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By ralfy
#14997213
Truth To Power wrote:I most certainly did, as my posts in this thread prove so very conclusively, and I will thank you to remember it.

But the accompanying graphs prove they didn't, as I have already proved to you.

<yawn> I have proved I understand it incomparably better than you.


No, it didn't!

From the article:

Dr Graham Turner gathered data from the UN (its department of economic and social affairs, Unesco, the food and agriculture organisation, and the UN statistics yearbook). He also checked in with the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration, the BP statistical review, and elsewhere. That data was plotted alongside the Limits to Growth scenarios.

The results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario. The data doesn’t match up with other scenarios.


A link to the paper.

So much for your claims that LtG is "unscientific garbage"!

And since it is now revealed that you can't even read graphs correctly, I don't see why you should continue wasting my time.
By Truth To Power
#14997266
ralfy wrote:No, it didn't!

Yes, of course it did.
From the article:

A link to the paper.

So much for your claims that LtG is "unscientific garbage"!

It is indisputably unscientific garbage. The only graphs that are close to the LtG projections are ones that make no prediction more complex than, "the recent trend will continue." All the more complex predictions, such as declining food production, have been proved wildly wrong. When LtG projected slowing global population growth because of starvation and poverty, the fact that population growth has slowed because of reduced fertility is not confirmation of their projection, sorry.
And since it is now revealed that you can't even read graphs correctly,

You are makin' $#!+ up again.
I don't see why you should continue wasting my time.

It's the silly doomsayer cult that is wasting everyone's time, as well as effort and money.
By Sivad
#14997271
The Limits to Panic
Bjørn Lomborg

We often hear how the world as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse. Indeed, more than 40 years after the Club of Rome released the mother of all apocalyptic forecasts, The Limits to Growth, its basic ideas – though thoroughly discredited – are still shaping mindsets and influencing public policy.

The Limits to Growth warned humanity in 1972 that devastating collapse was just around the corner. But, while we have seen financial panics since then, there have been no real shortages or productive breakdowns. Instead, the resources generated by human ingenuity remain far ahead of human consumption.

But the report’s fundamental legacy remains: we have inherited a tendency to obsess over misguided remedies for largely trivial problems, while often ignoring big problems and sensible remedies.

In the early 1970’s, the flush of technological optimism was over, the Vietnam War was a disaster, societies were in turmoil, and economies were stagnating. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring had raised fears about pollution and launched the modern environmental movement; Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 title The Population Bomb said it all. The first Earth Day, in 1970, was deeply pessimistic.

The genius of The Limits to Growth was to fuse these worries with fears of running out of stuff. We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution. The only hope was to stop economic growth itself, cut consumption, recycle, and force people to have fewer children, stabilising society at a significantly poorer level.

That message still resonates today, though it was spectacularly wrong. For example, the authors of The Limits to Growth predicted that before 2013, the world would have run out of aluminium, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc.

Instead, despite recent increases, commodity prices have generally fallen to about a third of their level 150 years ago. Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings, and thermometers: mercury consumption is down 98% and, by 2000, the price was down 90%. More broadly, since 1946, supplies of copper, aluminium, iron, and zinc have outstripped consumption, owing to the discovery of additional reserves and new technologies to extract them economically.

Similarly, oil and natural gas were to run out in 1990 and 1992, respectively; today, reserves of both are larger than they were in 1970, although we consume dramatically more. Within the past six years, shale gas alone has doubled potential gas resources in the United States and halved the price.

As for economic collapse, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global GDP per capita will increase 14-fold over this century and 24-fold in the developing world.

The Limits of Growth got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness. Population growth has been slowing since the late 1960’s. Food supply has not collapsed (1.5 billion hectares of arable land are being used, but another 2.7 billion hectares are in reserve). Malnourishment has dropped by more than half, from 35% of the world’s population to under 16%.

Nor are we choking on pollution. Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no particulate air pollution and happy farmers, and a future strangled by belching smokestacks, reality is entirely the reverse.

In 1900, when the global human population was 1.5 billion, almost three million people – roughly one in 500 – died each year from air pollution, mostly from wretched indoor air. Today, the risk has receded to one death per 2,000 people. While pollution still kills more people than malaria does, the mortality rate is falling, not rising.

