Climate Change now inevitable according to Climate Scientists

[Strigix]

Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial. (Published 2020)

The Times spoke to two dozen experts who said decisions made now would spell the difference between a difficult future and something far worse.

www.nytimes.com

(Climate Scientist's) most sobering message was that the world still hasn’t seen the worst of it. Gone is the climate of yesteryear, and there’s no going back. The effects of climate change evident today are the results of choices that countries made decades ago to keep pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates despite warnings from scientists about the price to be paid. That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.

Managing climate change, experts said, will require rethinking virtually every aspect of daily life: how and where homes are built, how power grids are designed, how people plan for the future with the collective good in mind. It will require an epochal shift in politics in a country that has, on the whole, ignored climate change. One hope raised by some experts is that the current onslaught of fires and storms — the death, the destruction, the apocalyptic skies — might motivate people to unite behind calls for action. “Those orange skies — I mean, that was scary,” said Kris May, a climate scientist and coastal engineer in San Francisco, referring to the midday tangerine glow over Northern California this month, a consequence of smoke from wildfires. Yet she wondered if they would have been even more powerful had they had struck places like Washington, D.C. Perhaps there, she said, “they’d bring about more change.”

Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible. If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years. Failure to do so doubles or triples that number. If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century. If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable. The best hope is to slow the pace of warming enough to maintain some control for humanity. “In our research, we’ve found that most systems can cope with a 1.5-degree or two-degree world, although it will be very costly and extremely difficult to adapt,” said Dr. Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. “But in a four-degree world, in many cases, the system just doesn’t work anymore.”

This is something I've been saying for quite a while, but we're at a point where we can't really prevent climate change any more. From now on, we need to focus on mitigation strategies- rethinking how we organize our cities, our power sources, our food supplies, and our very way of life. If we do not act to create radical change now, even more radical changes will be forced upon us later.

So, how do we do that? I think we need to have a conversation of what we can tangibly do to organize for the changes we know are going to happen, and to mitigate the damages we know are going to occur. Something must be done- but what?