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'Terrifying' New Climate Models Warn of 6-7°C of Warming by 2100 If Emissions Not Slashed
Link information
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- Authors
- Common Dreams, Jake Johnson, staff writer
- Published
- Sep 17 2019
- Word count
- 517 words
Not a great link, but this is the only article in English I could find about this topic. Basically French researchers working for the IPCC have revised their models and are now telling us that continuing on the current path will bring us to around +7°C by the end of the century, which to put it simply is basically extinction.
Here's a source in french, unfortunately behind a paywall: https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2019/09/17/jusqu-a-7-c-en-2100-les-experts-francais-du-climat-aggravent-leurs-projections-sur-le-rechauffement_5511336_3244.html
Edit: Here's the official press release in English: https://www.cnrs.fr/en/two-french-climate-models-consistently-predict-pronounced-global-warming
If that's the prognosis, it will require dyson dots to beat the warming.
One of the things I wonder about is what reverses the warming trend on its own. The earth has been hotter than this, and turned into a snowball with miles of ice at the equator, then back to hotter than this a couple of times. We had fuck all to do with that process. We know volcanic carbon dioxide is what breaks the cold spell eventually. What we don't know is what process breaks the runaway heat.
The leading idea for that is the breakdown of the ocean currents caused by fresh melt water desalinating the oceans near the poles. When those currents stall, the heat at the equator is no longer carried away from it. The poles should plummet dramatically in temperature, leading to the start of a new ice age at the same time that the equator has record temps. Then we'll be trapped living in narrow bands between the poles and equator, both of which are too cold or too hot to be safely livable. God only knows what happens to the global weather patterns if that happens and the atmosphere has to handle distributing that much more energy without the oceans to help it. Shit could get much weirder than we're expecting.
The natural processes might operate on the scale of thousands of years, which wouldn't be very useful to us now.
Not sure our civilization will be strong enough to pull this off, especially once real climate change starts impacting us strongly.
We'd be far better off trying to reduce our emissions, now.
While slashing emissions should certainly be a top priority, it's probably not going to cut it on its own anymore, not this late in the game. The carbon we've already emitted is more than enough to bring about dangerous levels of warming, and considering even an ambitious crash decarbonization program would take at least a couple of decades to get us to just neutrality, we need to buy all the time we can get to put that stuff back in the ground.
Well at least that will solve the source of the problem, doesn't it? Looking at the bright side...
It’s not just human extinction that is possible. It’s all oxygen dependent life. That’s worse than a nuclear winter.
I’m not saying that this is guaranteed, but it surely seems possible:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138252/
This is my main concern. We have basically one shot to make it to a Type-1 civilization, and I'm afraid we're blowing it.
Eh, oxygen dependent life will pull through, microbes are resilient and extremophiles are the most likely survivors of even the worst outcomes.
edit: Most microbes depending on oxygen can also survive much greater CO2 concentrations, complex oxygen-breathing life is fairly sensitive to a little bit of Co2.
How is this a good thing???
"Oh, no big deal, we'll burn off everything with multiple cells but some bacteria tucked away in dark recesses of the earth will survive. That's not technically extinction of all life."
I don't think dude's saying "everything's fine guys no need to worry the microbes will live on without us." Hard to tell if he's just adding detail or if he has a point but he's not saying that that makes everything A-OK
I didn't say it was good for us or the planet, just that life will pull through even in a worst case scenario.
It's probably too early for final conclusions, we'll have to wait for the final report for that.
But I think evidence is sufficient to declare a state of absolute emergency, as in "everyone stop what you are doing" or close. After all, even if the models are wrong and it's only +4°, it's still so bad that whatever you are doing right now will probably be rendered meaningless by climate change. We need a major societal change, now.
This is basically uncharted territory AFAIK, in regards to large scale greenhouse gas production. It's kinda like "Giant meteor headed straight towards earth, 50% of models predict we'll get hit head on, 50% predict we'll only lose half of the earth". We will never get the luxury of perfecting the models, we need to decide now what our policy will be.
I want a world where we roll back as much as possible while maintaining modern medicine.
Alternate link: https://phys.org/news/2019-09-earth-quickly-climate.html