A report published in June found that the world only has three years before it crosses the 1.5C climate target. Can we reverse course?

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/were-within-3-years-of-reaching-a-critical-climate-threshold-can-we-reverse-course

by The_Weekend_Baker

35 comments

  1. In theory? Sure. In practice? For way too many people this is not a priority.

  4. Of course we can, but we won’t. The death cult of fossil fuel fed capitalism is in full charge. It chose profits over our children’s lives and a safer saner human future, very consciously, roughly 40 years ago, and we will all now pay the price. Strap in, love your children, do everything you can to build community resilience. Because this ride has peaked and it is going down hard.

  5. With the current administration of climate change deniers? Is this a serious question!

  8. No because Republicans, religion, the ultra rich and corporations want you to breath toxic fumes, drink poisoned water, or die in a natural disaster for the sake of power and money.

  10. When will they stop pretending because we have already crossed 1.5C. How long are they planning to beat a dead horse?

  12. Not even close . We won’t even have a EPA anymore and we are the world’s second largest polluter.

  13. Not with the current US administration.

    Maybe the rest of the world could with some really heavy lifting , but unlikely.

  15. Thing is all the methane coming from thawing tundra seem to have reached a state where not much can be done. You can’t choose between 1,5 or 1.7, rather 1.5 and 5 degrees warming meaning virtually all ice will melt in polar regions . No more Holocen since the crops we depend on can’t be grown in a scale we need.

  16. Depending on the size of the window of the rolling average, we technically probably won’t hit it until around 2035 or so.

  17. That would require stopping any and all combustion or burning of any substance by tomorrow.

  19. I feel that’s about right. This is why the trump administration is hiding all the information about climate.

  20. 1.5 is done. They’re talking about a multi year average of 1.5. We blew by 1.5 two years ago.

  21. No, I ride a bike do work and do not own two private jets to get around, it’s not my fault.🤦‍♂️

  22. Lol no. A scary number of people still don’t believe it’s real or do not care.

    We have three more years of an eco terrorist as the president of the largest historically polluting country on Earth and plenty of other right wing parties are on the rise elsewhere.

  26. Even if we weren’t in the grip of a fascist death cult bent on baking the planet as fast as possible action needed to be taken decades ago to prevent this.

    We will probably hit 3-6C of warming by 2100 so enjoy the cool while you can.

  28. So many articles and talk about what if and if only this and that. Look at the charts- look at the worst case scenario if nobody does anything to change it. That line. That’s what’s up- that is what will happen.

  29. Can we stop being asked stupid questions? The optimism is misguided at best.

  31. These thresholds don’t happen at a singular point. “1.5° over pre-industrial times” didn’t (or *won’t haveI*) happen at some specific moment like we usually mean them. It’s more like a phase shift. We are already there.

  32. We are technically already reversing course in the sense that global CO2 per capita have peaked. It’s just that the rate of growth has offset total CO2 savings since most of the world are devloping nations still growing pretty fast. It’s really not practical to ask developing nations to just give up on growth for the sake of the pollution mostly put there by the developed nations.

    The high rate of solar and wind install for new power demand and the move off coal has lowered CO2 per capita. That’s the first stage and after awhile of that global CO2 will eventually peak and go down, but for now replacing the existing already paid off fossil fuel plants is a bit hard when we don’t have the energy storage for baseline or much real ability to globally rapidly mass produce nuclear power or get most nations to buy into it.

    That being said I think it will work out better that nations didn’t blow too much money on nuclear because energy storage will soon make solar and batteries cheaper than nuclear anyway and that will get the faster adoption rate because it’s cheaper, easy to export, and falling in costs much faster. Given that the worlds nations have finite money to spend on green power waiting until the tech hits the sweet spot in costs winds up getting faster adoption rates while keeping energy costs and thus all costs down more.

    Right now that sweet spot is new power demand with minimal baseline needs. Soon that will expand to energy storage and solar being cheaper than coal and LNG and it’s mostly already cheaper than nuclear already. Piped natural gas will be the hardest to get cheaper than, but most data doesn’t bother to break natural gas down into LNG and piped.

    We are making progress, but it could be deceptive because things mostly only get harder as you start getting down to replacing natural gas and industrial/factory furnaces as well as agriculture and sanitation having minimal solutions.

    Generally the lowest efficiency process are being targeted first and replaced, but that does mean we make good progress at first and then slow down a bit as we hit the higher efficiency processes to replace, industrial heating will be significantly harder because fossil fuel heating can hit 80-90% efficiency, not just the lame 40% of most fossil fuel power plants or the even worse 20-30% of internal combustion. As we replace those ultra low efficient process, things will get harder.

  33. We definitely can’t. We’re actually not trying in the US anymore.

  34. No. It’s actually too late now. Welcome to the new dark ages

  35. Every day we didn’t reverse course made it a harder and more extreme proposition to start.

    Covid was probably the last best opportunity to start. People got to see the immediate reversal of constant pollution, and all routines were disrupted.

    If we weren’t willing to embrace a new direction then, I don’t think we ever will.

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