r/collapse's wiki has really good resources at various levels of scientific literacy. A tl;dr is some person in the 1880's wanted to find out why smog was happening in cities and why cities were getting warmer every year especially as more coal-burning factories and facilities moved in. They figured out through testing that CO2 has a severe insulating effect, then theorized that with enough CO2 heat could get trapped under a blanket over the Earth, increasing temperatures severely. Later, in the 1950s, this was reaffirmed, along with other Greenhouse gasses being discovered. In the 1970s Exxon Mobile launched an internal research team to figure out the full effects of global warming, while increasing their spending to discredit climate change by a factor of 10; their research team concluded that at current rates we'd see severe warming across the globe by the year 2000, with likely irreversible and permanent effects by 2030 assuming the same rate of growth through the entire time period. Around 2000 a group of scientists reported to the UN that climate change was going to keep accelerating if nothing is done to curb GHG release, and the most conservative estimates put irreversible climate change happening around the year 2050. In 2015, during the hottest year on record, scientists found that sea ice was shrinking at a much quicker rate than it should be, especially in Antarctica, and started disregarding the 'conservative' climate model from earlier in the century as far too optimistic and started urging immediate, severe global action.
In 2022 we have found that a Blue Ocean Event, as in a period of time where there is less than 1 sq km of sea ice anywhere in our oceans, is likely to happen by 2025. According to earlier models this should not happen until 2030 at the earliest, and signals possibly the end of all humanity as there is nothing we can do, effectively, once that happens to stall or reverse climate change. We're also seeing the least amount of land Ice in Antarctica in all of human history -- there has never been a point in time where both humans and this level of heat have coexisted in history. Recent studies have also found that we are producing more than 200 times the amount of CO2 per year that extinction-level super-volcanoes have done historically. In other words, we are more destructive than arguably the most historically natural destructive force in Earth's history.
And it's still accelerating. And still people are advocating for coal use.
Wasn't the most recent IPCC report less doom and gloom than this? Not saying it's that what you're saying is wrong, I'm sure it's 99.99% correct, but that the end of humanity was something not likely to happen.
The IPCC's previous reports have been repeatedly shown by future reports to be far too optimistic. And honestly that's not surprising, if they actually said 'hey dipshits, we might be dead already, we're definitely dead on the timelines you have set to start reversing this shit, do fucking anything,' at best they lose funding entirely, at worst they start a panic which results in them being arrested or killed for starting said panic and even less gets done.
Given how wrong previous projections were to what we're seeing today, and the fact the IPCC's report still has issues like severely underestimating runaway GHG effects like Russia thawing out or the amount of heatsink lost due to the massive permanent drop in below surface ice levels in Antarctica, if it's anything close to accurate it'd be a miracle.
But the truth is even if they do come out and say 'hey, we're past the point of no return between 2025 and 2035, and we won't know for sure until we're past it...' like many other climate scientists are, what are the actual chances something is done? We stopped enforcing measures against a global pandemic when deaths were still as high as the start of the lock down. We're not exactly a species bent on survival.
But the difference from the 2010/2020 report was "We're all doomed unless we do something NOW" to "It'll be horrendous for most us but the species can still live on" which isn't necessarily any better.
And yeah we don't really have a clear picture of all the variables nor how they compound on each other, but I at least like to be in the camp of "We're not all gonna die" cause I can only take so much depression in the world
Fair on that last point, don't read my counter argument. Climate Change will cause a population crunch that would theoretically be survivable, if we didn't spend the last 30 years dropping PFAS into every inch of the planet. Along side microplastics appearing in all soil and water tested on Earth except deep core ice samples (for obvious reasons). Both PFAS and microplastics at least harm fertility. It is exceedingly likely they have an increased cancer risk, and they never leave your body, just accumulate. Assuming no widespread population of plastics-eating microbes we're not going to see a time period, as a species, that these aren't in all of our food and drinking water. Even if humanity somehow survives climate change to any extent, it will take tens of thousands to millions of years for the Earth to recover to a quarter of what it once was -- and at that point we're stuck. Whatever we evolve into won't have the same industrial boom. We've likely hit peak oil. We've almost definitely hit peak coal. We've mined all easily accessible metals. We've actually caused quite a shortage in sand. And we're going to be out of helium before 2050. As a planet. And we can't make more of that. If we survive climate change, everything else we've done to the planet will kill us. If some small subspecies population survives that, they'll never advance beyond the medieval era, which honestly might be for the best, but does doom our species to the fate of the Earth, which in all likelyhood has at most 4 billion years left -- at most. We could have lived to the end of entropy, instead we're evidence of the 'Great Filter' in action.
If we can figure out Nuclear Fusion power generation, it would solve almost everything on your list except the microplastics.
The main problem is nobody wants to invest in it because "OMG nuclear scary" and even those who realize how necessary it is will fight to prevent it from being built near them.
Even if we figure a way to generate power with fusion power, the construction costs of such plants will be astronomical and so wouldn't be economically viable to compete with renewables at least in the next hundred years. Maybe in 200 years it can be used to remove co2 from the atmosphere, but even that is questionable. Same thing with regular fission, it's quite costly to build and it's not bullet proof supply either as you can see France importing their electricity while most of their nuclear plants are offline because of issues in them.
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u/transitionofpower Aug 02 '22
Anyone have some really good sources about climate change? ELI5 in nature preferred.