donlever wrote: ↑Sat Nov 02, 2024 12:23 pm
So what's your ultimate point here Per?
Not to be crass but what would you like us to do, jump on your bandwagon and shout from the rooftops, gas bad, electric good, go on a Cruise Ship with you (sic)?
This is where we are whether we believe it is Fossil Fuel generated or an historcially cyclical planetary trend.
It's not changing either way.
The goal for the Paris Accord was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep global warming below 1.5 C above the pre-industrial average. It has been said that when we go beyond that the disturbance of weather patterns will make large parts of the earth uninhabitable.
And now we are there.
Now, 2024 is an El Niño year, and those tend to be hotter, so this is an outlier. But the curve (and the emission patterns) indicate that we will be more or less constantly above that level five years from now and probably for the rest of your and my life.
The predictions from climatologists is that this will lead to unstable weather patterns, causing more floods, more droughts and more storms. On average it will be more rain (a logical consequence of warmer oceans), so on the bright side there may be some deserts that could become arable in the future, but the scenes we just saw in the Valencia region with hundreds of people drowning trapped in their cars as roads and towns were waterfilled in just a matter of minutes when rivers overflowed will become more common. They had more than one year's worth of rain fall within eight hours.
Both you and I know that the earth has been much warmer than it is now, but that was millions of years ago, and humans would have had a hard time surviving back then. Our species, homo sapiens, developed in Africa during the ice ages of the very cold period that followed those warmer days, and then started spreading throughout the world when the ice retracted. We’ve been around for some 200,000 years, but it is only during the last 10,000 years, when the climate has been remarkably stable, that we have thrived and been able to develop significant cultures and civilisations.
With the release of enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, the levels of CO2 are now the highest they've been in 18 million years, we’re nudging ourselves out of that sweet spot and into unchartered territory.
All available science says that the greenhouse effect of these gases will lead to a warmer climate than our species has ever experienced. We’re moving toward another mass extinction event. Sure, you and I will both be dead before things turn too ugly, but our grandchildren may have a very bleak future.
Now, if we would be able to phase out fossil fuels completely while simultanously developing techniques to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and somehow bind it, put it back in the ground, we may be able to reverse it. But that will probably be decades from now, and with Trump in charge, the USA, which is one of the two biggest culprits, alongside China, will probably not be of any help the next four years.
In our lifetime the main problem will be the increase in storms, flooding and droughts as weather patterns bevome unreliable. In the long term the rising seas will be the bigger problem, as sea levels could rise up to twenty meters, and most major cities are located on the coast line or at a river. They probably won’t rise more than 1-2 meters this century though, but that could be bad enough for places like the Netherlands, the Maldives, Denmark, Bangladesh and Florida.
Not sure what we can do at this point. Sweden has reduced its CO2 emissions to less than a third of what it was in 1970. But when major players like the USA and China don’t give a shit… yeah, we’re screwed. Or at least our grandchildren are.
You and I may die from natural causes long before the situation in Sweden and Canada becomes unbearable.
But the Mediterranean is already starting to turn into a hellhole.