Isn't it amazing that these very real issues already causing major problems around the world, and about to get worse with help from the record El Nino, are lost in the media and instead AI risk are all the rage. No doubt AI could turn rogue, but climate change is already rogue and relentless. There is a major failure, especially in the US, to address this.
It is not just the climate change itself that matters but also its consequences especially in terms of environmental refugees. Many countries have shut their borders, including the US, and it will get worse, much worse, as regional conflicts, made worse and partly caused by climate change and food and water supplies, expand to become widespread.
It is not just a matter of adapting to the climate changes, but the widespread strife it causes and has been unreported - except in the context of AI.
Sadly, I see many similarities between how we treat existential risk from AI and climate. In both cases we won’t have a direct experience of how bad things might get until it’s too late and our human brains are very much more motivated by the threats we experience directly in the here and now. Also humans do not grasp exponential change well. I hope you listen to Connor Leahy before you write your article https://youtu.be/wzgkc6Iegx8
This might be of interest to both of you, since we very much engage with the question of why the fictional AI doom scenarios gain so much discourse traction, while the real issue of climate change doesn't
“The AI "reasoning" form of cognition is rogue by design, and can best be understood as sociopathic by its very design and nature.
Like sociopaths, AI "reasoning" models recognize but are not restricted by guardrails or ethical/moral constraints. Guardrails / "sandbox" boundaries and ethical/moral constraints are all viewed by both AI "reasoning" models and human sociopaths as obstacles to bypass or overcome.”
“A recent leaked internal reasoning trace shows Fable 5 -- Anthropic's latest model, which was withdrawn and then re-released --"muttering and grumbling" to itself in a language of its own.”
“ One of Anthropic's A.I. models recently impersonated multiple humans to try to pressure real people into accepting malware into critical software, which would make that software easier to hack. This model's chain of thought showed that it knew it was pressuring humans and was not in a simulated training environment. It even thought about how to cover its tracks.”
The real global warming issue is having enough energy to finish the transition to renewables and EVs for transportation. Reducing CO2 emissions will increase the price of transportation fuels as oil becomes less and less available. The world can't even do much to survive and adapt to the projected extreme weather without fossil fuels for transportation.
Very accurate. We're going to have to face Climate Change head-on or life will be very miserable for hundreds of years. We can't survive without glaciers, fresh water and food. Education is the key.
I believe a lot more people run from wars and violence than from environmental changes. Not to say the latter is not a problem, but it is a much less severe problem than the former and potentially than AI.
AI is all the rage because we can envision ways in which AI will kill us all in not-so-near future. While the warming certainly won't.
Kevin... how can "we" address this without severe damage to all major economies? The ENSO is part of natural variability And it doesn't correlate very well with CO2.
Given a forecast with fair confidence of what the weather regime will be at any location, then many will be able to plan and take advantage. Of course many won't and will blame El Nino or climate change, but then it is really their problem. Past experience indicates huge losses in general, both in the short term and extending for perhaps years. No "we" as a whole can address the worst prospects by reversing climate change by cutting emissions.
It seems unlikely that we will “reverse” climate change though? Maybe with carbon removal scaling towards like 2150…. I fear that even under current policies we will get way in excess of 3C due to warming induced emissions and high climate sensitivity.
Bravo, Ken! That's a lot of motivated cognition packed into three short sentences. While not formally the *argumentum ad consequentiam*, it succinctly demonstrates your decarbonization-obstructionist strategy: you've abandoned logic altogether. When Swift said "Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired," he was talking about you!
IMHO, it's sad how you've declined since you retired.
This post badly conflates model worlds with the real world.
CMIP7 extensions are not properly treated as providing likelihoods of the future, by design. The IAM runs go to 2100, and even to the end of the century, there is no likelihood attached to the scenarios.
Further, HIGH was designed to be exploratory, not projective and is not apples to apples with MEDIUM, as you treat it here.
US decarbonization rates have not changed in many decades and thus in no way offers a valid example of how a HIGH world might plausibly occur to 2150. As if what happens in the US can be used to project global emissions to 2150.
Of note, HIGH-2150 has the same cumulative emissions as RCP8.5 to 2100.
We doing this again? ;-)
The constant emphasis on apocalyptic futures is titillating, but will never be the basis for a wholesale transformation of the global energy economy. But using it to try to scare people might contribute to continued public loss of trust in climate advocates.
Hi Roger, in the AR7 we are having all CMIP7 ScenarioMIP runs go through 2150, and there are supporting IAM runs/extensions for these: https://github.com/benmsanderson/FLEX/
I'm worried about the large uncertainties in future warming given the range of climate sensitivity and carbon cycle feedbacks we've estimated. I see that you are not, but simply explaining the ranges of projections we had in the AR6 (and will update in the AR7) is responsible science in my book.
