PBS Terra 
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RCP 8.5 has often been referred to as “business as usual.” It describes a world without action on climate policy and continued fossil fuel use expanding unchecked, leading to a truly apocalyptic future for our climate and everything living on our planet – including us.
For this episode we wanted to see where we are in terms of “business as usual,” and if we are still headed towards an apocalypse of sorts… or if, perhaps, all of the technological innovations in renewables and EVs along with new climate policy such as the Paris Agreement might have bent down the curve on global warming. So tune into this episode of Weathered to see where we’ve been in our race against the clock, where we’re going, and how the RCP scenarios can help us understand this story as well as our future on this planet.
Weathered is a show hosted by weather expert Maiya May and produced by Balance Media that helps explain the most common natural disasters, what causes them, how they’re changing, and what we can do to prepare.
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About The Author
Mankind will perish of Hubris.
War is the biggest polluter and the worst cause of global warming!
We cannot afford to stop pushing at all. Thank you Maiya for all you do as well. 😊
Love Terra, not alarmed enough😢
To little too late unfortunately. Go 100% green tomorrow and the things will still get worse for decades to come. We still need to do it but we need to realize we're screwed and MUST change and quit just talking about it and letting greed take over.
It is important to translate Celsius into Fahrenheit. Both need to be reported for a complete picture of how things are changing. Unfortunate as it is, many people in the United States cannot convert that in their head. I.E. 3 degrees Celsius is 37.4 degrees Fahrenheit.
You say 'we may not be able to get 0 emissions around the globe, but that we have accomplished the minimum'. Well just like in school, always strive to get the A+ 100% in your test. That way if you fail at that goal, it's the hard work put to studying that will ensure you stay well over a minimum passing grade.
We can't get pridefully complacent in our accomplishments. While I'm happy to see more Teslas being driven by my fellow local people out here in my area and more solar panels and mills, I still see plenty of gas fueled cars and fossil fuel factories around me.
I think another thing we as a globe (let alone a country) need to do is come up with a PERMANENT law that requires us to keep gas and radiation emissions as close to zero as possible. That means no matter what politician gets into office, they must abide by that unbreakable law; because the minute they strive to strike it down means they are also striking down the idea of all people (current and future) surviving in the future.
So if the president needs to write up an unbreakable law that says we, "We will not drive gas fueled cars for the month of June," then let it be so (I only hope they also have into place a basic living plan for the people who can't afford that by then. There's a lot of moving parts). Striving to not have children is also a plus to help slow emissions, I feel. Perhaps limit your offspring to 1-2. The more the people, the more the time to spend to educate and convince the population on global warming and possibly more chances of emissions.
I don't know…. I'm just trying to throw something out on the empty canvas so we can have something good to work with.
But above all, DO NOT STOP IN YOUR PROGRESS. EVER. ALWAYS ASK YOURSELF, 'HOW CAN WE BE BETTER IN HELPING THE PLANET STAY HEALTHY?' THEN PUT IT TO THE TEST.
Wow, how did the CO2 emissions go down without killing all those horrible cows?
Why do you deliberatly don't include context? You message will is not lost if you include it.
Some Context….
2:16 average global radiation is 137W/m² … so we add 4.5W/m² to that
4:40 rich countries bullied carbon intensive business to migrate to china to lower their emissions …
Not alarmist enough! We've lost most of our winter here in Maine already, and this summer has been blistering hot compared to what we're used to. And yet, the environmentalist s here won't talk about nuclear or hydro which are really the only good solutions we have. So I'd say we're f***
Well I can tell you who doesn’t help with progress on this. People who glue their hands to the road or throw soup at paintings. Those people need to grow up, and think of ways that actually help
Who says we need to make any progress at all? The models are so wrong it’s not even funny..the existential threat are the climate models and fear mongering
The cure is worse than the disease. If climate policy is worse than the climate change then we are making the wrong play
Thinking because solar prices are going down means we've avoided the apocalypse is such fantastical thinking it should be criminal to report this way
California has gone from 80 to 114 this sumer, and I am sure it's the same everywhere else.
Climate change crybabies. Climate change is good.
Don't kid yourselves. Our planet is on fire. As fire heats up the rate of burning increases. The 'so called' experts say that the temperature of the planet will increase incrementally but the
truth is that as fire burns, the rate of burning is closer to exponential. It's pissing me off that very few of these climate change videos discuss how to resolve the climate change dilemma.
