“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said.
Let’s stop climate change!
Let’s stop it at 1 degree!
Let’s stop it at 1.5 degrees
Okay, we might get to 2.5 degrees, but the economy!
This will go on until we get to around 5 degree and most parts of the world have become uninhabitable and most animals and vegetation has gone extinct and we’ve locked ourselves in perpetual wars due to water and food shortages. Sounds like a shitty B movie, but this is what I truely believe we will end up with.
If it makes you feel any better, once it gets that bad, society will eventually break down and our CO2 levels will naturally return to normal over the next several centuries while the Earth is reclaimed by nature as we go extinct.
Finally some good news
I’m hopeful economies and governments will collapse before 3 degrees and measures will be put in place. I’m not extrapolating a utopian future. Before we get to the point where the world reacts, there will be many wars, migration and fascism. But as it gets worse, I’m hopeful groups will work together and fight for a better future.
Nah, what will happen is that said incompetent governments will be replaced by incompetent dictatorships that will just tell people over the barrel of a gun that things are better now.
A nuclear winter will cool things off quite a bit.
There is no ceiling. It might go up 6 or 7C. The people who have the power to change things do not give a shit if the rest of us die. They don’t care, and they won’t change anything. That’s the world we live in.
4C is basically Mad Max breakdown of society. Problem is self-correcting after that.
Well, renewables seem to be saving our undeserving asses, just by virtue of finally getting cheap.
Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.
There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.
Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.
I don’t think that’s quite true. Where I live it has expanded from nothing to a major power source in just a few years. We’ll need grid storage of some kind to kick fossil fuels completely, but that seems surmountable. Worst case scenario we build pumped air and just eat some round trip losses.
Nuclear plants take many years to get off the ground, so I’m not sure that’s actually an easier solution. Once they’re up and running at scale they’re actually really cheap per unit production, so I would have agreed with you a decade ago, but as it is solar and wind have just pulled ahead.
Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.
Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.
You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.
Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.
And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.
Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.
It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…
…or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.
Sorry for the delay. I’m trying to get this the response it deserves, including gathering figures for Alberta, and some basic mathematical modeling.
Alright, I can’t seem to find useful numbers anywhere. We went from 50% coal to nil in just a few years, though, so big changes fast are possible. If you’re in Ontario, you also have to consider your local renewables penetration was really high to start with, because of those waterfalls.
And yeah, like I said to the other person, exact growth pattern matters. It’s probably exponential-ish right now, not linear, because it’s just unambiguously cheaper to move to renewables, and so just getting ducks in order to do it is the bottleneck.
I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.
The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.
Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.
Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.
Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.
Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.
The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.
That’s fair. Thanks for the intelligent conversation.
Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.
I get ~2 decades when I extrapolate these numbers (from 2010-2023) to get to 2022 total primary energy usage for solar alone.
Energy usage will grow as well, and keeping that growth is ambitious, but it the future doesn’t look that bleak too me if you look at it that way.
Did you use linear extrapolation, or something else? Because it’s an actual paradigm shift happening now, I’d guess some kind of exponential or subexponential curve would be best. That would bring it even faster.
Extrapolation is tricky, and actually kind of weak, although I think it’s appropriate here. This XKCD explains it really well, and I end up linking it all the damn time.
Exponential, it fits the curve very nicely. I can give you the python code if you want to. I got 2 decades for all energy usage, not only electricity, which is only one sixth of that.
I just took the numbers for the whole world, that’s easier to find and in the end the only thing that matters.
The next few years are going to be interesting in my opinion. If we can make efuels cheaper than fossil fuels (look up Prometheus Fuels and Terraform Industries), we’re going to jump even harder on solar and if production can keep up it will even grow faster.
They (selfishly) believe that allowing the problem to flourish is what will get us to solve it.
They’re not wrong. There’s just way better, more humane approaches.
So you’re mostly right. Because they know they have the wealth to weather the discomfort in comfort. But it is accurate that humans historically are fucking aces at reacting and kinda piss poor at proacting.
