Climate scientist says 2/3rds of the world is under an effective 'death sentence' because of global warming
Climate expert says 2/3rds of humans are under an effective 'death sentence'
Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.
In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun's output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we've applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they're mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we've not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn't happen "too fast" (values of "too fast" may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We're so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun's output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us -- assuming we survive that long.
That doesn't detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.
I think people are missing the point, it's not about who survives, it's about who dies and suffers.
If I told you (made up numbers) that in the next 50 years, 100 million people will die an average of 20 years early because of climate change. Sure, 100 million is just about 1.3% of humans, but it's still 100 million people, who will die at 50 instaed of 70, or at 25 instead of 45, these are people who will probably die from heat, from natrual disasters, from famine, from poor health as economies collapse.
We won't be fine, someone will be, but WE, as a group, won't be fine.
In fact, we are already not fine but it's mostly felt in poor contries.
Not to kill the mood but the harsh truth is that the generations before us doomed a lot of us, and the current generations are just starting to get it, and future generations will truly feel the ignorance of our past and the indifference of our present.
No, kill the mood. Stab it in it’s stupid fucking face and kick it’s corpse out of the way. All it’s done is be an obstacle because weak people are too uncomfortable doing little things and even more whiny now that the need is far greater.
You’re exactly right and put it perfectly: “it’s not about who survives, it’s about who suffers and dies”. People will die over something we have endless solutions to but will never put in place because the weakest, most fragile little snot-nosed fucks are afraid of the slightest discomfort.
It’s disgusting, end of.
We're estimated to have lost about 15 million additional people in 2020/2021 due to covid and a disturbingly large amount of us were salty about being asked to cover their mouths in order to stave it off. Might favor certain groups, but it's doom from every generation top to bottom.
Generations of the past had plausible deniability. Most of them may not have known what they were doing.
We knew. We’re well informed of the consequences. And we kept making it worse. We’re still making it worse. We still have too much of the population unwilling to change. How do you think future generations will remember us?
Are they accepting volunteers for the 'die early' group?
As long as climate change doesn't happen "too fast" (values of "too fast" may vary), we will engineer our way around it.
While this is true, we must also take into account who exactly will benefit from that engineering and survive. Not everyone will be able to take advantage of non-global engineering solutions, and just like with every technological advancement, the differential will be used by those "with" to subjugate those "without."
The global solutions will eventually happen. Right now nationalism gets in the way of it, but on the timescales of geology, nationalism is a blip. Hell, many scholars cite 1648 as the creation of the current system -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_system -- so hopefully this is just a phase and we'll get over it and start global scale geoengineering before we get cooked :)
Can you imagine a UN agency in charge of sun shades positioned at Sun-Earth L1 that reduced the total sunlight hitting the earth by 0.1% and halted the heating problem entirely? Wouldn't solve the carbon dioxide levels, but it'd be a start :D
(The orbital mechanics folks can chime in here. Sunshades at L1 are unstable because L1 is unstable, and sunlight exerts pressure on them like solar sails. However, there are quasi-stable positions slightly sunward of L1 where you can balance these instabilities and actually use the solar sail effect for station keeping in a swarm. It would require launching a lot of rockets, but is entirely doable with today's technology. Said rockets use hydrocarbons to launch, ironically.)
Are you actually a scientist?
Air Conditioning to mitigate climate change? That's like dowsing a fire with lighter fluid.
And you think we'll be able to out engineer the sun? In 250million years we will not be here guaranteed, and if somehow we make it it won't be in any form we know as human.
Yes, I even once got a B+ in thermodynamics, decades ago. I was proud of that B+ -- one of the hardest courses I've ever taken.
Yes, AC. It uses energy, adds heat into the total system, and you cannot fight entropy. However, you can mitigate heat gain in other places. You trade local effects for net zero global effects.
Simple example: AC running off of solar. It increases heat by decreasing albedo (solar panels are dark), but if you paint another area white, you can have a neutral effect in terms of total energy captured by the earth. But you can have a net zero heat gain and still have AC.
Obviously you'll have a harder time balancing this equation if you're using non-renewable energy sources.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever
Let me introduce you to Facebook.
