The reality is that it's too late at this point. The easy fixes might have worked if we could get worldwide buy-in 20 years ago but short of a planetary-scale engineering project or outright banning fossil fuel usage we're in for some bad times even before we factor in economic growth from India, China, and Africa.

Levelling off is no longer good enough, it's too late for that, we need a massive decrease in global carbon emissions. And beyond that we need to start thinking about levelling out energy consumption entirely, even independent of CO2 emissions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U

Classic Newsroom clip but fact-checked as accurate, minus the hyperbole at the end about permanent darkness. We're already seeing majorly shifting weather patterns, movement of the jet stream, droughts, unprecedented wildfires, etc. We're already starting to see the first major cities lost due to rising sea levels - Miami is already sinking beneath the seas and it's only a matter of time before it exceeds the limits of engineering to fix it. It's built on porous limestone and borders directly on hundreds of square miles of swamp, so it's something of a worst-case scenario. You can't pump out water when it just comes right back in through the limestone, and even if you could we would be talking about hundreds of times as much wall as the Netherlands uses.

Every single building in Miami will need to be elevated Chicago/Seattle style or abandoned within the next decade or two. Otherwise people are going to start leaving rather quickly once the sewers start backflowing on a regular basis. All of modern society is built on the shoulders of sanitation infrastructure and it's going to get nasty once it stops working.

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/11/climate-desk-...

https://newrepublic.com/article/123216/miami-sinking-beneath...

I wish I had something positive to say like "maybe this will finally get us to proactively solve our problems instead of assuming they can always be fixed at some future date" but I don't actually believe that will happen. We are unwilling to systematically factor in future risks into present costs. Heck, even we as a community don't do it properly - how many times are we going to get hacked before we learn to lock things down from day 1?

Sorry to be pessimistic but that's the reality at this point. Objections to this are political slant and wishful thinking. The US military's job is to be apolitical and make realistic assessments about future threats to our nation, and they're planning for increased levels of conflict due to climate change in the 21st century. It's happening and it's going to suck pretty bad.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-idUSKCN1...

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/10/u-s-intel-alert-cl...