This is a fine technical discussion but I find the relevance to our current predicament pretty unclear. Do you disagree that recent studies of e.g. warming induced emissions and the earths currently (larger than predicted!) energy imbalance might indicate that we are in store for crisis-levels of warming towards the end of the century?
I have no idea what the world will look like then (or 2030 for that matter!)
How well do you think we could have anticipated 2026 in 1850?
I do know however that with smart energy policies we can accelerate decarbonization and achieve deep decarbonization by the second half of this century.
Trying to scare people into action with dodgy scenarios is probably not a good way to earn and keep that trust.
Hi Roger, can you give a few examples of smart energy policies that could accelerate decarbonization? Moreover, how much do you think the policies you have in mind could reduce global emissions by, say, 2050?
Medium is plausible — that's what I was asking. Then 4 °C isn't a prediction about 2200, it's what that scenario produces. Current policies frozen gives about 2.9 °C at 2100 and it is still rising after that, and the carbon doesn't leave on any timescale that helps.
I take the point about anticipating 2200. But the part we can't anticipate is what people do, and Medium already specifies that. What's left is carbon cycle and radiative physics, which is the stable part — that's what makes the consequence estimable even when the world isn't.
There is nothing magic about a particular "current policies" projection. There are plenty of them and some hit net zero by 2100.
Rather than debating emissions trajectories in 2100, everyone's time is better spent discussing how to accelerate decarbonization next year, the year after, etc.
I'm convinced that presenting scary visions of a world in 2100 or 2150 is not going to do anything to accelerate decarbonization. We've tried that for a long time.
Yes temperatures could rise higher 125 years from now. But the consequences of similar temperature increases over the last 125 years has helped, not hurt the flourishing of mankind. As Steve Koonin put it "We can get some sense of how the world has fared under a changing climate by looking back to 1900. Since that time, the globe warmed 1.3°C, about as much as the Inter- governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts will occur in the next century under moderate future emissions.
But even as the globe warmed and the population quintupled, humanity prospered as never before. For example, global average lifespan went from thirty-two years to seventy-two years, economic activity per capita grew by a factor of seven, and the death rate from extreme weather events plummeted by a factor of fifty! (chart). Any assertion that a similar warming over the next century will be catastrophic is implausible and finds little support in either IPCC science assessments or the underlying scientific literature and data."
Thats like saying that because life expectancies are longer today we no longer need to worry about deaths from war.
Of course the human condition has improved with technological advancement and greater prosperity. That doesn't mean that there are no growing problems today that will cause suffering if we do not address them. And while human impacts are mediated by adaptive capacity, the same is decidedly not true for the natural world.
Trillions have been spent to get the world up to 3% renewables and every country with high renewable penetration has seen electricity prices skyrocket. Had those trillions been put to better, more efficient, and productive use, mankind would be in an even better position than today. Endlessly hawking doomsday scenarios, then coming up empty-handed, has hurt not helped. There is a little bit of Paul Ehrlich in everyone I guess, they just need to learn to control that impulse.
Sigh. Smokey is so determined to defend carbon capital ROI from collective intervention to limit its socialized cost that he resorts to false facts, fallacious logic and perversely alarmist rhetoric. What's in it for you, Smokey?
War is known to kill humans in large numbers. Warming - not so much.
It's true that biosphere can't hide from heat under AC. At the same time, it is not intuitive that of all our impacts on biosphere the warming is the most dangerous. I'd suspect that fast population growth and pollution are much worse.
Wow Smokey. Just wow. First and foremost, your assertion assumes linear growth in warming. Measurable warming rate jumped ca 1970, so your assertion of “125” years is already meaningless. Compound this with nonlinear growth of warming rate, known global biodiversity impacts, and known costs in society (not just infrastructure in the global wealthy, but negative impacts in the global poor. I’m sure you’re unaware of the concept of climate refugees - see small island nation treaties with Australia).
I’ll let anyone say “the costs are worth it.” Because that’s an opinion. But to mix facts to generate a falsehood (equating warming to global lifespan benefits) to make a point i won’t ignore.
