Quote:
Originally Posted by Anteater
One of the best videos I've seen in awhile on this subject.
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I personally wouldn't rate this video as highly as you have, Anteater, but it was certainly interesting: a sober look at some statistics, and a reminder that making climate projections is is a very difficult thing to do with any degree of accuracy.
They make a good case for the idea that 12 years, 2030 and 1.5° are not the fixed points-of-no-return that some politicians are suggesting. The UN report your video clip looks at shows that the science is more complicated than that, but of course it's in the nature of political discourse that public speakers are going to look for an easy-to-digest soundbite in among the statistics.
If 1.5° by 2030 is a worst-case-scenario, as your video suggests, I think it's still a valid enough figure to work to. After all, some kind of worst-case-scenario is the usual design parametre when it comes to matters that involve public safety: aircraft design, building design, etc.
I thought the argument presented in the video was at it's weakest on these points:-
(i) Too much reliance on the opinion of the one guy, Aaron Brown/ Bowen?
(ii) His idea that climate protection measures are going to do harm is partly based on his guess that governments are going to employ radical measures to keep below that much touted figure of 1.5°. He mentions the risks of using pellets to scatter sunlight, of injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. I'm not sure that's ever going to happen. To me, that sounds like a scenario out of a Superman comic in which the world acts in unison against a common threat. My own guess about how the world will behave? Paris Agreement or not, quick profit, self-interest and inertia will mean that any global response will continue to be slow and patchy.
If there's a choice between scaring people into action now, and a policy of don't-worry-so-muchism, I'm strongly in favour of the former on the issue of global warming, given that it is such a huge and unpredictable monster of a problem. Plenty of evidence of the up-coming disaster: the recent "heat dome" in western US/Canada, and the 20-year-drought that is hitting the Lake Mead reservoir are just two alarming examples.
Bottom line: my advice is better safe than sorry.