What happens if the world gets too hot for animals to survive? By Matthew Huber | July 20, 2022 

governance rather encompasses all localdecision-makers as well, as it is actually almost entirely within their own respective dominions ofcontrol where the overall success or failure is determined.

For example, in respect to the goal of reducing the global emissions of carbon dioxide, the relevantsystem of governance is not limited to those who conclude that there is a global risk, those whoaccept or reject the conclusion, those who formulate objectives, those who choose to adhere to or toignore them, who conceive of regulations, who choose to implement them or not, who determineprogress, decline or failures, those who select means by which to influence the desired local industrialinvestment, or consumption choices and so on.

We Need to Stop Pretending we can Limit Global Warming to 1.5°C

all kinds of regressions along the way um and there's many things that are getting worse um but for most um for most indicators of human well-being uh the world is in a 00:02:18 great trajectory and the last few centuries have been um a great direction uh however we're now confronted with a series of x-risks um or how uh david one of the 00:02:30 researchers in the um in our team likes to put public bads in extreme public baths that we have to have to really avoid and these especially the ones that are human caused um 00:02:44 present extreme challenges for us to get through and we we sort of control the speed at which we'll uh hit these uh but especially things like nuclear war and engineered pandemics and on ai 00:02:57 uh those kinds of risks

Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation

dire warning

THE ECONOMICS OF IMMENSE RISK, URGENT ACTION AND RADICAL CHANGE:TOWARDS NEW APPROACHES TO THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

climate and environment change (CEC) hyperthreat

Schools and other public buildings in Italy will be forbidden from setting their air conditioning to any setting lower than 25C from next month, under a scheme intended to help the country dodge an energy crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.

The flotsam and jetsam of our digital queries and transactions, the flurry of electrons flitting about, warm the medium of air. Heat is the waste product of computation, and if left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilization. Heat must therefore be relentlessly abated to keep the engine of the digital thrumming in a constant state, 24 hours a day, every day.

Because of the invasion in Ukraine, “people are reminded of the problem, but then they resort to sort of quick fixes, which are not really for the long term,” says Rolf Wüestenhagen, director of the Institute for Economy and the Environment at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

At a global climate meeting Monday, Ukraine’s representative, Svitlana Krakovska, pointed out the connection: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots—fossil fuels—and our dependence on them,”

I hope, for the sake of everybody -- Ukrainians, Russians and the whole of humanity -- that this war stops immediately. Because if it doesn't, it's not only the Ukrainians and the Russians 00:11:39 that will suffer terribly. Everybody will suffer terribly if this war continues. BG: Explain why. YNH: Because of the shock waves destabilizing the whole world. Let’s start with the bottom line: budgets. We have been living in an amazing era of peace in the last few decades. And it wasn't some kind of hippie fantasy. You saw it in the bottom line. 00:12:06 You saw it in the budgets. In Europe, in the European Union, the average defense budget of EU members was around three percent of government budget. And that's a historical miracle, almost. For most of history, the budget of kings and emperors and sultans, like 50 percent, 80 percent goes to war, goes to the army. 00:12:31 In Europe, it’s just three percent. In the whole world, the average is about six percent, I think, fact-check me on this, but this is the figure that I know, six percent. What we saw already within a few days, Germany doubles its military budget in a day. And I'm not against it. Given what they are facing, it's reasonable. For the Germans, for the Poles, for all of Europe to double their budgets. And you see other countries around the world doing the same thing. 00:12:58 But this is, you know, a race to the bottom. When they double their budgets, other countries look and feel insecure and double their budgets, so they have to double them again and triple them. And the money that should go to health care, that should go to education, that should go to fight climate change, this money will now go to tanks, to missiles, to fighting wars. 00:13:25 So there is less health care for everybody, and there is maybe no solution to climate change because the money goes to tanks. And in this way, even if you live in Australia, even if you live in Brazil, you will feel the repercussions of this war in less health care, in a deteriorating ecological crisis, 00:13:48 in many other things. Again, another very central question is technology. We are on the verge, we are already in the middle, actually, of new technological arms races in fields like artificial intelligence. And we need global agreement about how to regulate AI and to prevent the worst scenarios. How can we get a global agreement on AI 00:14:15 when you have a new cold war, a new hot war? So in this field, to all hopes of stopping the AI arms race will go up in smoke if this war continues. So again, everybody around the world will feel the consequences in many ways. This is much, much bigger than just another regional conflict.

This is a moment that we should seize, in all seriousness, in order to take on the two huge existential plagues that face us this morning: the climate crisis, outlined in this new IPCC report, and the fact that we have a madman with nuclear weapons who’s used the revenues from oil and gas to intimidate and terrify the entire world.

(For comparison, most organizations can’t avert a metric ton for less than $2. The average American causes around 16 metric tons of emissions per year.)