Yes, they are wrong. Because we don’t know if there are positive feedback loops that will take us beyond survivable temperatures once we’ve crossed an invisible line.
Even the ultra-rich won’t survive +5C because the entire concept of “wealth” falls apart when society does.
Not really. Economies started to slow down and crash when warming gets over 2°C and CO2 production crashes with it.
Finally some good news on the climate. Our ability to fuck the Earth will mostly go away when our civilization collapses. We might even get a second Genghis Khan cooling when everyone dies.
The problem is that feedback loops start to kick in above 2°C so it doesn’t matter if the economy crashes.
In fact, in some cases that makes things even worse. One example is that without smokestacks and ships pumping out sulfur dioxide the albedo of the atmosphere will rapidly drop, which might cause immediate and rapid warming over a period of only a few years.
We could be pushed past 2.5°C or even 3°C without industrial forces contributing at all.
We’re close to blowing past 1.5c
I think we’ll blow past 2.5c
I think we’ll be looking back, waving longingly to the incredible hulk ending song, to 5c
Because the world doesnt exist to serve the 8 billion humans. It exists to serve a few thousand rich and business owners. . which means as long as there is profit to be had, the killing of the planet and the population will continue not only at pace, but ever accelerating
Global warming is funny in that there is a threshold at which runaway reaction evaporates all water on the planet and changes it into inhabitable wasteland akin to other sad space rocks.
I don’t know what are the chances for that but I feel if it is anything above 0.1% then it is too fukin big of a chance.
I don’t want to risk that the scientists completely missed the mark in some computer simulation or missed some vital, crucial info and this is the actual scenario, those things are awfully hard to model and predict. Maybe the rate of change is so meaningful that it kicks in some bad stuff that would not happen if the rate of change was hundred thousands years. Who knows at this point. Climatologists are fumbling around in confusion
That won’t happen, CO2 and warming has been much, MUCH higher than it is now or probably will ever be.
What will happen is that loads of animals will die because they won’t be able to adapt quick enough. Thought that we had many extinctions now? Try a hundred times more.
What will happen is mass crop failures due to extreme weather, and water shortages. Humans being the assholes that the are will not focus on an actual solution, they’ll just start wars over the scarce resources to make it even worse.
Humanity actually might go extinct if we let it ge tbad enough.
There are still many people out there claiming it’s all fake. Can we please just make them extinct?
It begins with wiping out the brainwashed. Theoretically, this should allow democracy to correct the problems, but i suspect the owners will just stop pretending they operate within the bounds of democracy at that point and go all out authoritarian to prevent themselves from being dethroned. Then we wipe them out.
And we’ll do nothing about it because everybody is looking at corporations and their government but not at themselves to change.
Look for the main pollution producers and you’ll be shocked (or not).
Just a hint: not the individuals.
the main polluters are making products for the individuals you speak of. they don’t exist in a vacuum.
I just hope im gonna be as excited to see this „civilization„ fall as I think I am. Humanity is just fucking disappointing.
You really want to live through a “Children Of Men” world? I’d rather be dead.
Shit, do I get to choose? Than hell fucking no. But I don’t, do I?
I hope I’ll have the balls to kill myself when all this shit collapses and our last breaths turn into wars.
if you’re going to kill yourself because you have nothing left to lose, why wouldn’t you take a few assholes that deserve it with you?
People will be fleeing famine, uninhabitable areas, rising sea levels and wars. The areas that can support life will grow smaller, more valuable and crowded.
Will we be assholes if when this happens we be like. WE FUCKING TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN, but y’all more concerned with arguing over pronouns and protests (I support both).
I get your frustration. I feel it myself. Still, I fear, calling people assholes won’t be helpful and prevent folks from admitting they did wrong. At the same time, it can always get worse (hotter) and I think it would be best to win as many people over as possible, to do the right thing.
I don’t know. We’re fucked anyway, I guess.
Yes yes, suddenly we shouldn’t mock because it’s unhelpful…not see through at all.
mocking is pointless. most conservatives don’t care if you mock them. neutralizing their threat to democracy is the answer.
