What is this author smoking? "2 to 3 feet" of sea level rise is still absolutely catastrophic and is hand waved away in one sentence. 5 degrees in 50 years? We've already gained about 1 degree in the last 20 years alone - with no signs of slowing down. If it's ackshually 5 degrees in 75 years, what even is the point of making a point about that? We're reaching several ecological tipping points. We're in a mass extinction. What in the everloving hell is this? Have we gone full "don't look up" with this now?
I think the problem is that "catastrophic" is not well-defined. Will we all be back to caves and sticks? No. Will there be trillions of dollars of damages and massive societal upheaval from massive migrations of people? Yes. Will a billion people die? Probably not, unless a war breaks out and leads to nuclear destruction.
I would consider all of these to be "catastrophic" but some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be "catastrophic."
We have a working system. That's why our world's population is so large. And it improved over time, as in more efficient ways to grow food, more productivity, the green revolution, to feed more, then roads/cities/buildings tied to single spots improving efficiency, giving safe housing to billions, mass transport and global logistics.
So what will happen if that gets disrupted? And badly disrupted, while at it. And while that is happening, multiple other things pile up in different ways everywhere?
Thats the danger. You don't die from climate change. You may occasionally die from increasingly frequent extreme weather, a flood because rains, some dam break, extended forest fires and so on. But that is not a single catastrophic event that kill billions. What will kill billions are losing food security in big scale, no safe/climate controlled place to live, violence and wars, widespread diseases and no way to help. In some years to decades millions to billions may die by that combination of factors.
So no, it wont be a single day, sudden event that will kill billions. Is the breakup of the system that holds it together. Agriculture needs a stable climate, megacities need food, the economic system depend on more things, and everything else is packed together. And the first wave of deaths will be just the start.
During some of the worst starvation events in the 20th century, it was still only on the order of ~10 million people that died. And most of those deaths were because horrific totalitarian governments prevented outside aid to the affected regions.
I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.
In the US, our domestic food production has started collapsing thanks to the massive deportations of farm workers. According to various reports, a tremendous amount of food went to waste in the fields last summer because farmers couldn't get workers to harvest it.
Well, one plane crashing or one building falling, destroying something valuable and killing "only" a few dozen people is considered a catastrophe. I think we can say the bar for "catastrophe" is lower than that for "apocalypse".
The higher global average temperatures alone are already a yearly catastrophe, by this standard.
A metre of sea-level rise is painful for a rural cottage by the sea. But if you're in a city - particularly a wealthy city - it's something that can be engineered around.
An expensive liability? Definitely. A civilization or nation ending event? Unlikely.
besides the fact that 40% of the world's population lives near the coast - and that 2-3 feet of sea level rise is not a uniform "the tide used to be 8 feet, now it's 11 feet" - Entire islands in the pacific will disappear - How do you think global trade works? What do you think happens to ports? AMOC collapsing (a byproduct of sea level rise) will have profound effects on climate, despite this author claiming without any evidence whatsoever that "actually it isn't a big deal."
Ports get retrofitted, redesigned, and rebuilt. The AMOC collapsing is a serious thing, but I'm not saying climate change isn't real or isn't a threat. My original point is that three feet of sea level rise is manageable, if expensive. Simply that, nothing else.
If you draw the line at the year 2100, things are uncomfortable but maneagable. If your horizon is 2300 or 2500, you get a different story. But you would hope that in tha sort of time frame, we have time to adapt.
Canada, this year committed to spending $3.9 billion dollars to hopefully have just completed plans for a high-speed train line in six years [1]! The number of years and dollars to actually build the line are unknown at the moment. This is a project that has humongous potential economic upside.
Would Canada be able to build a seawall to protect Vancouver? I am not sure.
And how will these engineered workarounds be paid for ? It is known workarounds will cost trillions today, NYC alone could cost $1T+. And these workarounds should have been started 5 years ago when it became very clear we will never get off fossil fuels.
I fully expect no workarounds will be done just like Climate Change Mitigations. Getting off fossil fuels should have been seriously started 30 years ago, and maybe even 50 years ago. Instead the politicians have been adding hot air talking and fighting instead of doing real work.
