I’ve interviewed Daniel Swain a number of times, and found him to be one of the smartest and most well spoken communicators in the scientific community.
TLDR – 1.5° C is pretty much lost in the next 5 years. A 2° C target is still theoretically possible but challenging in the current geopolitical environment.
We need to be honest about where we are headed, which is between 2.5 and 3 degrees on the current trajectory.
Dr. Swain is at UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Excellent. Yet does not fully say that at best the size of the human niche and the population it can support will diminish with rising temperature.
I too have respect for Daniel Swain, despite his extremely understated mild-manneredness and despite, well, because of his scientific reticence. But in fact he says here many things David Spratt of Climate Code Red/Breakthrough (Australia), David Roberts, Kevin Anderson, and others have been saying and explaining for years—decades, even. Exponential increase in many effects, for example. Scientific reticence (What Lies Beneath: The Scientific Understatement of Climate Risks, eg).
Humanity, aka rich people, have driven the temperature up so astoundingly fast compared to previous changes, that the biosphere is always catching up. Even if we immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases completely, temperature would keep rising because of the CO2 lag time, and storms, floods, fires, droughts, ice-melt/sea level rise, crop failures, extinctions, et al would continue to rise even faster in response because of the resilience-driven time lag of the natural world behind temperature. The non-living biosphere is resilient and dynamically stable but breachable and breakable; the living biosphere even more so, and most resilient of all, though terribly fragile in the paradox of breakthrough—perception and pressure—is human society. It and its failed states lag behind nature.
Well, except when they proceed it.
Human resilience and trends we attribute to other causes—for example, the surge in right wing lying in their attempt to control…well, everything, and take us back to their imaginary paradise, the 1950s, before uppity coloreds, girls, commies,(1) and dirty hippies started whining and ruining things. (In every way possible (2) it was the ugliest decade in centuries, so of course they miss it. Sexual repression being what it is, and reaps, and comes from.(3)
The changes in society we see now are the maladaptive resistance of the virulent strain of Wetiko/malignant egophrenia (Paul Levy)/civilizational autism (me)/emotional plague (Reich, Konia)/Folie Imposée/nihilistic narcissistic psychotic psychopathic disorder (DSMs, though separately) the allies caught from the fascists during the war, and failed to shake off by refusing to mourn, tremble, and revitalize the bodily, mindily, and political bodily immunological institutions of healing and prevention. That plague’s resistance to change is often mistaken for resilience though it actually makes humanity—the species and the quality—so fragile.
So scientific reticence be damned. We passed 1.5 and are never going under it again—for a year, as an average, as an idea except where denying delayalists cling to it, Gibbsianlike, like they cling to the wind and solar prices of their teen years. The 10 hottest years are the last 10 years. The 10 hottest years will always be the last 10 years, because…exponential, mathematical exponential, acceleration, positive feedback loops. There is between .5C and 1C warming “hidden” by cooling aerosols from coal burning. If we don’t stop burning coal incredibly fast we’re cooked. If we stop burning coal even half-fast we’re cooked by the jump as the aerosols do an Icarus. If we keep substituting gas for coal, well, we’re not cooked, we’re doubly fucked. And not in the good place.
So let’s see… 1.5 + .5 = um… Are we staying under 2? Not in a million goddamned years. Literally. Mathematically. And they will be. All million of them, damned by gods, and humans who think they are.
PS. Quisling.
As stupid as Liberty Cabbage and even stupider, Freedom Fries were, and still remain, and as diabolically clever and stupid and evil and pathological as WHISC and the black prince’s X, and the muskrat’s X, and “PB”(4) Union Carbide/Dow/3M, and Bayer/IG Farben/Monsanto/Bayer we’ll need new names for many things for the coming eon. Australian for liberal? = Fascist, and coaldirtier than any hippy. “Supposedly non-dirty coal”? Expensiver dirty coal. The designated suit that can win over any other suit in bridge? Need a new name. Even though it sorta fits, can’t use it any more. Small “r” republicans? New name. The R word now means fascist and anti-science bringer of hell.
New names
Old name New name
Liar republican
Pathological liar trumper, 30k-er (or whatever the number is by the time this is over. I’m guessing Bezos outlawed counting.
X (24th letter of the alphabet) Don’t need it. Use “ks”
KS Don’t need it. Use Nebraska.
PB&J GNsB&J groundnotanut butter & jelly
(1) commies, liberals, whatever. They’re all the same.
(2) Everything ugly since has just been the 50s-with-a-lag-time like the biosphere’s. Everything bad is an intensification of what started in the post-optimism postwar industrialization and hardening of the mental arteries along with political positions by the increasingly sclerotic and psychotic far right. They have since destroyed most of the natural world and radically compromised and degraded the human spirit, mainly because in their minds it’s still the 1950s. We could try to bring them into the 21st century as they try to take us back to the 9th, but the 21st century sucks. And despite advances in psychotherapy, it ain’t gonna getny better.
(3) Wilhelm Reich, Function of the Orgasm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Charles Konia, The Emotional Plague: the root of human evil. [Except sexual repression has roots, too.] Paul Levy, “Wetiko: the greatest epidemic sickness known to humanity” part 1 of 3; Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the curse of evil.))
(4) Post-Bhopal