What is this author smoking? "2 to 3 feet" of sea level rise is still absolutely catastrophic and is hand waved away in one sentence. 5 degrees in 50 years? We've already gained about 1 degree in the last 20 years alone - with no signs of slowing down. If it's ackshually 5 degrees in 75 years, what even is the point of making a point about that? We're reaching several ecological tipping points. We're in a mass extinction. What in the everloving hell is this? Have we gone full "don't look up" with this now?
I think the problem is that "catastrophic" is not well-defined. Will we all be back to caves and sticks? No. Will there be trillions of dollars of damages and massive societal upheaval from massive migrations of people? Yes. Will a billion people die? Probably not, unless a war breaks out and leads to nuclear destruction.
I would consider all of these to be "catastrophic" but some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be "catastrophic."
Well, one plane crashing or one building falling, destroying something valuable and killing "only" a few dozen people is considered a catastrophe. I think we can say the bar for "catastrophe" is lower than that for "apocalypse".
The higher global average temperatures alone are already a yearly catastrophe, by this standard.
A metre of sea-level rise is painful for a rural cottage by the sea. But if you're in a city - particularly a wealthy city - it's something that can be engineered around.
An expensive liability? Definitely. A civilization or nation ending event? Unlikely.
besides the fact that 40% of the world's population lives near the coast - and that 2-3 feet of sea level rise is not a uniform "the tide used to be 8 feet, now it's 11 feet" - Entire islands in the pacific will disappear - How do you think global trade works? What do you think happens to ports? AMOC collapsing (a byproduct of sea level rise) will have profound effects on climate, despite this author claiming without any evidence whatsoever that "actually it isn't a big deal."
Why not address the actual points he is making? He dramatically screwed up his forecasts of both human population growth rate and technological advancement rate.
These underlying assumptions being incorrect are the reason climate alarmist move the goal posts every year.
I think this mostly points to us not taking his opinion seriously on the matter.
Most others in the climate science debate have been far more realistic and measured. Similarly, I tend to ignore everything from David Wallace-Wells, another person who has written a ton on climate but from a very different political perspective, who has also been quite wrong.
Sea level has risen 1 foot since 1800 and nobody noticed. 2 to 3 feet isn't catastrophic. Nobody credible claims temperatures will rise 50 degrees in 50 years.
He's comparing AGW, which drives a trend, with weather-based events, which are noise around the trend. He conveniently cuts his analysis off at the year 2100, by which we'll all probably be dead. But he's probably right that the trend itself doesn't cause insurmountable problems by that point.
But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...
It's pretty amazing how much we've lowered our collective standards for article quality since the advent of AI generation. (Not just here, but everywhere). It's not like it's a rote spelling mistake deep in the article, the spelling mistake is the very first thing you see.
Why would a serious author go with this image? Just a few years ago, misspelling "climate" and having nonsensical political cartoon to headline your article would have just been disqualifying.
It’s the only thing I saw before I closed the browser tab. If you’re going to use AI to generate an the very first things reader sees, proofread the damned thing so it doesn’t come off as amateurish.
Wow, that is a terrible image (yellow tinge indicative of gpt-image-1, spelling errors). I don't mind generative images being used in articles, provided that they:
A. Have some relevance to the actual content.
B. Don't exhibit glaringly obvious AI flaws (polydactyly, faces like melted wax candles, etc.).
It's amazing how little time people take to vet images that are intended to be the first thing viewers will see.
Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the founding members of OpenAI) Twitter post on founding an education AI lab:
I see very little agreement in any way with Bill Gates is talking about.
In fact I suspect that Gates would be dismissed as too woke for making this one of his main points:
> But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.
> It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
This is just rehashed Green New Deal language for the global stage. (Something I fully support!!)
They're agreeing that climate change is serious but not necessarily civilization ending:
Nordhous: "The amount of warming that is conceivable … is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes … where tens or hundreds of million, perhaps even billions of lives were at stake."
Gates: "Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise."
I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics. Also occasionally from those that are poorly informed, but they also tend to believe things like GMOs being the end of agriculture, and have basically zero impact on society due to lack of influence and small number of people. Nordhous' extreme situations may have been possible back in the 1990s with zero action and without the advent of solar, wind, and storage that have been created since then, but his statements are kind of wacky.
