Even planning for anything 10 years in the future is a daunting task. For any prognosis there are a dozen more claiming different results or different trends with different outcomes. It's an information flood that does not let you make a definite judgement since it's overwhelming, and even when you try to base a decision on scientific evidence, because there's usually a "model", the certainty of the outcome "depends" (on any number of "variables").
What do? Make a conversative projection on what things are like today, and a plan based on that.
Me, I take a pessimistic view - I don’t think you have to have a large percentage change in, say, crop production, or storm damage rebuilding costs, for economies to feel the effect - prices rise, labour is diverted from growth to maintenance, and adaptations are ultimately made, but in the intervening period expense has been incurrred, and by now the climate has warmed further. The costs end up growing astronomically, and at what point do governments fail due to popular discontent, at what point do further governments collapse and even wars start due to resource cost rises and the need for popular distraction, and mass migration caused by revolution and war nearby?
I’ve put my money where my mouth is - I’ve become itinerant, while I scope out where on earth to live this out - somewhere quiet, and remote, and self-sufficient, that hasn’t yet seen ecological disaster and might escape the worst of climate change due to geography. Sadly, everywhere I’ve been in the past few years, across all continents and hemispheres, even when these places as yet appear verdant and untouched, are feeling the wrath of a changing climate, and human-wrought ecological destruction, from drought to flood, from aquifer pollution to overfarming and desertification, and vast agricultural monoculture, highly vulnerable to moving growing zones and viable climates for pests.
I’d love to be able to do something to prevent this - I recycle, I don’t buy much, I travel overland wherever possible - but I fear we’re too far gone.
What humanity and our civilisation will be in 20 or 30 years I don’t know, but I fear it’ll be unrecognisable and almost unimaginable to us, even now.
I'm in a similar spot but optimistic about systemic action.
I’m not optimistic about systemic action - the people taking it seriously don’t have the power to overcome a far more dominant system: our consumption-driven way of living, and the economies built around it. Mindshare may grow sufficiently in coming decades, but by then it’ll largely be too late, and that growth will likely come from more people witnessing and enduring the effects of climate change - and if we’re at that point, it’s already too late, as systemic collapse beckons as I laid out in my previous.
The climate is a chaotic system - it finds a metastable mode for a given set of inputs, and once moved by changing those inputs (e.g. CO2 ppm) from that point of stability can wander drastically before finding that point again. As forests die, as methane is belched from the thawing permafrost, as marine ecosystems collapse (everywhere is overrun by jellies - even Antarctica), as ice caps and glaciers melt, as coastal plains flood, as grassland turns to desert, core components of the current system of stability are yet further altered, thus pushing the current mode yet further from its stable point and making that stable point harder to reattain.
Like I said, get a climatologist talking in private, and it’s grim listening. They see the bigger picture in their work, but only publish studies on specific observations. Longitudinal studies end up being conservative otherwise they sound radically alarmist and don’t get published.
Anyhow. We should keep on playing while the ship sinks.
https://www.gaffologist.com/ (Ireland-only)
Sorry if it sounds like a plug but it's the best answer I have to your question. I studied physics in college and hoped it would help me work on energy efficiency or renewable energy generation technology, but it turns out that when I graduated (in to the worst recession in a century) nobody had any interest at all in what I was able to offer. I'd still love to work on saving the planet if I could do so while paying rent or a mortgage.
This is certainly true when looking at 2018 from the perspective of 1988 (or even 1998).
The pessimistic oportunist in me thinks it might be wise to start buying up vacation property in Newfoundland.
But global warming will be/is unprecedented and will affect the whole world. Immediate action is unlikely to reverse this process either.
Your comment about population growth issues is disgusting.
Because we have adapted. But how many are affected by the terror it involves? Terrorism = terrorizing people, not just murdering them.
> But global warming will be/is unprecedented
Erm, no.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...
Why do you bother commenting on this if you just flat-out refuse to accept scientific evidence in the original post?
To be honest, we still don't need them. Obviously it's horrible but considering that we accept ~1.25 million people a year killed on the roads (~25k in the EU, 30-40k in the US, or about one 9-eleven a month) it's probably not the best ROI. Though to be honest I think we should put massive barriers between cars and people anywhere we can, or just remove the cars wherever possible, but I'm odd that way.
Like I said I hope I'm wrong, but right now it looks like all the earlier estimates were too conservative and to think that we can cause major disruptions to the world's food supply, as well as making some places simply uninhabitable without air conditioning, strikes me as naive. To think that you can do it while still planning a 401(k) and buying holiday houses on the beach a cheap flight away for when you retire seems especially naive (though I worry we'll still have the cheap flights, which would be a bummer unless they're electric).
As far as population - it's true that we could stand to have far fewer people around, but even if your motivations are purely selfish, making hundreds of millions of people hungry, thirsty, and desperate doesn't sound like a good idea. And of course, most poor people emit basically nothing, so reducing the population of people living on under 5 dollars a day won't do much for the planet as a whole.
The perceived need to add car barriers to public events ks nothing in comparison with having to air-condition homes and public spaces around the globe. Also, remember nature?
There's nothing you'll be able to do about oceanic anoxia, or a myriad other effects that are simply catastrophic.
Speaking of skiing, good luck when those economies collapse when the brunt of tourism goes away.