If you mean inevitable due to lack of global action, then yeah because that’s how most models present eventual societal collapse.
If you mean because its too far gone, that’s not true. There’s still time to mitigate the issues we’ve created, but the effort required increases every year, and there’s not enough being done about it.
Reconcile what exactly? Scientists give the info, if people don’t act on it … What are you expecting researchers to do about it?
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Is going to? It’s already happening. We’ve seen increased heat stroke deaths. We’ve seen animal populations get displaced.
Climate scientist here: what is there to reconcile? Slowing and eventually stopping warming is definitely possible, even inevitable, the question is just when and how fast we can do it, and what the repercussions are. Every fraction of a degree warmer is worse, so we should be taking as much mitigation action as fast as we can. Mitigating earlier is better than adapting later.
Sorry if you think Im throwing shade. I just dont see how mitigation is possible.
Use less fossil fuels. We have the technology to have electrified public transport, for instance. We just don’t have the political will or the financial backing. This is not really a problem that scientists are well equipt to solve.
Mitigation is always possible. If we don’t do it intentionally, eventually the climate will force our hand. This will result in billions of human deaths, extinction of many organisms, and massive destruction of the current global ecology, but it will happen.
Remember, the Sahara wasn’t always a desert, and North America was more than once covered in ice.
We’re likely to die off due to poisoning the environment long before the climate makes a significant dent in our 8bn population.
We’re not going to escape sea level rise or some places becoming uninhabitable, nor a redistribution of water and total destruction of all weather models. But we can slow the changes to the point where we can adapt faster than the climate changes… and the more we mitigate, the more lives we save along the way.
Im not really saying that they use science to solve the issue, though. Im just wondering if the people most informed on the issue have done any critical thinking on a new path forward knowing the current path is insurmountable.
Right now, it seems, we are petitioning government and businesses while asking consumers to be conscious.
Maybe its time to start offering options to people who are aware of the issue but dont have means. So maybe they can start taking actions that account for the drastic devastating consequences that are yet to come.
Me, personally, I dont have children. Im hitting mid life but if im honest with myself Im probably way past it. I might see the cataclyism but I dont expect to live through it.
They proved that it is happening, that it is caused by humans and explained again and again how it can be mitigated.
That’s all science can do. You might be thinking of technology and not science.
Just shoot all the planes
I had to reckon with this as a civic-minded class of 2000, we got the early digital everything and they had such fanfare for bringing us up, and into the future, a gateway to a new generation - and as kids, we had media for 20 years telling us something had to change - they told us Millennials were going to solve the looming problems of the past. But then we found out the world didn’t really want those changes, and we burned out like Great Value Incandescents. Then it was several years of “how do I plan a retirement against the coming climate wars…” and then the Great Despair where I just did drugs for several years and gave up,
To be fair, I don’t think they expected that generation of the time to still be in power.
The next generations might inspire change. We can hope that change will be good, but the world hasn’t really moved from the old generations of then.
Yes they have already reconciled that it is already happening now. They are figuring out how to stop it so that all life on Earth doesn’t go extinct…
There are virtually no scientists that think all life on earth will go extinct.
That ALL life will go extinct is hard to imagine, but many scientists do see a high chance that humanity is going extinct (due to climate collapse) or, at the very least a population collapse of >95% is certain to happen within 200 years.
Civilization collapse in 200 years is pretty plausible, which would go along with 95% of the population dying. For humans to go extinct would take better than 99.9% dying. 5,000 individuals would be a comfortable minimum viable population for humans to survive.
Yeah, if they were in one place. Not 5000 remaining survivors scattered all sround the world. Also, keep in mind that this would be an ongoing catastrophe, not something the world will just bounce back from once the humans are gone.
