We Have Five Years To Save Ourselves From Climate Change, Harvard Scientist Says
This is true, as is “We have 12 years to avoid catastrophe” and every other prediction of doom, but it is really hard to explain. We definitely won’t have 3 meters of sea level rise in 5 years or even by 2030. The climate, and shoreline, will likely be a bit worse than it is now. But without exceptionally rapid and drastic action now (that is, stop burning all fossil fuels in the next 5-12 years) we have locked in warming that will take us to that ultra-disaster of underwater cities and 200,000,000+ climate refugees in several steadily-worsening decades, and no one is sure when. At this point doubters conclude “They’re just fear-mongering liars, apocalypse is not actually going to happen in 5 years or even 12 years, nobody can really say, Algore said it would be awful years ago, still hasn’t happened.” The worse crisis is always about the apocalyptic climate N decades from now, unless we take drastic action that we should have started a decade ago. That’s a perfect recipe for defeatism and delay.
Children understand the problem, but a lot of well-meaning adults don’t 😢. Bill Nye swearing and blowtorching a globe isn’t going to change them, they’ll change when the present gets bad enough, when it will be far too late.
I tried to find models of the climate beyond 100 years from now. There aren’t any, because it’s so different from what we have now that the models don’t work. 😱 We don’t even know the current rate of warming because the climate zig-zags upwards. We’ll know in 20 years if it was 0.1 or 0.25°C per decade. Either will have been a disaster.
