I gave it 15 to 20 years before it reaches a total breaking point where we will see major wars based upon masses of people being forced into migrations or die where they are. People will choose war rather than sitting around waiting ton die.
Its good news and entirely accurate. The worst case scenario is becoming more and more unlikely to happen. It doesn’t mean its not a problem, just that we are making progress.
Everything you’ve cited here supports exactly what I said – RCP 8.5 was always an extreme outlier, as correctly described in the BBC article and slightly misleading in the SciAm article (as an extreme outlier, it was never considered realistic, but was in there for comparative purposes).
ETA: When humanity is faced with an existential threat, I’d rather err on the side of being potentially alarmist rather than on the side of unwarranted complacency.
I predict between 40 and 50 years.
Is your prediction “never”, or do you have a solid guess?
For guessing, maybe only 25 years.
“Obviously, a lot has changed since 2005 or so when the scenario was created. A lot of clean technology prices have fallen, by factors of five, while global coal use peaked in 2013. And it’s been flat since then.”
“So what originally was a sort of worst-case (scenario) with less than 10% chance of happening is today, exceedingly unlikely.”
If that’s your criteria for things having improved (as far as emissions are concerned), then I agree that things have improved. The outliers on both sides from early RCP scenarios are no longer realistic. With additional time and additional research, we’ve narrowed to the “middle” range of likely emissions scenarios.
Unfortunately, research in the past several years indicates the climate is more sensitive to our emissions than previously thought, and significant research has been done on climate feedback loops. None of it is remotely encouraging.
The TLDR: our emissions may not be following an RCP8.5 scenario, but the earth seems to be warming as though we were.
edit: Dialed that is back to a seems to be. The warming and particularly the energy imbalance are diverging from where they’d be expected to be given our emissions thus far.
99.99 percent of the Earth’s history has been in a climate regime that humanity has never experienced. What we consider to be “normal” is very abnormal for the Earth.
Everything that we can learn about the past is relevant, especially the bits outside of human history.
Climate models are based on what existing data we have. One thing about modeling complex systems like this is that with enough effort, those models tend to get quite accurate, as long as the thing you are modeling stays relatively close to what the model was based off of. This can give you a false sense of confidence in the accuracy of your models, and I suspect that we have a lot of that going on with our current climate models. They fell into the same trap a couple of decades ago when they tried to model financial markets. For a while things went really well. The different models all agreed with each other, the predictions were accurate, everyone involved was really proud of themselves. Then the markets went into conditions that hadn’t been seen before, and the models all went haywire. Instead of agreeing, the models each gave drastically different predictions, and none of them ended up being accurate.
Thinking that our current climate models can accurately predict the future is probably a mistake. Thinking that things can’t quickly go to hell in a handbasket is also probably a mistake.
There is one thing that we need to be keenly aware of. Hot and wet is good. Hot and dry is bad.
Hot and wet possibly gets you into a state where everything from Florida and Maine has a warm climate that is good for growing food. Canadians won’t need to go to Florida for the winter, because southern Canada will have weather that’s just as good. Sea levels are going to rise, but while coastal areas will be negatively affected, the rest of the planet is going to be great.
Hot and dry gets you into an extinction level event. The area around the equator gets too hot for most life. Plants die off. Animals that depend on those plants die off. Animals that eat the animals that eat the plants die off. Farming anywhere near the equator becomes impossible. The swamps of Florida turn into a desert waste.
Both of these have happened in the past.
In the more recent past, ice ages have occurred fairly regularly. We aren’t due for the next one for maybe 20,000 to 50,000 years or so. But will our abuse of the planet accidentally save us from another glacial freeze? Probably not, but you never know.
One prediction that I am fairly confident of is that I’m not going to be around long enough to see the wheel really come off. But I predict that when it does happen, it’s going to take climate researchers by surprise. I also think that the “paradise Earth” (warm and wet, things grow easily, etc) is extremely unlikely. I predict that the warm and dry extinction event scenario is much more likely.
This. This year in particular is going to be a tipping point for my hometown of Corpus Christi. Due to a combination of an ongoing drought and increased use by Big Industry, we are on track to run out of fresh water by the end of this year.
This will not only impact us locals, but likely the global economy. Due to the war in Iran, the port of Corpus Christi has moved up from 3rd to 1st place for the largest amount of exported petroleum products. Once we run out of water, however, all that industry is going to shut down. That recent doubling of gas prices is going to look like chump change when that happens.