Our behavior towards our environment is the problem. Our behavior towards our environment is guided by this behavior model: "profit = income – expenses". This behavior model instructs us
that profit equals money and everything else is expenses; additionally, it says that to achieve maximum profit we must 1) ignore the damages that we cause to the environment and we
must 2) fire as many people as possible. This clearly explains both why our planet is on fire and why there is so much homelessness.
Let's be realistic. Money is not profit. All of our actual gains come to us from the environment. Money is just a permission slip that lets us acquire our actual profit.
We can correct our behavior towards our environment simply by changing our behavior model.
I recommend this new behavior model: "profit = protecting and enriching the environment, and sharing the sustenance that it provides for all of us".
This new profit model says that profit = the environment and it also says that our only major expense is ignoring our obligation to care for and enrich the environment.
The new profit model requires us to create millions of new jobs that will come under the heading "Caretakers of the Environment".
Caretakers will have many specialized categories:
1. Collecting pollution that is already in the environment
2. Collecting pollution before it gets into the environment
3. Dealing with all of the waste in such ways that are good for the environment, and or good for the production of products.
4. Economically incentivizing families with two or fewer children
5. Designing new ways of producing products so that those products last for a long time and don't have to be replaced every two years.
There will be many more types of Caretaker jobs.
Every company and government will have Caretaker jobs, and everybody will be schooled, from elementary school through university about how to be caretakers of the environment.
If we choose to continue living by our present erroneous profit model, then we are doomed.
There are a few obstacles to achieving an economy based on this new profit model.
1.) Criminals want it all for themselves and would probably be repulsed by the idea of sharing the profit.
2.) Getting all countries to be onboard with this new profit model might not be easily achieved.
p.s. it may already be too late to save our environment, but it is never too late to try.
Combine with being in the 6th mass extinction. If you alive right now you an mvp.
I'm kinda annoyed at my parents for birthing me in such times can't lie
You are not alarmed enough.
One huge blind spot in this video: Global emissions are still on the 'business as usual' track.
Only North America and Europe have made significant progress on emissions, and that is only because of the reduction in cost of alternative energy in the more technologically advanced regions. The rest of the world has yet to benefit from this cost reduction of alternative energy.
Additionally, the planet stopped acting as a net carbon sink this past year. That means net zero conditions have dramatically changed. Net zero emissions now means absolute zero emissions when the planet is already so damaged that it is losing biomass to lethal temperatures, drought, floods, and wildfires, rather than adding biomass in response to growing CO2 concentrations.
Not only did the 2008 economic crash reduce overall emissions globally, so did the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting economic shut-down. However, global emissions recovered rapidly once these economic disruptions abated. This clearly demonstrates that only economic disruption will bring us to net zero and below, so widespread economic disruption is where we are inevitably headed because our industrial infrastructure and the burgeoning human population it enables are both unsustainable. That economic disruption will inevitably be accompanied by unprecedented human misery plus rapid mass extinction across the biosphere. It's already happening with this year's rapid collapse in the marine, insect, and bird populations.
It is irresponsible to exhibit the minor progress in specific sectors and portray this as a significant change. It isn't anything of the sort. It's hopium, straight up.
Manufacturing overall hasn't experienced any substantial decline in emissions anywhere in the world, nor has agriculture. It is far more difficult to eliminate manufacturing and agricultural emissions. To do so essentially requires a reversion to a pre-industrial, non-chemical economy that has zero hope of sustaining 8 billion people, or even 1 billion people. Our population is already beyond 100X the realistic sustainable carrying capacity of the planet. Magical flight of fancy about marvelous supernatural 'renewable' technologies that have yet to be developed changes nothing about this grim circumstance.
Focusing on energy production alone is entirely misleading. The attached link illustrates that gross emissions actually haven't declined significantly anywhere in the world, nor are they likely to with the current actual policies regarding net zero. At best we have seen a stabilization of gross emissions in Europe and North America at levels that are already unsustainable.
Globally, the penetration of alternative energy is still in the region of 3% of all energy production. All of that alternative energy is being used to increase economic growth under 'all of the above' energy policies, rather than to displace emissions down to net zero. That increasing economic growth is not only contributing to increased greenhouse gas emissions, but it is also leading to PFAS contamination of aquifers from fracking, and generalized chemical contamination overall, with dire consequences for wildlife. Regulatory agencies have been corrupted by corporate interference and are not adequately tracking the pollution. We are being told that we are cleaning up the place when actually what is happening is that novel toxic and long-lived chemicals are making the entire planet less hospitable toward life in general. Early onset cancer is on the rise among our children and autism rates are going through the roof from the neurotoxicity of these chemicals, especially the herbicides.
