Trump and Biden are not the same
Trump and Biden are not the same
heated.world
Trump and Biden are not the same
tl;dr:
....neither a Biden presidency nor Trump presidency would put the U.S. on track to achieving net zero emissions by 2050, the benchmark needed to prevent catastrophic warming of over 1.5 degrees Celsius
As alarming as that is, however, it does not mean that Biden and Trump are the same...
...a Trump administration would still add an additional 4 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere by 2030 compared to a Biden administration, according to Carbon Brief’s analysis.
That additional 4 billion tons could add more than $900 billion in global climate damages compared to Biden, the study’s authors claim.
My guy, we’re at 1.5 now
There’s a fiction that it’s far away, because all the pleasant theories that meant we were going to avoid the catastrophic outcomes put it far away
But it’s not. It’s here now. And things will get much, much, much worse from this point forward. As the author points out, we’re still setting a new record for how much fossil fuel we are burning, every single fucking year.
Yes, Biden is better, by a significant-fraction-of-the-federal budget amount. He spent a trillion dollars on the problem, and how he got the current government to be okay with that much, I have no idea.
But compared to what’s required, it’s pitiful. It’s turning on the seat belt sign when the plane’s engines are off, and you’re over the ocean. It’s moving the steering wheel around when your car is already sliding down the embankment towards the high cliff-face.
The problem is, we’ve still got our foot hard on the gas, even though we’re clearly going to go over the edge, while we keep congratulating ourselves on hitting our targets, because we lifted up on the pressure by a fraction of a fraction of an inch.
I see this misconception a lot and it's really unfortunate. We aren't at what climate scientists call 1.5°C. Being at 1.5°C in the means the average anonomly being over 1.5 for a period of decades. It isn't just a case of scientists being cautious it a completely different impact in the climate. It implies different amounts of impacts and different levels of heat energy in the whole system.
Yes we have hit 1.5°C over the last 12months partly down to el nino which is expected to subside shortly. Though there is some discussion about whether this year was an expected randomly anonomly or whether it suggests some feedback loop that's been underestimated but we can't know until enough time has passed (maybe a year).
All that just means both that the impacts we are already saying are less worse than you'd expect at long term 1.5°C and therefore we should be extremely worried but also that we have factored that in in our estimates of what outcomes are possible (though the 1.5°C window is increasingly narrow because as you say we still have our foot on the gas). So there is still time to make an impact and every fraction of a degree and kg of CO2 matters.
I find it unlikely that the average temperature year on year is going to go down now, and bring the average over a period of decades back down below 1.5.
Yes I know about El Niño. I don’t think the drop in temperature is going to bring us back down below 1.5 for any significant length of time. Certainly not for decades. Maybe for a single year. I am not a climate scientist, so maybe I’m missing something, but I can look at the graph and understand that (1) they are clearly using a baseline that includes some amount of increase already baked in, for whatever reason, (2) we are roughly 1.5 degrees above the real baseline, and (3) the idea that the trend will suddenly reverse or even hold steady now that we’re at 1.5 seems like pure fantasy since the direction of all human activity year by year is still to increase the slope of the line, not decrease it.
This is a good point. The sheer apocalyptic magnitude of the problem means that every tiny amount of change matters. Billions will die. There probably isn’t a way to prevent that completely anymore. But if we can tick things down by a fraction and save a few hundred thousand people, preserve a species of food crops that would have gone extinct, IDK what the exact outcomes are but the point is tiny changes will have a massive impact and they’re important even if the situation is dire.