Even If Effective Climate Action Starts Now, Things Will Get Hotter & More Unstable For Decades

[hatrack]

Links at original

EDIT

The big picture: Even under the most optimistic scenario for carbon emission reductions — one far more ambitious than anything the world is currently on a path for — global average temperatures are projected to keep rising until the 2050s and, while they begin to dip, still end the century higher than they are now.

As one meme circulating on social media goes, this year isn't the hottest summer of your life, but the coldest summer of the rest of your life.

Between the lines: Barring the invention of some kind of technology that could economically pull carbon out of the atmosphere — and we're not close to that — there is no full solution to climate change. Instead, it's a problem to be managed — whether well or badly — for the foreseeable future.

But that makes it very different than most of the other major challenges the world faces. As terrible as the COVID-19 pandemic has been and remains, it will end one day, and both individuals and governments can take immediate actions to get immediate results. But there's no "flattening the curve" on climate change — at least not in any near-term time frame.

EDIT

https://www.axios.com/climate-change-pessimism-future-ipcc-dbd9fd35-8474-45f1-bf12-69a8095f4272.html

[Random Boomer]

1. I see this fallacy over and over again...

"We must act now to avert climate change!"

That phrasing implies this is something we avert, when the stark truth is that things are going to get worse no matter what we do. Our actions now can only (possibly) avert yet a far worse future farther down the line.

Climate change is here. It's here to stay. It will continue to get worse every year of our lives. That change is already backed in and not reversible.

[Delphinus]

4. I read that with

Jared Diamond's book, How Civilizations Choose to Fail (or something akin to that) and his last chapter talked about how even if we stopped right now, things would continue forward because of what was baked in.

I don't think anyone knows how to tells us the truth without making people freak out.

[Vogon_Glory]

2. Doom-saying skepticism aside, we still have a choice

Between bad and truly Gawd-awful. I’d like to avoid the Gawd-awful outcome, thank you very much.

[NNadir]

3. We haven't even come close to defining what "effective" might be.

In general "effective" is, in the popular imagination, defined by dogma and mysticism and not observation.