@Velocity , IIRC you live somewhere “up north” here in Texas, at least up north from those of us in the Coastal Bend. Has your area begun preparing for the possible arrival of large numbers of evacuees, should the worst happen and the whole coastal bend area has to be evacuated?
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Appropriate username for the OP.
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Threads like this make me not want to do anything about the environment, except maybe just consume mercilessly and live it up while I still can.
I live in Austin. No, I don’t see any sign of preparation for any large number of climate-migrants.
We passed that point 50 years ago. If we went to zero carbon emissions worldwide tomorrow, global warming will continue for a thousand years. We’ve already built in all that additional heating.
At this point we’d need major remediation efforts to begin to slow the temperature trajectory back to flat-line, much less reverse it back to e.g. the 1900 baseline. Problem is, nobody really has any idea of how to remediate what we’ve already done. And nobody thinks zero carbon emissions tomorrow is realistic either.
Right now we’re already committed to going over the upcoming cliff and in most areas of life & tech, we’ve still got our foot on the gas, not the brakes.
Is there a reason to hit the brakes? Putting aside the will to change, it doesn’t sound like most in this thread think that there’s anything that can be done that’s worthwhile. This kind of jives with my belief that the only methods that would have “enough” of an effect are ones that are so extreme that practicality + politics would make them impossible (e.g. hard limits on how much of a distance people or objects would be allowed to travel from their point of origin, worldwide banning of technology above a certain level, etc.–things that would substantially reduce quality of life for the entire human race). I’m not sure that genie can be put back in the bottle.
They’ll just be left to die where they are, in the modern world of increasing xenophobia.
Not pressed into slave labor?
Warning for dragging topics off topic far too often.
You have to know this wasn’t on topic but you were just replying will be your complaint.
Any more of this and suspensions will begin.
@The_Other_Waldo_Pepper, you contributed to this.
Quite, but some speculations are rational - mass migrations from areas where the climate becomes intolerable, disruption and possible collapse of over-sophisticated food production and distribution systems, inability of government and political systems to respond sufficiently quickly and effectively…
That’s really the point. The Earth will not become uninhabitable to life. Not even to human life.
But it will become very inhospitable to our current international political system and current techno-economic system. And the rate of change will slowly increase, with some unexpected sudden jumps along the way. At some point the cumulative disruption and damage plus the rate of change will exceed various countries’ citizens’ willingness to play nice together, then both politics and the economy will suffer from chaos and opportunism.
Because the impacts themselves are cumulative, the world as it is at any given moment will be X amount of inhospitable. And tomorrow will be X+1. Like getting seriously elderly or dying of cancer, today is the best healthiest day of your remaining life. Which is a dispiriting prospect to say the least.
Right now we’re busy using up the slack in the system. So the direct, obvious, serious impacts are local, episodic, and mere tastes of what is to come.
e.g. Here in greater Miami we have tides a few times per year that inundate some coastal city streets to a depth of inches to maaaybe a foot. Fast forward 50 or 100 years and that area will be sitting in a foot of seawater all day every day. Nobody (and certainly nobody in the USA) has ever lived or worked in a neighborhood built for dry land that now sits in a foot of seawater. On nice days; when it’s stormy or hurricaney out, the situation will be much more dire.
As the slack runs out, and that will happen on various dates to various aspects of the system, there will be a bit of a jerk as suddenly the metaphorical rope goes taught and things suddenly have a large, continuous, and unstoppable force applied. I’m sure we’ve all seen YouTubes of some yokels trying to extricate a stuck vehicle. Somebody attaches a cable or chain to it, and gets a running start with their not-stuck vehicle. Nothing happens until the cable goes taught. Then one or the other vehicle loses a bumper, an axle, a whatever as all that built up inertia arrives all at once.
IMO there will chaos and civilization-changing impacts. I doubt that’ll become widespread in less than a century though. We the gray-haired crowd will be the last people to party hearty to the end. Our kids, the current working generation, will be the ones who start tidying up after the bender but they’ll die in a world still pretty similar to today, just with more Nature shit goin’ down more often.
The kids born 20 or 50 years from now will reap the whirlwind we & our parents have so thoroughly sown.
I was very much with you up to this point. To use your rope analogy (which is great by the way), I’m clearly more pessimistic about the amount of slack in the system.
I look at the world and see a lot of tightly coupled systems that do not seem to handle disruption particularly well. Not quite single points of failure, but close. As a prime example in current news, we have the straight of Hormuz and it’s impact on the global economy.
I think the wheels start to come off when these regional and/or global junctions experience jerk enough times to cause people broadly to start doubting the system, and I don’t think it’ll take a century to do so.