We are now seeing this repeat with "engineered workarounds", no one wants to pay for it, so yes I call BS on the article.
All I can say is I feel real bad the past generations did nothing to really reverse CC, people being born now are looking at a very bleak future.
Fun fact - sea level rose 120m since 20,000 years ago but people seem to have largely not noticed. If you don't have large buildings and planning laws you could just move your shack a few yards inland.
Why not address the actual points he is making? He dramatically screwed up his forecasts of both human population growth rate and technological advancement rate.
These underlying assumptions being incorrect are the reason climate alarmist move the goal posts every year.
I think this mostly points to us not taking his opinion seriously on the matter.
Most others in the climate science debate have been far more realistic and measured. Similarly, I tend to ignore everything from David Wallace-Wells, another person who has written a ton on climate but from a very different political perspective, who has also been quite wrong.
Not sure that just providing climate alarmist talking points is going to be a convincing counter to a climate alarmist who is now a climate pragmatist and provides some interesting reasons why they switched.
How about explaining why he is wrong? Don’t just respond with incredulousness and generalizations and assumptions.
It's closer 1 one degree in the last 120 years, than 20, for a global average, though polar areas are bearing more of the brunt.
Unless AMOC collapses and we foolishly trip into another glacial period, the 200ft increase in sea level is inevitable in the next thousand years, but totally manageable for the continents. It's the oceanic mountaintops, aka, low level islands, and coastal cities that are at risk. Most of those cities are already filled with happy rich people who will have been long gone decades, or even centuries before Florida and Bangladesh are submerged and Russia, Australia and Canada are booming with happy with abundant rainfall, crops and awesome weather.
It just seems like focusing on ameliorating pain and focusing on the making the inevitable a better outcome is the most important focus for the next few decades.
Sea level has risen 1 foot since 1800 and nobody noticed. 2 to 3 feet isn't catastrophic. Nobody credible claims temperatures will rise 50 degrees in 50 years.
> Earth's climate always changes over time, it's not unusual, although not always the best for us.
Earth's climate has been stable during the rise of human civilisation.
It has changed more in the past 100 years than in the past 200,000.
It's true it's changed often over the course of the 4 billion year history of the pkanet. It's not true to claim it's fluctuated wildly over the course of human civilisation.
> What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.
False.
It's clear the cause is the increased insulation factor of the atmosphere. It's clear this change has been in the majority due to human activity dragging up millions of years worth of past captured C02 via fossil fuel extraction.
> That's not a reason to not do anything about it,
Naturally, because as stated it is false to claim the cause is unclear.
> but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.
Sure. It's true that no one alive today in a G20 non equatorial country need fuss much about it - all the real serious consequence will fall after their lives have passed.
Dammit - I went a zero too many, human civilisation ~ 20,000 years worth of "settled" building, agriculture, slowly increasing in scale as climate variations decreased in scale.
Everything that is "modern human civilisation" from, say, early Egyptian onwards (following the formation of the Sahara some 6,000 years past) has taken place in a period of climatc stability.
Point being, come climatic change on that scale again, the planet and various eco systems will adapt and move on, human civilisation patterns as we know them from history will be heavily jarred.
He's comparing AGW, which drives a trend, with weather-based events, which are noise around the trend. He conveniently cuts his analysis off at the year 2100, by which we'll all probably be dead. But he's probably right that the trend itself doesn't cause insurmountable problems by that point.
But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...
I see very little agreement in any way with Bill Gates is talking about.
In fact I suspect that Gates would be dismissed as too woke for making this one of his main points:
> But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.
> It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
This is just rehashed Green New Deal language for the global stage. (Something I fully support!!)
They're agreeing that climate change is serious but not necessarily civilization ending:
Nordhous: "The amount of warming that is conceivable … is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes … where tens or hundreds of million, perhaps even billions of lives were at stake."
Gates: "Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise."
I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics. Also occasionally from those that are poorly informed, but they also tend to believe things like GMOs being the end of agriculture, and have basically zero impact on society due to lack of influence and small number of people. Nordhous' extreme situations may have been possible back in the 1990s with zero action and without the advent of solar, wind, and storage that have been created since then, but his statements are kind of wacky.
