Climate Change: How Doomed ARE We?

Climate change is THE existential question that humanity is facing. But are we too late? Has climate change reached the point of no return? Are we doomed?

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**What's the state of climate change right now?**
Since around 1880, the average global temperature of the earth has increased by 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That increase is due almost entirely to humans burning fossil fuels, mostly from 1950 on. That might not sound like a big increase, but it is. It means sea level rise, shrinking polar ice caps, and increased extreme weather events like heatwaves and monsoons.

That's why a hundred and ninety-plus countries signed onto the Paris Climate Agreement. The goal is to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius -- or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit -- by the end of this century. Many scientists say that staying under 1.5 puts us near the upper limit of what's tolerable. We'll have droughts, sea-level rise, and extreme weather, but chances are we can manage it.

**What does climate change look like in the future?**
That's why we have the IPCC. The IPCC is part of the United Nations, and it stands for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's been the world's top authority on climate science for the last 30 years. Thousands of climate scientists from around the world volunteer their time to analyze and summarize the latest and best climate science. According to these experts, if we keep burning fossil fuels like we are today, then we're blowing past 1.5 degrees of warming by 2100. We'll almost definitely hit 2 degrees and might even reach 3 or even 4 degrees. That means longer and more intense heatwaves. And stronger hurricanes and dangerous flooding.

**How do we get climate change under control?**
Let's start with transportation. 95% of the vehicles on the planet burn fossil fuels. They're responsible for almost ⅓ of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide! It might sound like a pipe-dream to replace those gas-guzzlers with electric vehicles, but it might not be. In the last decade and a half electric vehicles that don't have any pollution out of the tailpipe went from a dream to commonplace in places like California, China, Norway.

Then we have the energy sector -- think power plants. In 2016, 80% of the world's energy came from fossil fuels, while only 5% came from renewables like solar and wind. But we're seeing that change. Now solar is the cheapest form of energy in just two decades. That's a huge change.

And then there's how we use land. We're cutting down WAY too many trees and using a lot of that land to raise livestock that we end up eating. The United Nations estimates that if the world stopped getting food from animal sources, greenhouse gas emissions could be cut by one-fourth.

SOURCES:
Climate Change: How Do We Know? (NASA)

Is it too late to prevent climate change? (NASA)

Sea level rise (NASA)

IPCC Special Report Global Warming of 1.5º C

IPCC Special Report Climate Change and Land

IPCC says limiting global warming to 1.5 °C will require drastic action (Nature)

Eat less meat: UN climate-change report calls for change to human diet (Nature)

Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers (Science)

Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data (EPA)

Energy Consumption in the United States (U.S. Energy Information Administration)

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#climate change #climate action

[AboveTheNoise]

So let us know...when it comes to climate change and our collective fate as humans on Earth -- are you an optimist or a pessimist?

[azdgariarada]

I'm an Optipesst.

I'm positive we're going to destroy ourselves.

[Donar]

Well, a pessimist is just an optimist with experience at this point ...

[ezTimmy]

I'm not optimistic given our track record. Methane leaking from permafrost will ramp up the hotter it gets, so I'd be careful with stating 1.5 or 2 degrees is "safe". Who knows what nature will throw at us during our climb up the thermometer

[fingiess]

a huge chunk of our co2 emissions come from transport. and a huge part of our transport emissions is food transportation. eating locally is probably one of the best ways to reduce how much you're contributing. as well as cutting down on meat, beef especially.

[EditioCastigata]

I'm climate change positive: This habitat will be better off without us humans.

[jacoblongwell]

What I don't get is why are banks still lending money to buy property along the coast in Florida? I assume they have an exit strategy but banks are not in the habit of losing money. Are the banks all making a bad bet together or is there some legal loophole they will use?

