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We Just Lived Through Two of the Hottest Days Ever. Does Anyone Care?
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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
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As in "We haven't cut emissions to zero yet." We can, and will. It's a question of whether we do it quickly enough to preserve a civilization-supporting climate.
Likely not. The next years will be hell. Then, after 10 years or so - maybe sooner -, 2024 will be remembered as one of the more pleasant years with still bearable temperatures and comparably few catastrophes. We even still had affordable coffee and olive oil.
We should probably start with reducing the rate of increase first. Then talk about reducing emissions per year. As for zero emissions, I fail to see how we have a civilization of any sort without some emissions. Maybe that's the point. Was "Net Zero" a hidden word for collapse all along?
Emissions have been falling in the US and EU since ~2005 or so, and look to be about to start falling in China, which means that they'll be falling worldwide after this year.
But...they'll likely be falling slowly, rather than rapidly, which is a problem.
That's a really hopeful reading of that chart. What I see in that chart is that even a year or two of falling emissions could quickly be wiped away. Just look at 2022.
It's a bit more than that; there are policies in place which make Chinese emissions likely to slowly drop from here on out