"Climate Pragmatism" A La Bill Gates Assumes That 3C Won't Be All That Bad; It Will Likely Be Far Worse Than We Imagine

[hatrack]

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Even if all other emissions from fossil fuels halted tomorrow, CO2 emissions from the global food system alone could eventually push us past 2 degrees Celsius in warming, half a degree higher than the always-aspirational 1.5 degrees Celsius goal set forth in the 2016 Paris Agreement. At this point, reaching that goal would require an impossible slashing of global emissions by a quarter every year for the next four years until they reach zero. As things stand, the UN projects that current policies will result in almost 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. Unfortunately, that 1.5-degree benchmark wasn’t selected at random. As one landmark paper puts it, the “Earth may have left a safe climate state beyond 1°C global warming,” and even 1.5 degrees would possibly invite inexorable ice-sheet collapse, coral-reef die-off, and permafrost thaw.

All of this grim news has given way to a new kind of cynical resignation to this future, and a vision in which the world scales back its climate ambitions and accepts an all but permanent and prominent role for fossil fuels in the global economy. This forfeit, recently championed by Bill Gates, flies under the banner of “climate realism” or, more sunnily, “climate pragmatism.” In this view, the trade-offs between minimizing global warming and pursuing other goals for humanity are too steep, and the consequences of somewhat-checked warming will be manageable. If climate negotiators were naive about the political economy of the energy transition when COP started 30 years ago, though, then the purveyors of this kind of “pragmatism” are downright oblivious to the implications of a 3-degrees-warmer world that they’ve made conceptual peace with.

If warming the planet beyond 1 degree Celsius isn’t safe, then 3 degrees is madness. Forget coral reefs: This collapse would cascade into the broader ocean as the sea succumbs to merciless heat waves, oxygen loss, and acidification, and entire ecosystems—seagrass beds, kelp forests, mangroves—fall away. On land, this vanishing act might extend to the Amazon rainforest, which—already relentlessly pared back by deforestation—could submit to a runaway drying. In the human world, migration could be measured in billions of people, as familiar rains that water staple crops depart for distant latitudes and unprecedented heat waves in eastern China and the Indus River Valley surpass the limits of human physiology. Even the U.S. Midwest would begin to see deadly hot and humid conditions, today experienced only in extraordinarily rare heat waves in places such as the Persian Gulf and inland Pakistan.

“In the United States, just 3 degrees Celsius of warming conditions in simulations tend to be hotter—when humidity is factored in—than heat waves in North Africa today,” the Purdue climate scientist Matthew Huber wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “These heat waves of the future could devastate US livestock yields, if they don’t kill the animals outright.” Humans, being animals, would also be killed by the heat. One recent study showed that in a 3-degrees-warmer world, deaths resulting from a week-long exceptional heat wave, like the one that struck Europe in 2003, would rival peak-COVID mortality rates, killing 32,000 people in Europe.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/11/cop-climate-3c-warming/685036/

[patphil]

1. 3 degrees Celsius is over 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

World wide, the effect would be devastating.
Add 5 degrees to the average temperature across the southern US in the summer. It'd be unbearable, especially in places where the humidity is high.