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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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It’s good to hear 2C is still achievable. However, I wonder if this takes into account recent evidence that climate sensitivity may be higher than previously believed? I doubt it, since this is still an unsettled question.
I think it is probably pretty "optimistic" and not reflective of the actual on course outcome, yes
On the other hand, I suspect that the original picture before the Paris accords was also probably pretty optimistic, so the idea that we already cut down 0.9°C is probably right around on target. That's way more than I thought, and gives me some level of hope that what we have accomplished isn't totally a bag of lies and garbage.
But yes, we're on course for absolute apocalypse, with or without sudden emergency action. Very much so, and even still.
I’m still hopeful we can avoid total apocalypse. The most likely outcome I’ve seen is major economic disruption and human migration, famines, etc. but probably not total global collapse. But only time will tell.
The reality is, we just don’t know. I feel confident in saying it will get bad enough to kill food crops on a massive scale and a bunch of people will starve to death. How many is “a bunch”? I don’t know. Maybe billions. Maybe less.
But how bad it really could get, on the bad side, with as many tipping points as could exist, I think it’s impossible to say until it happens. Big changes in the earth’s climate have historically been big. The whole thing was a snowball for like 100 million years. Sometimes the ice caps melt and everything dies. Actually as I understand it, the pretty consistent answer for what happens when a big climate change happens is “almost everything dies” and then the survivors slowly adapt to the new reality. But it definitely wouldn’t be survivable for any kind of civilization (even just on pure food availability grounds) in a lot of the realistic scenarios.