all supposes tens of thousands of those plants would actually be built, without a profit motive, in a capitalist framework.
Finally, as I said in another comment, even assuming BeCCS could be deployed and that it would work (which again, is extremely unlikely), that does fuck-all for the ongoing biosphere destruction (species are disappearing right now much faster than during the worse mass extinction the Earth has ever seen, and mostly thus far not because of climate change) - making the idea that we'd only be in for 150 "shitty years" sadly optimistic.
Can’t wait to see how much more fucked things will get in my lifetime 🙃
When I'm able to push through the seething hatred and abject hopelessness, I can recognize a certain morbid curiosity is there for me too. But then the existential dread usually kills it.
I don't think 2c is achievable. We're gonna need everything to stop 4c.
As for the rest I agree. We're fucked. But there's "geologically scale ruined the biosphere but still somewhat functioning as a civ" fucked and "unlivable planet, no seasons, no crops, weather shuts down trade by making ports unviable, everyone dies" fucked
4C is probably "humans still alive as a species but in incredibly reduced numbers and no functioning large scale modern civilization". At 4C there's not a lot of food that can be produced; heat actually becomes lethal for days at a time in large areas of the world; extreme weather events have become the norm.
I love worrying about my super important deadlines at the spreadsheet factory while the pandemic and climate change disasters really rev up
I normally chime in on posts like this because I’m a climatologist and yeah this post isn’t doomer this is pretty much the consensus in our field. Sorry guys.
its actually baffling how i try to tell people we are in a much worse place than you could possibly imagine, the news CENSORS that shit.
this post isn’t doomer
anything that makes liberals feel bad is "doom"
Take it for what you will, but this post on r*dd*t suggests it's not a great paper.
He links to 6 climate scientists, so I believe this is credible. Also, apparently the paper is based on a model developped by business professors, so their credibility isn't that high.
The post
Just about every reputable climate scientist currently active on twitter has been calling this bunk all day.
https://twitter.com/richardabetts/status/1326948034979172356?s=20
https://twitter.com/Knutti_ETH/status/1327006226224439296?s=20
https://twitter.com/queenofpeat/status/1326939156040327168?s=20
https://twitter.com/CColose/status/1326956220503240705?s=20
https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1326959675401768962?s=20
https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1326993036820156416?s=20
every NEOLIBERAL climate scientist, you can't get someone to disagree with the people who pay them.
I'm gonna need some more evidence of their "neoliberalism" before I disregard scientists in this topic. I'm not saying it's not possible, i'm just sceptical at the moment.
The biggest issue is that it's a very simple model that runs very quickly, which means it's unlikely to capture any dynamics that rely on any kind of spatial heterogeneity, ocean circulation, and so forth. There's likely feedback mechanisms that simply aren't captured in their model, and it's not clear whether the feedback mechanisms it does capture are accurately modeled. The paper acknowledges these shortcomings and suggests that more complex models should be run to verify their results. There's good reason to be skeptical of this particular result until that happens.
We did experiments with ESCIMO (see Supplement Figure 13) to explore (contra-factually) in what year man-made emissions must stop to avoid self-reinforcing melting of the permafrost. The answer is that all man-made emissions would have had to be cut to zero sometime between 1960 and 1970—when global warming was still below some + 0.5 °C.
Neato.
The same Exxon that's part of the American Petroleum Institute; an entity that in the 80s grouped several scientists internally into a task force to investigate the likely evolution of climate change. Their report includes this fun little tidbit:
5°C rise (2067): globally catastrophic effects
Here for the full report (PDF, 4.5MB). After reading that, these ghouls of course continued pumping up the oil and even ramped up misinformation campaigns. Of course the report itself was wrong - 5C is straight up unsurvivable, not just "globally catastrophic". Recent models (currently being integrated into the next IPCC report) also indeed suggest 4-5C, but more likely by the end of the century rather than 2067. Said models ignore many non quantifiable / non predictable feedback effects, though, mind you.
In a just society all those execs would've spent their lives in prison.
I will say that part of the Conservative Climate Change talking points is that they want to zoom past the point of being able to achieve anything to reduce emissions to affect the world, so they can say "eh, there's nothing we can do, we''re too late."
So I'm still on board drastically reducing emissions just to spite the FF industry, the media employed to defend them, and the chuds who shovel con talking points into their mouth.
Well even if we are past the point of no return, its hard to argue that there isn't still value in slowing it down as much as we can, so we should pursue reduced emissions no matter what.
still on board drastically reducing emissions just to spite the FF industry
make them pay for it
there's something narcissistically thrilling about seemingly being around for the end, I guess I can see why doomsday cults can be so alluring to people
So how do I not be a doomer? Or I guess what I should ask is why shouldn't I be a doomer? The world is fucked. Capital isn't gonna stop polluting. Even if the global revolution happened tomorrow (it's not) it's still too late. Is a better world even possible anymore?
That phraseology is 💯 because it works for anything.
"Upon arrival at Dealey Plaza, JFK's head became locked into new dynamics, as the dominant processes shifted from biological to kinematic "
Yah it seems like we are truly fucked, and I know that's a thing that gets said a lot, but I really mean it this time
