Where do you realistically expect the world to be in terms of meeting the 2050 climate goals?

We'll not meet the goal limit, climate will change, the poor will suffer all the consequences, the rich will be mildly inconvenienced. Habitats will be destroyed, species will go extinct, life will go on.

It depends on if the super-wealthy can figure out how to make money off of it. If they can then all the politicians will fall in line because you don't say no to your main source of income.

Lol, no. Considering the three largest sources of emissions as far as countries are concerned are about 50% of the global total, refuse to take action, nothing is going to change.

I daresay India and China will be CO2 free before the western states. The West is too concerned with not loosing an inch of the status quo of current behavior. It’ll shoot itself in the foot by electing fascists with their go-back-to-the-good-old-days-without-migrants promises.

But the developing countries also will be much too late.

I don’t think 2-2.5 degrees are realistic. I mean for 2050, probably yes, but it won’t stop there. There are several tipping points that’ll help shoot far beyond that.

I think the world will settle between 4 and 5 degrees late this century and it will be a world with quite a smaller number of humans than we have nowadays.

It wouldn’t have to be that way. Siberia could become farmland and take on half of the African population, for example. But Russia won’t stand for that.

Nope. Net-zero emissions by 2050 is a vague sham of a goal supported by the fossil fuel industry. Big oil actually plans to INCREASE fossil fuel production and use "planting trees" and "carbon capture" to justify expansion of resource consumption.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16072020/oil-gas-climate-pledges-bp-shell-exxon/

Today on npr they mentioned 1.5 being likely within 10 years and could result in catastrophic consequences. Um ah. So half of north america being on fire and the other half along with europe and china have weeks of record breaking heat is not catastrophic along with all the drought!!!

I think we are heading headlong into worst case scenario territory.

And I think we're going to see a lot of terrible effects by 2050 if not earlier.

I feel that places like the Marshall Islands will be uninhabitable by 2050.

I feel we'll see wars break out in developed nations over water rights by 2100.

The world is on fire and those with the power to enact change are unable or unwilling to do so.

And with the rise of the far right all over the world it's only going to get worse.

The world will be unrecognizable in 2100 to the people alive today provided we live that long.

I still hold onto some hope that we may be able to pull off a turn around and actually save humanity. But the longer everything goes on the more that hope feels like a delusional fantasy.

Hug your loved ones, try to push for a better world, be kind to others, and enjoy the time we have. For tomorrow is not guaranteed, but the least you can do is allow love to enter your heart.

World wide? No.

I think you’ll see pockets of good choices and efforts being made, perhaps down to cities, that may or may not mitigate some of the damage, or allow for a more resilient response to ongoing events.

Catastrophic level collapses that take decades will be survivable, but not at the quality of life that most are accustomed to, leading to those on the bottom dying and suffering in greater numbers. Life expectancy will continue to drop. The world will be changed, it’s just a matter of how much civil unrest this engenders as resources become scarce and global markets less reliable or available.

I’m not sure how much ecofascism we’ll actually see, though, as the people who lean/are fascist are the ones least likely to believe climate change exists, and given how conspiracy style thinking has flourished with Covid, I really can’t be sure that they’ll ever “snap out of it” and start clamoring for the change that’ll actually do anything. I think it’s more likely to see increasingly angry people who demand more for their homes and less for others, which I guess could be ecofascism? But without actually believing climate is changing; it just happens to be dumping a ton more rain for whatever reason.

As long as conservatives have any say in the matter, we can expect the most destructive, deadly outcome possible.

We should expect no reasonable progress when conservatives (including neo-liberals) are able to intervene.

I feel like you're asking two questions.

Are we going to meet the 2050 climate goals, and can we limit global warming to 1.5C?

Imho, probably not, and definitely not.

Fossil fuel companies are still touting natural gas as having a role in addressing climate change goals, and we're still consuming more fossil fuels. Hell nah are we limiting global warning to 1.5C.

As for meeting 2050 climate goals...lol. Same evidence. Our main current sources of information routinely mention wildfires, hurricanes, severe thunderstorms, etc, without contextualizing it. Why should I expect that to change? The current economic incentives seem to be opposed to meeting climate goals.

For example, Shell says they're going to be net-zero by 2050. But that's not a binding declaration on their part. If they can make more money digging up the arctic, then that's what I expect them. It's going to take someone with a heavy regulatory hand to tell them otherwise, then it's going to take a not shitty court system to uphold that regulation.

Whatever the worse possible outcome is +15%.

I don't think humanity is doomed. What I do see happening is a lot of areas that are landlocked becoming wayyyyyyy too expensive for normies to live in. You'll see the coasts become stupid expensive to live as domestic climate refugees roll in. You'll see tensions between locals and newcomers. And you'll see it on the macroscopic scale with wars and tensions over resources like water rights, jobs, immigration, and racial tensions. You'll see the rise of idiotic nationalism and people waving their country flag as justification for the "good old days".

We'll make it halfway, but we will still see devastating climate events often. Big floods, big drought, big hurricanes, skyrocketing insurance, weird stock issues on certain things like some medications, olive oil, cotton, etc. Humanity will be distracted by some of the dumbest shit imaginable while the grownups (scientists) try to focus on drawing down carbon to stay on target.

Luckily humans are very adaptable. History will judge companies like BP and standard oil harshly though, for basically fucking up the planet for centuries.

I think we've fucked it. Without some drastic measures being taken we are on track for a minimum of a 2-2.5C rise and that is itself bad but will likely see certain feedback loops (defrosting permafrost, melting deep sea methane deposits, etc) ramp up hard to the point climate change will spiral out of control.

