If we keep our commitments, like the ones various nations have made to ban gas cars by 2035, we'll limit our warming to about 2.5 degrees.
The difference between 2.5 degrees and 5 degrees is the difference between a really bad time and an apocalypse.
Not to mention, we're taking about 2.5 degrees of warning by 2100. But the world didn't end there. If we don't go to 0 emissions (and there is currently no realistic path to that that any country even remotely accepts - massive degrowth of the economy), we will eventually reach 5 or more degrees of warming, it will just be a little later than 2100.
A country saying "We will do X" is much more likely to do X than a country that says "We will achieve Y" will achieve Y.
The effects get harder and harder to ignore with each summer that passes. It's easy to dismiss a hypothetical future scenario, harder to miss noticing 45 C heatwaves.
Where are you seeing this? In the last few years alone there has been hundreds of billions if not trillions put into renewable energy.
There's plenty of science looking at those trajectories and arguing about if we are on schedule and what needs to be done to stick to the schedule and if its enough.
But its a bit more sophisticated than, if the line isn't going down today, we should just give up.
Another weird thing is that, it's fairly easy to make fossil fuels less carbon intense to eke them out a bit longer e.g. don't flare or leak raw methane which is much worse than the carbon you'd get from burning it. That's a good change that actually increases fossil fuel production and that we currently subsidize doing the opposite in the US.
Not to mention, we've recently seen things like Germany's Green government approving the construction of new coal-based power plants when they couldn't get enough gas from Russia, which really tells you how likely we are to move to renewables very quickly.
Most of the money going into renewables has been in addition to existing fossil fuel plants, so at best covering growth in energy demands. But to stop global warming at 2.5 degrees, we need a sharp decline in fossil fuel consumption, and that just isn't happening, not globally and not in most places in the world locally either.
Shipping industries plan:
https://www.globalmaritimeforum.org/getting-to-zero-coalitio...
Aviation's plan:
https://www.iata.org/en/programs/environment/flynetzero/
Road freight's plan:
https://www.weforum.org/projects/decarbonizing-road-freight-...
To be fair, it might at the rate we're going
In India's case it's silly to make a comparison.
Unfortunately things look grim when you look at the state of international relations. It doesn't feel like we'll see progress on international carbon pricing anytime soon.
Carbon taxes are irrational and not a viable alternative.
Why by country? Because that is how we've split the world up for regulating.
When deciding each country's share of that allowed global tonnage, per capita does matter. Other allocations, such as equal amounts per country, lead to absurd outcomes. Here's a comment giving an example [1].
And, while progress has been made, fossil fuels are still by far the cheapest source of energy around, especially if you don't have great expertise. So, in principle, we should be letting the developing nations of the world use much more fossil fuels to power their economies, while those that have been using it for centuries at this point should use far less.
Note that I'm not actually advocating for this, as stopping global warming is far more important than some abstract notion of historical fairness in international politics, which is even more idealistic than world peace.
I'm fairly certain that doesn't do a thing for ocean acidification...
I suspect the next major climate conference will include discussion on this topic given the present effects of global warming and our inability to control carbon emissions in any region for the last 30 years.
CO2 polluters would just pump out enough more that they would make no difference. But stopping them after that would be disastrous.
Very much so!
"Anyone who would honestly try to think about it would give up on life"
Not at all. There are lots of people who studied this stuff carefully, thought honestly about it, and came to realize that the claims of doom and armageddon are woefully over-exaggerated. They realize that the people claiming the world is going to end because of climate change have been making those very same predictions for 70 years+ now and were always wrong, because their 'science' is flawed and agenda-driven.
Of course you aren't allowed to listen to such people, let alone be one, lest the sandwich-board wearers have a meltdown about it, so the mass hysteria gets worse every year, and the predictions get ever more extreme and less connected to reality.
"Meanwhile the world is less organized than ever."
Excellent! That is how it should be. The sort of people who want to "organize" the world have a terrible track record of causing hundreds of millions of deaths when their organized plans go awry and they can't admit it. The world needs much less organization a.k.a. central planning, and way more people being honest about climate science.
Name two (that aren't Bjorn Lomborg).
Nic Lewis, Roy Spencer, Judith Curry, William Happer, Richard Lindzen
There are many more of course. Dr Spencer's page is a good introduction to some of the issues (but by no means the only ones) that cause scientists to disclaim armageddon predictions:
So people don't take it seriously for a whole lot of reasons:
1. There's no penalty associated with making end-of-the-world predictions that turn out to be wrong, not even in the short term. We saw this with COVID. Scientists made predictions that were totally invalidated just weeks later, repeatedly, with no visible consequences or even any admission that anything had gone wrong. Indeed they routinely lied about their own predictions that were made in writing, and got away with it!
