BREAKING: catastrophically rapid global warming via an 'aerosol termination shock' in the 2020s and 2030s cannot be ruled out say scientists as they urge immediate media coverage 🧵
1. A recent albedo decrease and increase in planetary heat uptake coincided with a decrease in anthropogenic sulfur emissions.
This trend could accelerate further with more sulfur emission reductions.
3. There’s a fix for at least some of this short-term increase in the rate of warming:
"The only measures that can counteract this increased rate of warming over the next decades are methane reductions"insideclimatenews.org/news/15092021/…
4. Methane is rising sharply
5. The thread is being updated with further details:
6. global warming acceleration is due to the one huge climate forcing that we have chosen not to measure: forcing caused by imposed changes of atmospheric aerosols
expect warming rate for 2015-2040 to double 'unless appropriate countermeasures are taken' mailchi.mp/caa/july-tempe…
7. Scroll up to read this helpful conversation.
Dire 1.5°C can be expected by the 2020s, or if not, by the 2030s.
2°C hell looks hard/impossible to avoid by the 2030s-2060s to my mind, though theoretically it could be delayed for many decades/centuries.
COLLAPSE: scientists indicate all aspects of human societies will be wrecked by 2029-2092 as habitat destruction and pollution intensify with unsurvivable accelerating warming of 1.95-2.15°C and rising now unavoidable even with capitalism's best-case emissions reductions 🧵
"The 2C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise”.. global heating is likely to reach 2C by 2045 dumptheguardian.com/environment/20…
The economy is a heat engine.
How will it cool the planet?
Collapse is already here.
Time to rethink. 🧵
1.
Economic growth: the engine of collapse
The hope is that, with astute academic guidance and sufficiently powerful doses of political will, we can safely navigate our way through the Anthropocene.
But there are physical limits to what is possible.
2.
To get a sense of any physical limits, it helps to look at how physical systems function. A useful concept here is a thermodynamic “heat engine”... available energy powers cyclical motions thereby enabling “work’’ to be done to move something else while giving off waste heat.
COLLAPSE: there is a very high likelihood that capitalism has condemned 2 to 7 billion people to an early death by 2038-2058. 🧵
1.
'a very high likelihood of 2.0 °C of regional warming by 2040 for the majority of regions, along with a likelihood of 3 °C by mid-century' iopscience.iop.org/article/10.108…
2.
Report fr risk management experts the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries:
'At 3C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states..'
* hard/impossible to survive
* hard/impossible to prevent
* likely by 2069-2092
* plausible by 2045
* just one of many existential threats that mean a total rethink of economic growth is mandatory to protect species and everyone
Journalists:
Capitalism has set up the early deaths of billions of people.
Has capitalism left it too late to avoid unsurvivable 2/2.5°C of global warming and rising?
Yes.
Has the scientific community issued major consensus reports indicating only political-economic systems changes may end biodiversity destruction and limit abrupt climate chaos?