Climate change: just how f***ed are we?

[obsessedwithsleep]

Obviously it's on my mind at the moment and it seems that nothing of any significance is being done. Like we're just watching those juggernaut come down the road and not even trying to the move the car.

Anyway, as the title says: how awful will the future be? What is the most likely degree rise by 2100? What does this actually mean in reality?

Would love to hear people's thoughts and wisdom.

@ILikeHotWaterBottles there is no way we can eliminate all cars and it’s statements like that that make people disengage. As I said I live rurally and rely on my car to work in community nursing and to take my children to school/attend appointments because they are not just 2 mins down the road. There is a good public bus service but it’s the length of time to get anywhere that’s an issue. Construction workers need vehicles, carers the list goes on and that will never change unfortunately, just what we use to run them

Well you can in theory, but people will likely die from it, because of like you say reduced caring services etc.

Increasing public transport may help of course, but that would take so long to organise and do that people would still die. It's a shame our government's can't be useful isn't it?

Big fire in London right now. On news.

Today podcast: what are we doing to combat climate change? (Summary: not enough)

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/best-of-today/id73330187?i=1000570462946

London fire info.
news.sky.com/story/several-homes-severely-damaged-after-fires-break-out-in-east-london-village-amid-record-breaking-temperatures-12655061

Wildfire close to the Dartford Crossing too.

That’s a blog. Do you have a link to a reputable source or a peer-reviewed study?

@ILikeHotWaterBottles yes better public transport is needed but that still doesn’t negate the need for cars, public transport would be no good for me covering 60 miles a day and people are still going to need community nurses especially with the push for more hospital at home services and with the ever growing elderly population.

More community nurses in better places would work. Could walk/cycle to houses then rather than need a car or travel far. But we need people to do the jobs and they won't because of the bad pay.. never ending cycle of crap.

Climate change is always happening :

200,000 years ago hippos in river Thames.
10,000 years ago polar bears in Scotland.
2,000 years ago Romans grew grapes in Newcastle area and further north.
UK still had reindeer until about 11th Century AD.
The little ice age after the medieval warm period.

One supervolcano or a tiny comet impact, hello new ice age.

They’re going to be pretty apocalyptic here the way we throw our farmers and land under the bus for ‘just in time’ food imported from places that will be utterly wiped out .

Phew! I'll quit recycling and wait for the next ice age then!

What do you people get out of this sort of thing, really?

@CockingASnook can you give me a sense of what you imagine our children's lives being like in the UK? Say in 30 years. Take me through a day in the life. I ask because there's a lot of talk about the future and how awful it will be in global terms, in temperature/weather terms, but little talk of experience at the granular level. I understand this is all related but it's so multifaceted I find it hard to grasp at that very specific local level

You're aware that this current climate change is caused by humans though, and will kill us if left to continue? What's your point?

Not the person you replied to but for one thing in California they already have water rationing, and I could see that coming here.

Climate Doomism is a social phenomena, there’s no real “science” behind the people saying we are doomed. These blogs are written by real climate scientists and you should take note…they’re saying books like “Uninhabitable Planet” are wrong.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-61495035
Climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto, who has been working with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: "I don't think it's helpful to pretend that climate change will lead to humanity's extinction."

metro.co.uk/2022/04/14/are-you-suffering-from-climate-doomism-heres-what-you-can-do-16461580/
In 2021, Climatologist Michael E Mann told the Guardian that ‘Doommongering has overtaken denial as a threat [to climate action].’ He said narratives that it is ‘too late’ can make people disengage, and fall into despair.”

yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/05/on-climate-doomism-heart-mind-reasons-to-resist-it/
As Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann points out, to give up is to join the opposition: the big carbon polluters want us to think they’ve already won. He also reminds us that our situation is one of urgency (we really do have to act quickly) and agency (our actions matter a lot).

