77% of Top Climate Scientists Think 2.5°C of Warming Is Coming—And They're Horrified | Common Dreams
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"I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South," one expert said.

“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said.

    • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮English
      3•7 months ago

      The good news is that almost all lines of evidence lead us to believe that is unlikely to be possible, even in principle, to trigger full a runaway greenhouse by addition of non-condensible greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. However, our understanding of the dynamics, thermodynamics, radiative transfer and cloud physics of hot and steamy atmospheres is weak. We cannot therefore completely rule out the possibility that human actions might cause a transition, if not to full runaway, then at least to a much warmer climate state than the present one. High climate sensitivity might provide a warning. If we, or more likely our remote descendants, are threatened with a runaway greenhouse then geoengineering to reflect sunlight might be life’s only hope. …[2 sentences cut to meet arXiv char limit]… The runaway greenhouse also remains relevant in planetary sciences and astrobiology: as extrasolar planets smaller and nearer to their stars are detected, some will be in a runaway greenhouse state.

      Goldblatt, Colin; Watson, Andrew J. (8 January 2012). “The Runaway Greenhouse: implications for future climate change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 370 (1974): 4197–4216

      We have a huge geoengineering greenhouse experiment running on earth as we speak with unclear final outcome. But at least the science of climate will become clearer during this experiment that’s for sure.

    • 𝓔𝓶𝓶𝓲𝓮English
      1•7 months ago

      It’s not that outlandish as one would instinctively think considering we have no idea why warming accelerated so much in the last years. It’s a good reason to act, among many others. However before that would happen obviously humanity would be long gone anyway.

      Also from interesting bits as of now theoretically our GHG ppm is the same as when there was no ice on Greenland and sea level 10 m higher. It seems we are now merely waiting for the delayed reaction because even if we would stop all emissions we would also have to remove the GHGs to avoid it.

      Another interesting thing is that scientists are intentionally underplaying some things to not appear ‚alarmist’ because it was figured out that this would have opposite and unhelpful effect to climate action. Except for James Hansen.

      In any case it’s useful to know what is the absolute worst scenario and what huge GHG numbers do to the planet(s).