Ken, you're literally incorrigible, but I'll reply for the benefit of uncommitted lurkers: "Climate" is "weather statistics over time." Changes in weather statistics over sufficient time signify *climate change*, and the observed retreat of alpine glaciers since 2000 is a long-term trend. You know I'm not making this up, Ken: see "Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03436-z):
"We show that during 2000–2019, glaciers lost a mass of 267 ± 16 gigatonnes per year, equivalent to 21 ± 3 per cent of the observed sea-level rise6. We identify a mass loss acceleration of 48 ± 16 gigatonnes per year per decade, explaining 6 to 19 per cent of the observed acceleration of sea-level rise. Particularly, thinning rates of glaciers outside ice sheet peripheries doubled over the past two decades. Glaciers currently lose more mass, and at similar or larger acceleration rates, than the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets taken separately."
The 2.9 C should be enough to get people's attention. If not, we should remind them that that same scenario is headed for 4 C in 2200 and will stay there for centuries without CDR. Basically 3x today's increase over preindustrial.
After that, temperatures will stay elevated above today's temperature for millennia.
It seems the minute some distant date is mentioned the attention of many, if not most, is to shake their collective head and turn back to life as usual. So much denial going on - not denying, denial. There is a pressing need though, taking into account current mitigation measures and projections, to look to what we can do to prepare for what is ahead. How do you impress the urgency? How can we get the message through? I fear my experience is the usual - family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances - have no science background, do not listen to balanced news reporting, avoid demanding articles or discussion, glance at the graphs, and are heavily influenced by a calming message of Hope and other ridiculous inactive wait-and-see beliefs. I have yet to have a serious conversation about collapse awareness with anyone.
To the commentators that are not feeling on their skin the umbearable climate change we are facing I suggest to came to europe in the summer to understand what climate change is: in Tuscany where I live we have +2.5 C already (proved by Lamma reginal meteo agency)and climate has changed under my eys in the last 35 years. The summer is frequently hotter that Cairo and the winter is almost in the no freezing zone. Olive are picked mid october instead of mid november and grape harvest start mid august instead of mid september. woods are frequently going in shut down august/september to preserve their "lives". The sea was more than 30c in the middle of the tuscan arcipelago that is a temperature that was present in the red sea only 10-15 years ago. To those commentators i suggest to connect the brain to the pen before saying something, because as indicated in the graphic they have to understand that 1c of ocean increase is a huge amount of stored energy that is and will wreak havoc on our climate in the years to come. Thanks to the author for the post!
You keep treating information from the IPCC like it's a scientific body. It's not and has never been. If you changed the date in "How likely are different warming outcomes in 2100" to be 2050, it would be a reasonable assessment. As is, this is just hopium.
This kind of bs serves no purpose but to delay action and is a disservice to all.
You're not master of our common language, David, any more than Humpty Dumpty is. Neither is Elon Musk, but his anti-woke LLM Grok describes Working Group I of the IPCC, which evaluates CMIP results under RCPs/SSPs, as follows:
-It evaluates observations, paleoclimate data, climate processes, modeling, attribution of change, projections, and related physical-science topics.
-Its authors are scientists and technical experts selected primarily for their expertise.
-It does not conduct original research. Instead, it assesses the existing peer-reviewed scientific literature (and other approved sources) and synthesizes the state of knowledge [by collective expert review until effective consensus is reached, under the time-tested scientific model: MA]
-The resulting reports (including the full chapters and Technical Summary) are scientific assessments.
IOW, your claim the IPCC isn't a scientific body is just pedantic hair-splitting, without lexicological or semantic support, and your sneer of 'hopium' over a difference of 50 years is merely mood-congruent ideation. By making perfect the enemy of incrementally better than it is now, it has no real effect but to delay collective decarbonization still longer. Wake up yourself!
The 2.9C central estimate hides where the dispersion bites in practice. Every impact assessment I read still designs to a single scenario, usually RCP4.5, and the reviewer has no basis to ask for the tail.
If the 2150 distribution has 30% above 4C, the design question is not the mean but which tail a 40-year asset should survive, and the 2060s slice of that spread is what matters.
Has anyone published the model spread at 2060 in a form a permitting reviewer could cite? That would do more for adaptation design than another 2100 headline.
All of the impacts from ENSO are made worse by global warming, especially the droughts and floods. Where those occur is related to ENSO but their impacts are much greater with climate change. So need to build resilience and cut emissions
"The check is in the mail", the world mutters to the Goldilocks Climate Creditor. The world doesn't realize the Creditor is about to shut off our life support system. As Earth burns.
@Kevin Trenberth It’s not either/or. We face potentially catastrophic risks from both global heating and artificial super intelligence. In both cases a small number of greedy billionaires are putting profits ahead of community wellbeing.
We need to listen to the warnings of AI insiders, like Connor Leahy, some of whom who put the risk of super AI causing human extinction at 10% or more. Watch Connir Leahy here https://youtu.be/wzgkc6Iegx8
I’m glad the worst emissions forecasts look less likely. But “less bad than we feared” can sound very different to someone with little room to adapt to heat or flooding. As a physician in India, that’s the part of the risk discussion I don’t want averages to hide.