We've known for almost a decade now that the RCP8.5 scenarios are no longer on the table, and even that worst case scenario wasn't civilization ending.
I read Bill Gates' note as not an evolution on his view at all, it seems 100% consistent with everything he has worked for, but rather trying to place climate change in a more humanity-focused context for evaluating tradeoffs of where to put money. That's very important for governments and for wealthy philanthropists like him, and for the COP 3 audience he's talking to.
>I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics
Did you see what happened in Europe with a rather small mass migration 10/15 years ago due to Arab Spring ? People have short memories.
Can you imagine what will happen when 100 of thousands start migrating north when they can no longer feed themselves and maybe even work outside ? Italy was close to sinking boats coming across the the sea. Other countries in the EU started building walls. And even Germany took a slight right turn. Once these large migrations start, I expect bombs will be dropped. Same applies to North America.
Mass extinction is not necessarily civilization ending. Half of all living species could die, 80% of all humans could die, and civilization would find a way to move on. It would still be an absolutely major catastrophic event.
At the rate that temperature is increasing, assuming it is not stopped, it's not a matter of will there be an extinction event within the next few hundred years, but how bad will it be.
that's what "climate skeptics" have been saying for twenty years but you would get bullied for saying so.
my favorite was getting told we "deserved it" for being in Texas during the ice apocalypse, because Texas is a red state.
I hope that people exhibiting that kind of behavior are finally starting to question whether or not it's helpful. The article suggests that is perhaps beginning to happen.
If you want people to make sacrifices to improve the future, just maybe messaging that it's hopeless and anyone who doesn't see that is stupid isn't the best strategy for effecting real change
You’re right, and you’re being downvoted for being so.
The bullying and name calling were intolerable. Even suggesting that the earths demise was not immediate would label you a denier and ignorant about the undeniable science behind the alarms.
It seems the tide is turning and some of the leading voices in the earth-is-cooking camp are now walking things back.
You folks should stop hanging around such awful, nasty people. Or, maybe you're not remembering very well what actually happened in these conversations, but it would be shame to break apart a self-pity party.
It's pretty amazing how much we've lowered our collective standards for article quality since the advent of AI generation. (Not just here, but everywhere). It's not like it's a rote spelling mistake deep in the article, the spelling mistake is the very first thing you see.
Why would a serious author go with this image? Just a few years ago, misspelling "climate" and having nonsensical political cartoon to headline your article would have just been disqualifying.
Whereas before the air of sophistication conned you into thinking the authors knew what they were talking about, it took AI slop for you to see how bad things really are.
It’s the only thing I saw before I closed the browser tab. If you’re going to use AI to generate an the very first things reader sees, proofread the damned thing so it doesn’t come off as amateurish.
Wow, that is a terrible image (yellow tinge indicative of gpt-image-1, spelling errors). I don't mind generative images being used in articles, provided that they:
A. Have some relevance to the actual content.
B. Don't exhibit glaringly obvious AI flaws (polydactyly, faces like melted wax candles, etc.).
It's amazing how little time people take to vet images that are intended to be the first thing viewers will see.
Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the founding members of OpenAI) Twitter post on founding an education AI lab:
As a layperson, I read that 2024 was the hottest on record, and I see charts that go up. I have no reason to believe that the charts will go down. I don't care if its 3 deg by the end of the century or 5 deg. But what about the century after that, or by 3000.
I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science.
Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can.
> We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it.
The irony is that without them, you (wherever you are) and I (wherever I am) could not be trading messages. Every bit you send and every pixel lit has a fossil fuel cost associated with it.
Our world 100% runs on fossil fuels and right now there is no alternative that rids us of them that can be made without them. No replacement technology can be developed that won’t employ fossil fuels even further to excess in its creation. So “not using it” is not an option. Cutting back is not an option. The only way to replace them is to extract, refine, and burn more and hopefully that investment can be the one that gets us the returns we need to hopefully one day eliminate our dependency.
