USS_Hornet t1_iu1u5tf wrote
Two posts here telling us good news while another story on the front page says it is too late already.
alphahydra OP t1_iu1xl19 wrote
They're talking about different things and not mutually exclusive.
The other report was saying it's likely now too late to come in below the target of 1.5 degrees of warming by 2030, which means an acceleration of extreme weather is probably inevitable.
This is about the energy industry being on the brink of peaking it's CO2 output. Which, whether we experience severe climate effects or not, needs to happen. However bad it gets with intensive efforts to stop it, it would likely be much worse without.
Even with tipping points, it's not a binary switch of climate change happens / climate change doesn't happen. It has happened, it is happening, it will happen, and people and ecosystems will suffer for it.
To simplify, the levers we still hold are "how fast can we transition away from high-carbon emitting industry?", "how much additional carbon can we sequester?" and "can we/how much can we mitigate heating by other means?". They will determine whether it it be civilisation-damagingly bad (i.e. after a lot of adversity we reach some kind of manageable equilibrium in future decades with a society that is at least recognisable), or civilisation-endingly bad (i.e. it doesn't correct until centuries after it's forcibly reduced us to a stone-age sized population).
This report speaks to the first of those three levers, and puts something on the side of the scales that says we might have at least a fighting chance of reaching that manageable equilibrium.
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