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Global Investment Firm Warns 7.8 Degrees of Global Warming Is Possible (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A leading British global investment firm has a warning for its clients: If we keep consuming oil and gas at current rates, our planet is on course to experience a rise in global average temperatures of nearly 8 Celsius (14 Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. This would make Earth basically uninhabitable for humans. Although this is the darkest scenario we've seen so far, there's reason for cautious optimism: the new projections point out that it's unlikely investors will simply ignore this risk, meaning that our present level of fossil fuel consumption could decrease. Still, by current climate research standards, this is a pretty wild number. It is four times as high as the "safe limit" for increasing temperatures caused by climate change, internationally recognized to be around 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Schroders, the British investment firm which controls assets worth $542 billion, released this forecast as part of a range of potential scenarios in its "Climate Progress Dashboard" in late July.

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  1. Re:Yay, another prediction! by green1 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    No, he actually believes it. He also sincerely believes that the Arctic ice cap no longer exists, having melted completely over a decade ago.

    I don't think you understand how climate science works. You never deny the current state of the world. You simply change all the past data to fit your prediction.
    Instead of believing that the ice caps have already melted, they revise the past claim and state that they never predicted that, or they revise the past data to show that the ice caps 20 years ago extended almost to the equator, and therefore we've already effectively lost them.

    Another couple of years and I'll learn that at the time of my birth at the start of August there were 8 feet of snow on the ground. (The picture my parents have of them in shorts on the front lawn will be dismissed as "weather is not climate")