The moral case is really for the billions of people near the equator who cannot afford for temperatures to go up much more. It's too hot there already. We are making their countries insufferable to live in and we aren't compensating them for it. It's a travesty.
At least hundreds of millions, if not billions, can't afford airtight walls and a ceiling. Their homes are made of sheet metal and other scraps. They can buy a few panels for the family which rest on dirt to power their phones.
If there is any technological progress, people in 3000 will be so much wealthier than we are today that fixing any problems arising from climate change will be trivially easy for them.
That is, if there are any people in 3000. Nuclear war is still the number one problem. AI is a candidate for number two right now; the next decade should clarify things.
> Each year over the last 20,000 years has been hotter than the last, on average. The "chart has gone up" every single year since when campfires were the height of human technology.
If you look at the chart in the link above, it's very clear there has been a dramatic change in the last 50 years. There has also been a dramatic rise CO2 emissions in a similar period. I don't think its unreasonable to assume the two are linked.
Even if you were to concede we cannot prove that our emissions are causing the change, we should at least acknowledge that there is some chance that they are. We can't do anything about the earth naturally warming itself, so there is no action required in that scenario, but we can reduce our emissions in the chance they are damaging the earth.
Your reaction doesn't matter; only the collective response does. It seems there is little appetite to doubt nationalism, and immense optimism for our ability to correct later.
After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate.
It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers.
Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science.
It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.
I hope that we see more measured, objective articles like this. It's been pretty frustrating as someone on the sidelines looking in, the degree of panic and emotion attached to the climate stuff, that has always seemed to be out of scale with the actual effects to me.
I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me.
Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years.
Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased.
I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits.
I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.
An article talking about a complex system [1] (the Earth's climate system coupled to human industrial/farming systems) with few hard numbers, no mathematical models and graphs of their behavior, and no links to any such discussions, is not objective in any sense of the word. It's all the author's uncited subjective views.
This is the kind of stuff one should take in from one ear, and let it out through the other ear without letting it touch the brain.
It sort of depends on the expertise of the author, right? In this case, it seems like an actual climate scientist that has moderated his opinion over time, at least that was my takeaway.
That makes it at least as valuable to me as any given "we're all going to die" article that pops up endlessly in these kinds of discussions.
I agree though, that a big problem with these conversations is dealing with complex systems, small signals and potentially large impacts and communicating all that in an effective way.
Most people (myself included) are simply not equipped to understand the details, so we rely on others to explain it to us.
My point was just that I enjoy a more balanced take on the issue.
> It sort of depends on the expertise of the author, right?
In a well-established field like Physics or Biology, if an expert is talking about the established part of their field, they can just say things and you can trust that they are correct. If they saying things about the unestablished parts of their field - say a physicist talking about string theory - they need to properly cite stuff.
In a not so well established field like Climate Science, where there is a lot of disagreement, every expert needs to cite their sources so people in adjacent fields can verify what they are saying.
"To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle.
Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it.
Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.
It's a funny business. I'm a bit skeptical how much of a problem it will be but am up for fixing things. But me not flying will make no difference. The kind of thing that could is a global carbon tax but hardly anyone seems up for that.
Speak for yourself. I can count the times I flied in my whole life on one hand, and I have never flied domestically. It's not some unachievable ideal, and majority != everyone.
What is this author smoking? "2 to 3 feet" of sea level rise is still absolutely catastrophic and is hand waved away in one sentence. 5 degrees in 50 years? We've already gained about 1 degree in the last 20 years alone - with no signs of slowing down. If it's ackshually 5 degrees in 75 years, what even is the point of making a point about that? We're reaching several ecological tipping points. We're in a mass extinction. What in the everloving hell is this? Have we gone full "don't look up" with this now?
I think the problem is that "catastrophic" is not well-defined. Will we all be back to caves and sticks? No. Will there be trillions of dollars of damages and massive societal upheaval from massive migrations of people? Yes. Will a billion people die? Probably not, unless a war breaks out and leads to nuclear destruction.
I would consider all of these to be "catastrophic" but some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be "catastrophic."
We have a working system. That's why our world's population is so large. And it improved over time, as in more efficient ways to grow food, more productivity, the green revolution, to feed more, then roads/cities/buildings tied to single spots improving efficiency, giving safe housing to billions, mass transport and global logistics.