We've known for almost a decade now that the RCP8.5 scenarios are no longer on the table, and even that worst case scenario wasn't civilization ending.
I read Bill Gates' note as not an evolution on his view at all, it seems 100% consistent with everything he has worked for, but rather trying to place climate change in a more humanity-focused context for evaluating tradeoffs of where to put money. That's very important for governments and for wealthy philanthropists like him, and for the COP 3 audience he's talking to.
that's what "climate skeptics" have been saying for twenty years but you would get bullied for saying so.
my favorite was getting told we "deserved it" for being in Texas during the ice apocalypse, because Texas is a red state.
I hope that people exhibiting that kind of behavior are finally starting to question whether or not it's helpful. The article suggests that is perhaps beginning to happen.
If you want people to make sacrifices to improve the future, just maybe messaging that it's hopeless and anyone who doesn't see that is stupid isn't the best strategy for effecting real change
As a layperson, I read that 2024 was the hottest on record, and I see charts that go up. I have no reason to believe that the charts will go down. I don't care if its 3 deg by the end of the century or 5 deg. But what about the century after that, or by 3000.
I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science.
Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can.
Your reaction doesn't matter; only the collective response does. It seems there is little appetite to doubt nationalism, and immense optimism for our ability to correct later.
I hope that we see more measured, objective articles like this. It's been pretty frustrating as someone on the sidelines looking in, the degree of panic and emotion attached to the climate stuff, that has always seemed to be out of scale with the actual effects to me.
I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me.
Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years.
Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased.
I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits.
I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.
An article talking about a complex system [1] (the Earth's climate system coupled to human industrial/farming systems) with few hard numbers, no mathematical models and graphs of their behavior, and no links to any such discussions, is not objective in any sense of the word. It's all the author's uncited subjective views.
This is the kind of stuff one should take in from one ear, and let it out through the other ear without letting it touch the brain.
What is this author smoking? "2 to 3 feet" of sea level rise is still absolutely catastrophic and is hand waved away in one sentence. 5 degrees in 50 years? We've already gained about 1 degree in the last 20 years alone - with no signs of slowing down. If it's ackshually 5 degrees in 75 years, what even is the point of making a point about that? We're reaching several ecological tipping points. We're in a mass extinction. What in the everloving hell is this? Have we gone full "don't look up" with this now?
I think the problem is that "catastrophic" is not well-defined. Will we all be back to caves and sticks? No. Will there be trillions of dollars of damages and massive societal upheaval from massive migrations of people? Yes. Will a billion people die? Probably not, unless a war breaks out and leads to nuclear destruction.
I would consider all of these to be "catastrophic" but some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be "catastrophic."
Well, one plane crashing or one building falling, destroying something valuable and killing "only" a few dozen people is considered a catastrophe. I think we can say the bar for "catastrophe" is lower than that for "apocalypse".
The higher global average temperatures alone are already a yearly catastrophe, by this standard.
A metre of sea-level rise is painful for a rural cottage by the sea. But if you're in a city - particularly a wealthy city - it's something that can be engineered around.
An expensive liability? Definitely. A civilization or nation ending event? Unlikely.
besides the fact that 40% of the world's population lives near the coast - and that 2-3 feet of sea level rise is not a uniform "the tide used to be 8 feet, now it's 11 feet" - Entire islands in the pacific will disappear - How do you think global trade works? What do you think happens to ports? AMOC collapsing (a byproduct of sea level rise) will have profound effects on climate, despite this author claiming without any evidence whatsoever that "actually it isn't a big deal."
Tell that to a pacific islander.
Why not address the actual points he is making? He dramatically screwed up his forecasts of both human population growth rate and technological advancement rate.
These underlying assumptions being incorrect are the reason climate alarmist move the goal posts every year.
I think this mostly points to us not taking his opinion seriously on the matter.
Most others in the climate science debate have been far more realistic and measured. Similarly, I tend to ignore everything from David Wallace-Wells, another person who has written a ton on climate but from a very different political perspective, who has also been quite wrong.
Sea level has risen 1 foot since 1800 and nobody noticed. 2 to 3 feet isn't catastrophic. Nobody credible claims temperatures will rise 50 degrees in 50 years.
He's comparing AGW, which drives a trend, with weather-based events, which are noise around the trend. He conveniently cuts his analysis off at the year 2100, by which we'll all probably be dead. But he's probably right that the trend itself doesn't cause insurmountable problems by that point.