We are seeing a collapse in fish populations including pacific salmon and also insect population that is negatively impacting bird population. We can't turn a blind eye to these changes and ignore them as if they don't matter. Drought, mass extinction, pollution, and resource depletion are all colliding directly with steady human population growth. The only thing that will terminate this devastation is a rapid die-off of humans fueled primarily by famine. Generalized unsustainability guarantees that we will have that mass human die-off regardless of what anyone wants.
The IPCC is dominated by corporate interests that keep shifting the Overton Window towards underestimation of climate risk. Even this PBS Weather video was behind the times with its claim that we had only 1.1C of warming over pre-industrial levels this time last year. Average global temperatures have been 1.6C over pre-industrial for the year June 2023-june 2024, with daily records in sea surface temperatures for that entire year, and polar ice melt at historic levels that is further reducing albedo and accelerating the warming trend.
As usual, PBS is an establishment disappointment. Nobody is telling us the truth of the situation. Even Michael Mann of the 'hockey stick curve' tree ring proxy fame is pretending that we aren't seeing a near doubling of the energy imbalance over the past decade from sulfate emissions regulations and reduced albedo, as ice melt covered in wildfire ash also exposes more dark surface to sunlight.
We are in deep, deep denial regarding the peril our civilization faces.
We have no way of accurately modeling tipping points. We can't see them in action because they require impossible changes in energy imbalance to cycle them through their full hysteresis loops. We can't isolate one from another to fully characterize them either because they cascade into each other like falling dominoes. All we can do is make educated guesses about them from the historic proxy climate record. Without accurate models, we can't know that we are approaching a tipping point or even measure its effect while we are actively crossing one. We won't know that we have crossed one even after it becomes undeniable if we have already lost the technological capability to take relevant data because climate change has wiped out our industrial infrastructure and plunged our civilization into chaos.
The IPCC has completely disregarded the 'clathrate gun' tipping point because they arbitrarily estimated that the rate and magnitude of warming required to set it off won't happen, yet here we are with not only a rapid surge in sea surface temperatures, but also daily sea surface temperature records for an entire year that border on the lower margin of our best guess regarding the heat level required to set off the 'clathrate gun'. The institutional blinders are hiding the truth from us. The Overton Window has shifted so far off center that our greatest existential risk isn't even on the radar.
Clathrates represent the most extreme abrupt heating potential of all tipping points. El Niño is already done for the year, but we're still seeing record temperatures because we're still at the same average (smoothed) level we were at last year, despite the ENSO having already passed its peak. We don't have any good way of estimating whether La Niña will bring us back down to 2022 temperature levels, given the dramatic shift we saw in the spring of 2023 that was disproportionately large compared to the magnitude of El Niño. We aren't sure how rapid or prolonged or large of a heat spike will set off the 'clathrate gun', but we are pretty certain that if it does go off, the AMOC will collapse and bring about climate devastation to agriculture and wildlife alike, plunging all of humanity into a grim famine.
We are institutionally blind to tipping points, yet we are raising the temperature of the entire planet at a rate that is at least 10X faster than at any time in geological history and probably 100X if we are being honest about the accelerating rate of warming as the planet cooks and loses its ability to sequester even the minimal amount of excess carbon it can store in surface soils.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=OWID_WRL~OWID_NAM~OWID_SAM~OWID_ASI~AUS~OWID_AFR~OWID_EUR
Crappy tesla Crappy tesla.
The FACTS about Climate Changed have been accepted and settled.
The problem with any attempt to effect the climate is that poor countries are not going to stop burning cheap fuel. Its like quitting smoking then walk into a bar that allows smoking and because you refrained you expect the room to be smoke free. Sorry but ain't happening.
Economic growth is bullshit
Imo tipping points scare the shit out of me
The ICCP is a conservative scientific body, meaning only the most broadly accepted scientific consensus gets accepted
I’m not sure if I trust that
Especially given poorer countries rise in population and projected economic growths, both for Nigeria and India
Unless we can find a way to allow their economies and populations to grow without growing their climate impact, I think we’re pretty toast
Our planet can’t handle the increased demand in meat that it would require especially in nations that are already heavily affected by climate change
humans are not alone on this planet, what about everyone else?
