Don't overstate 1.5 degrees C threat, new IPCC head says

Well by all means, let's make it seem less serious than it is! That'll get people moving

Signed, an actual fucking climate scientist

While I understand the intention here is to reassure people that not all is lost and there's still time for action, a take like this is going to be paraphrased into "climate change is overblown and isn't something to worry about" by Big Oil and other major polluters.

Wow, what a ridiculous straw man.

I haven't heard anyone referring to 1.5 C as apocalyptic. I HAVE heard it described in terms of being a threshold at which climate scientists predicted a certain set of consequences.

What's apocalyptic about the situation is our acceleration towards even greater climate change, and world governments' unwillingness to take the situation seriously.

In the US, for example, Biden passed the greatest climate mitigation law of all time ... and it's grossly inadequate. They're treating it much the same way that the Obama administration treated health care. They patted themselves on the back for passing the ACA, which still left the country in a health care CRISIS, because it was a half measure.

In many ways the absolute worst way you can respond to a crisis is with these types of half measures. Why? Because it acts as a pressure valve, removing all the momentum for real, meaningful change.

Much like the ACA, Democrats will pretend that this is a stepping stone for the next set of reforms... But we only need to look at the ACA to see how flawed that reasoning is. We have not built on the ACA. We have spent a decade watching Republicans chip away at it.

Now we're playing the same game with climate change mitigation. And the price will be hundreds of millions of climate change refugees, war, and famine.

To be 100 percent clear: while the Democrats are incompetent here, the real villains are the Republicans, who are WILLFULLY ignorant of the science, and are the ones forcing either impotent compromise or no mitigation at all.

Hey jackass, people aren't apathetic because they believe it's too late to do anything. People are apathetic because people like you haven't done anything and now it's too late. The "beneficial actions" you are calling for are half measures that won't help at all, and the people who care are already doing what they can while the real polluters, the real destroyers of humanity, are building bunkers and hoarding gold to survive the coming storm.

People aren't apathetic because "it's too late", it's because right now is the time humanity needs to act, yet all that's really happened is governments making promises to act in 10, 15, 20 years time if at all.

Oh, but there are pollution targets... that are routinely unmet, or are met through dodgy use of carbon credits, all with no punishment.

oh look people in the comments who are missing the fucking point. I'm honestly so sick of this shit. You either have rainbows and unicorns and "we'll just figure it out"/climate deniers to "WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH" apathetic fucks who won't do shit* because "what's the point we are all doomed anyway" which...causes the same problem as denying does.

honestly i've delt with more people who refuse to change anything because "what's the point" than I deal with outright deniers anymore.

*not sure if anyone in the comments is an apathetic "do nothing though tbf and honest. So there is my disclaimer don't @ me.

lol, because it's going to stay at +1.5 degrees. Russia as a member, resolutions that no country follows, is the UN anything but a joke nowadays? And this clown, his whole argument is basically "Fear basically paralyses people, so better not create it!" We have decades of downplaying the effects and not doing anything, and his advice is to continue it!?

Fucking learn the stages of grief, because the ones were people are "paralyzed" are only intermediary. People need to know how fucking bad it's going to get if they have any chance to prepare themselves and to contribute to fighting climate check, better they go through a reality check before it comes crashing down on them. It's not the end of the world? Perhaps your privileged first world UN head salaried ass will get some reprieve, but for many people it will be the end of their world.

People will turn to populist reactionary lies and hoaxes if you are too real with them, but this needs to be considered as one of those stages of grief at the society level, and it will be much harder to address if this happens later on.

Speaking to weekly magazine Der Spiegel, in an interview first published on Saturday, Skea warned against laying too much value on the international community's current nominal target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared the pre-industrial era.

"We should not despair and fall into a state of shock" if global temperatures were to increase by this amount, he said.

In a separate discussion with German news agency DPA, Skea expanded on why.

"If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change," he said.

"The world won't end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees," Skea told Der Spiegel. "It will however be a more dangerous world."

Surpassing that mark would lead to many problems and social tensions, he said, but still that would not constitute an existential threat to humanity.

(...)

Skea predicted that one difficult area might prove to be changing people's lifestyles. He said that no scientist could tell people how to live or what to eat.

"Individual abstinence is good, but it alone will not bring about the change to the extent it will be necessary," Skea said. "If we are to live more climate consciously, we need entirely new infrastructure. People will not get on bikes if there are no cycle paths."

Skea said he also wanted to adapt the IPCC so that it could provide better and more targeted advice to specific groups of people on how they could act to combat climate change.

He named groups like town planners, landowners and businesses: "With all these things it's about real people and their real lives, not scientific abstractions. We need to come down a level," he told DPA.