www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/faulty-science-doomism-and-flawed-conclusions-deep-adaptation/
“As scientists ourselves, we support our movement’s goal of halting greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss rapidly and equitably, but we also know that doing so successfully requires clarity about what science can and cannot tell us. Such clarity is especially important now. In the past few years we have seen a troubling trend: a few figures in the climate movement using science — or what looks like science — to justify increasingly dire and prophetic, but ultimately unsupported, claims about the future. The most influential example of such climate doomism is undoubtedly Professor Jem Bendell’s ‘Deep Adaptation’, a self-published 2018 paper which holds that accelerating climate change has guaranteed social collapse within the next few decades. Hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded ‘Deep Adaptation’ and the paper has significantly impacted the ideology and strategy of climate movement organizations like Extinction Rebellion. People have changed their life plans based in large part on this paper’s predictions. It is therefore past time to show that Deep Adaptation is wrong — not least because Bendell’s brand of doomism relies heavily on misinterpreted climate science that undermines the credibility of his claims. In fact, Deep Adaptation consistently cherry-picks data, cites false experts, puts forward logical fallacies, and disregards robust scientific consensus. Bendell defends himself by offering unsupported reasons for activists and the public to distrust mainstream climate science. In all of these regards, Deep Adaptation mimics the practices that deniers of global warming have wielded for decades.

To be totally clear, we argue that all of the following are simultaneously true:

1. There is an unprecedented global climate and ecological emergency. If governments do not undertake enormous measures to mitigate climate change, then some form of “societal collapse” is plausible — albeit in varying forms and undoubtedly far worse for the poorest people.

1. Policymakers and society at large are not treating this grave threat with anything approaching sufficient urgency.

1. The climate crisis is dire enough in any case to justify urgent action, including mass sustained nonviolent disruption, to pressure governments to address it swiftly.

1. However, neither social science nor the best available climate science support Deep Adaptation’s core premise: that near-term societal collapse due to climate change is inevitable.

1. This false belief undermines the environmental movement and could lead to harmful political decisions, overwhelming grief, and fading resolve for decisive action.

1. Respecting the distinction between the coming hardships and unstoppable collapse clarifies our agency to minimise future harm by mitigating and adapting to climate change, whilst freeing us from moral and political blinkers.

Deep Adaptation: unfounded doomism”

Of course. But due to industrial revolution we many have actually staved off a new Ice age starting in about 1600 to 1725.

The late Terry Pratchett stated that it's ironic that we worry about warming but the avoided potential Ice Age may have been magnitudes more devastating to human life .

10,000 vulnerable people dying over a extreme summer is far better than losing TEN PERCENT (6,000,000+ on current UK numbers) of your population ever single bad/extended polar climate winter.

Eskimo villages (Inuit, etc, etc) of hundreds have been wiped out in once in a decade icestorms. And they are used to intense polar climates.

We can't predict accurately trends more than twenty years hence.

Thanks. This isn't my phone and I couldn't paste links to my satisfaction, so your post helps our points.

There is also no need to eliminate all cars. We are already well on the way to getting rid of the internal combustion engine and cars that emit CO2 and other air pollutants.

This is a great question and sort of what I was driving at when I started the thread.

Listening to R4 just now and the environment correspondent said words to the effect of, "with climate change we can expect temperatures like this every 3 years" which I found to be massively unhelpful. Is this is only what climate change was (ie being hot and bothered every few years) then clearly it wouldn't be a big deal at all.

We can't say what will happen , only what might

Option 1 big actions over the next 10 years and your child might only see small changes most of which could be managed/ so the house might look different with a shade outside the window and a combined heating cooling system

Option 2 current rate of progress - It's very unclear how bad it will go as things could "tip" fast - if that happens , the glaciers melt , we lose large parts of the country - low lying land , major cities , 50m sea rise perhaps , instead of wondering what tv to watch or what takeaway to get your child may be scavenging for food , or part of a mass migration begging Russia to admit them as a climate refugee

It's impossible to accurately predict - that's part of the problem for communication

Wow, there must be a few options on between too :-)

The car represents more than 2 tonnes of emissions, the flights 1.5. Believe it or not, your mortgage is another big polluter.

@DdraigGoch Sorry if it's a silly question, but what's the problem with horses? I am always grateful for the manure for my allotment...