Allow me to introduce you to: an abstract concept of facebook-
People, separated by thousands of miles, tap messages into their glass topped smart rocks that can then be seen by other people with smart rocks - it does this communicating with big metal trees that talk to magic caves, where millions of smart rocks think about those messages and pass them over to other magic caves by a glass wire, which in turn pass the messages to another metal tree and over to other glass topped smart rocks for people to read.
I do agree that we are very inventive, capable and imaginative when it comes to solving great problems.
Unfortunately we are also capable of becoming very destructive, ignorant, selfish and absolutely brutal to one another especially under a lot of stress and anxiety.
My greatest fear in the coming decades is mass migration and entire populations of people moving to places where they won't be welcome, and people in places where everyone is relocating to worried that it will engage endanger their survival. The biggest problems we'll face won't be environmental... they will be political and social.
2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely.
So much of our modern economy is rooted in assumptions about where and how to mass produce food stocks. Climate change threatens all of that.
Obliterating breadbasket regions in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran would devastate the regional populations.
Then you've got the wars in places like Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, further strangling access to fresh food stocks.
People joke about the looming "water wars", but consider how much Israel and the Saudis have invested in desalination and what dehydration is doing to the million plus Gaza residents who have lost access to reliable drinking water.
What happens during a substantial crop failure in the South Pacific? It isn't as though India and China haven't experienced massive famines in living memory.
You can argue the finer details, but it is easy to see a scenario in which a billion or more people are wiped out over the course of a generation, because of substantive shifts in access to basic living needs.
Shit, all the stuff (we in the USA) use corn for.
If we lost that one crop it would cause at least a partial collapse of the US worse than the Great Depression.
Wealthy countries will generally be okay, comparatively. The rest of the world will be the 2/3rds that suffer. That’s always been the case.
The United States is a wealthy country. It's on the precipice of political and social disaster WITHOUT the above described problems occurring. The idea that wealthy countries will be fine seems wildly optimistic. Perhaps you meant wealthy people.
As long as climate change doesn't happen "too fast" (values of "too fast" may vary), we will engineer our way around it.
This and I keep repeating this: don't fight the global warming, let's think how to live with it.
OK but which third gets out alright I want to move there.
Anyone else notice the amusing edit fail?
This is not enough according to Dr. Brosnan, who gave a laundry list of steps the world could take to save the ozone layer
Hey doc, wrong environmental crisis. We already took steps to save the ozone layer
You say that but the ozone layer hole actually started to grow again in the past few years.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries
Feels like it's been speeding up the past few years. Barely had a winter season this year.
@Kedly@lemm.ee, the world may be a better place than 1000 years ago but it's still worse than it was in the 90s.
Tell that to someone living in rural India or China in the 90s
Hence why I said low tide and zoom out. Right now shit seems like its regressing, BUY WE ARE STILL AHEAD of where we used to be, so the TREND is still hopeful, even if the right now sucks.
tldr; in the immediate present/future things are looking worse, but the overall timeline/trend things are looking and have been getting better
Humanity is nothing but a cancer, a pox upon this world. Pathetic.
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The Daily Mirror is a trashy tabloid out of the UK.
Yeah. That shadowy underground source. The Mirror.
The bias bot refuses to look into the mirror. How apt.
Climate scientist is 1/3rd wrong.
I guess 1/3 of the planet will be just fine...like with a ship...the 1/3 that floats will be dragged down by sinking parts. https://www.simscale.com/blog/why-did-titanic-sink-engineer/
I don’t think she’s saying 1/3 will be unaffected but 1/3 will adapt.
For example, I’m set for more climate change than most
And most importantly, both the region and myself have above average income/wealth. We can afford to adapt somewhat.
Thinking of global population, I can see being in the 1/3 least affected
If there's a death sentence to 2/3rd of the planet, it's very doubtful it will stop there to leave the remaining 1/3rd livable for long.
The 2/3rd may die sooner, but if it does, the rest will follow. Because there will be runaway global warming.
If we can stop or even reverse it, there is no need for the 2/3rds to die either.
And you’ll never believe the rent prices on the other ⅓