Climate scientist here: what is there to reconcile? Slowing and eventually stopping warming is definitely possible, even inevitable, the question is just when and how fast we can do it, and what the repercussions are. Every fraction of a degree warmer is worse, so we should be taking as much mitigation action as fast as we can. Mitigating earlier is better than adapting later.
Sorry if you think Im throwing shade. I just dont see how mitigation is possible.
Mitigation is always possible. If we don’t do it intentionally, eventually the climate will force our hand. This will result in billions of human deaths, extinction of many organisms, and massive destruction of the current global ecology, but it will happen.
Remember, the Sahara wasn’t always a desert, and North America was more than once covered in ice.
We’re likely to die off due to poisoning the environment long before the climate makes a significant dent in our 8bn population.
We’re not going to escape sea level rise or some places becoming uninhabitable, nor a redistribution of water and total destruction of all weather models. But we can slow the changes to the point where we can adapt faster than the climate changes… and the more we mitigate, the more lives we save along the way.
Im not really saying that they use science to solve the issue, though. Im just wondering if the people most informed on the issue have done any critical thinking on a new path forward knowing the current path is insurmountable.
Right now, it seems, we are petitioning government and businesses while asking consumers to be conscious.
Maybe its time to start offering options to people who are aware of the issue but dont have means. So maybe they can start taking actions that account for the drastic devastating consequences that are yet to come.
Me, personally, I dont have children. Im hitting mid life but if im honest with myself Im probably way past it. I might see the cataclyism but I dont expect to live through it.
They proved that it is happening, that it is caused by humans and explained again and again how it can be mitigated.
That’s all science can do. You might be thinking of technology and not science.
Use less fossil fuels. We have the technology to have electrified public transport, for instance. We just don’t have the political will or the financial backing. This is not really a problem that scientists are well equipt to solve.
Stopping the digging up and burning of carbon fuels is a start.
It took the planet literal hundreds of thousands of years to get the carbon level of the atmosphere down to preindustrial levels, and we’ve undone that in the past near 200
It’ll take a lot, but it’s not impossible to increase carbon capture, use ground based solar to give shade and re-green some desert areas (proven to work) we can easily provide the entire earth’s power requirements while also increasing the carbon sequestration.
Just shoot all the planes
Reconcile what exactly? Scientists give the info, if people don’t act on it … What are you expecting researchers to do about it?
If you mean inevitable due to lack of global action, then yeah because that’s how most models present eventual societal collapse.
If you mean because its too far gone, that’s not true. There’s still time to mitigate the issues we’ve created, but the effort required increases every year, and there’s not enough being done about it.
I had to reckon with this as a civic-minded class of 2000, we got the early digital everything and they had such fanfare for bringing us up, and into the future, a gateway to a new generation - and as kids, we had media for 20 years telling us something had to change - they told us Millennials were going to solve the looming problems of the past. But then we found out the world didn’t really want those changes, and we burned out like Great Value Incandescents. Then it was several years of “how do I plan a retirement against the coming climate wars…” and then the Great Despair where I just did drugs for several years and gave up,
To be fair, I don’t think they expected that generation of the time to still be in power.
The next generations might inspire change. We can hope that change will be good, but the world hasn’t really moved from the old generations of then.
Is going to? It’s already happening. We’ve seen increased heat stroke deaths. We’ve seen animal populations get displaced.
As others said, it’s generally a routine thing. I did once see a Mastodon post from a climate scientist, where they expressed that they’re losing hope.
If that’s the kind of reconciling you’re talking about, I imagine every climate scientist has gone through that, but it’s something they tend to deal with individually rather than stating it publicly.The problem is that you don’t want to give the public the impression that it’s hopeless. Fossil fuel corporations will use that against you. And it just does not make rational sense.
Any amount of greenhouse gas that we don’t put into the atmosphere makes our lives easier. Even if you give up hope for some particular goal, you would still want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, so that it doesn’t become worse sooner.Climate change already affects our lives. We really don’t want it to become worse sooner.
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Yes, scientists have reconciled with this. In fact, climate change is now an outdated term; it is called climate collapse, and scientists (across many disciplines), most (rational, non-populist) politicians and citizens acknowledge that the dramatic effects are omnipresent.
We definitely still use the term climate change.
Glad semantics will survive any catastrophe 🤧
There are different fields of science. In my field (water resources), any scientist that is reasonable knows the climate change is happening, you can see it in any data that spans for last 50 years. We’re focused on how to deal with it, given it’ll get worse. All the future scenarios (from simulations) are worse than history, there’s less worse and more worse depending on how people will act. But I think even the worst case did not have “world war” into consideration. So we might have wayy worse than our predictions. But again, predicting future is hard, there could be effects that we’re not expecting. Specially the current geopolitical scenario when climate change (and greed) is making life hard leading into authoritative regimes which is making it worse on top of previous policies. Which exceeds the linear growth pattern used in the simulations.
