alt Hacker NewsUN says breaching 1.5C warming limit is 'imminent and unavoidable'
Comments
To me, the problem with “1.5 degC” messaging as it is treated as a boundary “avoid this or doom”, where “avoid” immediately means decades of economic disadvantage compared countries that ignore the warning.
Rarely, does the messaging talk about actual long-term harms in the form of economic costs with numbers. And if they do, it’s worse than convincing people to be concerned about the extended weather forecast for next month…
It’s really a trade-off that should be discussed with less emotion and more reason. Unfortunately, it involves a timescale that is beyond that of political terms, and remaining lifetimes of elected officials…
The entire human philosophy is to borrow from tomorrow to pay for today, and it’s leading to the destruction of our societies. At some point we will be forced to redefine the models that we’ve held onto so tightly.
This is the cue for fossil fuel defenders to say "Whelp, we tried. But what are you gonna do when India and China...blah blah. Let's just try to deal with it now, no point burning less fossil fuels.".
You can see an example of that attitude in this very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202929
No, we didn't try. We didn't even pretend to try. These are all lies.
The truth is even if India and China didn't exist on the earth, we'd be heading for the same fate. Maybe 20 years later, but in the same direction. Europe and North America emit just as much carbon as China even today[1], despite China building a coal plant every time you take a breath or whatever "fact" fossil-heads come up with.
China has probably made the best effort out of everyone, with its prioritization of solar, wind, and batteries. But even that was too little, too late.
Now the target is 2.5C.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50177911
"New UNEP report lays out emission cuts needed for return to 1.5°C" (2026) https://www.unep.org/en/news-and-stories/press-release/new-u...
[UNEP] "Emissions Gap Report 2026" https://wedocs.unep.org/items/87c02cac-8da8-4c28-ba61-c846ee...
How to use AI to solve this problem?
Energy storage?
A new Captain Planet? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48043192
> We are now saying this window has closed, but we can open it again by making the overshoot as brief as possible
Not holding my breath.
It would require relentless global catastrophe to move humans globally. And even then many would dig in and resist.
The spotty nature of climate impact on a globe wide scale will likely never allow a shared assessment of risk.
Not to mention the need for most of humanity to stick to a plan over sufficiently long timescales.
You know, I searched this article for "China" and "India" (each of whom have over 60 Gigawatts of coal-fired power plants completing construction over the next 24 months) and found nothing.
The world needs to either decide that we will confront the developing world and tell them they cannot build power plants like we did (unlikely), or start figuring out how to ameliorate the effects of the warming.
It is fundamentally unserious for smaller-population rich countries to think they can cut their own emissions enough to make a dent, unless they plan to return their populations to the pre-electric age.