Editor’s Note: Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical & climate hazards at University College London and author of “Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide.”
Editor’s Note: Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical & climate hazards at University College London and author of “Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide.”
Okay but… this is the one that legit may end human habitation on this planet. Ukraine, Gaza, even “but muh economy” and world-wide slavery all kinda pale by comparison.
The difference is that this “may end”, while Ukraine and Gaza are killing lots of innocents.
Also, we have the technological means to stop this one if we really want to. We just don’t want to.
Aerosol spraying for $1B a year can buy time.
Spending $100B a year for a decade on nuclear power plants built to Chinese/Korean safety standards in addition to current spending on solar, wind and electrification can stop our emissions in two decades.
Which is why it is good that this author is writing this article. We must fight apathy against climate change.
And there should be capacity to do multiple things at once - e.g. lessen dependence upon Chinese computer chip manufacturing and curb Russian aggression for a fraction of the cost that it would have been later after it succeeded in conquering Ukraine and set some kind of limit on giving billions of aid to eliminate people living in Gaza and do some kind of absolute bare minimum effort to save the planet from our abuses of it.
100b will buy you nothing. That’s like a tenth of Us military budget.
Indeed.
We can easily solve climate change if we are willing to spend a tenth on it compared to what we spend on defense.
Where did you get that number. It’s obviously wrong.
Why do you say that it would end human habitation? Genuine question because in my understanding it wont destroy all inhabitable zones but will push people away from the equator generally.
The heating alone would do that, yes. It’s the knock-on effects. As CO2 rises, the ocean slowly acidifies. As the ocean increasingly acidifies, oxygen producing lifeforms (approximately 70% of the oxygen we consume is produced in the ocean) increasingly die out. The Amazon Rainforest (a large producer of oxygen on land) is on fire. What will we breathe? It’s an ecological apocolypse, not merely from getting hot (which your comment seriously underestimates the direct effects of) but from the previously mentioned oxygen crash, and hundreds of other effects that we know about and can reliably predict.
edit: some light reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
You left out increasingly unpredictable weather patterns that would make it harder to grow crops and vegetables.
DarkNightoftheSoul already helpfully answered that (with link attribution!:-) but I did want to add that I never said that it would - I said that it may, as in in the absolute worst case scenario. By comparison, the ending of a nation, like Ukraine, Russia, the USA, or China, pales by comparison, given how on the other side we are talking something affecting all human habitation on the planet, with the worst case scenario possible being to bring it to an end, though even if that doesn’t happen there will be other effects. Like for one, perhaps no more coffee or chocolate, which historically were grown closer rather than farther from those equatorial zones that you mentioned. Even if the thought of billions of deaths doesn’t motivate us, at the very least the thought of losing our cafe mocha lattes should!
That’s fair, I’m sorry to imply you were to so definitive about it.
Even so, your seeking clarification about what you genuinely wanted to know more about resulted in DarkNightoftheSoul’s fascinating reply, so it all seems to have worked out for the best!? :-D
You mind linking some source for that? Even the worst predictions I’ve ever seen only talk about some millions of excess deaths. I’ve never heard a credible person explaining how climate change is going to be a civilization ending event.