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Global warming isn't a black and white issue. Generally speaking each fraction of a degree the planet warms is worse than the last and even if we don't have much chance of actually containing warming at 2 degrees, let along 1.5, not letting warming go from 3.0 to 3.5 is still incredibly important.

We will certainly need to invest in cleanup. But how much we'll have to invest can be multiple orders of magnitude larger or smaller depending on the investments we make now.

We will wait until the very last minute to do anything significant, reacting rather than anticipating. Then, when the effects of climate change are completely undeniable, we will try work-arounds other than solving the underlying cause.

My thought is that we will eventually try to put a thin reflective material into space (or manufacture it in space in 20-40 years) to create some sort of semi-permanent sun-shield that reflects 2-5% of the sunlight we receive. It would have to be massive in area, but think of your car's sun visor on a hot day.

Putting particles into the atmosphere to do the same thing would also do the job but it could affect other things and cause more abnormal weather.

I don't see our use of fossil fuels or consumption of livestock slowing down. People make exceptions for themselves because they are the center and most important part of their own experience. "You can't get a man to understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it" - Upton Sinclair.

Also it's worth saying that Bill Gates should be able to do better than a tiny 1 billion (1/96th of his wealth) given the dire situation we are in. Actions taken earlier will have a larger impact toward mitigating climate change. 1 billion is like him tossing a penny at the problem. I'm sure Microsoft has contributed a large amount of CO2 to the atmosphere over time as well.

We can give up, or we can take action. The choice is ours. I still think popular pressure can make a difference, it's how every progressive action yet has come about.

Many countries are already onboard, China is realising very quickly how important the environment is. The US public is on the side of reducing emissions, I think the only thing left is to convince US elites and we can get there.

I'm hugely pessimistic, but I haven't given up. Everyone frustrated by lack of action is another potential protester locking themselves up in front of a fracking plant or daubing graffiti and disabling a pump at a petrol station.

Realistically I don't think there will be much real or adequate government action until the system we have is creaking at the seams. Dealing with migration from poorer parts of the world, dealing with the cost and chaos of weather events like floods and storms. Some actually buying land 500 ft above sea level, away from population centres. Governments having to choose between martial law or reelection will change views on global throwaway consumerism surprisingly quickly.

I also expect to see a rebirth in spending on navies, troops and border guards amongst the developed nations.

Nonetheless there comes a point (as yet unknown) where it becomes a choice of fix it or watch Rome burn. It might even reach a last minute point where it's clearly cheaper to fix it than keep ignoring it. By that time costs could easily be an order of magnitude higher, and far more dependent on geo engineering that might generate its own unforeseen problems.

But every tiny act from individuals might, just might, contribute to a tipping point before it gets that far.

> ... is another potential protester locking themselves up in front of a fracking plant ...

Isn't fracking responsible for a massive drop in coal use though? The increased amount of natural gas available means that wholesale prices for it have dropped, which has made coal-powered energy plants increasingly less viable financially compared to natural gas power stations. And natural gas, fracking and all, is far less of an environmental problem than coal is with all its mountain-top removal strip mining and cancerous, radioactive soot.

> I wish I could start a poll here, but does anyone really think there's still time? Really?

Climate change is not a black & white thing; it's a gradient of bad things. No, we're not going to avoid heavy costs (sea level rise, higher disasters, etc.), but we can avoid making those costs even higher.

Maintaining anything like our lifestyle in a low-carbon world requires widespread electrical energy storage. (Nuclear plants cannot load-balance by starting and stopping. Fusion is unlikely to overcome this limitation in the foreseeable future.) Such technologies are in their infancy.

Political and economic reform may not be happening at the pace it needs to, but developing energy storage technology will go a long way towards being able to implement the reforms when people are willing to accept them.

The same argument applies to lab-grown meat and some kinds of carbon capture for industrial processes that necessarily release CO2, particularly cement and steel production. Ensuring that we have the technology makes it easier to use it when people are willing to.

My guess is that we won't do much until there is widespread suffering like dislocation of people or wars. And even then not much will be done until the polluting nations will feel the heat.

My hope is that at some point new energy sources like solar or fusion will make fossil fuels obsolete so the problem may just go away.

Even then we won't do anything, we won't need to.

