The thing is, it's already too late to prevent pretty terrible effects of climate change, but it's not too late to stop it from getting even worse. Every tenth of a degree can make a world of difference. So while we will most certainly not stay below 1.5°, the difference between 2 and 3 degrees is huge, and the efforts we make today decide in what world we'll live in. Resigning to the inevitable now is a surefire recipe to get to the absolute worst case scenario where the survival of our technological civilization is very much uncertain.
From what I understand no - warming by 5 degrees will cause all phytoplankton to die off and as a result we'll run out of oxygen(not immediately of course, but we inevitably will).
Wouldnt it be a really really long time to run out of oxygen?
“What would happen if we combusted every living cell on Earth?” it asked. That is, Peters wanted to know what would happen to the atmosphere if you burned down not just the Amazon, but every forest on Earth, every blade of grass, every moss and lichen-spackled patch of rock, all the flowers and bees, all the orchids and hummingbirds, all the phytoplankton, zooplankton, whales, starfish, bacteria, giraffes, hyraxes, coatimundis, oarfish, albatrosses, mushrooms, placozoans—all of it, besides the humans.
Peters pulled up the next slide. After this unthinkable planetary immolation, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere dropped from 20.9 percent to 20.4 percent. CO2 rose from 400 parts per million to 900—less, even, than it does in the worst-case scenarios for fossil-fuel emissions by 2100. By burning every living thing on Earth.
The world was once 8C to 14C hotter than it is now (during the Eocene) and it didn't run out of oxygen. In fact, this was the epoch when modern mammals took over the world.
Prehistoric warm periods didn't happen as fast as what we're doing. If you give nature thousands of generations to adapt to warmer temperatures it's not as big of a deal. If you do it over a hundred years or so, ecosystems have a much harder time to adapt.
Ecosystems can adapt very quickly with a little help.
We often see just a few members of an invasive species transplanted into a favorable environment multiply and spread and end up dominating the local ecosystem in far, far less than a hundred years. Let's use that to help ecosystems adapt to climate change.
Yes and we still have a good chance to keept it well below 5. For most technologies emitting CO2, we now have emission free replacements, so if we strongly push for using them, we do have quite a fighting chance.
Make the transition to those technologies a top priority in each sector. Like installing solar and wind energy as fast as it can be done. House heating should be done with heat pumps in most locations, so any new heating system installed should be low CO2.
Make a big push for electric cars. Norway is at over 50% electric in the new cars already. But for that, the car manufacturers need urgently to ramp up their production capacity for electric cars.
