Is There Time To Stop Climate Change?
Not really. Sorry. We’re well past the point of being able to stop +1.5 degree C change by 2100. It would take a titanic global effort to stop +2 degrees C.
Right now, there’s almost no chance to avert a 5-10% food production loss, 50 cm sea level rise, and almost all coral reefs dying by 2100. Many of us will still be around for that. All of us will get to see the planet descending into that type of hellscape.
That doesn’t make total sense, I bet. Why are we locked in to that already? Can’t we change things now? Imagine the world as a stove. Even after you turn off the heat, you’re still cooking your spaghetti-Os until the burner cools back down. We’re locked in to see that within 80 years. We’re projected to start seeing “the bad stuff” start to happen around 2030. We’re talking regular occurrences of Hurricane Katrina-type events. CO2 has a long halflife in the atmosphere. We consider methane to be a short-lived greenhouse gas because it only stays in the atmosphere for a DECADE!
Back to the depressing news: Right now 12.5% of the planet is undernourished in terms of food availability. We know that in 2100, we can expect to be producing less food due to dramatic climate change.
What do you think that’s going to do to overall world peace when we start seeing massive amounts of climate refugees clamoring to enter less-impacted countries? What will those governments do? How will the home-governments of those refugees respond?
The type of industrial action required to avert this would be roughly the same as the total economic transformation of America during WW2.
With that type of gloom and doom discussion, what hope is there? You have to change the rules of the game. Fundamentally, we have to shift the world to this new standard.
We lost out on being the world leaders on solar. China took that.
We’re going to have to try to follow in their footsteps with economical, sustainable technology. We’re leading the world in electric cars. What about starting to make electric construction equipment? Building custom infrastructure for remote operations using all electric equipment? Perfecting distributed power systems. Things like that. If we can lead the world in that type of technology, we will keep our role and can hopefully minimize the chance of hitting +3C. It doesn’t look promising so far though