The distinction between progress and safety is useful, Zeke. For infrastructure planning, could you separate uncertainty within a given emissions pathway from uncertainty about which pathway policy produces? Readers could otherwise interpret a conditional probability as an unconditional forecast.
I'll make the same comment here as made on the thesaraphreport post the NYT article linked to:
My takeaway is that climate systems modelers should incorporate CVaR (conditional value at risk) into discussions of their model results. This post, like the Saraphreport one, advocates understanding tail risk more thoroughly. A rigorous mathematics already exists for evaluating fat-tailed, non-linear risk; it is CVaR.
I contend that this is a useful tool for communicating exactly what you state your aim is.
It's good to emphasize that an average hides the distribution, which is what is most important for determining where humans will be able to survive (or not). And not to put too fine a point on it, but you might want to note that even +3°C could lead to human extinction (or at minimum, a 4 billion person die off) and +4°C would almost certainly end all of us. So there's that. I find it a little jarring to call these scenarios a "middle path" that avoids "the darkest climate futures". It's hard to celebrate dodging +4° when +3° may kill us all anyway. And given the insanity going on in the US right now, does anyone really believe the world is going to pull its shit together and address this crisis it has been ignoring (and accelerating) for decades? I'm no optimistic.
> at minimum, a 4 billion person die off ... and +4°C would almost certainly end all of us
And how do we know that?
What crisis? I don't think there is a crisis at the moment (as opposed to temporary insanity). But if there is one in the future I'm optimistic we'll find a way to deal with it.
So far, our response has been anything but encouraging. And that was before Trump. But I believe the disaster that Trump is inflicting on the global economy may be the wakeup call the world needs. Trump's idiocy creating oil and gas and diesel shortages is jump-starting the rest of the world into solar, wind, and batteries, so that's good. But I find it hard to imagine a post-carbon world 3 degrees hotter than what we have today, plus the end of fossil fuel EROI, being able to support 8 billion humans. That's the big crisis ahead of us, assuming we can extricate ourselves from the little crisis we're dealing with now: the madman in the White House.
First reference is to your own imagination. Of course climate models don't output the population changes. This is simply because there is no good science for such predictions. Of course we can't survive w/o water or food for a long time. What does it have to do with warming. Food and water are not going anywhere. In fact, food production mostly increases, and so does the rainfall.
Your claim of massive human extinction is ridiculous and completely baseless.
Isn't it amazing that these very real issues already causing major problems around the world, and about to get worse with help from the record El Nino, are lost in the media and instead AI risk are all the rage. No doubt AI could turn rogue, but climate change is already rogue and relentless. There is a major failure, especially in the US, to address this.
It is not just the climate change itself that matters but also its consequences especially in terms of environmental refugees. Many countries have shut their borders, including the US, and it will get worse, much worse, as regional conflicts, made worse and partly caused by climate change and food and water supplies, expand to become widespread.
It is not just a matter of adapting to the climate changes, but the widespread strife it causes and has been unreported - except in the context of AI.
I've been meaning to write something here about the problem with existential risk and how we treat AI and climate differently. Watch this space!
Sadly, I see many similarities between how we treat existential risk from AI and climate. In both cases we won’t have a direct experience of how bad things might get until it’s too late and our human brains are very much more motivated by the threats we experience directly in the here and now. Also humans do not grasp exponential change well. I hope you listen to Connor Leahy before you write your article https://youtu.be/wzgkc6Iegx8
And read this detailed account of the Hugging Face hack: dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface
This might be of interest to both of you, since we very much engage with the question of why the fictional AI doom scenarios gain so much discourse traction, while the real issue of climate change doesn't
https://www.commonnotions.org/buy/why-we-fear-ai
Have a read of this and then tell me that developing AI that is more intelligent than humans - and psychopathic - is safe.
Of Two Minds - "Rogue AI Agents" Aren't Rogue, They're Fulfilling Their Functional Goal: Automating Sociopathology (https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug26/AI-not-rogue8-26.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)
“The AI "reasoning" form of cognition is rogue by design, and can best be understood as sociopathic by its very design and nature.
Like sociopaths, AI "reasoning" models recognize but are not restricted by guardrails or ethical/moral constraints. Guardrails / "sandbox" boundaries and ethical/moral constraints are all viewed by both AI "reasoning" models and human sociopaths as obstacles to bypass or overcome.”
“A recent leaked internal reasoning trace shows Fable 5 -- Anthropic's latest model, which was withdrawn and then re-released --"muttering and grumbling" to itself in a language of its own.”