Electric cars won’t help anything if we aren’t doing much to move away from cars in general and more toward public and active transport.
Most of the problems cars cause aren’t how they’re fueled.
As long as everyone still calls it Climate Change instead of Global Warming no progress has been made.
So can we get some numbers or dates or info on corporate and govs worldwide emissions and then maybe try to figure it out. None of these guys have any solid number or idea on how we solve it
I like batteries over combustion
Climate change is a political tool to preserve their rule and authority. It happens slower than their timeline. So because governments need to stay in control for the next decades, this 110000 year cycle is distorted as few decades and they assume that the hypothesis is real about how much the CO2 emissions impact the climate.
Screw it, the world's on fire.I'm just gonna watch it burn at this point This is for all the homeowners, landowners and parents to figure out
Whoever uses the most energy has the most prestige. The value of currency is based upon access to energy.
Electric vehicles and solar power, while objectively better than fossil fuels, are very bad for the environment. We need to do better.
ye we ded
Your optimism is nice, but please sign deeper into the data.
I have watched this science and the messaging for 30 years.
We have to bring together our generational knowledge.
She is convincing, but clearly a fool paid by oil companies? Delay, delay, delay?
Girl, dig deeper. The numbers and science prove you wrong. For you and your generation. Granted, i missed the last 15 minutes…. But i think you had good analysis, but went way off track. Dig deeper. I’ll be dead soon. You will still be living with your bad analysis.
The planet is fucking dying. We have to get this message across, to fix it!!!
Disasters vs deaths? Is proof of progress against this global train wreck?
She is paid by the oil companies. Lets not be fooled. She appears smart, but is a shill for the oil companies. Watch her words closely.
Look deeper into the data. I am inspired by younger generations examining this issue in more detail, than your previous generation. But please realize, your analysis is still being polluted by the oil industry and others, influencing your views, and making you more optimistic than the reality of the situation.
Alarmist or not alarmist is not the real question, most people learn from personal experience. As the majority of the worlds population now lives in over crowded cities, they do not get to see the experience first hand of the farmers with failing crops, or the coastal communities dealing with erosion and increased marine traffic. I was first introduced to global warming in the 90's as part of my University "Living with Technology" education, at that time it was all about not wasting energy. What wasn't spoken about is time scales. We have all seen the disaster movies where all the action takes place in a couple of days. In reality all these disasters take many years, and unfortunately humans don't live that long or only think about their early days. Then when your politicians are elderly and cannot see further than the next few years, they don't really care about your future. So when people argue about climate activists, the climate activists need to show what is happening in a way for the city dwellers and elderly people to comprehend.
Climate change is going to happen no matter what so you better get used to it
An inconvenient truth is that had we done almost nothing since before that very bad SciFi movie was inflicted on children we would be far better off and releasing much less c02 than we are now.
The fact is the majority of so called green or zero emissions technologies are so far from actually being green that many prove worse than what they're supposed to replace.
a recent comparison between a Tesla and a very similar sized ICE vehicle with an efficient 4 cylinder engine revealed that over the average life of both vehicles the Tesla was still responsible for more c02 than the ice vehicle. And the Ice vehicle at a third the initial purchase price would fetch a higher trade in value as there would be no battery to replace.
don't electric cars just put the emission elsewhere? – at the source of the electricity production.
Climate change is driven by orbital and oblique changes we have less effect than a fart in a hurricane!
Dear non-voting Americans, Trump is DANGEROUS. His team are BANKING on you not voting. I get that you don't like politicians & politics, & you didn't LOVE Hilary Clinton. Protests are great, but they don't actually COUNT. VOTES ARE COUNTED.
I wouldn’t be so mad about this if it wasn’t for the fact that the western countries COULD EASILY go to 0 in the next decade AND THEY DO NOTHING or I mean, sorry they do “something” but so little that it’s actually pathetic. Yes, I get it “BuT InFLAtiON” but are you seriously going to value having to pay a few extra bucks for the privilege of billions of lives? That’s actually pathetic…
This is why old ass men shouldn’t be leaders. They don’t value anything they won’t live through…
the experts in the field of climatology are also scientist, who created everything that causes climate warming "gasoline, oil, nuclear, batteries, tires, metallurgy and the so called cures are, not stop making stuff, to stop climate change but to make more stuff to stop climate change more nuclear plants more cars more solar panels more wind turbines