Taking care of all of the causes is not enough to fix the problem of climate change. If we hit net zero today, it would still continue to warm for decades, which means more deforestation and desertification through fires. Your proposal is far too conservative to avert disaster.
Climate change seems to be one of the problems where acknowledging the cause is key to solving the problem. The only viable solutions we have right now involve mitigating the cause.
Source? I think we would avert disaster if we got net zero today. We wouldn't avoid change and things would continue to warm as you say. But it wouldn't be the end of civilization, just very inconvenient. In the other hand if we don't stop making the problem worse we will eventually activate feedback loops that can't be stopped and that do end civilization, kill the majority of humans and other species, and make huge parts of the Earth uninhabitable by us.
That's exactly the solution advocated by many climate scientists, economists, and some current candidates for president. An organization lobbying for it is https://citizensclimatelobby.org/
I think you misunderstood. If the goal is to prevent climate catastrophe, there isn’t really a solution. Mitigation of the worst of it might be possible, but anyone reading the linked article wouldn’t take that as the central thesis.
It isn't that we can't afford to mitigate climate change. We cannot mitigate climate change, period. In other words, you could throw all the money on the planet at it and it would not make a dent. No purported solution passes the math and physics tests.
It's easy to make a mess. This can be done with very little energy, resources and time. On the other hand, cleaning-up the mess takes far more energy, time and resourced than what went into creating it in the first place.
That's the problem.
We don't have it.
Energy, resources or time.
You are far more likely to kill everything on this planet than to fix climate change.
I'm not saying that the climatologists need to make a plan. But someone does, and so far I haven't seen any credible road map that gets us to net zero quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change.
It seems there is no non-radical future - either we face catastrophic climate change or unimaginable changes to our way of life.
Climate change should be treated as an emergency, we are already on an unavoidable course for misery. It cant be mitigated any more.
If you read IPCC report, it assumes massive negative emissions, larger in cost than the entire oil industry we have today.
Preventing climate change is a fantasy. Sont take it from me, watch Bill Gates discuss the topic.
The problem is even if we stop polluting it on any reasonably possible timeline, we'll still see continued heating of the planet (and even if we didn't, it's already hot enough to be seriously affecting natural disasters like hurricane Ian).
We need short term solutions like this, medium term solutions like reducing carbon emissions and longer term solutions like carbon capture. It's a complicated problem and the world is a complicated place.
You might be absolutely right about the root cause, but as a solution it's completely infeasible. To limit climate change to 2 degrees C, we need drastic action within the next ten years. The only way to drastically reduce the population in a ten year time span is through the use of bombs and bullets, but that solution would do far more environmental damage and require more industrialization than it would eliminate.
Immense strides have been made, but I feel it is dangerous to take a too rosy outlook until the job is done. Complacency has always been the biggest threat to solving the climate crisis. On the other hand climate apathy and fatalism are also real, and equally dangerous.
The best source for the amount of warming we are heading for is the yearly UNEP emissions gap report, which takes all the national commitments and calculates global outcomes. With the currently planned measures we are heading for 2.7 degrees of warming by the end of the century. If the countries that have promised a net-zero strategy actually implement one we are headed for 2.2 degrees. Realistically there is at present no path to less than 2 degrees of warming without major political upheaval or technological revolution and we are probably heading for 2.5 degrees of warming. Even at 2 degrees the consequences are severe. We are looking at a near-total loss of coral reefs and one fifth of insect species, 40% of humanity will become exposed to extreme heat waves, many coastal areas will need to be abandoned displacing hundreds of millions of people. The effects get disproportionately worse when temperatures exceed 2 degrees of warming. So, the situation is not hopeless, but without further action we are still locked into some pretty bad outcomes, and we need to keep the pressure on with all governments to take further steps.
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