"The North Atlantic just completely destroyed its June average temperature record, breaking the previous record by more than 0.4 °C (0.7 °F).
A stunningly sharp excess for such a large body of water."
Earth will be fine. Humanity will be fine. We will likely just move away from coastal areas.
Definitely a concern but humans are resilient and very adaptive.
Will not completely go extinct is not the same as fine. Even ignoring climate refugees and all that, let’s look at a simple thing: food supply.
The mathematics of global famine are quite simple. Add all the calories that earth produces in one day on average and divide it by 1500. That’s the amount of people that can exist.
Now, like 70% off all calories come from just 3 crops: rice, corn and wheat. As a good approximation, all of those lose about 10% harvest yield for each 1 degree C in temperature rise. It’s not really linear and is better at the beginning (so like 5% for the first degree), and much worse further on. But in general the approximation works.
Humanity now produces about 1.5x of the food supply we need, and even with super-optimized logistics we’re not going to get it lower than 1.2–1.3x population, since a lot of food gets wasted by cafes/restaurants and people themselves. Some just gets bad because it’s not consumed in time or takes too long to deliver or sell.
And with the current temperature rise estimations we’re looking at losing caloric supply for about 20% of the entire population in the next 20 or so years.
And that’s just one example. Have you seen rivers of dead fish in Australia and the states? For each species there is a point when the water gets too hot to hold enough oxygen or to cool down their bodies, and then bam — the whole species dies in a day. Right now, some algae, corals and plankton are like 1.5 degrees away from mass death.
It’s not really that “fine”.
Sorry for the rant.
An excellent write-up of what will unfold.
One note is that the food loss won’t just be linear. It will be chaotic within the probabilities you noted. Crop loss is effectively a weather event and, as such, a chaotic one. That means extreme events will be the driving force behind food shortages. Namely, heatwaves will cause extensive loss of crops in specific areas. Over some years, that will average down, but people don’t eat long-term averages; they eat daily. So we should expect significant one-time impacts. That is, the severity is not the average but rather the peak.
It’s also worth note that this is mostly caused by the ban on sulfur emissions a couple of years ago. The commission that banned sulfur emissions from ships basically decided that they were going to do a big geo engineering experiment and they were going to do it not in favor of humanity against global warming, but in favor of global warming against humanity.
And they decided to cut off emissions really quickly so that we get this massive incredible hilariously bad spike instead of slowly tapering off over time.
It’s mostly bullshit. Certain types of emissions create particles that reflect sunlight away from the earth, thus masking some of the warming that we have created through green house gas emissions. Banning sulphur emissions isn’t the cause of the problem, greenhouse gasses are. Banning sulphur just made our observed warming closer to what our actual warming is.
You’ll find people making the same claims about transitioning to electric cars accelerating warming since cars produce similar particles. It’s just maintain the status quo bullshit passively enabling the continuation of oil and gas. The solution isn’t to keep burning certain types of fuel because it masks our warming. Obviously the solution is to stop producing as much greenhouse gas as we possibly can.
People give a shit, and we are moving towards a solution. You just have to see it through all the doomerism that’s so popular on the internet.
The problem is that you need to have pragmatism, and you need context. I remember in the United States when “energy independence!” Seemed like an impossible far off goal. We guzzled down oil like mad and everyone was scared of it. We had peak oil. It was a meme that everyone talked about but never seemed to get fixed.
Then, quite silently, the change happened. Between 2012 and 2015 our efforts in research and technological advancements created fracking and revolutionized American energy generation.
These programs get solved. It’s just hard to get things moving and it takes years for investments to pay off. More energy than ever is green. And literally fucking Texas is one of the biggest green energy centers.
Have hope. Keep advocating for good policy, but know that at the end of the day we will succeed.
