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Governments 'Not on Track' To Cap Temperatures at Below 2 Degrees: UN (reuters.com)
Governments are not on track to meet a goal of the 2015 Paris agreement of capping temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) before the end of the century, a United Nations official said on Sunday ahead of climate-change talks in Bangkok this week. From a report: Patricia Espinosa, head of the Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which steers the climate talks, said both the public and private sector need to act with urgency to avoid "catastrophic effects". The Paris climate agreement, adopted by almost 200 nations in 2015, set a goal of limiting warming to "well below" a rise of 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times while "pursuing efforts" for the tougher goal of 1.5 degrees C. "1.5 is the goal that is needed for many islands and many countries that are particularly vulnerable to avoid catastrophic effects. In many cases it means the survival of those countries. With the pledges we have on the table now we are not on track to achieve those goals," Espinosa told Reuters in a telephone interview on Sunday in Bangkok.
Someone still needs to tell me exactly what downsides I'm supposed to be scared of here
- Zillionaire assholes with oceanfront mansions get fucked - never a bad thing.
- Mideast will turn into an uninhabitable wasteland, instantly bringing about world peace.
- While the resulting refugee crisis will almost certainly overwhelm the naive diversity zealots in Europe under a tsunami of Cultural Enrichment, at least the ones that make it as far as Europe will be (for the most part) somewhat above average in terms of resourcefulness and religious-nonextremism. So whatever Europe turns into, they can take comfort that at least they're still better than Sudan.
- Famine hits third world hellholes the hardest, again bringing some desperately-overdue herd-culling to the human race, which has been pretty much immune to natural selection for centuries at least.
- Warmer temperatures = less shitty winters. If you think I wouldn't personally kill 50 polar bears just to go one winter without scraping ice off my car in -10 degree weather, you're sadly mistaken.
- A coral reef might die here or there and a couple species of grasshopper might go extinct somewhere, but honestly who gives a shit? Circle of life.
2 deg C (35.6 deg F) is kinda cold. I'd prefer not to have my temperature capped that low thank you very much.
(I know they probably mean temperature increase vs some arbitrarily chosen base, but the same mistake is made in several places in TFS, so it isn't just an isolated typo).