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World on track for catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius warming, UN warns
(www.politico.eu)
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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It's one of the reasons I'm considering not having kids, even though I want kids. I don't want to create a human to grow up and live in a disaster like that.
Fwiw, it’s a very slow moving disaster. We’re already committed to a disaster and worse every day, but it’ll take years or decades to fully manifest
One horrifying article I read was talking about collapse of AMOC circulation. He was saying we don’t have a good projection of what would stop it, but there’s a chance we already have and it may take as long as 200 years for the currents to stop moving. We may have already wrecked Western Europes climate irreparably for our great grand children and we have three generations to watch it coming, knowing it’s our fault
Similar for other tipping points. We do t have a precise idea where we hit them but there’s a chance we already have but won’t see the effects for decades.
You're correct on the long term playout, but two things I'd suggest as well.
One is that we don't have to reach these limits to see bad things, as evidenced by what we've experienced even at the low end of 1 degree C. It's an ongoing buildup with worse and worse happening, so even a bit more warming and a little slower currents could have huge impacts way before the final results.
Second is that we're journeying into unknown territory. We can model the best we can with the knowledge we have, but this rate of change and how its occurring has never happened in the Earth's history, so all we have to work with is science we've learned and try to extrapolate. Point being, we think these things might happen over a century or two, but it's not a given. We also could experience sudden spasms as the climate shifts.