Nonetheless, the mindset nurtured by The Limits to Growth continues to shape popular and elite thinking.

Consider recycling, which is often just a feel-good gesture with little environmental benefit and significant cost. Paper, for example, typically comes from sustainable forests, not rainforests. The processing and government subsidies associated with recycling yield lower-quality paper to save a resource that is not threatened.

Likewise, fears of over-population framed self-destructive policies, such as China’s one-child policy and forced sterilization in India. And, while pesticides and other pollutants were seen to kill off perhaps half of humanity, well-regulated pesticides cause about 20 deaths each year in the US, whereas they have significant upsides in creating cheaper and more plentiful food.

Indeed, reliance solely on organic farming – a movement inspired by the pesticide fear – would cost more than $100 billion annually in the US. At 16% lower efficiency, current output would require another 65 million acres of farmland – an area more than half the size of California. Higher prices would reduce consumption of fruits and vegetables, causing myriad adverse health effects (including tens of thousands of additional cancer deaths per year).

Obsession with doom-and-gloom scenarios distracts us from the real global threats. Poverty is one of the greatest killers of all, while easily curable diseases still claim 15 million lives every year – 25% of all deaths.

The solution is economic growth. When lifted out of poverty, most people can afford to avoid infectious diseases. China has pulled more than 680 million people out of poverty in the last three decades, leading a worldwide poverty decline of almost a billion people. This has created massive improvements in health, longevity, and quality of life.

The four decades since The Limits of Growth have shown that we need more of it, not less. An expansion of trade, with estimated benefits exceeding $100 trillion annually toward the end of the century, would do thousands of times more good than timid feel-good policies that result from fear-mongering. But that requires abandoning an anti-growth mentality and using our enormous potential to create a brighter future.

Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It.
By Sivad
#14997274

In 1980 economist Julian Simon bet biologist Paul Ehrlich that the price of five commodity metals would decrease over the next 10 years. Today on the program Pierre Desrochers of the University of Toronto Mississauga joins us to explain how the bet came about, who won, and what was really at stake. Along the way we learn about depletionism versus resourceship, how lack of imagination leads people toward hysteria and failed predictions, and why the human brain is the greatest resource of all.



Renowned scientist Paul Ehrlich has been in the public spotlight for half a century now. But there's a question at the heart of the story of Ehrlich's unlikely rise to prominence. A question that must be answered. Why is it that this entomologist has become such a superstar of science, received so many accolades and awards, and wielded such influence over the public conversation on population despite being so remarkably, consistently, staggeringly wrong about the issues he presumes to lecture the public on?
By Pants-of-dog
#14997277
Sivad wrote:The Limits to Panic
Bjørn Lomborg
.....
Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It.


Lomborg does not discuss climate change at all here.

Which is probably for the best, since he has no background in climate sciences.

Sivad wrote:In 1980 economist Julian Simon bet biologist Paul Ehrlich that the price of five commodity metals would decrease over the next 10 years. Today on the program Pierre Desrochers of the University of Toronto Mississauga joins us to explain how the bet came about, who won, and what was really at stake. Along the way we learn about depletionism versus resourceship, how lack of imagination leads people toward hysteria and failed predictions, and why the human brain is the greatest resource of all.

Renowned scientist Paul Ehrlich has been in the public spotlight for half a century now. But there's a question at the heart of the story of Ehrlich's unlikely rise to prominence. A question that must be answered. Why is it that this entomologist has become such a superstar of science, received so many accolades and awards, and wielded such influence over the public conversation on population despite being so remarkably, consistently, staggeringly wrong about the issues he presumes to lecture the public on?


This also has nothing to do with climate change.
#14997296
Pants-of-dog wrote:Lomborg does not discuss climate change at all here.

Which is probably for the best, since he has no background in climate sciences.

But climate change hysteria is very much of a piece with the all the other eco-screaming we have been repeatedly subjected to since the 1960s.
This also has nothing to do with climate change.