So what will happen if that gets disrupted? And badly disrupted, while at it. And while that is happening, multiple other things pile up in different ways everywhere?
Thats the danger. You don't die from climate change. You may occasionally die from increasingly frequent extreme weather, a flood because rains, some dam break, extended forest fires and so on. But that is not a single catastrophic event that kill billions. What will kill billions are losing food security in big scale, no safe/climate controlled place to live, violence and wars, widespread diseases and no way to help. In some years to decades millions to billions may die by that combination of factors.
So no, it wont be a single day, sudden event that will kill billions. Is the breakup of the system that holds it together. Agriculture needs a stable climate, megacities need food, the economic system depend on more things, and everything else is packed together. And the first wave of deaths will be just the start.
we arent replacing population either. food scarcity doesnt exactly help that.
> Will a billion people die? Probably not
Really underestimating the amount of deaths that will occur when our food production systems start collapsing.
During some of the worst starvation events in the 20th century, it was still only on the order of ~10 million people that died. And most of those deaths were because horrific totalitarian governments prevented outside aid to the affected regions.
I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.
In the US, our domestic food production has started collapsing thanks to the massive deportations of farm workers. According to various reports, a tremendous amount of food went to waste in the fields last summer because farmers couldn't get workers to harvest it.
Well, one plane crashing or one building falling, destroying something valuable and killing "only" a few dozen people is considered a catastrophe. I think we can say the bar for "catastrophe" is lower than that for "apocalypse".
The higher global average temperatures alone are already a yearly catastrophe, by this standard.
A metre of sea-level rise is painful for a rural cottage by the sea. But if you're in a city - particularly a wealthy city - it's something that can be engineered around.
An expensive liability? Definitely. A civilization or nation ending event? Unlikely.
besides the fact that 40% of the world's population lives near the coast - and that 2-3 feet of sea level rise is not a uniform "the tide used to be 8 feet, now it's 11 feet" - Entire islands in the pacific will disappear - How do you think global trade works? What do you think happens to ports? AMOC collapsing (a byproduct of sea level rise) will have profound effects on climate, despite this author claiming without any evidence whatsoever that "actually it isn't a big deal."
Ports get retrofitted, redesigned, and rebuilt. The AMOC collapsing is a serious thing, but I'm not saying climate change isn't real or isn't a threat. My original point is that three feet of sea level rise is manageable, if expensive. Simply that, nothing else.
If you draw the line at the year 2100, things are uncomfortable but maneagable. If your horizon is 2300 or 2500, you get a different story. But you would hope that in tha sort of time frame, we have time to adapt.
Canada, this year committed to spending $3.9 billion dollars to hopefully have just completed plans for a high-speed train line in six years [1]! The number of years and dollars to actually build the line are unknown at the moment. This is a project that has humongous potential economic upside.
Would Canada be able to build a seawall to protect Vancouver? I am not sure.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-announces-high-spee...
And how will these engineered workarounds be paid for ? It is known workarounds will cost trillions today, NYC alone could cost $1T+. And these workarounds should have been started 5 years ago when it became very clear we will never get off fossil fuels.
I fully expect no workarounds will be done just like Climate Change Mitigations. Getting off fossil fuels should have been seriously started 30 years ago, and maybe even 50 years ago. Instead the politicians have been adding hot air talking and fighting instead of doing real work.
We are now seeing this repeat with "engineered workarounds", no one wants to pay for it, so yes I call BS on the article.
All I can say is I feel real bad the past generations did nothing to really reverse CC, people being born now are looking at a very bleak future.
Fun fact - sea level rose 120m since 20,000 years ago but people seem to have largely not noticed. If you don't have large buildings and planning laws you could just move your shack a few yards inland.
Why not address the actual points he is making? He dramatically screwed up his forecasts of both human population growth rate and technological advancement rate.
These underlying assumptions being incorrect are the reason climate alarmist move the goal posts every year.
I think this mostly points to us not taking his opinion seriously on the matter.
