Goals should be realistic.

Aiming for 1.5C, then missing it and then continuously failing on 1.6C, 1.7C, 1.8C etc. is akin to a fat person missing their goal of 200lbs, and then telling themselves in front of the mirror every extra 10lb - "I'm going to stop eating junk food today! No, really, this is the day!"

It's a cognitive failure to adequately process signals that the real physical world is sending to you. Or measurements that you take from the real world.

We _should_ be making things better, yes. But setting an arbitrary goal isn't helpful.

You know what would be helpful? Just giving ever person who's considering a solar project a much larger tax break than currently exists. Expand community solar programs for medium-size installations up to 2MW. Subsidize energy storage installations to complement that installed solar.

Anyone who's advocating for targeting an ambitious goal is missing the point completely. If that was helpful, why not just say we're targeting 0C?

In fact, let's target -1C and shoot extra energy into space. We might even discover some cool tech this way.

Well, the goals were realistic, and only became unrealistic, because action was lacking... and is still lacking.

People are being told technology will solve the problem, you can do x only if the alternative has at least the same advantages and no more disadvantages and you can't do y, because 'freedom'. (oh and did I forget 'communism'?)

1,5 degrees aren't an arbitrary goal either, at least to climate scientists: four tipping points are triggered at about that temperature. https://twitter.com/globalcommonshq/status/16164772483740467...

The problem with a "relaxed" or "realistic" goal is that it will make us lazy. If we set a goal of 1.5C which we probably won't meet then at least we are able to tell people what would happen when we reach that goal. Maybe then when someone adds 0.5C to the new target would take things more seriously.

I find this a sad dilemma. We want to save humanity from the climate catastrophe, but we are more worried about crashing the economy.

If we crash the economy then we will lose the surplus capacity to address climate change, and people will keep burning fossil fuels just to survive. Concerns about a 1.5 °C (or whatever number) goal several decades in the future are meaningless if you don't have a way to get to work and your home is freezing cold today.

> If we crash the economy

You're assuming that a drastic response to stop climate change will crash the economy more than climate change itself will, which is a highly dubious proposition given that many countries (e.g. Denmark) are case studies that show the feasibility and relative ease of the transition (relative to climate change itself).

Denmark hasn't done much significant about climate change. Like many other wealthy countries their efforts have been more about symbolism and political virtue signaling without addressing the core issues or making any drastic changes. Much of their food, energy, and other products is still produced using fossil fuels in foreign countries and then imported.

To be clear, I think that every country should do more and something is better than nothing. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the minor changes made by Denmark are sufficient, or that they could even be replicated in most other countries. Our physical stuff still has to be made somewhere.

Well I agree with some of what you said, Denmark hasn't done nearly enough, but they have done quite a bit, and they aren't any closer to an economic crash after that than they were before it. This leads me to doubt the claim that addressing climate change will cause a crash, let alone a crash as bad as what would be expected if the IPCC assessments come to pass.

It's quite a stretch to pick Denmark with excellent geographic conditions, great economy and surrounded by similar wealthy countries to point out that if they can do it, then surely everybody else can too without significant consequences.

I mean, we could stop CO2 emissions "tomorrow" if we really wanted to. We just need massive investments in tons of infrastructure, stop building with concrete, convince people not to travel, etc. Which - now as I type this - sounds like COVID lockdown to me which we still haven't recovered from fully. Even minor shifts in trends have cascading effects in the economy, so I'm not surprised at all, that things are going so slowly.

The alternative is a higher number, and then continuously not doing anything by pushing it into the future, eventually blowing past it anyway

If you make the speed limit for cars 55mph people will still got a bit faster, 60mph, 65mph. But almost no one would be driving 85mph. But if you say "nah people drive 65mph anyway, let's be realistic and make the the speed limit" they will go 75mph and more.

So if you want to not reach much more than 1.5°C, let's say 2°C or 2.5°C, you need to be realistic and set a lower goal. We will always be above any goal.

Really, the goal needs to be to minimize it to whatever we can attain.

There's some really bad redline some place past 1.5C.

Putting the goal possibly to the right of that redline (and possibly blowing past it anyways) is not good.