The remnants of human civilisation will be any billionaires with a sufficiently advanced escape plan in place, looking back on a boiling world in their rear view mirrors as they head off to eke out a pitiful existence on a barren rock somewhere out there.

It is very important to understand that the most apocalyptic visions of a climate change future are unlikely. Credible prognoses of the future predict that the world will suffer, and development will slow, but overall humanity will survive and even continue to grow.

I say this not to deny the effects of climate change, but because I sincerely believe that people use apocalyptic predictions to justify slacktivism. By deciding that the world is doomed, and they will go extinct regardless of what they do, people absolve themselves of their responsibility to agitate (including violently) for change. The world is genuinely unrecognizable compared to even 10 years ago, let alone 50. People are far more resilient than the worst predictions give them credit for, and even marginal victories will have real consequences for the future that we will live to see.

Fucked.

We've already experienced the hottest three weeks in recorded history. It does not get better from here.

Prepare for more migrants. The people who dislike migrants are the ones who also deny climate change.

Permanently Deleted

I expect them to shift burden of responsibility through some new alternative to carbon trading while the developing world becomes an unpleasant mix of droughts, floods , hurricanes .

At this moment? I'd say we should make peace with the fact that there aren't too many generations of humans ahead of us.

At one point or the other, we will have to accept the fact that saving humanity is not within our power - but wreaking vengeance on the elites that caused it is.

I give it the tiniest slimmest of chances to succeed. Below 1%

Too much regressives & right wingers. Entire, countries sometimes.

Plus, a handful of country(USA, China, india) are so overwhelmingly disproportionately polluting compared to the rest of the world ( or will massively increase in the next decades in the case of India ) that if all 3 are not all in into it, nothing anyone else does matters. And I don't believe any of those 3 will do enough.

So regardless of what the rest of the world does, I do t believe it matters. I still think they should tho, because if all 3 DO in fact make it, if the rest didn't, it still won't work either. So, achieving a largely global goal is even impossibl-er in my opinion

We are are fucked as is. A way to 'solve' this is a global collapse in population, but that wouldn't be very nice either.

Poorly

It is possible but we not gonna change peaceful

No, I do not think we will avoid catastrophic change. The ice sheets, the ocean heating, everything is moving faster than the predictions estimated. We have now entered into several severe feedback loops we have no way of stopping.

Every tech we might have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere is in it's infancy, when we needed it to be online and operational ten years ago. And we're STILL pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

During Covid we showed that humanity can't or won't pull together to fight a commen threat. Our species will survive, but it will be difficult, and many, many poeple are going to die in mass. Huge swaths of this planet are going to become uninhabitable.

And I'm sorry. I did everything I reasonably could. Ate less meat, grow/grew my own food, wrote to legislators, tried to spread awareness, and what good did it do? Did any of it do? Not a goddamned thing.

I am going to keep doing everything I can, but I think it's over. We just don't know it yet.

(I have sources for The Deadly Feedback Loops if anyone is interested.)

The robots will kill us before 2050.

I expect the billionaires to be successful in their genocide of the poors via their engineered famine and seizure of private property. So very well.

Well, the most dramatic scenary is that everyone is going to die. So, yes, we will avoid that.

But realistically, I think we wojt do 1,5C, but are going to have more like 2,5-3C. So horrible, but still survivable for at least half of the humans now.

Actual government intervention is starting to show up, and technology has worked in our favour. Maybe we'll do it. The biggest question is geopolitics, I think.

Of course, we might have hit a tipping point already, so net zero by 2050 will still lead to a very different Earth.

I think some humans might be able to survive on the tropical Antarctic archipelago...

@LiamMayfair The world will still be using fossil fuels until well beyond 2050. We already need to start the conversation about geoengineering and climate mitigation strategies.

Like today, but worse. We'll have five-sigma events occurring once a week, but we'll still insist on calling them "five-sigma" instead of "new normal", and the denialists will still be denying that it's any different than it's ever been, and utopianists will still be screeching about how the technology that will save us is just "a few years" away, and lots of people will die of prosiac, totally preventable things like famines and droughts while the super-rich will have retreated to the bunkers they started building back in 2012 exactly for this scenario.

Nope. There is no hope.

Only time anyone will make real, substantiative movement on climate change, is when we're in the middle of the absolute worst of it with nothing left to do but sit in and die slow, miserable deaths from heat, or quick miserable deaths from F7 tornados, Hypercanes, and biblical level flooding.

But just imagine all the profits that the shareholders would have made in the mean time, Thats really the most important part! /s

On fire or making nice with fish

Unfortunately not. The idiots now doing the most damage are justifying it with just pointing fingers at China or everyone else. They're the same narcissists who will always find someone else to blame for everything, in every aspect of their life

In 20 years time, those same people will still be blaming everyone else, whilst spewing anti-science nonsense about how clean solar apparently isn't or that EVs is far more dirty than their Dodge RAM's they use to flirt with their mates.

They're also the same clowns that exaggerate everything to justify their arguments (and they think everyone needs to tow 5 tons, travel 1500km on a regular basis and that EVs are regularly catching on fire)

Nothing will be done, I wouldn't sell my Shell shares yet.

If capitalism is still the dominant economic system and wealth inequality is even higher then it is now, then there is no chance at all of meeting climate goals, there never was.

No.

Lest we do not make use of geoengineering, definitely not.