I feel somewhat embarassed to talk about this, but does anyone else feel a sense of dread and depression when reading news like this? I can't seem to shake it and it's quite strongly affecting my worldview.
It's very jarring to read information from experts and scentific reports on where we're heading and at the same time everyone in the media and all people around me just ignore the problem completely except some comments now and then that reveal how greatly they underestimate the problem. If you start trying to talk about how severe our problems are becoming, you may be labeled a conspiracy theorist / "prepper" and your opinion thrown out the window.
I see what you did there.
→ CO₂ makes plants grow! It compensates for the rise of CO₂ levels!
→ We used to worry about the environment too, now suddenly it's the climate. The environment turned out fine! Acid rain wasn't a problem either!
It all boils down to not being able to accept that our society will (have to) change.
If any train of thought leads you to this point, you have a medical problem, regardless of what you are thinking about. Fortunately, I was able to get help and had fantastic support from my family and friends.
Today I'm off medicine and therapy. I still have bad times lasting 1 - 2 weeks, but never to the point that I can't live.
The important thing that I'm able to see now (even when my anxiety is back) is that everything that is important without climate change, is important with climate change. Even though the world is ending (I am not hopeful), I can still find love, learn new things, see the world, enjoy good food, risk my life, make money, enjoy art, and play sports. You can substitute into that list anything that brings you joy. You can also include fighting climate change in that list.
If I were younger, and/or had young family, maybe I'd be doing more. As it is, I spent maybe a decade working on climate change issues at an NGO. And my carbon footprint is relatively low. I don't commute, or travel long distances, I don't eat much meat, and my home is very well insulated. My main sin is running too many computers. But at least I've switched to SSDs.
This removes anxiety about fulfilling your purpose.
Nihilism can be a source of great comfort when practised by optimist. :)
Optimism helps more with that. Just be sure that they'll figure something out eventually.
But the human race won't get wiped out. And the global ecosystem will recover. It's not like Earth will flip into Venus mode. In a million years or two, this will all be just a blip.
Sure?
> Later calculations showed they were right — a Venus-type runaway on our planet is scarcely possible, even if we burn all available fossil fuels.
But unless you're over 70-80 you will have to face the shit, it has already been happening for some time now and is accelerating.
Now enter technology. Think about where we were a century ago technologically. Consider that in many ways technology today is accelerating even faster than it was then. Imagine now where we'll be in a century from now. Nobody would from 1918 would be able to guess what 2018 would look like, from a technological point of view, and I'm certain nobody in 2018 can even imagine what 2118 will look like from the same metric. I mean we are already today approaching the level of technology required to live on other planets which are completely and absolutely inhospitable. In the worst case scenarios of climate change, Earth would still be a utopia by comparison. And then enter in near future ideas like geo-engineering, atmospheric manipulation, and so on.
So I don't think it's smart to run a species level experiment on seeing what happens if we just keeping pumping out CO2, but the worst case scenario is both survivable and improbable. It could even end up changing us vastly for the better. The Black Death is something no one would have ever wanted, yet it paradoxically accelerated, if not sparked, the change that nearly everybody would have wanted of a transition away from feudal society to a more free society.
The average case looks like that. The worst case looks like the Permian-Triassic extinction.
Over time, if our models hold up, we'll see the desirability of coastal areas begin to gradually decline. As sea levels gradually rise we'll probably respond with pumping systems and other technological solutions and if/when technological solutions start to lose ground we'll begin to see demand for coastal property start to decline but as there will always be people with different appetites for risk and prospecting, it'll constantly be a gradual process. We'll probably also see the rise of entrepreneurs taking advantage of the changing landscapes to offer new solutions. For instance check out the ideas for ideas being carried out by Dutch Docklands. [1] Some phenomenal stuff there. For others, we'll likely see emigrations more inland as I imagine we've already seen, at least to some degree, from places like Louisiana.
In the worst case, there may be lots of change. But change is not necessarily bad in the longrun, even if undesirable in the shortrun.