The Founders Pledge report used countries’ climate targets and projected policies to estimate how many metric tons of carbon can be saved by avoiding various lifestyle choices.

Cryptocurrencies are not only an apocalyptic ecological disaster

Extinction Rebellion has been at the forefront of a fundamentally new message which is if a government doesn't change, it's your right and as we've identified, your duty, if you're not going to be complicit, 00:34:43 to go into a rebellion a nonviolent civil disobedience against the government in order to fundamentally reduce carbon emissions. It's not actually that complicated, Is it? If you ask the average person who controls the economy, right? They know it's the banks, the big banks, right? And we had the banks, I think they did it pretty deliberately ten years ago. 00:35:12 They pulled our chain and we had the most massive transfer of wealth that the world has ever seen the bank bailout, right? Trillions and trillions of dollars. We're seeing the same thing now with covid and the banks have got to be behind it, right? If the banks wanted and decided that emissions have to decline from today 00:35:36 fast in a matter of years, the banks can do it, right? Because the banks hold the strings. All governments now are in a massive amount of national debt . we have an axis of evil if you want, we have the big banking corporations. We have the big fossil fuel corporations and we have the compliant government.

A recent survey found that only 14% of people they surveyed in the United States talk about climate change. A previous Yale study found that 35% either discuss it occasionally or hear somebody else talk about it. Those are low for something that over 70% of people are worried about.

For a talk at one conservative Christian college, Dr. Hayhoe – an atmospheric scientist, professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy – decided to emphasize how caring about climate change is in line with Christian values and, ultimately, is “pro-life” in the fullest sense of that word. Afterward, she says, people “were able to listen, acknowledge it, and think about approaching [climate change] a little differently.”

Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance andimportance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitiveshortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and respondingto climate change (152),including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physicallyremote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview(153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangiblethreat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does notpresent itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events.

Global air traffic is expected to double to 8.2 billion passengers in 2037, according to IATA, which predicts that aviation's 2019 emissions peak of around 900 million metric tons of CO2 will be exceeded within the next two to three years.At the same time, the window to cut the world's reliance on fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic changes to the climate is closing rapidly. The International Energy Agency forecasts that aviation's share of global carbon emissions will increase to 3.5% by 2030 from just over 2.5% in 2019 in the absence of efforts to further decarbonize.

Since about 70% of water delivered from the Colorado River goes to growing crops, not to people in cities, the next step will likely be to demand large-scale reductions for farmers and ranchers across millions of acres of land, forcing wrenching choices about which crops to grow and for whom — an omen that many of America’s food-generating regions might ultimately have to shift someplace else as the climate warms.

The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop

rare for lightning to strike at all in Iqaluit.

Pathways that aim for limiting warming to 1.5°C by 2100 after a temporary temperature overshoot rely on large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) measures, which are uncertain and entail clear risks.

People thrive in a wide range of climates. The projected climate change is small relative to the diurnal cycle. It is therefore rather peculiar to conclude that climate change will be disastrous. Those who claim so have been unable to explain why. https://twitter.com/RichardTol/status/1313182006310731776?s=20

The science of the "Science is settled" crowd isn't an open system of skeptical inquiry, but a closed system of centralized authority funded and controlled by special interests, beholden to political agendas and intolerant of dissent. It has the same relationship to science that the various People's Democracies had to democracy.

Nonethel ess, scholars have begun to iden-tify procedures that can potentially mitigate political sectarianism. These in clude efforts to help Americans comprehend opposing partisans regardless of their level of agree-ment, such as by focusing on commonalities rather than differences (e.g., “we’re all Amer-icans”; SM) or communicating in the moral language of the other side (e.g., when liberals frame the consequences of climate change in terms of sanctity violations; SM).

It seems to also highlight how much our governments, banks and big corporations roles play into the state of our planet, how much we need them to change so that our individual choices can actually make a significant difference. Read more

“Although we now have at our disposal some fairly sophisticated methods of characterizing uncertainty,” she warned, “these do not actually enable us to control or even predict the extent of the disaster.

If everyone did all of the above things, they would have the personal infrastructure in place to enable their lives to become zero-emissions. But the above changes only cover 45% of average American emissions—so what gives? The remaining 55% of emissions come indirectly from the goods, services, and food we buy. The only way we’ll get to a zero-carbon world is for each of those industries to adopt new technology and change their processes to be emissions-free, or be replaced with a zero-emissions alternative. That’s why your first action is voting to make sure that policies and incentives are put in place to accelerate the overall transition.

Although relocations can be difficult, it requires a certain level of privilege to be a climate change migrant in America right now. Most of the people I spoke with are relatively free to move around, without the ties of children or home ownership, and with enough money to afford to relocate.