2. This is 100x more true in the long term. Climate predictions have a long history of being wrong. One dramatic example is Stanford Professor Paul R. Ehrlich who in 1969 was saying we'd all "disappear in a cloud of blue steam" within 20 years. He predicted America would be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. He said "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people". He was claiming the threat was global cooling before switching to claiming the opposite.
What happens to people who make such expensive claims (for society) and yet turn out to be wrong? Nothing - they pretend they were right all along and the parts of our society most dependent or in hock to academia goes along with the fraud rather than call it out (which is anyway pointless because universities are basically impervious to accountability for their output).
But people see it, they remember, and they tune it out. I think this is why skepticism is more common amongst the elderly population. They're old enough to remember the long history of bad claims. They see that getting it wrong never matters, that wrongness is rewarded. And they stop believing. The young haven't seen that so swallow it all.
3. Scientists who predict doom often don't act like they believe it. The famous discovery that climatologists attend more foreign conferences than many other types of scientists, the way Prof Ferguson insisted lockdown was impossible to avoid and then broke his own rules to see his married lover, etc. These people invariably claim everyone must submit to terrible hardship that mysteriously vanishes the moment it might get in the way of something they want.
And so on.
I'd love for you to be optimistic! But it's unclear why you're not, beyond a perceived failure to convince other scientists. That means virtually nothing though. The position of these scientists I named is "the temperature wanders up and down, most of it is natural, a bit of it is artificial, it probably doesn't matter much". Of course you can't convince climatologists whose entire career, funding, labs, and self-identity are pegged to the idea that climatology is of critical importance. What would they say exactly? Oops, sorry guys, we realized we made some mistakes and there's no real climate crisis, stand down, false alarm? They could never do that! The social pressure to only ever ramp up their predictions and never down is overwhelming in that sort of role.
So the people who need it to be true due to their prior commitments are the last people you should care about whether they're convinced or not. It's people who are new to the topic, neutral, or who have taken the "climate realist" position despite the strong social pressures not to, who are worth paying attention to. And if you do, well, they make a lot of good points. The end result is kinda unsatisfying though. You can't feel good about saving the climate by doing tokenistic things like buying offsets or going to marches, if you come to believe there's probably bigger environmental problems out there.
Also I don't buy the whole "self-identity...pegged to the idea that climatology is of critical importance" thing - a) climatology is still fundamentally important regardless of how much a problem AGW is b) plenty of scientists are pretty keen to stand out in their field and be remembered historically for being the one that demonstrated the current consensus was wrong. Lindzen tried to do that, and had a pretty decent hypothesis, but it just hasn't stood up to the testing that's been done (even he still only considers it a hypothesis).
The models have always over-estimated warming. Things haven't been warming faster than they predicted, they've warmed slower. Claims to the contrary are the sort of retroactive rewriting of history that makes climatology seem so untrustworthy. If you plot model predictions against reality you get charts like these:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-90-mode...
The blue dotted line is satellite observations. The green dotted line is temperature as measured by averaging surface level thermometers from weather stations. Notice how those two measurements don't agree at all. That's because the surface datasets are heavily corrupted by various factors (ask for details if you're curious). But also notice that both are running well below the average of the models, and in fact observed temperatures from satellites are below basically all (>~95%) of the models.
"climatology is still fundamentally important regardless of how much a problem AGW is"
Do you really believe that? More importantly, do you believe other people believe that? How many people would care about climatology if they were reporting that nothing much was happening, the climate was pretty stable actually and humanity didn't have to change much of anything? I think if that was their consensus position climatology would have the same status as people who study butterflies, or people who study obscure metals. Yes there'd be some funding and a small number of scientists would be passionate about it. But the field would be tiny, they'd never be in the news, politicians wouldn't care.
"plenty of scientists are pretty keen to stand out in their field and be remembered historically for being the one that demonstrated the current consensus was wrong"
That's a very nice idea and I really wish it were true. I've been following how science works very carefully as an outsider for the past few years now, and less carefully for about a decade before that, and I just don't see this at all. Nothing special about science in this regard. Going against a convivial agreement of your peers is always hard in any context, especially when what you're arguing is bad for everyone involved.
Consider the following story of what happened when Remote Sensing Systems published an independent satellite temperature dataset that contradicted the "consensus" surface datasets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOHrYY3yAGE
The video demonstrates two things: (1) scientists who take the realist position immediately predicted that RSS would come under immense pressure to rewrite their results to remove the contradiction, and that within a few years the data would have been altered, (2) that's exactly what happened.
