Mainstream Climate Science: The New Denialism?
Mainstream Climate Science: The New Denialism?
This is a bit of a long one! So here’s my “Executive Summary” so you can decide whether to commit the time to the rest of it: mainstream climate scientists run the risk of becoming the new climate deniers.
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/7967232
PMeanwhile, Johan Rockström, the driving force behind the whole Planetary Boundaries framework, is now spelling it out as starkly as it needs to be:
“A 2.5°C global mean surface temperature rise is a disaster. It’s something that humanity has absolutely no evidence that we can cope with. There would be a 10-metre sea level rise. There would be a collapse of all the big biomes of planet Earth – the rainforest, many of the temperate forests, abrupt thawing of permafrost, and the complete collapse of marine biology. Over 1/3rd of the planet around the equatorial regions will be unhabitable because you will pass the threshold of health, which is around 30°C. It’s only some parts of the Sahara Desert today that has that kind of average temperature.”
The last sentence does the article a disservice by qualifying the warnings with "before it's too late". That implies we still have time, that we can fix it if we just all work together. Pro-tip: it's too late.
I think I'd feel better if the discussion turned more towards "how do we cope" vs prevention.
We can learn to cope while we also learn to fix. The actions are not muturally exclusive.
That sea level rise is most likely for next century, so you can still enjoy it while you cope...
Joke aside, maybe the 1 billion people will be the realistic scenario, and we'll just live north.
The Franzen quote for the Solarpunks:
“If you’re younger than 60, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilisation of life on Earth – massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under 30, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.
You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope today.”