James Renwick predicts the end of civilisation "as worst scenario"

I’m not going to knock James Renwick too much but after his ad hominem attack on Guy McPherson when he was here I’m not going to let him off the hook.

Just suppose the following preposterous scenario was true and humanity was not moving in the wrong direction and we did not have a Trump regime but a Hillary one that did not (even more preposterous) play mere lip service to climate change instead of acting in the interests of the New World Order.

What if the rain forests weren’t turning into sources of carbon instead of being a sink?

Maybe we could keep warming withing some “acceptable” bounds?

Of course not!

But James Renwick is “30 percent optimistic”. Wonderful what conclusions you can come to when you ingore most of what is really going on along with the exponential function.

The Big Read: Climate change – the best and worst for NZ

NZ Herald,

15 January, 2018

New Zealand's destiny is inextricably tied to that of its celebrated environment. But our blue and green backyard is now under unprecedented pressure from a wave of pests and human activity, ranging from development and pollution to climate change and tourism. In the second part of our week-long series, 50 Questions About the Environment, Victoria University climate scientist Professor James Renwick discusses the threats we face from a warming planet.

Guidance tells us we can expect several degrees of warming this century and between 30cm and a metre of sea level rise. What are the best and worst case scenarios and what will determine whether these play out?

The best-case scenario is that we have only another 0.5C of warming and another 50cm of sea level rise, through this century and into the next.

This much more change would still mean big disruptions for coastal communities everywhere and a greater risk of problems for global food supplies.

This scenario would require global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) to peak in the next year or two and for emissions to get to zero globally around 2050.

The worst-case scenario is that we have 4C of warming this century, with nearly as much again over the following century.

That would be accompanied by perhaps 1.5m of sea level rise this century, and about 70m more over the following 1000 years.

That much warming would melt all the ice on the planet.

Such a future would mean massive disruption to societies everywhere, billions of people displaced, and possibly billions of deaths through famine and war.

The end of civilisation as we know it, in other words