Most others in the climate science debate have been far more realistic and measured. Similarly, I tend to ignore everything from David Wallace-Wells, another person who has written a ton on climate but from a very different political perspective, who has also been quite wrong.
Not sure that just providing climate alarmist talking points is going to be a convincing counter to a climate alarmist who is now a climate pragmatist and provides some interesting reasons why they switched.
How about explaining why he is wrong? Don’t just respond with incredulousness and generalizations and assumptions.
It's closer 1 one degree in the last 120 years, than 20, for a global average, though polar areas are bearing more of the brunt.
Unless AMOC collapses and we foolishly trip into another glacial period, the 200ft increase in sea level is inevitable in the next thousand years, but totally manageable for the continents. It's the oceanic mountaintops, aka, low level islands, and coastal cities that are at risk. Most of those cities are already filled with happy rich people who will have been long gone decades, or even centuries before Florida and Bangladesh are submerged and Russia, Australia and Canada are booming with happy with abundant rainfall, crops and awesome weather.
It just seems like focusing on ameliorating pain and focusing on the making the inevitable a better outcome is the most important focus for the next few decades.
Sea level has risen 1 foot since 1800 and nobody noticed. 2 to 3 feet isn't catastrophic. Nobody credible claims temperatures will rise 50 degrees in 50 years.
Earth's climate always changes over time, it's not unusual, although not always the best for us.
What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.
That's not a reason to not do anything about it, but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.
> Earth's climate always changes over time, it's not unusual, although not always the best for us.
Earth's climate has been stable during the rise of human civilisation. It has changed more in the past 100 years than in the past 200,000.
It's true it's changed often over the course of the 4 billion year history of the pkanet. It's not true to claim it's fluctuated wildly over the course of human civilisation.
> What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.
False.
It's clear the cause is the increased insulation factor of the atmosphere. It's clear this change has been in the majority due to human activity dragging up millions of years worth of past captured C02 via fossil fuel extraction.
> That's not a reason to not do anything about it,
Naturally, because as stated it is false to claim the cause is unclear.
> but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.
Sure. It's true that no one alive today in a G20 non equatorial country need fuss much about it - all the real serious consequence will fall after their lives have passed.
> It has changed more in the past 100 years than in the past 200,000.
I don't think so.
Look at sea level: 125,000 years ago, sea level was 8 m higher. 20,000 years ago, sea level was 130 m lower. [0]
So over the past 200,000 years sea level has varied ~ 138 meters. It hasn't varied that much over the past 100 years.
[0] https://courses.ems.psu.edu/earth107/node/1496
Dammit - I went a zero too many, human civilisation ~ 20,000 years worth of "settled" building, agriculture, slowly increasing in scale as climate variations decreased in scale.
Everything that is "modern human civilisation" from, say, early Egyptian onwards (following the formation of the Sahara some 6,000 years past) has taken place in a period of climatc stability.
Point being, come climatic change on that scale again, the planet and various eco systems will adapt and move on, human civilisation patterns as we know them from history will be heavily jarred.
Cheers for that.
He's comparing AGW, which drives a trend, with weather-based events, which are noise around the trend. He conveniently cuts his analysis off at the year 2100, by which we'll all probably be dead. But he's probably right that the trend itself doesn't cause insurmountable problems by that point.
But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...
This rhymes with https://www.gatesnotes.com/three-tough-truths-about-climate.
I see very little agreement in any way with Bill Gates is talking about.
In fact I suspect that Gates would be dismissed as too woke for making this one of his main points:
> But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.
> It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
This is just rehashed Green New Deal language for the global stage. (Something I fully support!!)
They're agreeing that climate change is serious but not necessarily civilization ending:
I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics. Also occasionally from those that are poorly informed, but they also tend to believe things like GMOs being the end of agriculture, and have basically zero impact on society due to lack of influence and small number of people. Nordhous' extreme situations may have been possible back in the 1990s with zero action and without the advent of solar, wind, and storage that have been created since then, but his statements are kind of wacky.
We've known for almost a decade now that the RCP8.5 scenarios are no longer on the table, and even that worst case scenario wasn't civilization ending.