If you disproved the idea there's a climate crisis (which has been done! many times!) then this is what happens:
1. Other climatologists will claim you're wrong, a minority, outside the consensus etc. They will not care what your argument is. They will instead tell everyone that listening to you is dangerous because to stop believing in a crisis means the world will end.
2. Journalists won't want to report on your work because of (1). Instead they will smear it, believing themselves to be doing the right thing.
3. You won't be able to get papers published easily or at all. That in turn will eventually cut off your funding.
4. If you did somehow succeed against the odds, well done. Funding would drop like a stone so you just wrecked the careers of all your colleagues, many of whom are friends, also your students who are doing their PhDs and so on. Also you are now hated by the public who are asking themselves why experts were wrong for decades in such a catastrophic manner.
There are no benefits to being the guy who is right when your colleagues are all wrong. Not in climatology or any field, really. That's why our culture has so many social norms designed to protect the contrarians like freedom of speech, freedom of the press and so on. Unfortunately in recent times and especially in academia these norms have broken down completely. There are some outsiders and especially retired people who are willing and able to say things that are true, but within the field it's hopeless. Anyone who points out the magnitude of the exaggerations and corruptions is directly attacking the people who control their own careers and success.
Similar will happen with climate change. Once we get desperate enough (as in actual crop failures and actual fear of hunger), suddenly, figuring out mitigation and reversing techniques will become more profitable than minting shitcoins, and the humanity will very quickly figure something out.
Currently, the real desperation isn't there yet. There is a lot of fearmongering driven by hunger for power (restricting what others can do is power) or corporate profits (electric cars are a huge business niche that is only competitive due to the climate angle). It is doing its part, but it's akin to driving at half the speed to conserve fuel, while simultaneously having a huge leaky hole in the gas tank. Better than nothing, but won't fully solve the problem.
The best we can do currently is try to not completely forget the real scientific method (experiment -> theorize -> refine -> reproduce -> question -> improve) and the real project management (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely goals with prioritization by cost/reward/risk). We will need those thigs when the shit really hits the fan and they are currently being very rapidly eroded in favor of pledging loyalty to the unquestionable leader and throwing poop at the competing tribe.
which is definitely a big part of our human struggle, but that doesn't mean we can't do better by looking at exactly those previous transformational periods. (and we can see that it did not affect everyone the same, hence waiting for crop failures in areas that emit the vast majority of CO2 means condemning tens/hundreds of millions of people to having a super doubleplus ungood time. oh and that's when wars start, when desperation makes it look like a better alternative.)
it was not innovation that decreased smog and lead pollution.
yet at the same time there's this paradox of history drawing straight lines on graphs:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/13/does-reality-drive-str...
switching to cars generated a lot of economic surplus directly. just as back in the days the new railway lines.
the problem with CO2 that it's an externality. exactly that horse to car switch introduced this hidden trade off, and we need to make it seen, and then markets can/will pick the innovative solutions that optimize for less CO2.
My wife and I were discussing this the other day actually. I was born in 86 so I'm not terribly old, but even I remember growing up as a kid in Idaho that one didn't just go to the grocery store to buy salmon--it wasn't really available. If you wanted salmon, you had to plan for it. Nowadays I can find salmon at every grocery store at any inpulse. Is it nice? Yes. Necessary? No.
Some people are changing things about their lives. It might be 1% of the population, but that 1% should be put on a pedestal instead of treated as non-existent like is happening here. A much more accurate statement would be:
"Only 1% of the population is selflessly making the choice to sacrifice quality of life/convenience to significantly decrease their emissions, whereas 99% is not doing this at all."
quite the contrary. trying to grow food where it needs a fuckton of water and fertilizer (and pesticides and herbicides).
because of idiotic subsidies.
similarly it's not the heating/cooling, it's the lack of modern insulation and heat pumps.
...
multi hour commutes are bad anyway, but even a few minutes in cars every day at the same time as everyone else is bad (because it's not scalable)
Thats an improvement in quality if lude, held back by efficient free market
Queue all the green democrats telling me all the silly reasons we can’t do it. Infinitely chasing a perfect outcome.
It’s the only plausible solution to buy us the time we need to advance renewable technology and move from fossil fuels without drastically altering quality of life. And we’ll do it just as soon as green democrats give up on the absurd dream of some renewable utopia just around the corner.
I predict no later than 2060.
and I doubt that trend will let up for a while.
And this is the trap we find ourselves in. People have no reason to achieve great things outside of getting theirs.
Meanwhile the world is less organized than ever.