[1] - http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States
A handful of extinctions over 10,000 years are no problem for an ecosystem to handle.
A handful of extinctions every year for 50 years can turn a forest into a wasteland.
For reference, I don’t think life on earth is threatened (that’s just hyperbole) but there is a high probability that the population will readjust down to 3-4 billion and this readjustment will be a rather painful down-sizing.
In my opinion, humans just don't do well with restriction. If politicians focus on restricting consumption of goods and energy, we'll just end up in another "general malaise"[1] like in the 1970s.
The only way this will ever get solved is through enormous amounts of clean energy (nuclear, which nobody wants) and recapturing carbon.
[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106508...
Well... The sun is gradually getting hotter over geological timescales. Eventually it will experience Venus-style runaway warming, and this could happen as soon as 500 million years from now.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runa...
I feel like someone found an asteroid headed for Earth and everyone just shrugged and decided to pretend it wasn't there. People still make plans for retirement, etc. assuming the world will be the same as it is now, and it dumbfounds me. It's not just climate change deniers - it's people who agree with the science and even see that we're not doing enough, and that it may be accelerating. But apparently it's too abstract to consider it in your own life. I kind of wish it were that way for me; it would beat living in dread and fear.
It would also explain how anyone is able to do things that are unhealthy - smoke, drink alcohol, eat sugar. Even though we all know that it's really unhealthy, it doesn't affect us directly, so it's hard to take it as serious threat.
I'm not sure if this theory is true, but it keeps explaining a lot of human behaviour to me.
then again this is one reinforcing feedback loop among several others.
Are you familiar with the concept of planet albedo, and how it is changing on earth due to melting polar cap? Ever heard of ocean's anoxic events and their consequences ?
And the list goes on.
The reason I'm citing this is not because I think we shouldn't worry, but because if the methane is released (and this depends on the release speed as well) we might have a period with an atmosphere with high concentrations of methane, then a sudden reduction.
Runaway greenhouse gas concentrations and higher temperature might trigger (the reason being we know some things, but we don't know everything) a runaway CO2 capture process. It sounds SciFi, and it probably is, and it seems Nitrogen is a limiting factor. But I wouldn't say it is impossible. Or it could be possible with human help.
Then at the end of this period we could end up with less CO2 in the atmosphere, with oil running out and the clathrates emptied.
So on one hand expect large scale migrations and/or massively expensive programs to mitigate the problems. On the other hand expect far more extreme weather far inland.
The idea it will only affect coastal cities is a dangerous one.
There are some cities (New Orleans, Venice, Boston to an extent, to name a few), which are highly vulnerable to sea level rise, but most coastal cities are at high enough elevation that a sea level rise of a few meters wouldn't be the end of the world - it would require better levees, dikes, etc.
Contrast with such risks as increased capability of biological warfare, the persistent risk of nuclear warfare, or, ecologically, declining natural forestation and vegetation due to heavy use of land for cultivated agriculture.
As for extreme weather, it's not like the Earth naturally has less extreme weather at colder temperatures. Warmer temperatures will cause changes in weather patterns, and some places are getting more extreme weather than before, but there is no reason it will be net worse for the whole world.
A lot of cities face issues with follow on effects like that.
It won't be 'the end of the world' if its just a few meters, but it is still enough that cities like London face multi billion flood defence upgrades, and towns housing hundreds of thousands will face increased flood risks as a consequence of anything done to upgrade the defences.
And you're severely underestimating the direct damage. Many of the highest population density areas in the world are at risk,and many of the areas at worst risk are also among the poorest, like Bangladesh.
As for extreme weather, yes indications are that we're heading for more overall extreme weather, not just changes.
Inform yourself and learn that one of the current issue we face is a continental increase of temperature and shift inseason that would make agriculture impossible in about 50 years.
There are reinforcing feedback loops that will push the change past a threshold where cascading effects would make life on earth surface near impossible.
Life on earth is a complex interdependent system and the larger animals are the first to go, guess what's next now that elephants, whales, tigers, and pretty much every animal larger than humans is on the brink of extinction.