@breadandcircuses

I suggest the idea that climate scientists should prominently adopt a new theory of "possible". I'm going to sketch it here, and it needs wordsmithing, but basically the notion is that if we have not seen evidence that many/most countries are willing to do a thing, then we should consider that not a possible thing. That's a "conservative" reading of "possible".

For example, speaking in purely abstract terms, let's suppose that stopping climate change meant no more eating of bananas. Climate scientists might imagine that it's easily possible to stop eating bananas and so would feel uncomfortable with a claim that it's impossible to reach climate goals because in principle banana-eating should be possible to reduce. So they would feel like they had to say that targets were reachable that merely required the cutting of banana consumption.

But if, over time, we see that no country has in fact reduced its banana consumption materially, then we need to simply line out actions like that as "possible" in the sense that a thing may indeed be "physically possible" and yet "politically impossible", much as the wearing of masks during covid was possible in some countries and next to impossible in others (sadly, I'm looking at my own country).

This kind of pragmatic terminological notion is essential because the ordinary "stretch" of words is such that we allow ourselves to say "yes, it's possible to reach 1.5C" because we see physical possibility, and so some people feel they'd be lying to say we can't reach it. And yet now the very people who said these things feel, I'm guessing, almost like they've been duped into lying to the public about what's possible, maintaining a story that allowed people to not act because some politician could point to "it's still possible" as if that was meaningful.

Or maybe in order to get the terminology to be good for everyone, a modifier or other term needs to be used, literally never saying "possible" and always saying "practical" or "pragmatically possible" and then giving that some formality by simply keeping track of what each government is committing to and which commitments they are really keeping, so that over time as people fail in their promises, what is practical or pragmatically possible is seen to be less available than what was previously thought, and so the urgency goes up because many of the possible paths are simply not reachable politically even though they are reachable physically.

I guess we each see the problems of the world through the lens of our own experience. I do language design (computer language design, but the concepts aren't that different than human language in many ways). I see this as a problem of making the words say what we need them to say, and I feel people are getting tricked by the incredible breadth of what "possible" means. What's frustrating everyone is that we have to mean something much more precise than just "theoretically possible". We have to mean something that accommodates political friction, which is every bit as real a problem right now as physics, perhaps moreso, since the physics is clear and we're only just starting to profoundly see that the problem was never one of physics but that it simply does not suit The Plutocracy to even admit or focus on the problem, however physically clear. I fear that without factoring this in, physicists will never end up saying what they mean.

I'm being approximate here. I happily accept similar-but-hopefully-better proposals along these lines that in some way accommodate the political physics, so to speak.

Or maybe someone will tell me there's a better way to conceive the source of frustration, and I'm open to that. But language seems the enemy here, and it is too easily cooptable.