Even if everyone stopped all emissions today it wouldn’t solve warming
Cascio 19 – Jamais, a professional futurist who has been exploring the intersection of environmental, technological, and cultural change for 25 years. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of their Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009, Cascio specializes in plausible scenarios of the future. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future, where he works on a wide array of projects. Cascio’s written work has appeared in both academic and popular journals and collections. “The apocalypse: It’s not the end of the world”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 75, No. 6, pg. 269-272, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00963402.2019.1680047?journalCode=rbul20, 10-28-2019
There’s a 25- to 50-year lag between the emission of atmospheric carbon and its persistent impact on temperature. This means the environmental disruption attributable to global warming we’re seeing now is the result of carbon emissions up through the 1980s. It also means we could cut off all carbon emissions today, globally, and still see another generation of warming. Beyond the environmental, economic, and human consequences, imagine the political impact of taking bold action that produces no observable benefits for 20 years, or even longer.