[abramthiessen]

I want to be optimistic. But we still have some major challenges and complications ahead.
As someone who is studying electrical engineering, one challenge with renewables like wind and solar is grid stability. Even if wind and solar were not dependant on weather and time of day, the fact that these technologies interface with the grid using electronics rather than heavy turbines running at grid frequency means that they do not add stability to the grid. This can be counteracted by use of flywheel storage or by using synchronous condensers, but such things are an added expense.
Hydro is the only reliable renewable that provides large amounts of stable power. Though Hydro is very location-specific. Fission power is also a reliable carbon-neutral power source and it is honestly safer than coal, but it tends to be expensive to start-up and maintain and does produce small amounts of hard to deal with waste.


Basically, it isn't as easy as saying, just use wind and solar. I know that it is hard to cover complex topics in short videos.

[David-dibo]

It's not just droughts and hurricanes. A 3-5 C rise may sound small but consider the last glacial maximum -- glaciers covered much of US and Canada in ice that was thousands of feet high. Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower. The Earth looked completely different. The temperature difference between that and the 19th century? Only about 6 C.

A 5 C warming would be a radically different planet. And the main point here is that it is climate change, not "climate changed". This is the climate in which civilization has always existed. It has been remarkably stable for 8, 000 years. It is the climate in which we have laid our farms, built our coastal cities, and generally decided where we want to live. A rapid, massive, and surely conflict-riden change represents a terrifying game of chase that will last centuries, a tremendous extra unnecessary burden for humanity.

It is not one that will wipe out every last one of us, but this is frankly a stupid reason to feel "reassured" considering the unimaginable scale of human suffering that will be its price.

[TheConfettiDress]

I’m a cautious optimist. So many people are pessimistic, but a doomed mindset (which I often fall into) doesn’t inspire change.
As much as eating less meat and taking public transportation help reduce your carbon footprints, we got to remember that the vast majority of emissions come from the top 1%. Vote, organize, contact your reps, and contact corporations too!
Love the climate videos 🌍🌱

[TheUnatuber]

The planet will survive. WE won't!

[andyshelly]

i am an optimist for the fact it can be fixed, but a pessimist as far as people actually doing what needs to be done .

[growsomeplace]

You did not mention acidification of the ocean and the affect on the food chain because of it.

[tanjameijer]

I'm don't really care to a point. I life in a city where i have 80% chance that there comes so much water that it is 3+meter (10+ft) deep with water. And if it happens than yeah i can't stop it i'm vegan dont have a car never go flight etc. And if it goes wrong i did what i can do. Stress or thing like that dont help also

[nataliefields]

go plant based! help the environment :)

[philipwoodgate]

I think were screwed, feedback loops will kill most of the life on earth, welcome back to an era of the reptiles

[jimbarth]

Well done and I appreciate the lack of doom and fear-mongering.

[pgantioch]

We may have enough time to act if we make a concerted effort. The problem is that climate change is an existential threat to the largest, wealthiest, most powerful industry in the history of the world, oil. A lot of very wealthy, powerful people will fight the physics to the death. Obviously they'll lose, but they'll take a lot of us down with them.

Pop quiz: who wants to tell Charles Koch that his petroleum holdings have to drop in value by roughly 98%? OK, that's just an estimate, but it's based on fact. Currently we burn ~97% of oil, & the rest goes into synthesis: for chemicals, fertilizers, fabrics, plastics - probably the plastic for some of the devices we use to watch YouTube. Single-use, non-recyclable plastics are being increasingly banned in multiple places. We simply have no choice about not burning oil, or at least not releasing the CO2.

So the laws of physics demand that the oil industry shrink by ~98%, maybe more; personally I'd like to do that in 10 years, but 25 years would be the absolute outside. How would Koch, the Saudis, the Russians, the Venezuelans, Exxon, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell & all the other oil barons respond to that demand? And then we'd have to develop carbon capture & storage on a massive scale to actively extract CO2 from the atmosphere, using renewable energy only; we have no idea how to do that.

Just askin'.

[stephenmason]

Then there's the ecological disaster unfolding collapsing biosphere extinction rates going through the roof, micro plastics in the environment, ocean acidification, stratification, deoxygenation, death of the worlds coral reefs...Resources and population overshoot. Industrial civilisation is on a suicide mission of infinite growth on a finite planet. Doomed

[momsspaghetti]

We should help crowdfund major climate based federal projects and tree planting

Every little helps