Yes, actually, it does: silly shrieking based on eco-nonscience is still with us today, in the form of anti-fossil-fuel hysteria (absurdly and dishonestly called, "climate change").
By Sivad
#14997324
Truth To Power wrote:But climate change hysteria is very much of a piece with the all the other eco-screaming we have been repeatedly subjected to since the 1960s.

Yes, actually, it does: silly shrieking based on eco-nonscience is still with us today, in the form of anti-fossil-fuel hysteria (absurdly and dishonestly called, "climate change").



Right, it's the same Malthusian junk science elitist have been pushing for over two centuries now in order to scare people into instituting a world technate with command and control over global resources and global development. It's the same elitist agenda supported by the same fake ass junk science.
------
A load of hot air?
By Simon Cox and Richard Vadon
BBC News

Hardly a day goes by without a new dire warning about climate change. But some claims are more extreme than others, giving rise to fears that the problem is being oversold and damaging the issue.

How much has the planet warmed up over the past century? Most people reckon between two and three degrees. They are not even close. The real figure, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is 0.6C.

It's not surprising most people get it wrong. We are bombarded by stories warning us that global warming is out of control. The most extreme warn us we will be living in a tropical Britain where malaria is rife and Norfolk has disappeared altogether.

Dr Hans Von Storch, a leading German climate scientist and fervent believer in global warming, is convinced the effect of climate change is being exaggerated.

"The alarmists think that climate change is something extremely dangerous, extremely bad and that overselling a little bit, if it serves a good purpose, is not that bad."


Attention grabbing

When it came to selling the story to journalists, the press release only mentioned one figure - 11C.

The ensuing broadsheet headlines were predictably apocalyptic, from "Global warming is twice as bad as previously thought" to "Screensaver weather trial predicts 10C rise in British temperatures".

They may be dramatic but they are also wrong. Dr Myles Allen, principal investigator at Climateprediction.net, blames the media.

"If journalists decide to embroider on a press release without referring to the paper which the press release is about, then that's really the journalists' problem. We can't as scientists guard against that."

But is the media solely to blame? We asked several climate scientists to read the paper and the press release publicising it. All were critical of the prominence given to the prediction that the world could heat up by 11C.

"I agree the 11C figure was unreasonably hyped. It's a difficult line for all scientists to tread, as we need something 'exciting' to have any chance of publishing... to justify our funding," one scientist wrote us.

Not easy being green

Even government agencies have been criticised for overselling climate change. When the Environment Agency publicised research on global warming over the next 1,000 years, it predicted cataclysmic change; temperature rises of 15C and sea levels increasing by 11m. The agency said action was needed now.

But this isn't how the study's lead author, Dr Tim Lenton sees it. His research shows if you did nothing for a century you would still only get a fraction of the worst case scenario. He says there's consternation among scientists at the presentation of their science by the Environment Agency. Scientists would have liked to have seen a more balanced picture presented.

Clive Bates, head of environment policy at the agency, says it's simply a case of Dr Lenton not understanding the way the media works. "He was involved in signing off the press release, there is nothing in there that is actually incorrect."

The difficulty for climate scientists is that their work has a political dimension.

All of the climate scientists we spoke to fervently believe global warming is being caused by human activity. Many agree there's also a major problem with alarmism. As one scientist said: "If we cry wolf too loudly or too often, no-one will believe us when the beast actually comes for dinner."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4923504.stm
----
[Back-to-back posts merged - please use the edit function to add to your previous post if you are still the latest person to reply to a thread, and it's within the 24 hour window allowed for editing. Especially if it's ony a few minutes later, as this was. Prosthetic Conscience, moderator]
By Pants-of-dog
#14997329
@Sivad

Do you believe that the Earth is getting warmer?

Do you believe that this is due to human impact?

If so, how much of it is due to human impact?
By Sivad
#14997340
I give it a 75% probability that the global average temp has gone up at least half a degree c over the last hundred years and I give it 50/50 that more than half of that warming is anthropogenic.

but who cares what I think, the only thing that matters is what the experts agree on and how much confidence we can rationally have in the experts after a critical institutional analysis of the field of climate science.
By Pants-of-dog
#14997349
Sivad wrote:I give it a 75% probability that the global average temp has gone up at least half a degree c over the last hundred years and I give it 50/50 that more than half of that warming is anthropogenic.


