The large crack in the Antarctic ice shelf has grown 6 miles

We'll get better results from improvements on alternative power than from political agreements anyway.

Can we put up a wall to keep the alligators out during the flooding?

The last decade is the most progressive political period in US yet all we did is the worst damage to the climate crisis (on the flip side, how much worse could it be?). So let's face it, the political show does not really matter. Nothing will change until we crash and nature will force the change upon us. This is nothing new in the history and in a few millennia every thing will be renew and we will be forgotten (and forgiven).

The inevitability is built into the large number theory. As long as there are too many drivers on the wheel and too many cooks in the kitchen, the average will rule the society and the average will always be shallow and near sighted. So before the actual crisis hit nearly every one, the society is incapable of change direction.

In the analogy, money would be the gasoline and we have too many feet on that pedal. The market absolutely destroys any kind of responsibility. Meanwhile, passengers, either enjoy the ride or embrace yourself.

Unfortunately, it's lose/lose for skeptics:

If you turn out to be right and Florida becomes unlivable in the next 50 years, you turn the skeptics into scapegoats and curb stomp them into submission. However, if you turn out to be wrong you just get off scot-free and say "Well, I turned out to be wrong because of X factor that everyone overlooked, but I came to the best conclusion possible with the evidence I had at hand. The skeptics were still wrong to have rejected science."

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/rift-in-antarcticas-larse...

While humanity will cope in the sense that the species will probably go on existing, the current human population of this planet only exists because a large number of ecological parameters are within the sweet spot. Anything that disrupts global food supply, anything that disrupts fresh water supply, will kill billions of people in a matter of decades.

Rising sea levels will displace a moderate percentage of our population and be the catalyst for a new round of wars, but the real danger lies in the fact that we're in the middle of a major extinction event that's increasingly likely to leave most of the population in starvation.

People in the richer countries most likely. The main concern with climate change are the effects on poorer countries in Southeast Asia.

Acidifying oceans are destroying marine ecosystems necessary for generating food and oxygen for the rest of the planet.

Rising temperatures might cause the release of frozen methane from ocean floor deposits and arctic permafrost. Methane accelerates greenhouse warming.

Melting ice could dilute the salt balance that drives major ocean currents and plunge Europe into an ice age while the planet bakes.

People are alarmed because the Titanic of society is cruising calmly toward an iceberg, and it takes an awfully long time to change direction, and no amount of technological advancement can swallow trillions of dollars in floods, droughts, famines, and barren seas.

Don't assume that all countries have the same resources. Two thirds of the world population live in developing countries. How exactly will they cope with the effects of climate change remains to be seen.

But facts and climate processes have no such bias and our understanding of these phenomena have increased greatly in the past decades.

Here's the thing: the fearmongering is not only justified, it is underplayed.

What do you think will happen to the planet when the climate patterns are taken out of a system of stable equilibrium? What happens when the ocean's acidity level crosses the historical threshold under which most of the oxygen-generating plankton on this planet has existed for hundreds of thousands of years?

I'm sorry, but belief has nothing to do with it. We understand very well what the impact on each individual ecosystem this will have, and we have a fairly good idea that the negative interactions amongst each other are going to be even worse.

Recent interviews with most climate scientists have shown that most are seriously depressed, and many have been literally contemplating suicide, or decided to not have children. And these are people who don't have any sort of political agenda in play and would rather live in a reasonably safe and sound world.

The fundamental political problem is that people have difficulty understanding exponential phenomena. Climate change has been very much exponential given the increase in carbon in the atmosphere, and it has been predicted for a long time that the feedback cycles are going to be accelerating things more and more.

Well, we're finally there. A ton of coral reef ecosystems are dying, most coastal ecosystems have changed because of ocean acidification. We're starting to see conditions of permanent drought in the Western USA, and so on and so forth for many different systems.

The reason why the Mediterranean stays as warm (and agriculturally productive) as it is year round (while being at the same longitude as DC) is the North Atlantic Current, which has exhibited signs of slowing.

The world's food supply is in jeopardy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Current

I would rather we focused more on things closer to home with more direct impacts on peoples lives. That diesel engine is not just heating up the atmosphere it is spewing out toxic gas that is slowly poisoning people. The same is true of coal power stations. I want to spend a little of the benefits of prosperity on making my world a little safer and cleaner. It is just good hygeine!

Lots of other people have pointed out flaws in your reasoning and how privileged your perspective is. I just wanted to add to the dogpile discussion by pointing out this is simply absurd.

We have LONG since converted the first world to a primarily electric society, and as science advances an electric society becomes ever cheaper and more imaginable. Our fascination with fossil fuel in all things is much more about the control offered to people who hold lands rich in the energy resources we use.

We found the use of our friend fire useful early on for portably moving the energy necessary to make mechanical energy, but as time has gone on we've found many viable ways to replace its use. Solar power has been cost effective near the equator since before anyone talking here was born, Shuman worked out the details of a reflection-powered low pressure steam turbine with excellent properties before 1920. You can build a shockingly effective solar engine in your local techshop, if your goal is to make mechanical energy and you aren't too far off the equator. That's 100 year old technology!

This idea that a carbon liberation is the norm of industrialization is a fiction sold to you by industrialists who have a scarce resource. Time and time again, we've already shown that industrialization progresses towards REDUCING our notion of waste and INCREASING efficiency, and yet the social discourse is about the inevitability of environmental impact and "recouping R&D costs."

Another lamentable issue in all this is that it's become impossible to have a calm, reasoned discussion about any of this. Take anything other than an extreme view and you get shouted down as a luddite.