[Deschodt]

I'm not an environmentalist, not a tree hugger, I wanna burn gas in a 911 as long as possible, just interested in science and been reading a lot of stuff from some clever guys (not English speakers so no links for now -if this escalates we can add that)

It appears that a +2C average temps rise is a)happening within 10yrs - period, and b) gonna make a whole belt around the equator and other places of high humidity unlivable 1/2 the year. We can survive at 35C/95F but that + 100% humidity means sweating does not work to cool you off, and you stay home or die. That's gonna cause major political unrest in those countries (and FL!), and then major migration (spreading unrest, possibly wars). We're not ready for this, not ready planning for this aside from military options I guess..

Gov'ts are tooting EVs and solar as a solution, yeah that is adorable but Solar and Wind are intermittent at best and require storage (batteries) which in turn require oil to go mining and making plastic and extracting ore for batteries etc... Sure it'll help but on KWH produced per grams of carbon added to the air, the total bill for solar and wind is kinda crap because of that associated storage need. Until we solve the battery issue, the only "doable" way of decarboning power production quick and clean (in terms of carbon output) is Nuclear + hydro. That's IT. And not everyone has hydro. You look at places like Germany that tried to stop nuclear and replace it with solar, the results have been awful in terms of carbon. Yet all aforementioned govt's are RUNNING away from Nuclear and closing plants cause it scares the people. We're not ready for this either. Everything "we" know as a way of life is coming from living in an age of incredible energy abundance. Travel, heat, power, mass production of stuff, global economy, mass agriculture.. everything, powered by oil. Within 30y the numbers show about a halving of oil production (let alone the associated pollution) so you choose what you do with this - defense, transportation, food production ? something's gotta give. Also if it gets bad what if producers start hoarding and not selling, at all ?

We're getting to a point where + x degrees C in temps means -x food production. At some point we're gonna run into a resource allocation issue of the available oil/power left, do we make goods with it, or do we supply the food chain and distribute food, not both.... Not ready for that food shortage or price hike on food either...

Simple math of existing enacted laws on decarboning isn't working - just as an example the airlines should be reducing carbon output 5% a year, instead they are adding flights. Some smarter folks did math on flying - if everyone on earth was allowed the same number of transatlantic flights under this new regime - we would get 4x flights life time per human. 4 ! Not cool.. We're definitely not ready to accept that (and not everyone on earth is wealthy enough for flying, but it still makes you think)...

A metal expert was on also, earth doesn't "make" new deposits, supply is finite and going away at least economically speaking ... One of them was talking about ratings of deposits (I do not recall the nomenclature, bear with me), 50y ago an ore deposit "find" with a rating of say B or C was very cool to find and use... Now we're in the E-F categories (!) being considered big deposits. As and Bs are long gone. ...it's more and more $ to extract and also pollutes more in the process. And uses oil and water, both things we try to save. We make too much stuff with metals and there's gonna be less of it and it'll soon be way more expensive... we're gonna have to enter an age of mega recycling of old stuff.. we're not heading that way... Go buy a new iphone 15 ;-)

It looks pretty clear that we're gonna need a scientific breakthrough, on cleaning the atmosphere and try to lower temps that way, or on a battery solution -ideally both ! and in all cases, degrowth. We're totally not ready to accept degrowth - hell I'm not! The economic systems all over the world works on 3% GDP growth, employment works on output growing, all our models do, even manning retirement homes or retirement funds. What to do with people if we want to make less crap and save resources ? Nobody is really planing for that.

Anyway, this is just a quick dumb summary of listening to really clever people lately, it's looking pretty bleak - maybe not for us, but for our kids... I have faith in science to bail us out, but not sure the timing will work out and who "us" is.