A few months ago Climate Home News published a leaked draft of the summary report for the United Nations concerning the goal to limit temperature rise due to anthropomorphic climate change to 1.5 C. WaPo summarizes some recent meetings on finalizing the report and remarks on our possible future:
“It would be an enormous challenge to keep warming below a threshold” of 1.5 degrees Celsius, said Shindell, bluntly. “This would be a really enormous lift.”
So enormous, he said, that it would require a monumental shift toward decarbonization. By 2030 — barely a decade away — the world’s emissions would need to drop by about 40 percent. By the middle of the century, societies would need to have zero net emissions. What might that look like? In part, it would include things such as no more gas-powered vehicles, a phaseout of coal-fired power plants and airplanes running on biofuels, he said.
And if we don’t? We’ll get a lesson in how religious expectations do not conform to the actions of Nature. By this I mean that an awful lot of people think they’ve led a good life because they’ve conformed, more or less, to the expectations of their religion. But Nature doesn’t really care about that; it keeps doing what the rules of chemistry (or physics, if you prefer) dictate, and if our religious rules don’t happen to recognize those chemistry rules, well, it’s just too bad.
On the one hand, it’ll be an awful demonstration of how religious belief can easily deviate from reality, but on the other, I doubt we’ll learn from it.
Later: My link on Facebook for this post amuses me so much that I have to copy it here. I make no apologies.
Meanwhile, the elephant tried to sit on one of your chairs, crushed it, fell through the floor, smashed the furnace, which caught explosively on fire, leaving your house flat and a flaming catapulted elephant which landed on the neighbor’s house, set it on fire, had enormous flatulence which ALSO caught fire, and now all the neighbors have flaming houses and harbor a grudge against you.
In case you were wondering, yes, that’s the climate change future WRT the United States in a nutshell.
