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Where do you realistically expect the world to be in terms of meeting the 2050 climate goals?

With evidence mounting on the failure to limit global warming to 1.5C, do you think global carbon emissions will be low enough by 2050 to at least avoid the most catastrophic climate change doomsday scenarios forecast by the turn of the century?

I am somewhat hopeful most developed countries will get there but I wonder if developing countries will have the ability and inclination to buy into it as well.

86 comments
  • I think we are heading headlong into worst case scenario territory.

    And I think we're going to see a lot of terrible effects by 2050 if not earlier.

    I feel that places like the Marshall Islands will be uninhabitable by 2050.

    I feel we'll see wars break out in developed nations over water rights by 2100.

    The world is on fire and those with the power to enact change are unable or unwilling to do so.

    And with the rise of the far right all over the world it's only going to get worse.

    The world will be unrecognizable in 2100 to the people alive today provided we live that long.

    I still hold onto some hope that we may be able to pull off a turn around and actually save humanity. But the longer everything goes on the more that hope feels like a delusional fantasy.

    Hug your loved ones, try to push for a better world, be kind to others, and enjoy the time we have. For tomorrow is not guaranteed, but the least you can do is allow love to enter your heart.

  • World wide? No.

    I think you’ll see pockets of good choices and efforts being made, perhaps down to cities, that may or may not mitigate some of the damage, or allow for a more resilient response to ongoing events.

    Catastrophic level collapses that take decades will be survivable, but not at the quality of life that most are accustomed to, leading to those on the bottom dying and suffering in greater numbers. Life expectancy will continue to drop. The world will be changed, it’s just a matter of how much civil unrest this engenders as resources become scarce and global markets less reliable or available.

    I’m not sure how much ecofascism we’ll actually see, though, as the people who lean/are fascist are the ones least likely to believe climate change exists, and given how conspiracy style thinking has flourished with Covid, I really can’t be sure that they’ll ever “snap out of it” and start clamoring for the change that’ll actually do anything. I think it’s more likely to see increasingly angry people who demand more for their homes and less for others, which I guess could be ecofascism? But without actually believing climate is changing; it just happens to be dumping a ton more rain for whatever reason.

  • Prepare for more migrants. The people who dislike migrants are the ones who also deny climate change.

  • No, I do not think we will avoid catastrophic change. The ice sheets, the ocean heating, everything is moving faster than the predictions estimated. We have now entered into several severe feedback loops we have no way of stopping.

    Every tech we might have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere is in it's infancy, when we needed it to be online and operational ten years ago. And we're STILL pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

    During Covid we showed that humanity can't or won't pull together to fight a commen threat. Our species will survive, but it will be difficult, and many, many poeple are going to die in mass. Huge swaths of this planet are going to become uninhabitable.

    And I'm sorry. I did everything I reasonably could. Ate less meat, grow/grew my own food, wrote to legislators, tried to spread awareness, and what good did it do? Did any of it do? Not a goddamned thing.

    I am going to keep doing everything I can, but I think it's over. We just don't know it yet.

    (I have sources for The Deadly Feedback Loops if anyone is interested.)

  • Like today, but worse. We'll have five-sigma events occurring once a week, but we'll still insist on calling them "five-sigma" instead of "new normal", and the denialists will still be denying that it's any different than it's ever been, and utopianists will still be screeching about how the technology that will save us is just "a few years" away, and lots of people will die of prosiac, totally preventable things like famines and droughts while the super-rich will have retreated to the bunkers they started building back in 2012 exactly for this scenario.

  • @LiamMayfair The world will still be using fossil fuels until well beyond 2050. We already need to start the conversation about geoengineering and climate mitigation strategies.

86 comments