1.5C is a decent benchmark because it lets us measure various scales of intervention against it.

I think most of us would be fine with an "achievable goal" but that's not really what you asked for or proposed in your first comment and most of the people who say something like "I’m not sure what’s the point of focusing on 1.5C anymore" aren't offering new goals as much as they are throwing up their hands and essentially saying "oh well, what are you going to do". I'm not saying you think that way but that's the people who suggest giving up say the same things.

Too many people are just "hoping for a miracle" as if that's doing something. Or they think "technology will fix this before it gets too bad". It might, but it will be in spite of those people, not because of. If we want technology to save us we have to make investments today, not "when it gets bad".

An achievable goal is exactly what I’m asking for. That’s part of effective goal setting. Anything else is fantasy and counterproductive.

If you only just fail on a more ambitious goal that’s better than succeeding on a less ambitious one

There's nothing unachievable about 1.5C

It would require sacrifices and global cooperation, but any real solution to climate change will require that

It is though. The Co2 we emit today will only have a greenhouse effect in 20 years.

The average climate we have today is the result of the Co2 we put in the atmosphere in 2003.

Indeed, this inertia has been missing in the media coverage recently where it was mentioned very often a few years ago. I wonder why.

>There's nothing unachievable about 1.5C >It would require sacrifices and global cooperation

Is IS unachievable. You just said right here exactly why it's unachievable: "global cooperation" is pure fantasy.

I agree we will hit the 1.5 degrees for sure. There's a lot of inertia in climate change anyway. Even if we stop tomorrow it will still continue to rise for years.

But I don't agree we're all going to die. It's not a human extinction type problem. There will still be habitable places and some places will become more habitable (the Russians even had a crazy plan in the 60s to dam the Bering strait and melt the Arctic with nukes to make Siberia more habitable.... :X )

The problem is mostly that a ton of people now live in the areas that will become much less habitable and the resulting mass-migrations will lead to extreme societal disruption and possibly wars. And the areas that will become more habitable have no infrastructure. This is why it's going to be more expensive to deal with the problem later than to prevent it.

I'm not saying it's not an unprecedented disaster. It certainly is. The country I'm from (the Netherlands) might mostly disappear. But it's not an apocalypse. There will still be places where people can live.

In fact climate change is normal in the scope of earth. The situation we are in now has become this way also due to change from the ice age that was before. The bigger problem is that we made this a phenomenon on the scale of decades where it was previously millennia. So society and nature can't adapt quickly enough.

> But I don't agree we're all going to die. It's not a human extinction type problem. There will still be habitable places and some places will become more habitable (the Russians even had a crazy plan in the 60s to dam the Bering strait and melt the Arctic with nukes to make Siberia more habitable.... :X )

It is a "human extinction type problem" (and likely most if not all life on Earth) … not necessarily directly killed by the climate itself, but by the way that stressed out stupid "people in power" react to the stresses brought on by that changing climate. We have entirely too many literally insane people in positions of power commanding weaponry that could conceivably wipe out all of humanity (and much if not all of the other life on this planet), and we're doing very little to rein them in or control them. Feels like a very real danger to me.

I agree that climate change will bring about human suffering far beyond anything most people envision. But I am mostly confident that extinction is not in the cards. Nukes could only erase a few thousand square miles, not enough to kill a majority of humans much less all of them. Starvation and collapse would kill many more, but still far from extinction.

If you mean novel bioweapons then I can see that being a problem.

For the record, when I stated: “We are all going to die!” I meant it as a hyperbole. I actually don’t believe a literal total extinction of the human species is a likely scenario (even in a +4° horror scenario; even with a nuclear holocaust on top of it). “We are all going to die” is more of a you and me are personally very likely to die because of climate inaction, or at the very least, our lives will suffer, and there is nothing we can do about it.

I understand, I just objected to it because I see in my environment that there are seriously people thinking now that climate change can be a human extinction event (though it will be for many other species of course)

There seems to be a 'project fear' movement that thinks it's ok to overblow scientific conclusions in order to sway people to act. I personally think this is a very bad idea as deliberate lies will only lead to deep disillusionment with government and the scientific community. It can also lead to fatalism where people won't act because they believe the worst outcome is already locked in.

