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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.
If we're on our way to a lethal +8C world, that's bad news. But the world is a reflexive system. If we kill ourselves off at +4C, say, human greenhouse gas production ceases, and (after a long lag) the world finds a new stable point without us. So there's a tendency for the world to self-correct. On the other hand, there may be positive feedbacks (tipping points) that push us all the way to a Venus scenario. The moral is, it's a complex non-linear system, and straight line extrapolations are almost certainly wrong when they go far beyond historical experience.
Fiat Lux.
I don't know about this particular investment firm, but investment and insurance firms are actually quite well equipped to think about risk, which is really what climate change is about from a financial perspective. They inherently need to be able to think rationally about climate predictions, assess the statistics/uncertainties behind them, and come to conclusions about where and how to invest in the long run. For example, what's the risk/reward for an investment firm to invest in an African company if there's an X% chance that company's location will be uninhabitable in 50 years? Or if climate change leads to social/political instability in the area?
For insurance companies, climate predictions tell them how much risk is involved in, for example, real estate purchases on the Florida coast as sea levels rise and extreme weather events increase in frequency.
For them it's all about probabilities - what is the probability that climate scientists are qualitatively right, and if they are, what are the chances of the particular predicted consequences being accurate (and how accurate). Actuaries crunch those numbers and advise their companies to make risk/reward decisions based off of them. One of the hardest parts about these predictions isn't the actual environmental impact, but the social consequences of it, which can have massive financial impacts.
In terms of what the companies know specifically about climate change, I'm guessing they have scientific consultant teams that provide the expertise they need.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
And Cat videos.
Those are real.
Aren't they?
AREN'T THEY????!!!!!!
Please say they are!!!!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Mod Fail.
The AC is correct. Doomsday predictions do seem to be a one upsmanship game, as evidenced by this article and Algore.
The surest way to undermine your position is to make outrageous claims that can't be substantiated.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Nobody disagrees the Earth will make it through this.
It's modern human society we're less confident of.
It may surprise you, but people actually managed to build rather well working thermometers for well over a century now. Not in the milli-degree area but certainly good enough to see a change that surpasses a whole degree Celsius.
And another surprise: Places on this planet were inhabited by civilized people well over 200 years ago. And they still are. And maybe yours will be, too, one day.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Really, a claim with no evidence, no source, and only one sentence long gets a +5 Insightful? The mod groupthink is strong with this post.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
If this biome map is still accurate then a rise of 8C/14F is not going to mean the world is uninhabitable. The equatorial region might be too much but there's plenty of land with highest summer temperatures below 72F/22C so the increase won't make those areas too hot for humans.
Habitable land isn't the biggest problem. Arable and fertile land is. A drastic shift in global temperature would make a large portion of our fertile lands unable to grow crops. Existing unarable land would not magically become fertile. Billions of people would still die even though there may be plenty of habitable land left on the planet.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
This isn't broken logic at all, they actually do think about all of those topics when it's appropriate. For example, a health insurance company does want to know what cancer research is going on, to assess what future treatments might cost, how likely those treatments are to result in permanent remission vs temporary, etc.
To be clear, they're not "running" anything. I'm not saying that they have in house climate scientists, or oncologists, or neuroscientists. I'm saying that they have the resources (e.g. through scientific consulting, literature studies, etc) to get informed about the current knowledge of topics that affect their investments, then make predictions based on that knowledge.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.