So you think the climate has warmed.

Do you think it will continue to do so?

Why do you give only a 50% likelihood that the causes are at least partially anthropogenic?

You believe that if the warming is partially anthropogenic, then humans are responsible for more than half of it. Is that correct?

but who cares what I think, the only thing that matters is what the experts agree on and how much confidence we can rationally have in the experts after a critical institutional analysis of the field of climate science.


What I find to be more important than any consensus or faith in science is what the politicians, business leaders, and other power players are doing.

And they, interestingly enough, are doing very little, nothing, or worse than nothing.
By SolarCross
#14997351
I wonder if the climate fad is related to the peak oil fad of yesteryear as they are both narratives which are designed to arrive at rather similar outcomes: arrest human technological and economic development by knocking away the energy pillar that supports it.
By Sivad
#14997353
Pants-of-dog wrote:
And they, interestingly enough, are doing very little, nothing, or worse than nothing.


:knife: They've implemented carbon pricing in every major Western country, they've invested over two trillion in alternative energy boondoggles, they're refusing loans for carbon fuel power plants, and they're forcing the developing world into genocidal planning and development schemes. They've done an enormous amount of mischief and they're only just getting started.
By Pants-of-dog
#14997441
Sivad wrote::knife: They've implemented carbon pricing in every major Western country, they've invested over two trillion in alternative energy boondoggles, they're refusing loans for carbon fuel power plants, and they're forcing the developing world into genocidal planning and development schemes. They've done an enormous amount of mischief and they're only just getting started.


Please provide evidence for these claims.
By Truth To Power
#14997449
Pants-of-dog wrote:Whatever the term is when you do not make an actual argument but instead dismiss your opponents for being hysterical. That is the fallacy, whatever you wish to call it.

Claims with no basis in verifiable empirical fact can be dismissed on logical grounds alone; but hysteria adds another very valid reason to dismiss them: they are dishonestly preying on human psychological vulnerabilities.
SolarCross wrote:I wonder if the climate fad is related to the peak oil fad of yesteryear as they are both narratives which are designed to arrive at rather similar outcomes: arrest human technological and economic development by knocking away the energy pillar that supports it.

In the case of anti-fossil-fuel hysteria, there's also the added goal of halting or even reversing the improvement in the atmosphere's ability to support plant growth and agriculture.
Pants-of-dog wrote:Do you believe that the Earth is getting warmer?

Nope. It was until about 10ya, while solar activity was at a sustained, multi-millennium high.
Do you believe that this is due to human impact?

The major human impact has been sooty particulate pollution, mostly from China and India, that visibly darkens the atmosphere, reducing the earth's albedo. Deforestation has also had some impact, while CO2's effect almost certainly does not exceed the ~1C/doubling predicted by the known physics of radiative heat transfer.
If so, how much of it is due to human impact?

Much less than half.
Last edited by Truth To Power on 04 Apr 2019 16:30, edited 1 time in total.
By Truth To Power
#14997484
Pants-of-dog wrote:Your opinion of the people who disagree with you is irrelevant.

I can only speculate as to the reasons for their errors.
How do you know that the EArth has stopped warming?

Arctic sea ice reached a cyclical low in 2012 that was close to the cyclical low recorded in the 1930s, and has increased since then. This puts the lie to the common AGW screamer claim that surface and atmospheric temperatures are not rising because the extra heat caused by CO2 is going into the oceans. Other indicators also point to a halt in warming, or even a reversal into cooling: many record low temperatures in locations all over the world, snowfalls where snow has not been seen in decades or even centuries, etc. Where I live, the winter of 2016-17 was the coldest ever recorded, 2017-18 the second coldest, summer 2018 the shortest and coolest summer, and February 2019 was the coldest February on record. That's not just weather. That's a sustained pattern that amounts to a cooler climate.

Winter is coming. And when it does, AGW screamers are gonna have some 'splainin' to do.
By Pants-of-dog
#14997487
Truth To Power wrote:Arctic sea ice reached a cyclical low in 2012 that was close to the cyclical low recorded in the 1930s, and has increased since then. This puts the lie to the common AGW screamer claim that surface and atmospheric temperatures are not rising because the extra heat caused by CO2 is going into the oceans.


