Unravelling the myth of a "carbon budget" for 1.5C

[GliderGuider]

Unravelling the myth of a "carbon budget" for 1.5C

• The published 1.5°C carbon budgets all have an unacceptably high risk — of a one-in-three or greater chance — of exceeding the target temperature. Scenarios with a 50% chance of not exceeding the 1.5°C target have a 33% chance of exceeding 2°C of warming, and a 10% chance of exceeding 3°C of warming.
  
  
• All published 1.5°C emissions-reduction scenarios for this century involve significantly “overshooting” the target for several decades (up to 1.8°C of warming) before returning to the target figure by 2100.
  From a sensible risk-management viewpoint, there is no carbon budget available for the 1.5°C target. Thus, achieving 1.5°C in the medium term means drawing down every ton of carbon dioxide emitted from now on.
  
  
• The damage that will eventually be caused by the current level of warming of 1°C is beyond adaptation for many nations and peoples. 1.5°C is not a safe target.]

We're done, finished, kaputt. Anything we do from here on is just a desperate rear-guard action that will make no difference to the outcome. The outcome is the extinction of the human species, possibly within a double-handful of decades.

So do whatever you feel like, but know that you're doing it only because it makes you, personally, feel better about your actions in the world.

[hunter]

1. That which others accept with great despair I will embrace as a rising tide of opportunity.

Combined cycle gas power plants, synthetic fuels, solar and wind power, electric and hydrogen powered cars, bell bottom pants, and permed hair are the future, man!

Let's party like it's 1970.



.

.

.

Nah, that's not me.

It's a human trait that we don't often wonder what will happen after we get what we wish for.

Even the very best of today's "clean" fossil fuel technologies, widely applied and supplanted by wind and solar power, are not good enough.

If we are unable redefine our definitions of economic "productivity" and "success" we will still be screaming down the highway to hell. Solar panels on the roof only make the bus go faster.

If there's anything we can be certain of, it's that those things which are unsustainable will not be sustained. Humans don't occupy any special place in nature. We won't be the first species to experience exponential growth and then crash, and we won't be the last.

I have a few ideas how we might cope with the crash, mostly of the love-your-neighbor sort, or more immediately, the don't-vote-for-Trump sort, but we will crash.

People who criticize that perspective as some kind of self-fulfilling prophesy are simply wrong. The universe doesn't give a shit about what we humans think, doesn't pay any attention at all to our hopes and dreams. A big asteroid could be coming our way and there would be nothing we could do about it.

There's something just as bad coming our way, it's already claiming it's first victims, and it's a catastrophe of our own making. Like we couldn't help ourselves.

As an amateur paleontologist with some formal training and field experience, this is a fascinating time to be alive, literally the end of an epoch.

[Jim Lane]

2. Disaster, yes. Human extinction, no.

Our technological prowess has enabled us to create, even if unthinkingly rather than deliberately, the conditions that will drive many species to extinction.

The irony is that that same technological prowess will enable us to shield ourselves from the effects of our own actions.

Not completely, of course. We could well see scores of millions of human deaths in Bangladesh alone. Effects on food production will lead to malnutrition and starvation even in areas that aren't flooded. Along with the deaths will be harsh reductions in the standard of living of those who survive.

But there will be survivors. We can shield ourselves against adverse environmental conditions better than most other species. At this very minute there are humans living in Antarctica and Death Valley. It's not a perfect analogy because they bring in supplies from other areas, but the most pessimistic climate change predictions don't put the whole world at Death Valley levels.

[GliderGuider]

3. You do realize that "technology" requires a large number of interoperating systems?

Industrial, resource extraction, financial, transportation, communication, education, food supply systems, for example. They're all interlinked, and current levels of technology require them to be at least continental in scope, if not global. I suspect that technological prowess will prove to be surprisingly fragile in the face of widespread system failures.

I realize that it doesn't seem like that from here inside the impregnable, omnipresent bubble of course.

[Ghost Dog]

4. Yes: The more sophisticated, the more fragile the web.

Still, I'm expecting total civilisational, but not absolute species, collapse.

There will be some attempted 'ark'-building. And there will be, amid the mass die-off, much profound primitivity.

[Jim Lane]

5. Yes, but it doesn't require 7 billion people to maintain it.

Raise global temperature by five degrees Celsius and kill off half the human population -- a tragedy, of course, but those still alive could adapt.

Perhaps a truly catastrophic breakdown of global systems might deprive us of rubber, so we wouldn't have an automobile industry. That doesn't portend extinction. Our species has survived almost its entire history without using rubber, burning oil, harnessing electricity, etc.

I mentioned Death Valley, just pulling an example out of my head when I thought of an inhospitably hot environment. Now, checking its Wikipedia article, I read that "Death Valley is home to the Timbisha tribe of Native Americans, formerly known as the Panamint Shoshone, who have inhabited the valley for at least the past millennium."

Certainly there will be disruptions. Maybe in 100 years Canada will have more people than the United States. Extinction, however, would require something even more dramatic, like the mutation of new virus that's very contagious and very deadly.