One would think this kind of outright over the top unhinged climate hysteria (climasteria?) would be someplace like Grist, Climate Progress, etc, not at one of the world’s premiere news organizations, CNN
Can we avoid climate apocalypse?
It’s probably the most important number you’ve never heard of: 2 degrees Celsius.
That’s when climate change starts to get especially dangerous. Nearly every country in the world has agreed that 2 degrees of warming, measured as an increase in global average temperature since the Industrial Revolution, is too much to tolerate. Yet there’s less agreement about how to achieve the ambitious goal of keeping the increase below that threshold, and how economies can switch quickly enough from dirty fuels like coal and oil to cleaner sources of energy like solar and wind.
World leaders will meet in Paris starting on November 30 to discuss all of this at the COP21 meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Before that gets going, we invited authors, experts and activists to weigh in on the 2-degree target. What’s at stake? And how can we actually get there?
Of course, the world has only seen a minuscule .85C since 1850, around 1.5F. During that time period there have been decades with increases, and others with pauses and even reductions. Despite Warmist objections (they’re objecting to actual science and facts, let’s be clear), there has been an 18+ year pause in statistically significant warming. According to their cultish beliefs, the world will suddenly warm 2C (3.6F) in just over 80 years. Science says otherwise. But, they want to push the doom. First up is Mark Lynas
Call it the nightmare scenario. First, world leaders meeting in Paris this December fail to agree on a plan to cut back global greenhouse gas emissions. Renewables like solar power remain too expensive, and people stay irrationally scared of carbon-free nuclear. The world shifts back to burning coal.
Then we find out that the Earth’s “climate sensitivity” — how quickly and drastically the planet responds to carbon emissions — is at the upper end of the range scientists predicted. Tipping points are crossed: Methane starts to belch out of the melting permafrost in huge quantities, and the ice sheets respond with what experts euphemistically call “nonlinear disintegration.” Sea levels begin to shoot up.
In the latter part of this century we find the planet’s temperature rise pushing not 2 degrees, as is the current internationally agreed maximum target, but 4, 5, even 6 degrees Celsius of warming. Large areas of the subtropics become biologically uninhabitable to humans: It’s simply too hot to go outside. Food crops in breadbaskets wither in searing heatwaves, and extreme cyclones pummel coastal cities already under threat from the rising seas.
Could human civilization survive? We don’t know — but this nightmare scenario is surely a risk we should not take. We know how to make the shift away from fossil fuels. The time to act is now.
Stephen King, Mark Tufo, and TW Brown do horror much better. And it’s entertaining.
Of course, then we have someone yammering on about the number being 1.5C. Like Lynas, Kathy Kijiner offers no solutions.
Van Jones supports Obama’s energy killing/cost of living increasing power plant plan. Surprisingly, CNN actually allows a disenting view from Bjorn Lomborg
For 20 years, governments have tried to cut carbon emissions. The result has been two decades of failure with ever-increasing global emissions.
Governments have already revealed the carbon cuts they likely will commit to in Paris. All of these combined will reduce temperatures by a tiny 0.05 degrees Celsius (0.09 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Yet the cost is likely to be more than $1 trillion annually.
He then makes a good point, one I’ve noted numerous times
We should end fossil fuel subsidies and invest much more in green energy research and development. This would be much cheaper and more effective than our current approach. We need to innovate the price of green energy down to where everyone wants to buy it. And we should acknowledge that wasting $1 trillion annually on minuscule temperature reductions is immoral and wasteful when there are major needs today — from malaria to nutrition to family planning — where small investments could achieve a great deal more.
But, Bjorn needs to remember that this is not about science or anything noble, it’s about political control. Progressivism. Nice fascism. His voice, though, is about the only non-Warmist one.
