Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.
And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.
That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.
By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and are cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives. Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to economics.
The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going.
There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse".
Nuclear superpowers are among the least likely countries to actually collapse from climate damage.
US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk.
First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices. Countries where the same food price spike would come with a major death toll don't have the tools to kick off WW3.
Not the only reason, no. But their nuclear ambitions certainly did contribute to their current predicament.
Nuclear weapons take time, expertize, resources and sustained political will to develop and deploy. If you have all of that, you might be able to put all of that towards climate adaptation instead. Or: go for the nukes and bet hard that you aren't going to get bombed to shit for it. Worked out for NK, but doesn't seem to have worked for Iran.
I think the level of tolerance US has for marginally stable autocracies with nuclear weapons has receded permanently.
Not to mention that merely having a nuclear bomb doesn't automatically allow one to cause WW3. Nuclear weapons were used in a world war already, and that didn't even destroy a single country - let alone the world. It takes a lot of nukes, and a lot of delivery mechanisms, to actually move the needle on the matter of human civilization existing.
Invade? No. Bomb? Probably. Same if for India if e.g. Sri Lanka decides it wants nuclear weapons.
Global warming will unfortunately disproportionately hit poor, equatorial countries. (Also, starving countries can’t afford a nuclear programme. There is no breakout risk in Sudan.)
And you think a second, much larger Syrian refugee migration will have 0 impact on France?
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything and everyone is connected.
There are many mechanisms of positive feedback that can accelerate global warming instead of just reaching an equilibrium at a higher average temperature than now.
If some of those mechanisms of positive feedback would be triggered, a global catastrophe would be possible, due to the excessive speed of the climate change, which does not give enough time for the biosphere to adapt to it.
Instead of hoping that we will be lucky, it would have been much better to avoid such risks and prevent further increases in CO2 concentration and average temperature.
I am old enough to have seen a dramatic change in climate from the time when I was a child, when the seasons were still exactly as they had been described for centuries and millennia at that location in Europe, to the present time, when winters are no colder than autumns were before and I have never used again my winter clothes and boots for about 15 years.
I find such a radical change during my lifetime quite scary and I see no evidence for claims that "the world will keep going". The truth is that nobody knows whether this will be true and hoping that this will happen without doing anything to guarantee such an outcome is reckless.
Plenty of feedback mechanisms were proposed, investigated, and found lacking. It's a "makes climate change 10% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing, not a "makes climate change 1000% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing.
If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
https://books.rockslide.ca/read/780/epub#epubcfi(/6/14!/4/2/...
We sink the boats.
Or am I misunderstanding your comment?
Like let them build few of those sci-fi domes and let them keep buying disposable bottled oxygen? I don't get the pessimism. India makes its own rockets. Pakistan has nukes. Why are they supposed to be incapable of holding the nation together on Mars-like Earth?
Tokyo is already hitting 40C/100F at >90% RH during summers. It's already mildly unsurvivable. Nobody cares. Maybe in 10-20 years we'd be wearing spacesuits, but do anyone seriously think the equatorial regions will be uninhabitable and land prices on northern Europe is going to skyrocket???
> Humans may also experience lethal hyperthermia when the wet bulb temperature is sustained above 35 °C (95 °F) for six hours.
More taxes go to ammunition for autonomous border guard systems.
Just look here in the USA -- the Democrats tried to do some forward thinking things like subsidizing solar and wind, and they were rewarded by losing at the ballot box (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).
There are no rewards for long term thinking, so it's hard to get anyone to do it.
It's not obvious what we can do (individual actions taken within the context of a system are dwarfed by structural forces of the system), but we're the only ones who are going to do it. So, let's assume we did fix things, and we're looking back from 2050, doing a retrospective. What things did we end up doing, that got us to that point?
Almost all emissions come from factories. There are only two ways to reduce that -- a global set of rules that increases costs to reduce emissions, and an overall reduction in consumption, via a carbon tax.
I'm sure there are people who've specced out detailed proposals for this sort of thing. There might even be previous cases where they've succeeded, which we can learn from. Neither of those "two ways" you mentioned are things that I can do, but I may be able to slightly reduce the intensity of the opposition. (Companies tend to like when regulations require their competitors to do things they're already doing, after all.)
industry, transport and home use (heating & A/C mostly) are all roughly 30% of emissions.
(another way of splitting it says electricity, industry, heating, and transport are roughly almost 25% each. It depends whether you count electricity on its own or bundle it with how its used)
But I agree with you about solutions. The market will quickly bankrupt any companies that induce extra costs to decarbonify. It's the governments job to ensure that externalized costs like CO2 emissions are internalized via carbon taxes. (or alternatives to carbon taxes, which are worse)
This is disingenuous. It's one of many in that it may have contributed 0.0001%. If they wouldn't have done that, would they currently have more power? Absolutely not, believing otherwise means being clueless about what has motivated people to vote in certain ways.
The topics have different purposes. Fossil fuels vs renewables in particular hasn't won the reps a single race, I repeat. Every race they've won, they would've won without it. And every race they've lost, they would've lost without it. The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.
How can you possibly know this? How could you know what is in the mind of every voter and why they make the choice they do?
They bring it up for a reason -- because their research says talking about helps them win elections.
You think that’s bad... Up here in Canada we’ll have to deal with Murican immigrants as things heat up. Talk about killing the vibe.
As it turns out the most abhorrent things can come out with those Epstein files and it doesn't seem to hurt Trumps support among his base any. Doesn't seem to be threatening any legal action for him or implicated parties. Once again only Maxwell is in jail, somehow, with dozens and dozens of witnesses stepping forward. Democrats have been grandstanding on this man for 10 years now and haven't been able to stop him. I think by this point it is clear he is going to get away with everything even if people want to write about him "flailing." Him flailing is literally him achieving all his domestic and foreign policy goals right now and his base couldn't be more pleased...
I guess I’m not someone, because I’m still open on whether Trump is a pedophile. (I don’t think he is. I’m open to being proven wrong.)
> the most abhorrent things can come out with those Epstein files and it doesn't seem to hurt Trumps support among his base any
We don’t know this. And we don’t know how those outside his base on whose votes he and his Congress depend would react.
From his own FBI department a few days ago. Federal court already found him liable for rape of Jean Carrol. Why are you giving this man any benefit of the doubt when he quacks like a rapist pedophile?
About 9 times higher.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
One local drought can't be attributed to or be proof of global warming.
It's like smoking causing lung cancer; (the following numbers are made up) 5 in 100 non-smokers might get lung cancer but 20 in 100 smokers do. 5 of those smokers would have gotten lung cancer anyway and 15 wouldn't have but there's no way to know which individuals are in which cohort.
You're drawing (or seem to be) a causal link from climate change to this specific drought/war.
Climate change is a statistical anomaly that cannot be seen in individual events.
For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.
Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.
Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.