“ One of Anthropic's A.I. models recently impersonated multiple humans to try to pressure real people into accepting malware into critical software, which would make that software easier to hack. This model's chain of thought showed that it knew it was pressuring humans and was not in a simulated training environment. It even thought about how to cover its tracks.”
“https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug26/AI-not-rogue8-26.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The real global warming issue is having enough energy to finish the transition to renewables and EVs for transportation. Reducing CO2 emissions will increase the price of transportation fuels as oil becomes less and less available. The world can't even do much to survive and adapt to the projected extreme weather without fossil fuels for transportation.
Very accurate. We're going to have to face Climate Change head-on or life will be very miserable for hundreds of years. We can't survive without glaciers, fresh water and food. Education is the key.
I believe a lot more people run from wars and violence than from environmental changes. Not to say the latter is not a problem, but it is a much less severe problem than the former and potentially than AI.
AI is all the rage because we can envision ways in which AI will kill us all in not-so-near future. While the warming certainly won't.
Kevin... how can "we" address this without severe damage to all major economies? The ENSO is part of natural variability And it doesn't correlate very well with CO2.
Given a forecast with fair confidence of what the weather regime will be at any location, then many will be able to plan and take advantage. Of course many won't and will blame El Nino or climate change, but then it is really their problem. Past experience indicates huge losses in general, both in the short term and extending for perhaps years. No "we" as a whole can address the worst prospects by reversing climate change by cutting emissions.
It seems unlikely that we will “reverse” climate change though? Maybe with carbon removal scaling towards like 2150…. I fear that even under current policies we will get way in excess of 3C due to warming induced emissions and high climate sensitivity.
Bravo, Ken! That's a lot of motivated cognition packed into three short sentences. While not formally the *argumentum ad consequentiam*, it succinctly demonstrates your decarbonization-obstructionist strategy: you've abandoned logic altogether. When Swift said "Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired," he was talking about you!
IMHO, it's sad how you've declined since you retired.
I wasn't talking to you, Mr. Malcolm Troll. But, you didn't answer my question either.
This post badly conflates model worlds with the real world.
CMIP7 extensions are not properly treated as providing likelihoods of the future, by design. The IAM runs go to 2100, and even to the end of the century, there is no likelihood attached to the scenarios.
Further, HIGH was designed to be exploratory, not projective and is not apples to apples with MEDIUM, as you treat it here.
US decarbonization rates have not changed in many decades and thus in no way offers a valid example of how a HIGH world might plausibly occur to 2150. As if what happens in the US can be used to project global emissions to 2150.
Of note, HIGH-2150 has the same cumulative emissions as RCP8.5 to 2100.
We doing this again? ;-)
The constant emphasis on apocalyptic futures is titillating, but will never be the basis for a wholesale transformation of the global energy economy. But using it to try to scare people might contribute to continued public loss of trust in climate advocates.
Hi Roger, in the AR7 we are having all CMIP7 ScenarioMIP runs go through 2150, and there are supporting IAM runs/extensions for these: https://github.com/benmsanderson/FLEX/
I'm worried about the large uncertainties in future warming given the range of climate sensitivity and carbon cycle feedbacks we've estimated. I see that you are not, but simply explaining the ranges of projections we had in the AR6 (and will update in the AR7) is responsible science in my book.
Here is a more technical critique of the misapplication of extensions to generate "forecasts":
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/fool-us-once
This is a fine technical discussion but I find the relevance to our current predicament pretty unclear. Do you disagree that recent studies of e.g. warming induced emissions and the earths currently (larger than predicted!) energy imbalance might indicate that we are in store for crisis-levels of warming towards the end of the century?
Here is what I wrote in The Climate Fix in 2010:
"The scientific community has indicated that a consequence of
human influences on the climate system could be profound and costly,
or perhaps more benign. Steve Schneider has explained a "lingering
frustration" that "uncertainties so infuse the issue of climate change
that it is still impossible to rule out either mild or catastrophic outcomes,
let alone provide confident probabilities for all the claims and
counterclaims made about environmental problems.""
I think that Schneider's characterization remains correct.
I don't see that he conflated the two. He just reported what the HIGH projection predicts.
Okay, set HIGH aside. Do you accept MEDIUM as the path we are on and as a possible scenario.
Are you okay with 4 C in 2200 and for centuries beyond?
HIGH is not a projection. It is an exploratory scenario. It does not predict anything.
MEDIUM is indeed plausible:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/is-the-new-high-climate-scenario
I'm not worried about 2200.
I have no idea what the world will look like then (or 2030 for that matter!)
