Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning

I'm sure you know that "up to" means the same as "no more than", and "could" means "might or might not". So there's no meaning in what you quoted, so why did you not only quote it but say that it's important and most people don't get it? It's not important, it's intentionally misleading.

this also means thermal turbulence which means breakup of flow, and that means failure of distribution, leading to localized torrid spots, that translates to heat dome regions of more than 10°C hotter.

You may enjoy Ian McEwan's What We Can Know: "Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled 'A Corona for Vivien.' They are the last, it seems, historians alive" [1]. (It's less apocalyptic than this makes it seem, at least relative to the modern apocalyptic genre à la Mad Max.)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/books/review/ian-mcewan-w...

We _are_ doing something about this. We’re locating concentrated millions of years of trapped fossil energy and moving it into our atmosphere as fast as we possibly can. To a first approximation, that is the world economy.

Or did you mean to do something differently?

On the path we're on I don't think we'll have to worry too much about future generations.

The EU has already seeing 10,000 excess deaths from climate changed caused heat waves and this is a minuscule taste of what's to come.

A very large percentage of mass extinction events have their roots in increased atmospheric CO2, but all of them on dramatically increased time scales. The closest thing in the history of the planet to what's happening to day was PETM [0] and that was only a lessor extinction even because the Earth was already quite warm (for example, there was already no polar ice at the time).

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_therm...

> If we don’t do something about this...

We can't. We're too late.

China (13 GT), the US (4.6 GT), and India (3 GT) alone represent 51% of global carbon emissions - and at least in India's case, it is growing at a rate of 5%.

Throw in other large polluters like Russia (2 GT), Indonesia (0.8 GT), KSA (0.6 GT), Brazil (0.5 GT), and Vietnam (0.5 GT) whose rate of carbon emissions is growing in the 5-10% range and you see there is no path forward.

Any amount of de-carbonization that China or the collective West does is automatically negated by the other countries I listed. At best global carbon emissions stagnate - which by default is going to lead to a 2-3 °C increase in temperatures.

I have already accepted that there is nothing plebs can do about climate change. I can try hard by using public transport, using less plastic, and using less air conditioning, but all of those efforts are rendered useless by rich people going on vacation in yachts or private planes. And if you talk about reducing meat consumption, Americans will go mad, lol.

Ordinary plebs trying to prevent climate change is like subtracting $100 from a billion dollars - it does not make any meaningful difference.

> there will basically no place to hide from these direct or any knock-on effects

This is nonsense. (And your own source doesn't support the claim that the consequences of global warming will be unmitigable for anyone.)

Many parts of the world will become milder for human occupation as a result of climate change. And nothing realistically forecast is unavoidable with wealth–rich countries will A/C and seawall their ways around the consequences.

One major issue is the extreme difficulty of being precise about tipping points.

Eg: Have you seen a train derail? A couple of degrees of tilt - nothing .. and then .. whoops.

The global climate has been 'stable' about mean values for the bulk of human written history and development of urban civilisations. The planet now hosts 7 billion+ people, largely urban, and feed by a century of stable agriculture patterns write large.

The disruption of that will have a major impact across the human population of the planet.

The tipping points, when they come, are related to the significant loss of polar ice, and the beginning of positive feedback of atmospheric insulation factors other than CO2.

Melting ice, the transformation from near zero degree ice to near zero degree water, takes up a large amount of the energy from the sun trapped by increasing insulation. The energy used to melt X tonnes of ice, if no ice can be melted, will instead raise the temperature of X tonnes of water by some 66 degrees C (or there abouts - worth looking it up exactly).

Increased land and sea surface temperatures releases methane from peat bogs and tundras, and increases the water vapour content of the lower atmosphere.

Both of these things increase the insulation factor of the atmosphere to a greater degree than CO2.

As I understand it just means there's a lot more energy in the atmosphere. Like imagine the amount of energy it takes to increase water temperature in a pot by 3° and scale it up to the planet. All that energy makes everything bigger, badder, and less predictable. Longer, dryer droughts; bigger, longer winter storms, etc.

There's a lot of bad things that happen at 3C.

The first is that 3C represents a lot more energy in the atmosphere. That translates to more water evaporating from the oceans creating bigger more violent storms (think more frequent flash floods).

It changes the ocean currents which can be really bad. Right now Europe is warm for it's latitude because of a weakening current from the equator to the UK brings a lot of heat. If that completely collapses, Europe can enter an ICE age.

The rising temperature also ends up weakening the vortex of the north pole which mostly keeps the arctic temperatures sealed up north. As that vortex weakens, spills of crazy blizzards can hit unusual places pretty hard. The winter storm in 2021 is an example of that happening.

Then of course there's the potential melting of the ice caps which will release a lot of methane into the atmosphere (speeding up warming). That will ultimately cause sea levels to rise which won't be great for the state of Florida.

Mass migration, crop instability, more frequent and more extreme weather. It's just a combo of bad things that all come together at once.

Among _many_ other things, 3 degrees Celsius globally means more evaporation over oceans, which makes the air denser.

Denser air carries more momentum, which means more frequent (and more severe) hurricanes.

It’s sort of all over the place but it’s mostly the other way round. The poles might see like +5-8c. It’s also the overall temperature. Today’s high temperature where I am is 33 and the low is 25. 33 isn’t super unusual, maybe a dozen days a year. 25 as a low though is crazy high even on days historically above 30. It all averages out to +whatever.

For temps by latitude/region this source seems ok on a quick search https://scied.ucar.edu/interactive/compare-climates-regional...

The most extreme warming happens at the poles, doesn't it? Plus increases in volatility on top of a rising baseline, so more extreme heat wave peaks even in temperate climates that don't change as much on average.

EU has a lot of historic emissions to make up for.

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

> EU basically throws money anything "green"

Including paying to have wood pellets shipped across the Atlantic using bunker fuel and then calling it "bioenergy"

The EU is 'clean' largely out of it's own limited access to fossil fuels and other energy resources rather than because they are "doing their part".

Protecting forests is good and all, but it will not reverse climate change. We'll have to stop all fossil fuel burning and, additionally, sequester around 600 billion tonnes of CO2 (that's taking into account all the natural carbon sinks) to get back to +1.5C by 2100.