And really, the truth about climate change is scary enough as it is. But we do still have the opportunity to mitigate some of the worst of it.

I honestly don't believe "climate change" in and of itself will kill us all off (although there's always that possibility, depending on tipping points and other factors). I'm more worried about how the humans in control of some of the deadliest killing technologies ever devised are gonna exacerbate an already horrifying future as things progress and ever more tension is created by the situations climate change will bring about. Humans (as always) are the scariest part of the equation.

I hold the same worries about A.I. The tech itself (currently just a tool, and honestly not nearly as "advanced" one as many seem to believe) isn't nearly as scary as how the dumbest of our number (our so-called "leaders") are gonna use and / or abuse it.

I honestly believe that if there is a true extinction of humanity (or life in general) on this planet, it's far more likely that a small group of exceptionally stupid humans will inflict it upon us than almost any other "doomsday scenario" I can imagine.

>I'm not saying it's not an unprecedented disaster. It certainly is. The country I'm from (the Netherlands) might mostly disappear. But it's not an apocalypse. There will still be places where people can live.

The Netherlands will be fine if they just dam up the North Sea. The main problems with this are 1) the English Channel is a huge trade route and damming it (without a way of passing ships through) would destroy the EU economy, and 2) Russia would be very hostile to anything that restricts their access to the ocean from the Baltic.

I could imagine damming off the channel. But on the north side? It's way too wide there. It would be shorter to just dam around the entire country.

But the cost would be extreme. Shipping access isn't a major issue though. A dam can have locks.

It's not too wide: the Netherlands actually did a study on this.

It is a pretty extreme proposal of course, but it is possible. It would have some big benefits, not just to Netherlands, but all the countries around it, because all of them (UK, France, Germany, Belgium) stand to lose a lot of land to rising sea levels. Instead, with this dam, they could actually create a LOT more new land in what's now the North Sea. Remember, much of the North Sea used to be dry land (we call it "Doggerland" now), only about 8000 years ago, and had human settlements.

I think shipping could still be an issue. Sure, dams can have locks, but the sheer amount of ship traffic there might be difficult. Maybe they should build new some ports and use freight rail to move cargo around.

we did aim for an achievable goal, and steamed straight past it with our fingers in our ears.

Yep. And those of us who listened to the experts and took steps to understand the issue and act upon our findings were largely ridiculed and harassed endlessly as "tree hugging hippies" or "paranoid tin-foil hatted doomers" and shunned by pretty much everyone else around us until many of us (like myself) have simply given up. Why the hell should I care about literally anything if that caring only utterly destroys any chance at a remotely enjoyable life? I don't want to live the rest of my life learning to hate every single human I meet simply because they're human (monster). I'd rather just accept we're all doomed because most of us are ignorant, greedy, hateful, and stupid, and depressing though that may be, it's less depressing than speaking about things I know to be true and instantly being shunned for it by almost everyone. The alternative (one I've seriously considered) is for me to sneak off to the woods somewhere and build a cabin and defend it to the death.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted? He's right. The odds that global warming will stay below 1.5C are miniscule. I guess there may be PR benefits in pushing 1.5C because it's ambitious (shoot for the moon and land among the stars), but those PR benefits will be offset by the fact that anyone who does the tiniest bit of research will realize that it's bullshit! Not to mention that using 1.5C as a goal without lying is difficult.

"If we do <x> we'll be able to stay under 1.5C" <- lie

"If we don't do <y> we won't be able to stay under 1.5C" <- possibly true, but deceptive

"Our goal is to keep global warming under 1.5C" <- lie, a goal is by definition achievable and anyone who's giving statements on climate change knows that 1.5C is not achievable

It's an average on the whole planet and the whole year.

0.1 on average can mean huge spikes on some parts of the globe.

The difference is how many billions of dollars it costs, and by proxy, who can afford to survive climate change.

Learn the concept of marginality. Things get progressively worse. Reality is usually not a binary switch.

Just think of that 0.1C as an incremental step making even more of what's currently productive agricultural land, not. Can you give up a little more? Maybe... but not forever.