The Hot Model

Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think! 

Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist and science communicator, posted this 20 minute video: "I wasn't worried about climate change. Now I am." She describes the "hot model" that people originally questioned because it seemed so impossible that we'd go beyond 5°C this century, but now some of their projections are coming to fruition. She explains how so many people don't see how climate change affects them because they can just turn up the A/C. At 14 minutes in, she described what will happen in the next 20 years, and it isn't pretty. 

There are five climate zones, and conditions are changing in each too fast for adaptation, so plants are dying. Some places fertilize and irrigate to keep things going, but crops yields will drop closest to the equator first, affected by heatwaves, droughts, and floods. The poor who don't die will leave, which means hundreds of millions of people migrating north, where there's more land, which will cause lots of political tensions. People will make money making weapons, and death and migration are a great breeding ground for pandemics. As people try to survive, they'll stop cutting back on emission. Everything will be too expensive to buy and our current perceived necessities, like phones and wifi, will disappear. She believes things won't entirely collapse, but we'll be in a really unpleasant phase of regress that will cost the lives of billions. AI can't help because we know the solutions, we just won't implement them. That's the most frustrating part that my students were up in arms about a good 30 years ago! 

Here's her list of problems and her wish list, but she missed the "L's" in nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.

Almost two years ago, the UN also sounded the alarm. Their wish list looks a little different: carbon removal and a rapid shift toward renewable energy "such as increasingly cheap solar and wind power" are the same, but they add less meat consumption, more efficient use of resources, and plug methane leaks from mines, wells, and landfills. We didn't do any of those things either, and I don't see our lives suddenly changing by design. The alternative is that we'll change by misfortune. But change is definitely coming.