How well do you think we could have anticipated 2026 in 1850?
I do know however that with smart energy policies we can accelerate decarbonization and achieve deep decarbonization by the second half of this century.
Trying to scare people into action with dodgy scenarios is probably not a good way to earn and keep that trust.
Hi Roger, can you give a few examples of smart energy policies that could accelerate decarbonization? Moreover, how much do you think the policies you have in mind could reduce global emissions by, say, 2050?
Sure.
At the top of my list is a global coal phase out:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/a-coal-exit-treaty-can-radically
Other good options include streamlining our ability to build nuclear:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/can-america-build-nuclear-again-part-96f
I am also bullish on solar:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/bullish-on-solar
A reframing of climate policy to recognize the multiple valued outcomes, especially for energy poor and just poor places is necessary:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-most-important-climate-paper
How fast can we go?
I built a tool to explore exactly this question:
https://scenarios.thehonestbroker.org/
I can generate what I believe to be plausible scenarios that approach net zero around 2075 ish +/-
But have a look and let me know if you can get there faster with plausible assumptions
As far as organizations with realistic/feasible scenarios, I like DNv and S&P Global as a start . . .
Medium is plausible — that's what I was asking. Then 4 °C isn't a prediction about 2200, it's what that scenario produces. Current policies frozen gives about 2.9 °C at 2100 and it is still rising after that, and the carbon doesn't leave on any timescale that helps.
I take the point about anticipating 2200. But the part we can't anticipate is what people do, and Medium already specifies that. What's left is carbon cycle and radiative physics, which is the stable part — that's what makes the consequence estimable even when the world isn't.
There is nothing magic about a particular "current policies" projection. There are plenty of them and some hit net zero by 2100.
Rather than debating emissions trajectories in 2100, everyone's time is better spent discussing how to accelerate decarbonization next year, the year after, etc.
I'm convinced that presenting scary visions of a world in 2100 or 2150 is not going to do anything to accelerate decarbonization. We've tried that for a long time.
Exactly - badly conflates. I said pretty much the same below.
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/my-new-nyt-op-ed-on-climate-change/comment/343330004
Yes temperatures could rise higher 125 years from now. But the consequences of similar temperature increases over the last 125 years has helped, not hurt the flourishing of mankind. As Steve Koonin put it "We can get some sense of how the world has fared under a changing climate by looking back to 1900. Since that time, the globe warmed 1.3°C, about as much as the Inter- governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts will occur in the next century under moderate future emissions.
But even as the globe warmed and the population quintupled, humanity prospered as never before. For example, global average lifespan went from thirty-two years to seventy-two years, economic activity per capita grew by a factor of seven, and the death rate from extreme weather events plummeted by a factor of fifty! (chart). Any assertion that a similar warming over the next century will be catastrophic is implausible and finds little support in either IPCC science assessments or the underlying scientific literature and data."
Thats like saying that because life expectancies are longer today we no longer need to worry about deaths from war.
Of course the human condition has improved with technological advancement and greater prosperity. That doesn't mean that there are no growing problems today that will cause suffering if we do not address them. And while human impacts are mediated by adaptive capacity, the same is decidedly not true for the natural world.
Trillions have been spent to get the world up to 3% renewables and every country with high renewable penetration has seen electricity prices skyrocket. Had those trillions been put to better, more efficient, and productive use, mankind would be in an even better position than today. Endlessly hawking doomsday scenarios, then coming up empty-handed, has hurt not helped. There is a little bit of Paul Ehrlich in everyone I guess, they just need to learn to control that impulse.
Sigh. Smokey is so determined to defend carbon capital ROI from collective intervention to limit its socialized cost that he resorts to false facts, fallacious logic and perversely alarmist rhetoric. What's in it for you, Smokey?
Not sure I’ve ever seen your preferred policy menu, Zeke. I’ve come around more to Matt Burgess’s view. I’m curious where you stand relative to it https://substack.com/@mattgburgess/note/c-342521426
War is known to kill humans in large numbers. Warming - not so much.
It's true that biosphere can't hide from heat under AC. At the same time, it is not intuitive that of all our impacts on biosphere the warming is the most dangerous. I'd suspect that fast population growth and pollution are much worse.
Wow Smokey. Just wow. First and foremost, your assertion assumes linear growth in warming. Measurable warming rate jumped ca 1970, so your assertion of “125” years is already meaningless. Compound this with nonlinear growth of warming rate, known global biodiversity impacts, and known costs in society (not just infrastructure in the global wealthy, but negative impacts in the global poor. I’m sure you’re unaware of the concept of climate refugees - see small island nation treaties with Australia).
