I’d like to see this same report circa 1970:
“Inaction will lead to an ice age costing $X by 2020”
meanwhile there’s another thread here about a “Contrarian VC” investing in climate change…
“Inaction will lead to an ice age costing $X by 2020”
meanwhile there’s another thread here about a “Contrarian VC” investing in climate change…
There is good reason to believe it isn't over and a glacial period will return.
If I move a shovel full of dirt to the same place in my backyard every day for 20 years, I'm going to have a big pile of dirt there.
It's the same for climate. If we keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, physics says we're going to warm the planet. It's a more complex system than the dirt pile, but no reasonable person thinks some unknown unknown is going to randomly overturn that and cause an ice age (other than possibly nuclear winter).
We can see the warming signal from CO2 in history and we can reasonably project the future as well, if current emissions continue.
But > 10 years out, unpredictable technological innovation (either improvements to decarbonization tech or other tech that would make a lack of decarbonization irrelevant) would almost certainly change the path we're on to a point where projecting the current path isn't useful. To that point, Deloitte's finding of "insufficient action" on climate change couldn't possibly take into account actions happening today that could build toward useful climate change solutions if their only concept of action is applying existing tech to the problem.
Not that I disagree with your general point, But this is why prediction is tricky, because unexpected flooding and your prediction is false.
I know it doesn’t show on co2 concentration yet.
Solar, wind power, batteries, EV are all on exponential growth curves.
In 10 years we will be in a much different place.
This is completely false. We are not interpolating with climate science, we are extrapolating. That is why the variance in the models is so wide (and expands rapidly). That variance, also, only applies to the known mechanisms: when a new important factor shows up, that can cause the predictions to be very wrong. This happened with ocean acidification in the early 2010's - the climate models had predicted increasing temperature, but it didn't materialize because the oceans were absorbing a lot more CO2 than we thought.
In your example, an earthquake, a tornado, a flood, a strong storm, another person stealing your dirt, or even a heavy wind can make your projection false. You can keep doing the same thing, but you will have no idea how big that dirt pile will be 20 years from now.