I mean the ones that think that trans people shouldn’t have human rights also tend to be the ones who don’t believe in climate change so…
so ____ all conservatives for the sake of humanity. i’ve been saying this for decades.
Seems low.
22% of climate scientists are likely funded by big oil. The other 1% are just normal stupid.
I can see some climate scientists just saying that 2.5C won’t be as dire as others predict without being stupid or paid off. There are often contrarians and sometimes (not often, but sometimes) they can be right, so it’s healthy to have them even when there is broad consensus. It’s how we came to accept ideas like plate tectonics.
So sure, maybe some of them are paid off (I doubt any of them are stupid since they have scientific degrees), but maybe some of them just disagree about the predictions for whatever semi-legitimate or maybe even legitimate reason and that’s fine. It’s worth exploring why just in case they could be right. The thing is, they’re scientists who are dissenting, not just some random guy on Facebook, which is why it’s worth exploring them.
It’s not like anyone’s going to do anything about it.
Someone will. We will. Our current trajectory is unsustainable.
That’s what I said a good 25 years ago when I learned about climate change. It went through a bunch of name changes, there have been multiple world meetings about it to see how much further we could push it up to sustain “our economies” and the few little suggestions that came out of that were completely ignored so that we could have the next world economic forum or whatever.
If any politician would actually do something REAL, I’d support it. I have not seen anything beyond “well let’s try to change cars to electrical over a 20 year period but also dump nuclear power so effectively all electrical cars still run coal”. We. Need. To. Stop. Using. Cars. Car use needs to drop by 95%, THAT would make a difference. Start converting 90% of car infrastructure to park, bicycle infrastructure and public transportation like trains and busses. Convert cargo trucks to electrical, start investing like crazy in nuclear power plants. Push companies to either let employees work from home or pay tripple tax. Tax the shit out of anyone earning more than 10 times the average. Start adding sulfur solutions to kerosine so that airplanes can start spewing it in the atmosphere to lower temperatures… Any of those are solutions, I haven’t seen any of it.
Nobody is going to do anything because politicians are dumb egocentric assholes that only care about their own reelection.
We’re fucked in the next 30 years or so
If Trump gets elected, we’ll be fucked within 10. I’m honestly thinking at this point that maybe we should just all vote for trump. Get it over with, kill this world, humanity is a failed experiment.
Stopping meat eating would have a bigger impact on climate change than removing cars, and that’s doable for everyone. Also EV cars do reduce the co2, and as grids get cleaner cars do too. Additionally many put solar on their houses to charge Evs.
Whist i agree car numbers should definitely be reduced, people should work from home far more for example, but meat is a greater problem that we could all address immediately without dismantling infrastructure.
Yeah, the “stop eating meat is doable” is not doable. Ppeoli simply won’t do it. What you can (should) do is increase taxes on meat. If meat becomes twice as expensive, people will eat it less. Use the extra tax income to subsidize meat alternatives, make those more attractive.
We can do with a LOT less cars if we wanted to. Same as with meat, we don’t want it. Still, most car rides are under 3 miles, which can easily be done by bike but good luck being the politician pushing bikes. Or increased taxes on meat.
No reason we cant do all of these things. Taxing meat is a geat idea too.
There is a big reason we can’t do any of that.
The general public is dumb, and politicians happily watch the world burn if they can rule the ashes.
Because of that, no politician will ever push for any of that.
Sadly you are probably correct here too
Literally every projection made about today, 20 years ago, was false. I swear yall have zero pattern recognition.
Was false… because it was optimistic seen from today.
The projections made by the Club of Rome in 1972 in Limits to Growth are still valid. Should we wait until 2040 to see if the computer simulations were true?
What?
What projections are you looking at? It is a few cherry picked ones? Generally the projections going back to the 80s are in line with what’s actually happening, if anything they were optimistic.
Even if you don’t agree with projection or that we’re actually in-line with them, the correlation between carbon in the atmosphere and global temperature isn’t disputable anymore.
So when did all you blowhards go vegan?
oh you didnt?
Ok then.
