Earth at 2° hotter will be horrific. Now here’s what 4° will look like. | David Wallace-Wells

Earth at 2° hotter will be horrific. Now here’s what 4° will look like.
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The best-case scenario of climate change is that world gets just 2°C hotter, which scientists call the "threshold of catastrophe".

Why is that the good news? Because if humans don't change course now, the planet is on a trajectory to reach 4°C at the end of this century, which would bring $600 trillion in global climate damages, double the warfare, and a refugee crisis 100x worse than the Syrian exodus.

David Wallace-Wells explains what would happen at an 8°C and even 13°C increase. These predictions are horrifying, but should not scare us into complacency. "It should make us focus on them more intently," he says.
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DAVID WALLACE-WELLS:

David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.
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TRANSCRIPT:

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, I think when we look outside our windows every day, we see a world that is basically stable, and even if we hear a lot about extreme weather, see horrible news of wildfires and droughts and heat waves that kill people all around the world, we still reorient our emotional expectations for what the world will be like in our own lives. And most of our lives have not been yet all that dramatically disturbed by climate change. But in the decades ahead, I think they will be. There's basically no life on Earth that will be untouched by the force of climate in the decades ahead, and in most cases, that means deformed, damaged, transformed.

I think most scientists would say that the best case scenario is 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. But personally, I think it'll be practically impossible for us to stay below two degrees without what's called negative emissions technology, which is fanciful tech that has been tested and is successful at a lab scale, but needs to be deployed at global scale to make much of a difference. The UN says that to have any chance of staying below two degrees, we need massive use of this technology, which we don't even know enough to trust. So for me, I orient my best case scenario at two degrees. And unfortunately, that's a level of warming that most scientists describe as the threshold of a catastrophe. Many island nations of the world describe it as genocide. That's how vulnerable they are to especially sea level rise at two degrees. But the impacts wouldn't just affect the island nations of the world. Many of the biggest cities in South Asia and the Middle East would be lethally hot in summer at two degrees, which could happen as soon as 2050. These are cities like Calcutta 5, 10, 12 million people. You wouldn't be able to go outside or certainly work outside without incurring a lethal risk. And that could happen, again, just by 2050, which is one reason why the UN expects that we could have 200 million climate refugees by that same date, 2050. 200 million. They think it's possible that we get as many as one billion, which is as many people as live today in North and South America, combined. I don't think those numbers are realistic. I think they're too high. But even if we get 100 million or 150 million climate refugees, it's important to remember that the Syrian refugee crisis, which totally destabilized European politics, led in its way to Brexit, and has transformed our politics globally through the way it's affected Europe, was the result of just one million Syrian refugees coming to the continent. We're talking about a refugee crisis that is almost certain to be 100 times as large, and it comes at a time when most nations of the world are retreating from our commitments to one another, retreating from our organizations and alliances, retreating from the UN, retreating from the EU, and embracing xenophobia and nativism and nationalism. That's especially concerning when you think about what's ahead, because there are going to be many more people in much more desperate need in the decades ahead. And if we don't welcome them, we'll be committing real moral crimes that from the advantage of today seem unconscionable, but which may become more normal, as we move forward into this new transformed world.

When we talk about worst case scenarios, there are a couple of different factors at play. One is what humans do. This is the most important factor...

[okzoomer]

Watching this after some random British Columbia town surrounded by mountains became Death Valley for 3 days and then burned to the ground in a couple of hours on the fourth day.
2 degrees C my ass, we're going to see Biblical, fictional-sounding catastrophes from now until the end of our species because of our collective carelessness and narcissism.

[boggaeddin]

Having watched the steady accumulation of bad news on the climate front since 1988 and having seen the underwhelming response of people in general, I don't hold out much hope for our species.

[fecardona]

“The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!”
- George Carlin

[jamesoverholt]

One of the things I'd like to leave behind before I leave this Earth is a stone monument that says, "we knew, we just didn't care."

[arkhitekt]

Climate change is like smoking: people don't find it imperative to quit once they learn the consequences because it's killing you so slowly.

[darinhitchings]

My phd is tightly coupled to feedback control theory and statistical inference. So while I agree with everything said in this video, it still misses the big picture. The feedback loops aren't a side story, they are the entire story. More than the forcing function / phenomenon themselves even.

This guy forgot to mention that we lose 40-70% of all mammals at 4-6 deg C of warming. And utterly neglected to mention what heat stress (the derivative (calculus) dGrowth/dTemp is about -10% crop yield per degree Celsius of warming, btw) and water shortages and storms and salt water intrusion mean for farming and livestock and the food chain. "Agriculture is the Achilles Heel of Humanity" says Naomi Klein. Smart observation...