Like, I don’t think a lot of simulation took into account “what if we get rid of all the environmental protection policies?”, maybe a little because they are looking at a lot of different scenarios, but not to this degree, because we didn’t expect this to happen 10 years ago.
But I think even the worst case did not have “world war” into consideration.
Specifically “blowing up regional methane storage” was probably unexpected.
The seeming lack of stopping it is a problem or economics or psychology or maybe even simple biology. I only rate one of those as ‘science’ though, two of them are grift/jargon. Physics and engineering meanwhile has done vastly more to accelerate it than to slow it down - and those dudes are way better at getting funding.
I think half the physicists sniff their own farts and convince themselves of their moral duty to deplete the earth’s resources, so that they can tell themselves they’re working on the building the USS enterprise to save mankind, whilst actually they’re pumping rocket fuel into doodlebugs.
And lose my funding?
Yes they have already reconciled that it is already happening now. They are figuring out how to stop it so that all life on Earth doesn’t go extinct…
But then Nestle says “Life? Or profits today?..PROFITS!!! FUCK YO’ WATER SUPPLY!!! I DO WHAT I WANT!!!”
There are virtually no scientists that think all life on earth will go extinct.
That ALL life will go extinct is hard to imagine, but many scientists do see a high chance that humanity is going extinct (due to climate collapse) or, at the very least a population collapse of >95% is certain to happen within 200 years.
Civilization collapse in 200 years is pretty plausible, which would go along with 95% of the population dying. For humans to go extinct would take better than 99.9% dying. 5,000 individuals would be a comfortable minimum viable population for humans to survive.
Yeah, if they were in one place. Not 5000 remaining survivors scattered all sround the world. Also, keep in mind that this would be an ongoing catastrophe, not something the world will just bounce back from once the humans are gone.
Well, the scientists are talking about 95%, which is 400 million people, and if people started dying out due to climate, you would see regions where people have a better time living. These would most likely be in the temperate bands, which are a narrow strip across South America and Africa, and a larger strip across North America and Eurasia. Those northern bands are thousands of kilometers long, and people have traveled those distances on foot before. Moreover, those 5000 people don’t have to be in one place, they need to join up in a few generations at worst. Also, climate collapse isn’t instant, as we are experiencing it right now, so those 5000 can start congregating before the collapse is complete. For reference, 0.1% of 8 billion is 1.6 million people. 5000 people is a third of a percent of that.
Killing every human is pretty hard.
Yes, essentially zero chance of human extinction also
You never know. 3-4C of temperature increase may offer some surprises.
Dude we made it through that already
What? When?
The last glacial maximum was about 25000 years ago and was 6-8 degrees C colder than today, globally. There was massive change in global climate, populations, etc. And we survived. And that was before we had established technology beyond stone tools, had relatively very limited starting population and organization, etc etc.
For all of our faults we are very good at adapting and surviving. More that nearly any other species.
We’ll survive whatever is coming as a species. Even nuclear holocaust is unlikely to totally wipe us out.
Uhhhh… they’ve been warning us for many decades, now? (and sounding alarms)
There’s also the fact that Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (and others) discovered key mechanisms of the Greenhouse Effect, and CO2’s key role in such, back in the 1800’s. So you know, want to know about a science issue? Maybe ask literal scientists?
It’s not the body of relevant scientists that are letting us down, Dafty…
Geologist here. It’s really depressing being in the community these days. We’re continually being defunded and we know better than most what a systemic crisis this planet’s ecosystem is in. For some reason we thought it was a good idea to put lawyers in charge of everything instead of experts.
We’re continually being defunded
Well, that’s the disaster happening in the States, but the time-stamp here suggests maybe you’re… in Western Europe? Shit, so what’s the trouble with lawyers, in this case?
Defunding is perennial and global, even if it’s not a targetted action like in the US. Consider for example that in the last 25 years the number of PhDs doubled while the funding of the National Science Foundation stayed flat. In the EU the situation is better, with funding at least keeping pace with inflation, but national funding depends on the whims of the current ruling party (I’m in the Czech Repoublic btw where we just elected a right-wing billionaire). Even in the best case the average acceptance rate for a grant is 10 or 15%, but in my experience it’s lower.
As for lawyers being in charge, I mean what’s the degree you go get if you want to enter politics? In China it’s engineering. In the West, almost a third of politicians have law degrees even though the fraction of lawyers in society is much less than one percent.
Thanks for explaining!
It’s been settled for 20 years that the world is warming. The efforts at this point are entirely focused on containing and limiting the damage. The fight to stop it is long over, and there’s absolutely nothing that can stop some level of catastrophic damage.
It’s actually been settled science for over 40 years at this point. Here’s Carl Sagan laying it out to Congress in 1985 https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
I mean technically the science of it has been settled for over 100 years. That’s why Alexander Graham Bell sunk his fortune into early solar energy. That we are going over the cliff into warming the likes of which haven’t been seen in 250 million years is what has been settled for at least 20.
They can either give up, or keep trying. Which would you do?
