Strategies for a Changing Planet: Awareness | Popular Science
We will almost certainly blow past 3.6° in any case. One recent study found that the average global temperature would rise another 3.2° by the end of the century even if human carbon emissions dropped to zero tomorrow, a scenario that is, of course, extremely unlikely. Simply limiting the temperature rise to twice the “safe” level would require heroic, sustained global effort, a level of ambition that appears nowhere in evidence. And if humanity does nothing to restrain climate pollution, the trajectory it’s on right now could carry the rise to as much as 10° within the century...In 2009, researchers from the University of Oxford, the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Center organized a conference on what a change of 7.2° or greater might look like—oddly, one of the first concerted scientific examinations of the impacts of temperatures that high. Here are some of the results: 7.2°, which could conceivably arrive as early as 2060, would mean a planet that was hotter than at any time in the past 10 million years. By 2100, sea levels would rise by as much as six feet, leaving hundreds of millions of the world’s coast-dwellers homeless, even as huge swaths of the ocean itself became “dead zones.” Glaciers and coral reefs would largely vanish from the planet...It may be possible to weather this onslaught if we begin preparing now, by building low-carbon, high-density cities away from the coast
...The real threat, the existential threat, is that climate change will gain so much momentum that humanity loses what remaining power it has to slow or stop it, even by reducing carbon emissions to zero. If change becomes self-sustaining, our children and grandchildren will inherit an atmosphere irreversibly out of control, with inexorably rising temperatures that could, according to one recent study, render half of Earth’s currently occupied land uninhabitable—literally too hot to bear—by 2300.
Given the risks humans pose to the planet, we might someday leave Earth simply to conserve it....Out on the “long tail” of the probability curve, there are small but not insignificant chances for damages that are, for all practical purposes, unlimited. For instance, if several of the world’s major land-based ice sheets melt, we could see a 40-foot rise in sea levels within centuries.
...Today there’s a nontrivial chance that much of Manhattan will be under water in 100 years.
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