I’ll let anyone say “the costs are worth it.” Because that’s an opinion. But to mix facts to generate a falsehood (equating warming to global lifespan benefits) to make a point i won’t ignore.
Oh, Smokey. Are you really that insensitive to human tragedy? Tell the survivors of the Trishuli River flood that global warming isn't catastrophic!
Mal. that's weather not climate.
Ken, you're literally incorrigible, but I'll reply for the benefit of uncommitted lurkers: "Climate" is "weather statistics over time." Changes in weather statistics over sufficient time signify *climate change*, and the observed retreat of alpine glaciers since 2000 is a long-term trend. You know I'm not making this up, Ken: see "Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-first century" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03436-z):
"We show that during 2000–2019, glaciers lost a mass of 267 ± 16 gigatonnes per year, equivalent to 21 ± 3 per cent of the observed sea-level rise6. We identify a mass loss acceleration of 48 ± 16 gigatonnes per year per decade, explaining 6 to 19 per cent of the observed acceleration of sea-level rise. Particularly, thinning rates of glaciers outside ice sheet peripheries doubled over the past two decades. Glaciers currently lose more mass, and at similar or larger acceleration rates, than the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets taken separately."
Although the abstract seems easy enough to grasp, I'm not a professional climate scientist. But I'll provisionally accept attribution science over your doggedly dishonest decarbonization obstructionism: https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/rapid-warming-in-the-himalaya-exacerbates-geohazard-cascades-beyond-adaptation-limits/. Peer-reviewed expertise is way more credible than a caricature denialist on the Internet.
The 2.9 C should be enough to get people's attention. If not, we should remind them that that same scenario is headed for 4 C in 2200 and will stay there for centuries without CDR. Basically 3x today's increase over preindustrial.
After that, temperatures will stay elevated above today's temperature for millennia.
Welcome to the Anthropocene.
It seems the minute some distant date is mentioned the attention of many, if not most, is to shake their collective head and turn back to life as usual. So much denial going on - not denying, denial. There is a pressing need though, taking into account current mitigation measures and projections, to look to what we can do to prepare for what is ahead. How do you impress the urgency? How can we get the message through? I fear my experience is the usual - family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances - have no science background, do not listen to balanced news reporting, avoid demanding articles or discussion, glance at the graphs, and are heavily influenced by a calming message of Hope and other ridiculous inactive wait-and-see beliefs. I have yet to have a serious conversation about collapse awareness with anyone.
To the commentators that are not feeling on their skin the umbearable climate change we are facing I suggest to came to europe in the summer to understand what climate change is: in Tuscany where I live we have +2.5 C already (proved by Lamma reginal meteo agency)and climate has changed under my eys in the last 35 years. The summer is frequently hotter that Cairo and the winter is almost in the no freezing zone. Olive are picked mid october instead of mid november and grape harvest start mid august instead of mid september. woods are frequently going in shut down august/september to preserve their "lives". The sea was more than 30c in the middle of the tuscan arcipelago that is a temperature that was present in the red sea only 10-15 years ago. To those commentators i suggest to connect the brain to the pen before saying something, because as indicated in the graphic they have to understand that 1c of ocean increase is a huge amount of stored energy that is and will wreak havoc on our climate in the years to come. Thanks to the author for the post!
You keep treating information from the IPCC like it's a scientific body. It's not and has never been. If you changed the date in "How likely are different warming outcomes in 2100" to be 2050, it would be a reasonable assessment. As is, this is just hopium.
This kind of bs serves no purpose but to delay action and is a disservice to all.
Wake up.
You're not master of our common language, David, any more than Humpty Dumpty is. Neither is Elon Musk, but his anti-woke LLM Grok describes Working Group I of the IPCC, which evaluates CMIP results under RCPs/SSPs, as follows:
-It evaluates observations, paleoclimate data, climate processes, modeling, attribution of change, projections, and related physical-science topics.
-Its authors are scientists and technical experts selected primarily for their expertise.
-It does not conduct original research. Instead, it assesses the existing peer-reviewed scientific literature (and other approved sources) and synthesizes the state of knowledge [by collective expert review until effective consensus is reached, under the time-tested scientific model: MA]
-The resulting reports (including the full chapters and Technical Summary) are scientific assessments.
IOW, your claim the IPCC isn't a scientific body is just pedantic hair-splitting, without lexicological or semantic support, and your sneer of 'hopium' over a difference of 50 years is merely mood-congruent ideation. By making perfect the enemy of incrementally better than it is now, it has no real effect but to delay collective decarbonization still longer. Wake up yourself!