I read Bill Gates' note as not an evolution on his view at all, it seems 100% consistent with everything he has worked for, but rather trying to place climate change in a more humanity-focused context for evaluating tradeoffs of where to put money. That's very important for governments and for wealthy philanthropists like him, and for the COP 3 audience he's talking to.
>I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics
Did you see what happened in Europe with a rather small mass migration 10/15 years ago due to Arab Spring ? People have short memories.
Can you imagine what will happen when 100 of thousands start migrating north when they can no longer feed themselves and maybe even work outside ? Italy was close to sinking boats coming across the the sea. Other countries in the EU started building walls. And even Germany took a slight right turn. Once these large migrations start, I expect bombs will be dropped. Same applies to North America.
"I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics. "
And yet, sentence from current top comment: " We're in a mass extinction."
We are in a mass extinction. It is not civilization ending.
Can you explain why you think these contradict each other?
Mass extinction is not necessarily civilization ending. Half of all living species could die, 80% of all humans could die, and civilization would find a way to move on. It would still be an absolutely major catastrophic event.
At the rate that temperature is increasing, assuming it is not stopped, it's not a matter of will there be an extinction event within the next few hundred years, but how bad will it be.
I hope you realize that there are more species on earth than just humans.
that's what "climate skeptics" have been saying for twenty years but you would get bullied for saying so.
my favorite was getting told we "deserved it" for being in Texas during the ice apocalypse, because Texas is a red state.
I hope that people exhibiting that kind of behavior are finally starting to question whether or not it's helpful. The article suggests that is perhaps beginning to happen.
If you want people to make sacrifices to improve the future, just maybe messaging that it's hopeless and anyone who doesn't see that is stupid isn't the best strategy for effecting real change
> particularly for people in the poorest countries
> for being in Texas
News flash: climate change by and large isn't about the US, and US will be one of the least impacted nations of first hand climate change effects.
You’re right, and you’re being downvoted for being so.
The bullying and name calling were intolerable. Even suggesting that the earths demise was not immediate would label you a denier and ignorant about the undeniable science behind the alarms.
It seems the tide is turning and some of the leading voices in the earth-is-cooking camp are now walking things back.
Don’t wait for an apology, though.
You folks should stop hanging around such awful, nasty people. Or, maybe you're not remembering very well what actually happened in these conversations, but it would be shame to break apart a self-pity party.
Anyone else notice the obvious misspelling of “climate” in the AI-generated hero image?
It's pretty amazing how much we've lowered our collective standards for article quality since the advent of AI generation. (Not just here, but everywhere). It's not like it's a rote spelling mistake deep in the article, the spelling mistake is the very first thing you see.
Why would a serious author go with this image? Just a few years ago, misspelling "climate" and having nonsensical political cartoon to headline your article would have just been disqualifying.
Whereas before the air of sophistication conned you into thinking the authors knew what they were talking about, it took AI slop for you to see how bad things really are.
Queue the “always have been” meme.
It’s the only thing I saw before I closed the browser tab. If you’re going to use AI to generate an the very first things reader sees, proofread the damned thing so it doesn’t come off as amateurish.
When I see an AI-generated hero image, I close the tab. It’s an excellent heuristic for quality.
Wow, that is a terrible image (yellow tinge indicative of gpt-image-1, spelling errors). I don't mind generative images being used in articles, provided that they:
A. Have some relevance to the actual content.
B. Don't exhibit glaringly obvious AI flaws (polydactyly, faces like melted wax candles, etc.).
It's amazing how little time people take to vet images that are intended to be the first thing viewers will see.
Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the founding members of OpenAI) Twitter post on founding an education AI lab:
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301
As a layperson, I read that 2024 was the hottest on record, and I see charts that go up. I have no reason to believe that the charts will go down. I don't care if its 3 deg by the end of the century or 5 deg. But what about the century after that, or by 3000.
I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science.
Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can.
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...
> We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it.
The irony is that without them, you (wherever you are) and I (wherever I am) could not be trading messages. Every bit you send and every pixel lit has a fossil fuel cost associated with it.
