World could hit 1.5 degrees of warming by 2024

Strigix

Verified Xeno
Administrator
GENEVA (AP) — The world could see annual global temperatures pass a key threshold for the first time in the coming five years, the U.N. weather agency said Thursday.

The World Meteorological Organization said forecasts suggest there’s a 20% chance that global temperatures will be 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) higher than the pre-industrial average in at least one year between 2020 and 2024.

The 1.5 C mark is the level countries agreed to cap global warming at in the 2015 Paris accord. While a new annual high might be followed by several years with lower average temperatures, breaking that threshold would be seen as further evidence that international efforts to curb climate change aren’t working.

“It shows how close we’re getting to what the Paris Agreement is trying to prevent,” said Maxx Dilley, director of climate services at the World Meteorological Organization.

Dilley said it’s not impossible that countries will manage to achieve the target set in Paris, of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), ideally no more than 1.5 C, by the end of the century.

“But any delay just diminishes the window within which there will still be time to reverse these trends and to bring the temperature back down into those limits,” he told The Associated Press.
 

Aaron Fox

Member
The sad thing is, between the fact that this is gradual (in the human sense), that data dumping to make data 'white noise' is an actual tactic, and active propaganda...

... I'm afraid that real life has decided to take a setting that I'm working on and use it as a blueprint for the future like how reality took Stand on Zanzibar and ran with it...

... this century is going to get rough. We're talking 'the start of an era of human history where there is only one thing happening: war'.
 

Aaron Fox

Member
Well we're fucked.
If reality takes my future-history setting as a blueprint like how Stand on Zanzibar was from the 1960s to the present, then 2020 is going to have two things happen: Brexit will be punitive (a Versailles!Brexit if you will, and won't allow Scotland, Wales, and North Ireland succeed from the UK because they don't want to spend money on a military venture that would eventually lead to war) and the US 2020 elections will have the GOP crushed by the Dems despite Russian interference... and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Let's just say it won't be pretty by that setting's 'present' if you assume rights and freedoms are static entities.
 

Strigix

Verified Xeno
Administrator
We should probably avoid apocalyptic proclamations based on fantasy timelines; Better to focus on the tools we have available, and the means and methods which we can prepare for and mitigate climate change, rather than simply accepting it as a given that it will happen and therefore doing nothing but idly speculate about how bad it could be.
 

Aaron Fox

Member
We should probably avoid apocalyptic proclamations based on fantasy timelines; Better to focus on the tools we have available, and the means and methods which we can prepare for and mitigate climate change, rather than simply accepting it as a given that it will happen and therefore doing nothing but idly speculate about how bad it could be.
Here's the thing, that assumes that good actors are the only actors 'in play'. The situation is, bad actors are 'in play'.

Given that the book Stand on Zanzibar is all but prophecy at this point, I'm not going to ignore the possibility that reality has been taking my fictional universe as a fucking blueprint like how it used Stand on Zanzibar so far.

Sure climate change would eventually stop after the ocean levels were raised two meters, but that was only because of a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and combat to make the systems that ensure things don't get worse made it off the drawing board and into serial production.
 

Strigix

Verified Xeno
Administrator
Here's the thing, that assumes that good actors are the only actors 'in play'. The situation is, bad actors are 'in play'.
... What part of bad actors being in play means we shouldn't be focusing on the tools, means, and methods we have available to tangibly act on the problem(s) we face, rather than making apocalyptic claims and idle bets based on our tastes in literature and then settling in to see what happens and whose predictions 'win'?

That's just a complete nonsequitur.

What we need to do is analyze the evidence to figure out what is actually happening, to break down the current scenario into actionable intelligence, to figure out what options are available and how we can respond- and then to create a plan based on that analysis.

Making bold claims that one's fiction is 'all but prophecy' isn't particularly useful as an analysis. It's literally basing your assumptions on what will happen off of your taste in fiction.
 

Aaron Fox

Member
... What part of bad actors being in play means we shouldn't be focusing on the tools, means, and methods we have available to tangibly act on the problem(s) we face, rather than making apocalyptic claims and idle bets based on our tastes in literature and then settling in to see what happens and whose predictions 'win'?
Because most of our systems are based on the assumption that the only players are good actors, not bad actors, and/or that Hobbes is wrong.
That's just a complete nonsequitur.
When there is precedent in history... it either could happen or will happen in the present or future.
What we need to do is analyze the evidence to figure out what is actually happening, to break down the current scenario into actionable intelligence, to figure out what options are available and how we can respond- and then to create a plan based on that analysis.

Making bold claims that one's fiction is 'all but prophecy' isn't particularly useful as an analysis. It's literally basing your assumptions on what will happen off of your taste in fiction.
When you actually go into the book, it gets absolutely freaky on how accurate it predicted the present is. For example, it predicted modern smartphones back in the 1960s...
 

Strigix

Verified Xeno
Administrator
Because most of our systems are based on the assumption that the only players are good actors, not bad actors, and/or that Hobbes is wrong.
This is... literally just wrong?

Strategic analysis doesn't 'assume that all actors are good people.' The question of whether people are 'good' or 'bad' is never asked; the assumption is that, regardless of whether people are good or bad, they will come into conflict due to mutually exclusive goals and objectives.

Your repeated claim that what I'm saying is wrong because it 'assumes that there are only good actors' is, frankly, confusing explicitly because it makes no such assumption. What part of looking at the tools we have available, considering the situation we are in, and creating a strategy based on that analysis implies in any way that 'there are only good actors'? It's nonsensical- especially when you take into account the fact that you're literally asking that we ignore reality, and instead analyze the contents of books you like (and/or settings you've written yourself!) in order to determine how the future will go.

What I am calling for is for us to base our analysis on reality, and not fiction. If you have an issue with that, please raise your issue with that, rather than with nonsequiturs which talk about something else entirely.
 
Top