Beware the non-linearities in the world climate response. e.g. If you hit a glass with a knife it'll ring. But if you hit it a little harder it will shatter... One such non linearity is the fraction of current ground water irrigation that is non-renewably sourced. An affine model, a line, is highly non-linear near the origin. It's like telling a person who breathes 10 times a minute to breath 100 times every 10 minutes. It ain't going to work out well. Anymore than 2 couples can make a baby in 4.5 months...

Our entire agricultural base is a giant fossil-fueled impending disaster. It's a tower of dependency that's sky high from start to finish. (Everything from nitrogen for urea production, transportation, tilling soil, irrigation, harvesting, storage, the roads for transportation, fridges in super markets or in our homes, how we cook the food and carry away the trash... all of it is fossil fueled). It leads us into a damned if you do, damned if you don't world where either we have no food or we have food but producing it sows seeds of climate chaos in the years to come. Wildfires that melt permafrost. Ocean acidification that marginalizes fishing and puts more food demand on shore (leading to further deforestation for farming). Ocean warming that disrupts the oxygen pump that oxygenates the Atlantic via turn over of the water column. (Cold water sinks, warm water rises. So pumping heat/cold carries oxygen in a 3D circuit. The heat comes from a) sunlight, b) millions of years of stored sunlight via photosynthesis -> oil...). Temperature changes that put bird migrations out of sync with insect hatching. Water temperatures that are too warm for trout and salmon. Hurricanes and sea surge. It goes on and on.

And while losing ice is bad, far worse are the plants that are turning the poles green. Green doesn't reflect sunlight the way white ice does. It's another giant feedback cycle. We're undermining the Thwaites glacier which sits on top of blocks of ice that sit on the sea floor. We're about to pull the cork out of a bottle with literal mountains of ice behind it...

The wildfires in recent years are setting the stage for yet bigger fires in the years to come (by releasing C from trees that becomes CO2 that causes warming and therefore lowers the activation energy for future "oxygen reduction", aka redox, chemical processes we know as "fires").

I see positive feedback cycles everywhere I look, frankly. And a few negative ones. But mostly positive ones. We have a population of individuals who are each using exponentially more resources and meanwhile the human population is growing exponentially. That's an exponential of an exponential. Our world governments have utterly failed to plan around our impacts on the planet.

[thersten]

That's ok. It won't be a problem for me.

-CEOs in their mid 70's

[Indoman_]

This spate of bad news that keeps on rolling in has made a marked impact on my decision to stay the course and live as simply as I can. Embracing minimalism the way a hippie hugs a tree.

[ExNihil]

The insanity in the comments is proof that this is going to be unavoidable.

[solidaritytime]

*Saturday*

Me- "I acknowledge the ability of CO2 molecules to trap heat. I acknowledge that humans are releasing billions of tons of CO2 every year. I recognize the past 150 years of peer-reviewed climate science. I agree with 98% of scientists that humans are therefore causing global warming."
My parents- "The jury is still out. There's no proof"
Me- "Well look here at this dat..."
My parents- " *YAWN* well, I'm pooped, time for bed"

*Sunday*
My parents- "I believe in God the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only begotten son."
Me- "I don't have enough evidence to belie..."
My parents- JSVDIENEBDISHDHD!!!"

[feilidh]

Any content on the internet dealing with the reality of [anthropogenic] climate change inevitably draws out denialiats like moths to a flame.

[machinech]

Most people don't care unless they are in danger of dying in the next few weeks or months. The concept of irreversible damage cascading over 20 or 30 years is well outside their practical imagination. I'm just glad I won't live to see it. I feel bad for those born that will see it. The careless don't care what happens, the hopeful pray someone does something miraculous, and the smart realize we're pretty much already screwed in regards to our way of life now.

[Gothead]

If only we would put all the $$$ blown in offensive wars into good use...like, saving humankind...

[edwardcote]

It's not just a matter of temperature. There's also pollution and the acidification and death of the oceans, for example.

[blader]

If we die off before we feel the effects then it's not our problem - Boomers.

[frenchiehorn]

You know, I've always had a soft spot for being eco-friendly, but damn. This video legitimately terrifies me. Because I *know* our species won't make the necessary changes to save our planet.

[joncoda]

But my corporate overlords say that climate change isn't a problem. For them... So, guess I'll just go to work and die when they tell me to.

[elcid]

What scares me the most is that every type of video's like this to warn us of this disaster got very low views, i think people start to care in 10- 20 years when it is in there face but by then sadly it will be too late.

[jackryan]

Humanity. Here for a good time but not long time!

[RedCrusaderArc]

The crazy thing is that when you meet a climate change denier you already know their political affiliation and religious views.