My favorite thing are climate change takes from people who don't realize that economics isn't physics.

I'm allowed to say this: I was an economics major in college. Thinking about the physical limits of emissions reduction through its traditional lens (ignoring the work of people like Herman Daly and Kate Raworth) is a trap.

On the one hand yes every unit of emissions reduction is beneficial.

On the other hand, if we don't reduce emissions by a certain amount within a specific time frame, there are tipping points that can't be undone within a meaningful human time scale.

Any solution that doesn't reconcile the underlying physics is committing us to emissions scenarios that are too high and leaving us a future of increasing drought and floods (and by proxy famine), fires, heatwaves and aboroviruses.

In fact, the best corollary to climate right now is covid in the US.

The death toll we're suffering now is directly linked to delays in testing and tracing, and when it became clear those weren't going to happen to delays in socially isolating.

Even if we successfully flatten the curve we can't undo the lives lost, the people who will be left with lingering health effects or our collective trauma.

An interesting data point: while we think a lot about the ice caps melting (for good reason) about 1/3 of sea level rise is from something called thermal expansion. Basically, warm water takes up more space than cold water.

(Ice is weird, most things shrink when super cold).

If we warm the Earth to 2.7°F(1.5° C) by 2040 (20 years!) our current trajectory we can't unwarm the ocean. We can't solve sea level rise by throwing the ocean in the fridge.