Oh, it’s worse than that. We may have fucked the planet and all life on it.
Anything that is in motion - like the climate - has an “inertia”.
In past warming events, the planetary ecosystem was able to migrate across thousands of kilometers to provide “resistance” to that inertia, because said climate changes were happening across tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
Our current changes are happening in 0.01% of the time.
That means it has massive inertia, and there is far too little time for carbon-sequestering ecosystems to migrate in order to survive. That even if we stop pumping out CO2e - and no, our output is still accelerating - the feedback loops that are kicking off across the planet will push us into +12-16℃ of warming without any more input from us.
You know what happens at +12-16℃ of warming? A Venus Scenario.
And we are now discovering credible evidence that warming has kicked into overdrive in the last 2-3 years, in that we will see more warming in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 50. Think +3℃ by some time in the late 2030s, and +4℃ by the 2050s.
And you know what will happen at +4℃? The extinction of megafauna - anything over 45Kg - planet-wide. Including humans.
Oh, it’s worse than that. We may have fucked the planet and all life on it.
Anything that is in motion - like the climate - has an “inertia”.
In past warming events, the planetary ecosystem was able to migrate across thousands of kilometers to provide “resistance” to that inertia, because said climate changes were happening across tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
Our current changes are happening in 0.01% of the time.
That means it has massive inertia, and there is far too little time for carbon-sequestering ecosystems to migrate in order to survive. That even if we stop pumping out CO2e - and no, our output is still accelerating - the feedback loops that are kicking off across the planet will push us into +12-16℃ of warming without any more input from us.
You know what happens at +12-16℃ of warming? A Venus Scenario.
And we are now discovering credible evidence that warming has kicked into overdrive in the last 2-3 years, in that we will see more warming in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 50. Think +3℃ by some time in the late 2030s, and +4℃ by the 2050s.
And you know what will happen at +4℃? The extinction of megafauna - anything over 45Kg - planet-wide. Including humans.
Fun times.
I’m well aware that things are going to get dire. Venus by Tuesday, if the fish can be trusted.