RE: Climate Optimism vs. Climate Pessimism
September 25, 2025 at 5:29 pm
(This post was last modified: September 25, 2025 at 6:48 pm by Alan V.)
(September 25, 2025 at 4:40 am)Rev. Rye Wrote: Whether or not we transition to alternative forms of energy, the evidence tells me that the measures needed to stop it would be absolutely drastic, and even if our leaders gave a shit, it’d be a hard sell.
The odds of us preventing +1.5 Centigrade at this point are zero.
Yes, we will not prevent +1.5 C of warming at this point. There is a lot of inertia in the system.
However, the world will transition to alternative forms of energy because of economics. Fossil fuels will get more and more expensive to extract until they are no longer economical. Meanwhile wind and solar will get cheaper, and new varieties of alternative energies will be developed.
The problem is the timing. We still have enough fossil fuels to burn to drive us over the edge in terms of climate change. The reason why not going too much higher than 2 C is so important is that natural positive feedbacks of various sorts will kick in over time, taking the control of climate change out of human hands. Think of more forest fires emitting CO2, more droughts killing trees and plants, the dying off of the Amazon rainforest, the ice sheets melting so they no longer reflect so much sunlight, the oceans absorbing less heat as they warm and perhaps emitting heat, the permafrost melting and emitting CO2 and CH4, and so on. We will have to actively pull CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it safely underground again to stand a chance against climate change, and that's still an unproven technology at scale.
At a point people may be so busy moving away from the big cities on the coastlines that humanity will likely be overwhelmed. I think this is a realistic assessment of our chances, unless as you say we adopt drastic measures, and within the next two decades at that.
Hopeful thinking aside, physics is physics.
