Leaving some of the oil in the ground isn’t enough. If we stopped today, fully electrified from non-polluting sources, we will still see warming of multiple degrees. We have spent over a hundred years putting tens of millions of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere. The extinction rate is estimated at somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than normal - yes, three to four orders of magnitude greater than occurs naturally! Things are so much worse than this admits. People keep talking about “wild” worst case scenarios like “a million people struggling to survive on the tropical Antarctic archipelago” but that’s not how it works. Far before that point, the vast majority of life will be gone likely leaving only microorganisms. We’re losing all our arable topsoil (1/3 in just the last 40 years), our bees and other insects are under threat… The concern is not that our homes will be underwater, it’s the collapse of food webs worldwide starving us and everything else more than one or two links removed from primary production. That will happen long, long before we have a “tropical Antarctic archipelago”. For complex life to exist you need an entire biosphere, a small group of vertebrates in a limited area like that doesn’t work. The point is that according to all the models, we’re already locked in for 3-4 degrees of warming. Not that many years ago we were shooting for 1.6 optimistically and two at worst because that’s what we could tolerate without too much death. Now three is the best we can possibly hope for and frankly we aren’t heading for that, either. More likely 4+ and that is just not tolerable.
Also, as much as china is doing well at preparing to halt fossil fuel use, they still haven’t. I trust that they’ll meet their goals and that their goals are the best they can reasonably do, but that doesn’t mean they’re enough alongside the rest of the world.
That wasn’t meant to be a wild worst case scenario. That’s a middle case scenario as far as I’m concerned, I understand that there are many natural feedback loops that we are triggering now, the Earth is on track to become largely uninhabitable.
To humans.
But it’s hard for me to believe in some kind of extinction of all complex life in the biosphere. The Earth could warm 8°C and be within the its historical range that can and has supported complex life in the past. It will be a cataclysmic transition, most megafauna will probably die, but there are many species alive today that actually were alive when the Earth was that much warmer.
Leaving some of the oil in the ground isn’t enough. If we stopped today, fully electrified from non-polluting sources, we will still see warming of multiple degrees. We have spent over a hundred years putting tens of millions of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere. The extinction rate is estimated at somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than normal - yes, three to four orders of magnitude greater than occurs naturally! Things are so much worse than this admits. People keep talking about “wild” worst case scenarios like “a million people struggling to survive on the tropical Antarctic archipelago” but that’s not how it works. Far before that point, the vast majority of life will be gone likely leaving only microorganisms. We’re losing all our arable topsoil (1/3 in just the last 40 years), our bees and other insects are under threat… The concern is not that our homes will be underwater, it’s the collapse of food webs worldwide starving us and everything else more than one or two links removed from primary production. That will happen long, long before we have a “tropical Antarctic archipelago”. For complex life to exist you need an entire biosphere, a small group of vertebrates in a limited area like that doesn’t work. The point is that according to all the models, we’re already locked in for 3-4 degrees of warming. Not that many years ago we were shooting for 1.6 optimistically and two at worst because that’s what we could tolerate without too much death. Now three is the best we can possibly hope for and frankly we aren’t heading for that, either. More likely 4+ and that is just not tolerable.
Also, as much as china is doing well at preparing to halt fossil fuel use, they still haven’t. I trust that they’ll meet their goals and that their goals are the best they can reasonably do, but that doesn’t mean they’re enough alongside the rest of the world.
That wasn’t meant to be a wild worst case scenario. That’s a middle case scenario as far as I’m concerned, I understand that there are many natural feedback loops that we are triggering now, the Earth is on track to become largely uninhabitable.
To humans.
But it’s hard for me to believe in some kind of extinction of all complex life in the biosphere. The Earth could warm 8°C and be within the its historical range that can and has supported complex life in the past. It will be a cataclysmic transition, most megafauna will probably die, but there are many species alive today that actually were alive when the Earth was that much warmer.