
The human imperative of stabilizing global climate change at 1.5°C - sohkamyung
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6459/eaaw6974
======
Gatsky
The issue has become heavily politicised and even worse, is now a fault line
in identity politics. This is the death sentence for meaningful action. If
only publishing journal articles was enough.

I'm not sure that we are hoping for the right category of solution. All
countries and people in the world uniting and making sacrifices... has this
ever happened for anything ever? I am hoping there are examples, I just can't
think of any. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I just can't see the 'Unified
Earth' solution happening, at least not because everyone just agrees to be
that way.

Maybe the right analogy is something like the internet. If you were concerned
about tyranny and oppression of free speech in the 1930s, it is doubtful you
would ever conceive that the internet could be one 'solution' to that problem.
It isn't a perfect or complete solution, and it actually makes the problem
worse in some ways, but nevertheless, on that particular issue, the internet
has changed the landscape completely. Maybe this category of solution is the
best we can hope for. The trouble is that it is very hard to conceive of how
it will look or what we should do.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
People often talk about sacrifices, but we don't even make much progress on
the stuff that's actively harmful and therefore a net benefit, like phasing
out coal for cleaner energy, or building well insulated homes so I don't think
that's the whole reason. In fact it seems like a talking point from one side.

------
fallingfrog
We are halfway to the first doubling of co2 right now. 280 is preindustrial,
560 is the first doubling, 410 is where we are. Now emissions are rising
exponentially. If things turned around on a dime and emissions fell as fast as
they went up, then the total co2 would be about 1 doubling. If the climate
sensitivity is 3 degrees, then that’s 3 degrees of warming right there.
Holding it to 1.5 or 2 would require emissions to go down substantially faster
than that.

But my money is on nothing getting done, and emissions continuing to rise
exponentially for the next 20 years at least. That means probably 6 degrees or
more of warming.

I will fight to try to stop that from happening.. but that’s where we’re at.

The real problem is that the worlds fossil fuel deposits and infrastructure
represents at least 6 trillion dollars worth of someone’s private property,
and they will fight to the end to make sure that that investment pays out.
That means using _all_ the worlds fossil fuel deposits, no matter the cost to
society.

------
bayesian_horse
Not gonna happen, unfortunately.

I agree that achieving those goals, even at the envisioned costs, would be
desirable. But the short term pain of much of the necessary measures would be
too great to make it politically infeasible. And any "defector" of significant
size (China? Russia? US?) would make it even more difficult, politically.

The developing nations will feel a lot of the pressure to cut down on their
growing emissions. Which is unfair and would also result in more Human
suffering, short and midterm.

I'm hoping for somebody to prove me wrong!

~~~
bestouff
Or more realistically business will go on as usual, with a little green-
washing here and there, and we will cope as well as we can with the resulting
mess. Which means after a period of relative calm (less wars nowadays than
before) we'll probably have climate/water exodus and wars in the future. But
this will happen gradually.

~~~
xupybd
My hope is all in climate engineering. Not because it's the best solution but
because it's the only politically viable one. Not until we've felt the pain
will we invest in solving the problem. Governments also have an easier time
investing in massive infrastructure projects than curbing pollution.

Will will be able to do anything at that point is not certain.

~~~
bayesian_horse
At the moment the traditional ways of fighting carbon emissions seem to be
more practicable...

And who is going to pay for those infrastructure? Are the rich countries
paying for them to be build in the poorer countries?