Do you mean area or volume?

Perhaps if you could link to a study or article that shows exactly what the increase is and when it happened, we could look at this critically.

Other indicators also point to a halt in warming, or even a reversal into cooling: many record low temperatures in locations all over the world, snowfalls where snow has not been seen in decades or even centuries, etc. Where I live, the winter of 2016-17 was the coldest ever recorded, 2017-18 the second coldest, summer 2018 the shortest and coolest summer, and February 2019 was the coldest February on record. That's not just weather. That's a sustained pattern that amounts to a cooler climate.

Winter is coming. And when it does, AGW screamers are gonna have some 'splainin' to do.


Or it might be a local effect of wherever you live that is caused by the overall warming.

Again, without more information, it is impossible to say anything about overall trends.
User avatar
By ralfy
#14999036
Truth To Power wrote:Yes, of course it did.

It is indisputably unscientific garbage. The only graphs that are close to the LtG projections are ones that make no prediction more complex than, "the recent trend will continue." All the more complex predictions, such as declining food production, have been proved wildly wrong. When LtG projected slowing global population growth because of starvation and poverty, the fact that population growth has slowed because of reduced fertility is not confirmation of their projection, sorry.

You are makin' $#!+ up again.

It's the silly doomsayer cult that is wasting everyone's time, as well as effort and money.


Reduced fertility doesn't mean population peak. Look up population momentum.

Do you have any evidence showing population peaking due to lower birthrates earlier than what is estimated for LtG?
User avatar
By ralfy
#14999041
Sivad wrote:The Limits to Panic
Bjørn Lomborg

We often hear how the world as we know it will end, usually through ecological collapse. Indeed, more than 40 years after the Club of Rome released the mother of all apocalyptic forecasts, The Limits to Growth, its basic ideas – though thoroughly discredited – are still shaping mindsets and influencing public policy.

The Limits to Growth warned humanity in 1972 that devastating collapse was just around the corner. But, while we have seen financial panics since then, there have been no real shortages or productive breakdowns. Instead, the resources generated by human ingenuity remain far ahead of human consumption.

But the report’s fundamental legacy remains: we have inherited a tendency to obsess over misguided remedies for largely trivial problems, while often ignoring big problems and sensible remedies.

In the early 1970’s, the flush of technological optimism was over, the Vietnam War was a disaster, societies were in turmoil, and economies were stagnating. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring had raised fears about pollution and launched the modern environmental movement; Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 title The Population Bomb said it all. The first Earth Day, in 1970, was deeply pessimistic.

The genius of The Limits to Growth was to fuse these worries with fears of running out of stuff. We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution. The only hope was to stop economic growth itself, cut consumption, recycle, and force people to have fewer children, stabilising society at a significantly poorer level.

That message still resonates today, though it was spectacularly wrong. For example, the authors of The Limits to Growth predicted that before 2013, the world would have run out of aluminium, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc.

Instead, despite recent increases, commodity prices have generally fallen to about a third of their level 150 years ago. Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings, and thermometers: mercury consumption is down 98% and, by 2000, the price was down 90%. More broadly, since 1946, supplies of copper, aluminium, iron, and zinc have outstripped consumption, owing to the discovery of additional reserves and new technologies to extract them economically.

Similarly, oil and natural gas were to run out in 1990 and 1992, respectively; today, reserves of both are larger than they were in 1970, although we consume dramatically more. Within the past six years, shale gas alone has doubled potential gas resources in the United States and halved the price.

As for economic collapse, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global GDP per capita will increase 14-fold over this century and 24-fold in the developing world.

The Limits of Growth got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness. Population growth has been slowing since the late 1960’s. Food supply has not collapsed (1.5 billion hectares of arable land are being used, but another 2.7 billion hectares are in reserve). Malnourishment has dropped by more than half, from 35% of the world’s population to under 16%.

Nor are we choking on pollution. Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no particulate air pollution and happy farmers, and a future strangled by belching smokestacks, reality is entirely the reverse.

