Even If Effective Climate Action Starts Now, Things Will Get Hotter & More Unstable For Decades [View all]

[hatrack]

Links at original

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The big picture: Even under the most optimistic scenario for carbon emission reductions — one far more ambitious than anything the world is currently on a path for — global average temperatures are projected to keep rising until the 2050s and, while they begin to dip, still end the century higher than they are now.

As one meme circulating on social media goes, this year isn't the hottest summer of your life, but the coldest summer of the rest of your life.

Between the lines: Barring the invention of some kind of technology that could economically pull carbon out of the atmosphere — and we're not close to that — there is no full solution to climate change. Instead, it's a problem to be managed — whether well or badly — for the foreseeable future.

But that makes it very different than most of the other major challenges the world faces. As terrible as the COVID-19 pandemic has been and remains, it will end one day, and both individuals and governments can take immediate actions to get immediate results. But there's no "flattening the curve" on climate change — at least not in any near-term time frame.

EDIT

https://www.axios.com/climate-change-pessimism-future-ipcc-dbd9fd35-8474-45f1-bf12-69a8095f4272.html