But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...
Anyone else notice the obvious misspelling of “climate” in the AI-generated hero image?
It's pretty amazing how much we've lowered our collective standards for article quality since the advent of AI generation. (Not just here, but everywhere). It's not like it's a rote spelling mistake deep in the article, the spelling mistake is the very first thing you see.
Why would a serious author go with this image? Just a few years ago, misspelling "climate" and having nonsensical political cartoon to headline your article would have just been disqualifying.
It’s the only thing I saw before I closed the browser tab. If you’re going to use AI to generate an the very first things reader sees, proofread the damned thing so it doesn’t come off as amateurish.
When I see an AI-generated hero image, I close the tab. It’s an excellent heuristic for quality.
Wow, that is a terrible image (yellow tinge indicative of gpt-image-1, spelling errors). I don't mind generative images being used in articles, provided that they:
A. Have some relevance to the actual content.
B. Don't exhibit glaringly obvious AI flaws (polydactyly, faces like melted wax candles, etc.).
It's amazing how little time people take to vet images that are intended to be the first thing viewers will see.
Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the founding members of OpenAI) Twitter post on founding an education AI lab:
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301
This rhymes with https://www.gatesnotes.com/three-tough-truths-about-climate.
I see very little agreement in any way with Bill Gates is talking about.
In fact I suspect that Gates would be dismissed as too woke for making this one of his main points:
> But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.
> It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
This is just rehashed Green New Deal language for the global stage. (Something I fully support!!)
They're agreeing that climate change is serious but not necessarily civilization ending:
I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics. Also occasionally from those that are poorly informed, but they also tend to believe things like GMOs being the end of agriculture, and have basically zero impact on society due to lack of influence and small number of people. Nordhous' extreme situations may have been possible back in the 1990s with zero action and without the advent of solar, wind, and storage that have been created since then, but his statements are kind of wacky.
We've known for almost a decade now that the RCP8.5 scenarios are no longer on the table, and even that worst case scenario wasn't civilization ending.
I read Bill Gates' note as not an evolution on his view at all, it seems 100% consistent with everything he has worked for, but rather trying to place climate change in a more humanity-focused context for evaluating tradeoffs of where to put money. That's very important for governments and for wealthy philanthropists like him, and for the COP 3 audience he's talking to.
"I've only ever heard the claim that climate change is civilization ending as a strawman from so-called climate skeptics. "
And yet, sentence from current top comment: " We're in a mass extinction."
I hope you realize that there are more species on earth than just humans.
We are in a mass extinction. It is not civilization ending.
Can you explain why you think these contradict each other?
that's what "climate skeptics" have been saying for twenty years but you would get bullied for saying so.
my favorite was getting told we "deserved it" for being in Texas during the ice apocalypse, because Texas is a red state.
I hope that people exhibiting that kind of behavior are finally starting to question whether or not it's helpful. The article suggests that is perhaps beginning to happen.
If you want people to make sacrifices to improve the future, just maybe messaging that it's hopeless and anyone who doesn't see that is stupid isn't the best strategy for effecting real change
> particularly for people in the poorest countries
> for being in Texas
News flash: climate change by and large isn't about the US, and US will be one of the least impacted nations of first hand climate change effects.
As a layperson, I read that 2024 was the hottest on record, and I see charts that go up. I have no reason to believe that the charts will go down. I don't care if its 3 deg by the end of the century or 5 deg. But what about the century after that, or by 3000.
I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science.
Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can.
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...
Your reaction doesn't matter; only the collective response does. It seems there is little appetite to doubt nationalism, and immense optimism for our ability to correct later.
What has that got to do with TFA?
I hope that we see more measured, objective articles like this. It's been pretty frustrating as someone on the sidelines looking in, the degree of panic and emotion attached to the climate stuff, that has always seemed to be out of scale with the actual effects to me.
I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me.
Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years.
Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased.
I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits.
I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.
An article talking about a complex system [1] (the Earth's climate system coupled to human industrial/farming systems) with few hard numbers, no mathematical models and graphs of their behavior, and no links to any such discussions, is not objective in any sense of the word. It's all the author's uncited subjective views.
This is the kind of stuff one should take in from one ear, and let it out through the other ear without letting it touch the brain.
[1] complexity in the sense of mathematics.