In 1900, when the global human population was 1.5 billion, almost three million people – roughly one in 500 – died each year from air pollution, mostly from wretched indoor air. Today, the risk has receded to one death per 2,000 people. While pollution still kills more people than malaria does, the mortality rate is falling, not rising.

Nonetheless, the mindset nurtured by The Limits to Growth continues to shape popular and elite thinking.

Consider recycling, which is often just a feel-good gesture with little environmental benefit and significant cost. Paper, for example, typically comes from sustainable forests, not rainforests. The processing and government subsidies associated with recycling yield lower-quality paper to save a resource that is not threatened.

Likewise, fears of over-population framed self-destructive policies, such as China’s one-child policy and forced sterilization in India. And, while pesticides and other pollutants were seen to kill off perhaps half of humanity, well-regulated pesticides cause about 20 deaths each year in the US, whereas they have significant upsides in creating cheaper and more plentiful food.

Indeed, reliance solely on organic farming – a movement inspired by the pesticide fear – would cost more than $100 billion annually in the US. At 16% lower efficiency, current output would require another 65 million acres of farmland – an area more than half the size of California. Higher prices would reduce consumption of fruits and vegetables, causing myriad adverse health effects (including tens of thousands of additional cancer deaths per year).

Obsession with doom-and-gloom scenarios distracts us from the real global threats. Poverty is one of the greatest killers of all, while easily curable diseases still claim 15 million lives every year – 25% of all deaths.

The solution is economic growth. When lifted out of poverty, most people can afford to avoid infectious diseases. China has pulled more than 680 million people out of poverty in the last three decades, leading a worldwide poverty decline of almost a billion people. This has created massive improvements in health, longevity, and quality of life.

The four decades since The Limits of Growth have shown that we need more of it, not less. An expansion of trade, with estimated benefits exceeding $100 trillion annually toward the end of the century, would do thousands of times more good than timid feel-good policies that result from fear-mongering. But that requires abandoning an anti-growth mentality and using our enormous potential to create a brighter future.

Bjørn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, founded and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It.


The problem is that economic growth has been weak since the 2008 crash, and that's because of increasing global debt plus the effects of peak oil (as reported by the IEA).

This is critical because it's oil that's been the main driver of growth throughout. For China alone to reach middle class status, it will require up to half of the world's resources. This is similar to a country like the U.S., which has only 5 pct of the world's population but has to use around 20 pct of world oil production.

Of course, the rest of BRICS and emerging markets have to join them because our economic systems are globalized. For that to happen, we will need more resources than what's available. In terms of oil, and following OECD countries, we will need up to four times more oil than what we now have. Similar will be needed for phosphorus, copper, iron ore, uranium, and many other material resources.

One more thing: what's been shaping public policy is not LtG but the opposite.
By Truth To Power
#14999421
ralfy wrote:Reduced fertility doesn't mean population peak. Look up population momentum.

Look up strawman fallacy.
Do you have any evidence showing population peaking due to lower birthrates earlier than what is estimated for LtG?

The timing is not the point. The cause is. You didn't understand what I wrote, did you?
By Sivad
#15000233
Why protesters should be wary of ‘12 years to climate breakdown’ rhetoric

Professor Myles Allen
Professor of Geosystem Science
Leader, Climate Research Programme
Fellow, Linacre College

some of the slogans being bandied around are genuinely frightening: a colleague recently told me of her 11-year-old coming home in tears after being told that, because of climate change, human civilisation might not survive for her to have children.

My biggest concern is with the much-touted line that “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says we have 12 years” before triggering an irreversible slide into climate chaos. Slogan writers are vague on whether they mean climate chaos will happen after 12 years, or if we have 12 years to avert it. But both are misleading.



But an additional quarter of a degree of warming, more-or-less what has happened since the 1990s, is not going to feel like Armageddon to the vast majority of today’s striking teenagers (the striving taxpayers of 2030). And what will they think then?

So please stop saying something globally bad is going to happen in 2030. Bad stuff is already happening and every half a degree of warming matters, but the IPCC does not draw a “planetary boundary” at 1.5°C beyond which lie climate dragons.
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