Dr. Genevieve Guenther (@DoctorVive): I'm sorry but the idea that destroying the web of life with extraction, and heating the planet 2.7 C in decades by adding billions of tons of CO2 to the carbon cycle, will make the world ... only just about as shitty as it is now is absolutely false—and so, so dangerous.
Even just thinking for five minutes about what's going to happen to our financial system with the collapse of the real estate market due to the sea level rise to which we're already committed: how will our wealth keep growing enough to hedge America against climate change??
Even considering just what's going to happen to our growing zones with 2.7 C of warming—how can our global food system not be strained to breaking?? Are Americans immune to hunger?
Even tallying only the economic costs of the multiple pandemics projected to be fueled by 2.7 C of warming: how can we still believe that we can have this climate change but the wealth created by fossil fuels will ensure our post-1950s standard of living??
Of COURSE no mainstream climate models game this out. They are quite literally not designed to do so. The scientific models correlate emissions and warming; the integrated assessment models assume continued economic growth.
The latest scholarship, which has updated the standard damage function used in the modeling, finds that warming of 2.5-3 C will lead to 15-25% reductions in per capita output—which is to say an ongoing and presumably irreversible Great Depression.
The finding in the previous tweet comes from here. https://twitter.com/DoctorVive/status/1533470925542285313/photo/1
So much more to say, but I'll stop here, and just remind y'all that each of these disasters produced by the "less bad" version of global heating that we're supposedly on (ignoring the fact that most government pledges rely on massive amounts of unproven carbon dioxide removal) will not happen in isolation, but all at once, complicating and amplifying the experience of each.
2.7° of warming will be worse than anything humanity has ever seen. Even in America.