
How much climate change can still be considered safe? - avip
https://twitter.com/SISeneviratne/status/1142825458200928256
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ForHackernews
A lot of people seem to misunderstand the 12 (now 11) year deadline. It's not
that suddenly an apocalypse will occur in 2030. It's that after that point,
we'll no longer have any realistic hope of avoiding the worst effects of
climate change that will arrive in the following decades and centuries.

Maybe we need to explain it to people like cancer treatment: if we'd caught it
early, maybe chemotherapy alone would have been sufficient. Today, we need
invasive surgery, plus chemo, plus radiation therapy, and we also need to hope
that untested immunotherapy treatments will work.

If we continue to leave it untreated, then our prognosis is very grim indeed.
We won't die immediately, but our cancer will be inoperable.

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ryandvm
People have a hard enough time caring about humans suffering and dying on the
other side of the world. Trying to get them to worry about humans that don't
currently exist is a total lost cause.

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ForHackernews
You might have thought they'd care about their own kids and grandkids, but
here we are.

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saganus
In my experience, most people don't even care about their _own_ future, i.e.
retirement and such, and instead buy cars and other stuff that they can't
afford, because short term satisfaction is more compelling than long term one.

So while I agree with you that I care about ny children and grand-children, I
don't see this as being a mainstream thought.

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sametmax
It's assuming it's already safe. There is a good chance several armed
conflicts of the last decades were influenced by climate chances consequences.
Conflicts that also cascaded into other tension rising events, because of
immigration, altered business, demography flux, etc.

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ianai
People have already died because of climate change. So we’re already beyond
“safe” climate change.

A good, free, and quick primer is just searching for “uninhabitable earth”. He
talks about the real world implications and impacts for various levels of
warming.

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avip
The death toll in India only, from heat waves only, in recent years is in the
thousands. This is an illustration that the "rising ramp" fable would be more
realistic if the ramp itself was of varying height.

Some parts of the earth are expected to become more inhabitable with extra 1-2
°C. India is not one of them.

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mapleoin
This doesn't state the fact that if we stop all emissions now, the temperature
will keep rising because there is already too much CO2 in the atmosphere.

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mehrdadn
Yeah, I recall hearing it'd take 500-800 years to stabilize if we literally
stopped all emissions right now.

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singularity2001
Even with current emissions CO2 levels are periodically FALLING 6ppm each
summer => Without emissions we would be back to normal in 30 years:

[https://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2013/05/mauna-
loa...](https://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2013/05/mauna-loa-C02-ppm-
full_record.png.860x0_q70_crop-scale.png)

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mehrdadn
IIRC it's falling because the oceans are taking the hit. I might be wrong
about what exactly the figure was referring to, though -- might have been not
just atmospheric temperature stabilization but other things too.

