If the world was warming even faster than scientists thought it would, seemingly jumping years ahead of predictions, would that mean even more crucial decades of action had been lost?

Yes. Yes it would.

Capitalism is a death cult.

climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating

Could it be ... fossil fuel producers lying about their output of greenhouse gases? Nah.

There are also some comments about aircon not being a good answer if solely relied on, including:

One of the key effects of heatwaves, which send demand for electricity soaring and cause extreme storms that stress electrical grids, is to cause blackouts. Blackouts mean no more air-con. A recent study suggested a blackout lasting just two days could hospitalise more than half of Phoenix residents and kill 12,000, mostly in their own homes. This is why the author Jeff Goodell warns of a “heat Katrina”: you thought the hurricane in New Orleans was bad?

wow have we procrastinated real climate action long enough yet?

The reason nothing will be done is because the only realistic option we have to save our planets ability to sustain life is economic degrowth.

We don't have enough of the minerals we need to go fully nuclear or renewable and even getting close would use up vast amounts of the very same energy were looking to save in the first place.

As the record levels of equality directly after ww2 showed, economic degrowth due to nearly all the men being at war, only results in the loss of the super rich which is why they'll never allow economic degrowth.

We all work too much, produce too much and pollute too much. Worse, we're all forced to produce the very wealth thats used to force us into wage-slavery and kill our planet.

The answer is and will always be the strategic refusal of labour, above what we need to survive and have a good quality of life. This, by default, will result in economic degrowth.

Want to sit around and do nothing to save the planet? Well, now you can.

While some argue that the world will soon pass the lower Paris agreement guardrail of 1.5C of heating above the preindustrial average, Schmidt says

Unless 2022 - present turn out to be an anomaly, we already have.

Late or not, we have to do all we can to stop runaway warming and ecological collapse. We know corporations and populations won't do anything voluntarily. That is why legislation is the only way. EU is taking the lead on this. I'm hoping world countries will follow.

Global warming is a test. We're failing the test, so the warming is going to start accelerating until we learn our lesson

This'll happen when the corporations causing this don't do anything about it.

times like these, I feel pretty shitty about how the world and I have condemned my kids to suffer the water wars in a handful of years

I thought the consensus was that it was El Nino exacerbating things, but I guess that's not the only factor.

The new evidence that Greenland lived up to its verdant name in the not-so-distant past may represent an exciting scientific breakthrough, but it also heralds ominous possibilities for the future of humanity. Present-day atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher than they’ve been in millions of years; evidence of an ice-free Greenland in the more recent past means that it could take even less warming than once expected to deplete the continent’s all-important ice sheet. The frozen stronghold that covers Greenland contains enough fresh water to raise sea levels by 23 feet — a staggering volume that would reshape coastlines around the world.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/08/14/news/climate-desk-new-fossils-reveal-ice-free-greenland-its-bad-news-sea-level-rise

Impossible. Michael Crichton and the experts in Superfreakonomics assured us that scientists would be able to quickly implement geoengineering projects to reduce CO2 and cool the earth. /s

Nonlilnearity has begun