Quick reply with no links to hand, but I keep up to date with climate science (at a layperson's level).
In short - I haven't read the compressed article, but I did read Wells' book and followed up most of the refs in detail. Yes, parts of it were exaggerated. Little outright false, but he tended to take worst-case scenarios, particularly regarding the chance of vast methane burps from tundra, etc. It was a reasonable if tendentious summary of what could happen, but it didn't describe the most likely trajectory. It was more like a possible black swan warning.
But much has changed since. Somewhat to our advantage on the basic science - temperature sensitivity to CO2 increases seems to be towards the lower end of earlier IPCC estimates. It also seems that earth's systems are more responsive to reductions in CO2 emissions, so there's a better payoff to actions we do take. Renewable energy costs have reduced much faster than earlier projections suggested.
One significant factor is worse - extreme weather events are worsening much faster than climate models had prevously suggested. The on-the-ground effects of climate change are worse per degree of increase than we thought. The higher-end temp rises once talked about (4 degrees plus) are now all but ruled out.
So, no, we're not technically fucked. But 30 years wasted since we understood climate change dangers at least in outline have taken their toll. We have made it much harder to keep the globe's temperature within limits that our societies can deal with than if we had just thrown a few fossil fuel suits in prison 3 decades ago (semi-joking).
Our political chances of staying within the 1.5C (which isn't a magic number, just an estimate of the temp rise whose costs we can reasonably deal with) are in my estimation miniscule. But political guesses aren't worth much.
No-one is really confident that our political systems can deal with the vast numbers of refugees and disasters resulting from a likely 3C end-of-century rise. Our best projection isn't anything silly like human extinction or complete global collapse. More a sort of increasing dystopia: more wars, more disposessed, more hunger. And ever fewer nonhumans.
Extreme weather events are not actually worsening if you look at longer time scales. The damage from extreme weather events is worsening because we've built more in vulnerable areas. Hurricanes, for example, have gone through natural cycles lasting centuries or millennia before any sort of anthropogenic global climate change. We had been living in a period of relative calm and now appear to be reverting to the mean.
Nonsense. See Ch11 of the last IPCC report. The evidence that increases in global adverse weather events are (as was predicted decades ago) and will continue to be driven by increases in global temperature is entirely clear and hardly disputed. If you really think the article you cited even attempts to refute (let alone successfully) that body of evidence, then you haven't read (or understood) either.
Comments
Quick reply with no links to hand, but I keep up to date with climate science (at a layperson's level).
In short - I haven't read the compressed article, but I did read Wells' book and followed up most of the refs in detail. Yes, parts of it were exaggerated. Little outright false, but he tended to take worst-case scenarios, particularly regarding the chance of vast methane burps from tundra, etc. It was a reasonable if tendentious summary of what could happen, but it didn't describe the most likely trajectory. It was more like a possible black swan warning.
But much has changed since. Somewhat to our advantage on the basic science - temperature sensitivity to CO2 increases seems to be towards the lower end of earlier IPCC estimates. It also seems that earth's systems are more responsive to reductions in CO2 emissions, so there's a better payoff to actions we do take. Renewable energy costs have reduced much faster than earlier projections suggested.
One significant factor is worse - extreme weather events are worsening much faster than climate models had prevously suggested. The on-the-ground effects of climate change are worse per degree of increase than we thought. The higher-end temp rises once talked about (4 degrees plus) are now all but ruled out.
So, no, we're not technically fucked. But 30 years wasted since we understood climate change dangers at least in outline have taken their toll. We have made it much harder to keep the globe's temperature within limits that our societies can deal with than if we had just thrown a few fossil fuel suits in prison 3 decades ago (semi-joking).
Our political chances of staying within the 1.5C (which isn't a magic number, just an estimate of the temp rise whose costs we can reasonably deal with) are in my estimation miniscule. But political guesses aren't worth much.
No-one is really confident that our political systems can deal with the vast numbers of refugees and disasters resulting from a likely 3C end-of-century rise. Our best projection isn't anything silly like human extinction or complete global collapse. More a sort of increasing dystopia: more wars, more disposessed, more hunger. And ever fewer nonhumans.
TIL: ten·den·tious /tenˈdenSHəs/ adjective: tendentious
Extreme weather events are not actually worsening if you look at longer time scales. The damage from extreme weather events is worsening because we've built more in vulnerable areas. Hurricanes, for example, have gone through natural cycles lasting centuries or millennia before any sort of anthropogenic global climate change. We had been living in a period of relative calm and now appear to be reverting to the mean.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/uncovering-prehist...
Nonsense. See Ch11 of the last IPCC report. The evidence that increases in global adverse weather events are (as was predicted decades ago) and will continue to be driven by increases in global temperature is entirely clear and hardly disputed. If you really think the article you cited even attempts to refute (let alone successfully) that body of evidence, then you haven't read (or understood) either.