Well, the scientists are talking about 95%, which is 400 million people, and if people started dying out due to climate, you would see regions where people have a better time living. These would most likely be in the temperate bands, which are a narrow strip across South America and Africa, and a larger strip across North America and Eurasia. Those northern bands are thousands of kilometers long, and people have traveled those distances on foot before. Moreover, those 5000 people don’t have to be in one place, they need to join up in a few generations at worst. Also, climate collapse isn’t instant, as we are experiencing it right now, so those 5000 can start congregating before the collapse is complete. For reference, 0.1% of 8 billion is 1.6 million people. 5000 people is a third of a percent of that.
Killing every human is pretty hard.
Yes, essentially zero chance of human extinction also
You never know. 3-4C of temperature increase may offer some surprises.
Dude we made it through that already
What? When?
The last glacial maximum was about 25000 years ago and was 6-8 degrees C colder than today, globally. There was massive change in global climate, populations, etc. And we survived. And that was before we had established technology beyond stone tools, had relatively very limited starting population and organization, etc etc.
For all of our faults we are very good at adapting and surviving. More that nearly any other species.
We’ll survive whatever is coming as a species. Even nuclear holocaust is unlikely to totally wipe us out.
But then Nestle says “Life? Or profits today?..PROFITS!!! FUCK YO’ WATER SUPPLY!!! I DO WHAT I WANT!!!”
Yes, constantly.
Most people, imo, don’t have a good idea who the scientific community is and what their discussions look like. The scientific community is made up primarily of working class nerds who work at universities and suppliers and contract companies, and they communicate through blog and magazine articles in publications by and for other academics.
If you go to a scientific conference, you’ll see talks and panels on this subject and it’s a routine topic at coffee breaks and drinks in the evenings.
The scientific community has been discussing this topic literally longer than anyone else.
It’s been settled for 20 years that the world is warming. The efforts at this point are entirely focused on containing and limiting the damage. The fight to stop it is long over, and there’s absolutely nothing that can stop some level of catastrophic damage.
It’s actually been settled science for over 40 years at this point. Here’s Carl Sagan laying it out to Congress in 1985 https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
I mean technically the science of it has been settled for over 100 years. That’s why Alexander Graham Bell sunk his fortune into early solar energy. That we are going over the cliff into warming the likes of which haven’t been seen in 250 million years is what has been settled for at least 20.
Uhhhh… they’ve been warning us for many decades, now? (and sounding alarms)
There’s also the fact that Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (and others) discovered key mechanisms of the Greenhouse Effect, and CO2’s key role in such, back in the 1800’s. So you know, want to know about a science issue? Maybe ask literal scientists?
It’s not the body of relevant scientists that are letting us down, Dafty…
Geologist here. It’s really depressing being in the community these days. We’re continually being defunded and we know better than most what a systemic crisis this planet’s ecosystem is in. For some reason we thought it was a good idea to put lawyers in charge of everything instead of experts.
We’re continually being defunded
Well, that’s the disaster happening in the States, but the time-stamp here suggests maybe you’re… in Western Europe? Shit, so what’s the trouble with lawyers, in this case?
Defunding is perennial and global, even if it’s not a targetted action like in the US. Consider for example that in the last 25 years the number of PhDs doubled while the funding of the National Science Foundation stayed flat. In the EU the situation is better, with funding at least keeping pace with inflation, but national funding depends on the whims of the current ruling party (I’m in the Czech Repoublic btw where we just elected a right-wing billionaire). Even in the best case the average acceptance rate for a grant is 10 or 15%, but in my experience it’s lower.
As for lawyers being in charge, I mean what’s the degree you go get if you want to enter politics? In China it’s engineering. In the West, almost a third of politicians have law degrees even though the fraction of lawyers in society is much less than one percent.
As others said, it’s generally a routine thing. I did once see a Mastodon post from a climate scientist, where they expressed that they’re losing hope.
If that’s the kind of reconciling you’re talking about, I imagine every climate scientist has gone through that, but it’s something they tend to deal with individually rather than stating it publicly.The problem is that you don’t want to give the public the impression that it’s hopeless. Fossil fuel corporations will use that against you. And it just does not make rational sense.
