Yep…targeted harassment…of fascists. Now I've heard it all.
And heaven forfend anyone suggest soldiers might be called upon to kill people in the discharge of their duties. Where did I get that strange idea?
Against denial. Against fascism. Against climate nonsense, racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, and anti-intellectualism.
Yep…targeted harassment…of fascists. Now I've heard it all.
And heaven forfend anyone suggest soldiers might be called upon to kill people in the discharge of their duties. Where did I get that strange idea?
One particular aspect of both the RCP8.5 and the new SSP 8.5 scenarios that has drawn quite a bit of criticism from energy researchers are their assumptions around future coal use. Reaching the CO2 emissions in these scenarios requires a large-scale increase in coal use – with 6.5 times more coal use in 2100 than today.…
With global coal use having declined slightly since its peak in 2014, it is hard to envision a world where coal expands this dramatically in the future even in the absence of new climate policies. This is particularly true given the falling prices of alternative energy technologies in recent years. A forthcoming “expert elicitation” – where energy experts were asked to assess the likelihood of various outcomes – gives RCP8.5 only a 5% chance of occurring among all the possible no-policy baseline scenarios.
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The first problem here is that, by definition, implausible is not impossible. And when dealing with "nightmare scenarios," identifying them as implausible is far from making the case we should "say goodbye" to the possibilities.
RCP8.5 was intended to explore an unlikely high-risk future2. But it has been widely used by some experts, policymakers and the media as something else entirely: as a likely ‘business as usual’ outcome. A sizeable portion of the literature on climate impacts refers to RCP8.5 as business as usual, implying that it is probable in the absence of stringent climate mitigation. The media then often amplifies this message, sometimes without communicating the nuances. This results in further confusion regarding probable emissions outcomes, because many climate researchers are not familiar with the details of these scenarios in the energy-modelling literature.
This is particularly problematic when the worst-case scenario is contrasted with the most optimistic one, especially in high-profile scholarly work. This includes studies by the IPCC, such as AR5 and last year’s special report on the impact of climate change on the ocean and cryosphere4. The focus becomes the extremes, rather than the multitude of more likely pathways in between.
Happily — and that’s a word we climatologists rarely get to use — the world imagined in RCP8.5 is one that, in our view, becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year5. Emission pathways to get to RCP8.5 generally require an unprecedented fivefold increase in coal use by the end of the century, an amount larger than some estimates of recoverable coal reserves6. It is thought that global coal use peaked in 2013, and although increases are still possible, many energy forecasts expect it to flatline over the next few decades7. Furthermore, the falling cost of clean energy sources is a trend that is unlikely to reverse, even in the absence of new climate policies7.
Suppose one night there is a knock on your door. You open it to find 100 bedraggled families shivering in your yard — exhausted, filthy, terrified. The first cry of your heart would be to take them in, but you’d know there were too many.If there were any confusion, the "100 bedraggled families" are the "hundreds of thousands of people fleeing violence in Central America or seeking economic opportunity"[1].
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