1.5C was never a threat, it was a target. The IPCC produces simplified "stakeholder" report, it would be a superior use of one's time to just give it a skim than spend time reading clickbaity website titles. https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/

Policymaker summary report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf

• That didn't happen.
• And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
• And if it was, that's not a big deal. <- WE ARE HERE
• And if it is, that's not my fault.
• And if it was, I didn't mean it.
• And if I did, you deserved it.

well. 1.5C° maybe not an existential threat, but I don't see a single sign it would stop there, and not going further into 4.0C° ya know

His statement isn't really about the severity of the issue, he just says that people are prone to give up

The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.

Maybe for humans. Animal and plant species are disappearing faster than ever. Fuck you Jim Skea!

The news;

• we are fucked
• just kidding no we are not
• yes we are
• no we are not

Don't even know what to believe anymore. All I know for fact is what I can see and trend myself. I know about 7 years ago or so I definitely noticed more wildfires than I ever have. Never had I had memories of every summer being smoked out. This summer I've felt autumn chill in some mornings when I normally would not have. Heat domes... Didn't even know why that was until last year or the year before.

I think shits fucked.

Nuance, the world is filled with it. Who'd have thought?

We're definitely nowhere near "fuck it" levels, as the article says, we sure can make things a lot more awful if we decide now that we can't do anything about it anyway.
But maybe we need a stronger example than.. Bike lanes.. Though I get the point he's making.

What is he waiting for, his feet to cook under the sun?

This is critical. We need to be careful, alert and active in mitigating climate change (and putting massive pressure on our governments to do the same) but we cannot give in to alarmism; all it’ll lead to is apathy, and a all that’ll lead to is inaction.

Climate change is real, it’s dangerous, and it’s happening. However, as long as we have commitment, it is not beyond our capabilities to mitigate. We still have time, and we can still fix this.

It is important to recall of IPCC's mission to be "policy neutral while being policy relevant and never policy prescriptive". They try their best to be scientifically accurate, discuss the state and suggest solutions. One can wonder why IPCC won't take sides and but that's the way it has always been. The burden of what to do with their message is always upon the commons.

This statement is on a similar vein. While it was possibly guided at consoling common people from climate grief, it has all the risks of being misquoted.

It’s like the world is desperate to recreate AppleTV+’s show Extrapolation, where companies just kept negotiating to raise the world temperature target cap. The red skies many people in the US were seeing were finally a wake up call to some.

He's not wrong. Groupthink elevates the most extreme rhetoric, and when people hear that, they disregard the totally valid argument as a whole.

If one person is saying "Hey, this could be bad for our coral reefs, polar bear populations, may cause more hurricanes over time, etc." they're going to be completely drowned out by the person saying "THIS IS THE END OF MODERN SOCIETY!" (paraphrased from an upvoted comment under this post)

In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction

I don't know why OP mischaracterized what Skea said. We're 100% on track for thousands and thousands of extinctions and while humanity itself won't go extinct, modern human society is on track to completely collapse in the 50 years. His point was that worst of those events won't occur in the next decade when we inevitably hit +1.5 C, but that doesn't change the fact that at some point before +4 C they surely will.

Half of my country is burning down, Mr. IPCC head guy.

"Don't worry. You aren't dying out, just risk the fall of civilization as we know it and then the rest of humanity can live in some post apocalyptic societies. All good!"

Everyone's already preparing to accept this new norm instead of actually doing something about it.

Old fuck who won't be around when shit hits the fan says we don't have serious problem.

I think we should take these people and (gently mind you) press their faces against the asphalt for 5 minutes. See if they still believe there's no extreme heat afterwards.

aren't on track to an apocalyptic extinction,

things aren't perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate.

Those statements are contradictory.

These fucking jackasses are running our offices and industries. If something isn't done about this then it will kill ALL of us.

It's a 1.5C increase in a very, VERY short period. What happens if we get another 1.5C increase?

And another

And another

And another

You get the point.

Nuclear energy is the key to saving this planet. It would solve any energy problem we would have for hundreds if not thousands of years, and that's just uraniam. Don't even get me started on thorium, we would have energy for longer than we could ever comprehend. All readily available, yet we keep burning up dinosaur shit because "muh coal companiez!".

What happens when we run out of oil? You bastards are going to go out of business anyways, why not just INVEST IN NUCLEAR ENERGY?

What an absolute dogshit headline - this old white man certainly needs to better at avoiding giving clippable highlights but the journalist absolutely knows what they are doing.

Finally some levelheadedness. Wholeheartedly agree. There is much to be done. But elements of the movement have ecome somewhat cultlike unfortunately.

As long as climate change kills leftists I'm good with it.