Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

multiplegeorges

Not much of a surprise. Government action has been anemic at best. Industry action (overall) has been net negative. The only hope now is exponential growth of (solar and wind)+batteries making other sources uneconomic. This seems to be slowly happening, so I hope we hit the exponential curve soon and we're there quicker than we expect. This only stops it. Then, to fix it, we'll need a massive Direct Air Capture industry that will have to operate for a century, and probably past that so we can hit and maintain a CO2 level of 250ppm.

Schiendelman

There hasn't been a question about this in a decade or more. There was no path, even theoretically, to stopping our CO2 emissions without dramatically lowering quality of life for maybe a couple billion people. We won't slow climate change. We can build resilience to the effects, and we have good incentives to do so. But we'll keep burning fossil fuels for a very long time.

jt2190

Interestingly, financial markets are a good place to see the “price” of some environmental issues. A made up example: “Should I buy bonds that are backed by electricity sales from a yet-to-be-built hydroelectric dam? Will there be enough rainfall to fill the reservoir reliably? I’ll have to receive a higher interest payment to offset that risk.”

OgsyedIE

Supposing all anthropogenic emissions went to zero today, we'd still keep warming almost as far as three degrees with all of the disasters and famines that entails, because there's a lag time between existing emissions and their effects. We need massive bounty programs that pay out irrespective of nationality for every possible kind of improvement and gain to carbon capture technology if we want to prevent 90% of all land on Earth between 30°N and 30°S from slowly turning into copies of the uninhabitable stretches of the Middle East.

monster_truck

How could this happen? I've faithfully sorted all of my recyclables into their respective bins to maximize profit for my city's garbage collection just like they asked

amazingamazing

When will the rich, say top 10% of planet decrease their emissions?

beloch

We already know we need to pump the breaks on AI for a host of safety issues. However, perhaps the biggest concern is the sheer scale of electricity generation they require. One hyperscale data centre can require electricity equivalent to a fair sized city. Many data centre builders are keen to claim they'll use renewable energy sources... eventually. They'll just suck power off the grid "temporarily" or rely on "clean" natural gas for a few years. There are a decent number of states, provinces, etc. whose total emissions will double in a matter of months. Could the timing possibly be worse? From a warming perspective, it's utter madness to let this build-out proceed unimpeded. New data centres should be required to be net-zero at power-up. Unfortunately, it's a race and the U.S. side of it has an administration that is actively rolling back policies that fight climate change.

wateralien

Our environment will collapse and the fat cats will still deny it and convince most of us that it was our fault and that nothing could be done and that we should just buy their anti-environment-collapse products to protect ourselves.

fithisux

This is not bad news. At some time we should decide to get along with Mother Nature. The Industrial party of the last 2 centuries is over. We should love the trees, the animals, the land and leave ASAP from the cities. Unfortunately, the plutocracy has different plans.

jmclnx

>Climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, said that "although UNEP does a good job of describing the hole we've dug ourselves into, it does a poor job of showing us that there's a way out." I need to say WTF, the way out is to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. That means stop using fossil fuels. How many times does this need to be said ? Already it probably has been said millions of times.

shubhamjain

It’s surreal how quickly this went from being the most important problem in the world to barely being on anyone’s mind, all in less than a decade. I had plenty of problems with the fear-mongering and doomed-by-2030 predictions, but the current situation, where we seem basically fine with doing nothing, is genuinely scary. Technology has its limits, billions of people still aspire to a European standard of living, and global population isn’t expected to peak until near the end of this century. I just hate this post-Trump, post-Covid, post-Russia-Ukraine-war world. I don’t know what the trigger was, but there must have been a point where things just went to shit. And here we are: an increasingly ultra-capitalistic dystopia where wealth seems to be the only thing that matters.

sajithdilshan

It’s way easy to preach vegan diets, solar/wind installations, etc. from the comfy chairs by the citizens of first world countries. But for someone living in a dirt poor country, climate change is the last thing in their mind even though they might be the hardest hit population. For them it’s about survival and meeting basic human needs.

wateralien

This is mostly the UN’s own fault. Nation governments refrain from getting “hardcore” on this because the better options are expensive and they don’t want to be undercut by another country. The UN is supposed to somehow use its deep diplomatic negotiating and deal-making skill to find and enforce agreement between these states so we all adopt the changes together… and penalise the hold-outs (we all know who) together.

skeledrew

Burn baby burn!

aorth

The story does not link to the report itself, which can be found here: https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating...

radu_floricica

I'm mostly stopped feeling autistic since adolescence, but climate change is one of those times. It's obviously real, and it's also obvious that shuffling chairs in developing countries is rounding to zero effect. We're converting to cleaner energy anyways because of pollution and better economics, so the push for decarbonization in itself is... what do you call a rounding error when it's already rounding to zero? And it's FAR from hopeless. Again, global warming is obviously happening. But the amount of adapting and reacting to it is virtually nil. Installing AC. Tree cover in every city. Start serious discussions on what level of risk we want with geoengineering. Because yes, there absolutely is an acceptable risk level with geoengineering. Planting trees is that. Carbon capture is also that. And better and more effective tech will definitely be available. But we're in a social climate where I don't even dare write down examples of what those more effective methods would be, because if you're not luddite enough you're the enemy.

unchocked

Geophysically, there are 3 pillars to climate stabilization: 1. Emitting fewer greenhouse gasses. Need to do that more than ever, but we are now in overshoot so… 2. Actively remove greenhouse gasses from atmosphere. Will need to do that, but land use and dirty energy trends away from net negative. Also, it’s a 100 year project once started. 3. Shade Earth. Not regions, The whole globe. There are two ways to do that: a. Stratospheric aerosols b. Planetary sunshades in space, at Sun-Earth L1. That’s the whole solution space, conceptually. As long as we continue to fail within that space, we will suffer compounding effects of unmitigated climate change.

qoez

Maybe if I develop really strong anxiety about this, it's gonna solve the problem

hypfer

From my understanding, the West never truly committed to that goal. It just said so as a PR thing, so that the much more affected countries quiet down, because "hey hey we said 1.5°". "Oops, sorry, we tried". The West knows that it will manage even with more than that, but it also knows that not everyone will. Jury's still out on whether the neglect is just due to apathy or because it might be beneficial. Only time will tell.

tito

Want to do something about this? El Niño this year is going to be especially crazy, worst in human history by a large margin looks like. I'm putting together El Niño Climate Week to work on averting the worst impacts. It's a good opportunity to move the conversation forward about how our climate is changing very quickly. https://elninoclimateweek.com My projects tend to be pretty good schelling points for people that like to take action, in case you're finding the comments here frustrating ("I'm not surprised", "we just need to X", "we're doomed", "it will be fine", etc etc etc)