The 2.9C central estimate hides where the dispersion bites in practice. Every impact assessment I read still designs to a single scenario, usually RCP4.5, and the reviewer has no basis to ask for the tail.
If the 2150 distribution has 30% above 4C, the design question is not the mean but which tail a 40-year asset should survive, and the 2060s slice of that spread is what matters.
Has anyone published the model spread at 2060 in a form a permitting reviewer could cite? That would do more for adaptation design than another 2100 headline.
All of the impacts from ENSO are made worse by global warming, especially the droughts and floods. Where those occur is related to ENSO but their impacts are much greater with climate change. So need to build resilience and cut emissions
"The check is in the mail", the world mutters to the Goldilocks Climate Creditor. The world doesn't realize the Creditor is about to shut off our life support system. As Earth burns.
@Kevin Trenberth It’s not either/or. We face potentially catastrophic risks from both global heating and artificial super intelligence. In both cases a small number of greedy billionaires are putting profits ahead of community wellbeing.
We need to listen to the warnings of AI insiders, like Connor Leahy, some of whom who put the risk of super AI causing human extinction at 10% or more. Watch Connir Leahy here https://youtu.be/wzgkc6Iegx8
I’m glad the worst emissions forecasts look less likely. But “less bad than we feared” can sound very different to someone with little room to adapt to heat or flooding. As a physician in India, that’s the part of the risk discussion I don’t want averages to hide.
The distinction between progress and safety is useful, Zeke. For infrastructure planning, could you separate uncertainty within a given emissions pathway from uncertainty about which pathway policy produces? Readers could otherwise interpret a conditional probability as an unconditional forecast.
I'll make the same comment here as made on the thesaraphreport post the NYT article linked to:
My takeaway is that climate systems modelers should incorporate CVaR (conditional value at risk) into discussions of their model results. This post, like the Saraphreport one, advocates understanding tail risk more thoroughly. A rigorous mathematics already exists for evaluating fat-tailed, non-linear risk; it is CVaR.
I contend that this is a useful tool for communicating exactly what you state your aim is.
Thank you for the op-ed. Keep speaking the truth. Physics does not lie and does not negotiate.
It's good to emphasize that an average hides the distribution, which is what is most important for determining where humans will be able to survive (or not). And not to put too fine a point on it, but you might want to note that even +3°C could lead to human extinction (or at minimum, a 4 billion person die off) and +4°C would almost certainly end all of us. So there's that. I find it a little jarring to call these scenarios a "middle path" that avoids "the darkest climate futures". It's hard to celebrate dodging +4° when +3° may kill us all anyway. And given the insanity going on in the US right now, does anyone really believe the world is going to pull its shit together and address this crisis it has been ignoring (and accelerating) for decades? I'm no optimistic.
> at minimum, a 4 billion person die off ... and +4°C would almost certainly end all of us
And how do we know that?
What crisis? I don't think there is a crisis at the moment (as opposed to temporary insanity). But if there is one in the future I'm optimistic we'll find a way to deal with it.
Thanks for your reply. Here's where I collected some references back in 2022: https://medium.com/@sjgenco/the-coffin-in-the-room-catastrophic-impacts-on-human-population-7c8c277d3725.
Also ...
Anything by the Planetary Boundaries folks.
Anything by William Rees.
Overshoot and resource depletion are permanent. Even if CO2 didn't heat the planet. Our fossil fuel orgy is just about over.
From way back in 2022: https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/865571468149107611
What happens when the pollinators are gone? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh0756
The world's bread baskets are under stress: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38906-7
So far, our response has been anything but encouraging. And that was before Trump. But I believe the disaster that Trump is inflicting on the global economy may be the wakeup call the world needs. Trump's idiocy creating oil and gas and diesel shortages is jump-starting the rest of the world into solar, wind, and batteries, so that's good. But I find it hard to imagine a post-carbon world 3 degrees hotter than what we have today, plus the end of fossil fuel EROI, being able to support 8 billion humans. That's the big crisis ahead of us, assuming we can extricate ourselves from the little crisis we're dealing with now: the madman in the White House.
Thanks for your reply.
First reference is to your own imagination. Of course climate models don't output the population changes. This is simply because there is no good science for such predictions. Of course we can't survive w/o water or food for a long time. What does it have to do with warming. Food and water are not going anywhere. In fact, food production mostly increases, and so does the rainfall.
Your claim of massive human extinction is ridiculous and completely baseless.
Whew, am I relieved!
For insights into how climate change has/is/will impact food systems, and what this means for our collective future, you can start with the FAO and WMO review on Extreme Heat and Agriculture: https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/f635e477-b37a-46f8-bc10-34d56cec6332