Our world 100% runs on fossil fuels and right now there is no alternative that rids us of them that can be made without them. No replacement technology can be developed that won’t employ fossil fuels even further to excess in its creation. So “not using it” is not an option. Cutting back is not an option. The only way to replace them is to extract, refine, and burn more and hopefully that investment can be the one that gets us the returns we need to hopefully one day eliminate our dependency.
The moral case is really for the billions of people near the equator who cannot afford for temperatures to go up much more. It's too hot there already. We are making their countries insufferable to live in and we aren't compensating them for it. It's a travesty.
They are getting cheap electricity from PV and batteries and cheap air conditioners to run on the electricity.
At least hundreds of millions, if not billions, can't afford airtight walls and a ceiling. Their homes are made of sheet metal and other scraps. They can buy a few panels for the family which rest on dirt to power their phones.
If there is any technological progress, people in 3000 will be so much wealthier than we are today that fixing any problems arising from climate change will be trivially easy for them.
That is, if there are any people in 3000. Nuclear war is still the number one problem. AI is a candidate for number two right now; the next decade should clarify things.
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> Each year over the last 20,000 years has been hotter than the last, on average. The "chart has gone up" every single year since when campfires were the height of human technology.
If you look at the chart in the link above, it's very clear there has been a dramatic change in the last 50 years. There has also been a dramatic rise CO2 emissions in a similar period. I don't think its unreasonable to assume the two are linked.
Even if you were to concede we cannot prove that our emissions are causing the change, we should at least acknowledge that there is some chance that they are. We can't do anything about the earth naturally warming itself, so there is no action required in that scenario, but we can reduce our emissions in the chance they are damaging the earth.
I stopped reading at the AI image at the top of the page. The comments here suggest I was right to.
CLMATE
Your reaction doesn't matter; only the collective response does. It seems there is little appetite to doubt nationalism, and immense optimism for our ability to correct later.
What has that got to do with TFA?
Well, your reaction does not matter (and neither does bill gates'); only the collective response does. The
Lucky for your conscience the world doesn't give a shit about global warming, nor your realization that you can't do anything about it
Of course the world is fucked
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Bill Gates opened the floodgates.
After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate.
It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers.
Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science.
It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.
I hope that we see more measured, objective articles like this. It's been pretty frustrating as someone on the sidelines looking in, the degree of panic and emotion attached to the climate stuff, that has always seemed to be out of scale with the actual effects to me.
I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me.
Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years.
Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased.
I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits.
I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.
An article talking about a complex system [1] (the Earth's climate system coupled to human industrial/farming systems) with few hard numbers, no mathematical models and graphs of their behavior, and no links to any such discussions, is not objective in any sense of the word. It's all the author's uncited subjective views.
This is the kind of stuff one should take in from one ear, and let it out through the other ear without letting it touch the brain.
[1] complexity in the sense of mathematics.
It sort of depends on the expertise of the author, right? In this case, it seems like an actual climate scientist that has moderated his opinion over time, at least that was my takeaway.
That makes it at least as valuable to me as any given "we're all going to die" article that pops up endlessly in these kinds of discussions.
I agree though, that a big problem with these conversations is dealing with complex systems, small signals and potentially large impacts and communicating all that in an effective way.
Most people (myself included) are simply not equipped to understand the details, so we rely on others to explain it to us.
My point was just that I enjoy a more balanced take on the issue.
> It sort of depends on the expertise of the author, right?
In a well-established field like Physics or Biology, if an expert is talking about the established part of their field, they can just say things and you can trust that they are correct. If they saying things about the unestablished parts of their field - say a physicist talking about string theory - they need to properly cite stuff.
In a not so well established field like Climate Science, where there is a lot of disagreement, every expert needs to cite their sources so people in adjacent fields can verify what they are saying.
Everyone is a climate skeptic.
"To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle.
Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it.
Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.
It's a funny business. I'm a bit skeptical how much of a problem it will be but am up for fixing things. But me not flying will make no difference. The kind of thing that could is a global carbon tax but hardly anyone seems up for that.
Speak for yourself. I can count the times I flied in my whole life on one hand, and I have never flied domestically. It's not some unachievable ideal, and majority != everyone.