Four billion people live in the tropics, and the majority are quite poor. The idea that the rich are going to build them power distribution systems and buy them air conditioners and insulated houses to put them in!
And what’s going to be powering those air conditioners? Those tens of thousands of nuclear reactors we have yet to build?
Look at the first graph here, of world energy use. See all those tiny little threads near the top all joined together? Those are all the non-fossil fuel sources put together — nuclear, solar, wind, renewables. That’s 6% of the total. 6%!
Fossil fuels are 94% of the world’s energy use. Renewables are growing exponentially — and so is fossil use, just a little slower.
You claim that a 5º increase is not catastrophic — yet you provide no citations or proof. But here’s what two respected climate scientists say.
“Those sorts of things would be absolutely devastating — they would be catastrophic,” she said. “There’s a widespread view that four degrees could be incompatible with organised global community and would inevitably lead to conflict and disruption and could potentially be beyond adaptation. Ecosystems are already being threatened — at four degrees we have irreversible impacts on ecosystems.”
That’s 4º. 5º would be far, far worse. The consensus of experts seems to be that we risk catastrophe starting around 3ºC.
Remember, we’re already committed to disaster. That is inescapable. Now the question is catastrophe or not.
For example, long before 5ºC all the permafrost would melt — more than doubling the CO₂ in the atmosphere (source). Sometime around 1000 ppm CO₂ human thought itself is impaired (source, or just consider that a stuffy meeting is probably less than 700 ppm).
In terms of the biosphere, a temperature increase that large will indeed be very stressful, but the earth has been even hotter than this in the past. The threat is in the speed of change, not the absolute value of change.
This is correct — and previous temperature changes of this magnitude happened over hundreds of thousands of years, not hundreds of years. Natural selection is not magic. It needs tens of thousands of generations to operate, not a dozen.
Your turn. Let’s see your reputable, peer-reviewed sources that claim that 5ºC is not catastrophic.
I spend decades of my life believing that humans wouldn’t be so stupid as to destroy themselves, and perhaps another ten years hoping this was not the case. Starting about a decade ago, I ran out of ways to lie to myself that humans would ever take the drastic actions that would need to be to be taken to avoid catastrophe.
The idea that any significant percentage of us would accept draconian cuts to their standard of living in order to prevent universal catastrophe a century hence is of course laughable to anyone who has spent time around humans.
My wife and I have made considerable strides in this direction, but we aren’t fooling ourselves that this will have any effect or that suddenly people will stop their constant driving, flying, eating of animal products, and consuming and rapidly discarding non-recyclable, environmentally deplorable consumer junk — or of course, stop reproducing.
Humans are addicts, and the drug is energy, fossil fuel energy. We won’t stop until we see the consequences right in our faces, and by the time that happens, it will be decades too late to avert catastrophe.