Any amount of greenhouse gas that we don’t put into the atmosphere makes our lives easier. Even if you give up hope for some particular goal, you would still want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, so that it doesn’t become worse sooner.Climate change already affects our lives. We really don’t want it to become worse sooner.
They can either give up, or keep trying. Which would you do?
“Scientific Community” is kind of a broad term. It is composed of a lot of smarty-pants types who are unlikely to take “no” for an answer, and will keep trying to fix the problem.
In the end, you may be right, and there’s no way to stop the runaway train, and all these folks will accomplish is getting our hopes raised while they earn their PhD’s and present papers in worldwide conferences they all burned jet fuel to get to.
But, what if you turn out to be wrong, and one of those poindexters actually figures out how to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere in an economical fashion, and they manage to stop the train? That person will be instantly famous, and the Nobel Prize might be the least of their accolades. They will be remembered as one of humanity’s greatest minds. If they happen to be British, they will be buried in that cathedral next to Newton and Darwin and Hawking, that’s how important it will be.
So, they will keep trying, because it’s as close as you can get in this life to immortality.
It’s an energy problem, not a smarts problem.
Imagine the Hiroshima bomb.
How much energy that contains.
Now understand that, just from excess emissions alone, we are adding at least four of those nuclear explosions worth of energy into the atmosphere.
Per second.
That’s right, per second.
There is no solving this without technology that would be indistinguishable from magic, so not happening. We had our chance, capitalism won, and those at the top are hoarding and preparing for what’s coming next.
looks at a solar panels
Yep, magic right there.
Sees nuclear power plants
What sorcery is this?!
Observes EVs, heat pumps, biofuels…
Mysteries beyond the comprehension of man!
Remember that we have technology that 100 years ago would have been indistinguishable from magic.
That’s an assumption that math and physics doesn’t support.
There is no infinite well of technology and efficiency for us to draw from.
That’s not to say we can’t find things that will help a lot, we should, but they won’t save us.
I made a statement about the past. No assumptions we made.
You weren’t implying by saying that, that we could possibly have the magic technology to save ourselves 100 years from now? Sorry if I misunderstood.
Technology will keep developing in ways we can’t predict yet. I think it’s unlikely we can save all our even most of humanity, but you never know what will happen. There is already research being done into options for geo engineering and the way things are going they will probably end up being tried. Even though that’s already technically possible to most people that would still be like magic.
Respectfully, this is the sort of thinking and arguing that got us into this mess in the first place.
Even a cursory exploration of climate geoengineering leads to the conclusion that it’s impractical and inadequate.
The world really is dying. It will correct itself. We are just along for the ride now. This year will be the panic year (look at the arctic ice extent right now, look at the average sea temp, look at the average air temp, now realize we’re just exiting la nina and heading to el nino this year)
Sorry if I’m being blunt, but there really is no way to save ourselves other than using way less energy, and that’s not going to happen at this point.
Good luck out there! Live for today!
They said your statement was incorrect; either there’s a way to salvage the planet in a habitable form, or there isn’t — but “indistinguishable from magic” doesn’t come into it.
Personally, I think energy is only a portion of the problem space; we need to slow climate change enough that humanity can continue to adapt with it.
After all, we survived multiple ice ages; will the climate destroy our technological advances, or will those advances enable us to adapt to a changing world?
The world is likely highly overpopulated at the present, but we can lose a significant chunk of humanity and still preserve the body of knowledge and many of the technologies that we currently enjoy.
Collapses are inevitable, but total collapse is still avoidable.
Yes, scientists have reconciled with this. In fact, climate change is now an outdated term; it is called climate collapse, and scientists (across many disciplines), most (rational, non-populist) politicians and citizens acknowledge that the dramatic effects are omnipresent.
We definitely still use the term climate change.
Glad semantics will survive any catastrophe 🤧
The place to read that would be the latest IPCC reports https://www.ipcc.ch/
Lmao
