| >It's very likely an existential threat. Al Gore is of the opinion that it's not. You can take that with a grain of salt because Al Gore's predictions have been quite incorrect. He claimed the Icecaps would be completely gone 6+ years ago. He claimed Florida and India would be under water today. >We're currently on-track for a +5°C increase in temperature by 2050. I'm happy to tell you that it's not. The source of this is the IPCC report from 2014. The claim comes from RCP8.5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... RCP8.5 was never an expected prediction, it was a theoretical worst case of some unknown huge increase in carbon emissions. When in reality, humanity has done some amount of decrease. The RCP8.5 claim is basically considered wrong now. In fact we are on track for RCP4.5 despite not doing what IPCC says we need to do to reach this. This is great news. We also know fossil fuels mostly run out in around 2050-2060. A simple reality that even if we don't do anything, we simply run out and must adapt to life without fossil fuels. So we are going to peak about 1.4celcius warmer. We are around 1celcius already. Therefore, we don't have much more to go. >There's no way we (humans) are going to survive this scenario. The reality is that climate change is impossible to stop; in fact it's probably a disaster to try to stop climate change. In the past 50 million years the earth has dropped 14 celcius. Between 20,000 years and 10,000 years ago we have increased 7 celcius. Just 125,000 years ago the Earth was 2-4 celcius warmer than today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian#Global_temperatures Humans didn't affect any of these events. The climate changes, we shouldn't try to prevent it. |
We don't know that, it will just get more expensive to extract it. And given that beneath the ice shelves of the arctic are untapped vast reserves of oil, we cannot even expect that to remain true anymore. Norway and Russia are already preparing exploitation of these reservoirs.
> So we are going to peak about 1.4celcius warmer.
At about 1.5 to 2°C we're going to see the methane in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf starting to be released. We were expecting this to start in the 2040ies, but guess what; it already started and we've seen the increase in CH4 ppm from 2018 through 2020. And while CH4 quickly degrades in the atmosphere, the release will very likely trigger a feedback loop that at about 3.0 to 3.5°C will start melting the suboceanic frozen CH4. This will then kick us easily up to 5°C (or above).
The IPCC models don't include any trigger points or feedback loops because our models are just not sophisticated enough.
> The climate changes, we shouldn't try to prevent it.
The climate change we're currently experiencing is human-made. It's orders-of-magnitudes faster than anything we see in the records. To say that this is just the same as the natural fluctuations of climatic behavior over tens of thousands of years is false equivalence. We definitely must do something about it or face extinction as a civilization (and possibly even as a species).