Huge numbers of people will die, and that will fix the problem.

There are two knobs:

1. climate impact per capita

2. quantity of capita

Through inaction, on a long enough timeline, #2 will sort itself out. It's just ugly and involves a lot of suffering.

That's life.

You described tragedy not life. Life (intelligent) can escape tragedy. That fatalistic attitude towards huge numbers of people dying is degenerate. Its a common attitude but not one that's good for anything but apathy.

I disagree.

Life is cyclic by nature and humans are currently in the late stages of a boom phase. Wether we intervene "intelligently" to defer or soften the bust is largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. There will eventually be a bust, the populations will collapse, and life will go on to repeat the cycle again.

I don't see this as apathetic at all. It's comforting, it can give significant hope to people who are so obsessed with preventing the inevitable bust as if it's the end of the world it paralyzes them in depression when faced with the overwhelming reality of the situation.

Let go, treat others kindly, adopt austerity measures if it makes you feel better about your impact on the planet, but know that regardless life will continue.

We've had a long period of steady, exponential growth, everything must balance out in the end - so I see no reason to expect there to not be a correspondingly far fall from this precarious tall cliff we've perched ourselves upon.

You really find it comforting that huge amounts of people can not be helped from perishing - that others perishing is "the fix" ? Is it not just guilt that could be comforted for choosing not to be a helper? I think the "hope" is that you will never find yourself in need of help.

"but know that regardless life will continue" - your message was the inverse - it was "know that regardless early death must continue"

This is bad philosophy and not based on good analysis, just simple curve fitting and some degree of jadedness. People and history are capable of surprises.

Get over it, the forest needs to burn down occasionally.

So let's all play with flamethrowers and smoke in it?

Oh well. Nothing we can do.

By all means, do what you can. I certainly do, in fact, I probably do more than most.

I'm pessimistic about governments solving it through policy, but optimistic about science solving it. I'm particularly interested in technologies that sequester CO2, and I think this is a fantastic way to start setting prices for a carbon tax when things get worse. If all else fails, I've seen proposals for geoengineering that could work out in a reasonably short amount of time.

I'd prefer if we solved it through being responsible (plant more trees, stop cutting down the rainforest, move to renewable energy, etc), but I'm not all that worried in general.

I'm optimistic about renewable energy coming online fairly quickly, even optimistic about the transportation sector undergoing a vast transformation with the right pushes.

I'm less optimistic about people consuming less. Unless market forces make it more costly to toss away material, we're going to need an entirely new way of manufacturing a lot of different types of things.

CEB is possibly going to be a great alternative for concrete brick construction if it takes off based on the Boring Company. I'm not quite certain of the technical nature, but I understand this uses a minimal amount of concrete added to a highly compressed block of earth. Adobe construction has been used quite a lot in the past. (Probably won't work so well for skyscrapers). That being said, there are supposed to be alternatives here but scale is the main concern. Steel looks like it is going to be the main thing for a long time.

Politics are cyclical in nature, the next cycle will shift and we will likely see a radical shift in a lot of these policies. Will it be enough? Hopefully, but probably not everything.

My main concern, and I think about this quite often, is the sheer magnitude of our consumption and waste we produce every single day. Landfills need to be adapted to capture methane for one. But more than that, more products need to be made with compostable material.

I've seen a lot of recent food shops / juiceshops here in Austin that now provide compostable cups / silverware / packaging where nothing is provided in Sytofoam or plastic (all plant based material). It appears to be scalable and something I would love to see elsewhere with manufacturing / packaging.

Though I can also imagine a world where people will want to be able to get whatever they need nearly instantly. Maybe 3D metal printing will accelerate at larger scales and take into account better recycling / raw material breakdowns. That being said, it's argued that 3D printing is more environmentally sustainable as an additive manufacturing process rather than the traditional subtractive process of cutting and breaking down material to form and producing waste.

> A U.S. Department of Energy study confirmed that utilizing additive manufacturing can reduce material needs and costs by up to 90%. Along with waste savings, the DOE also found that 3-D printing can save energy, especially when a component that was previously made by combining several smaller parts is consolidated into one. > https://www1.eere.energy.gov/manufacturing/pdfs/additive_man...

It's not going to be pretty, for sure, but we can still make a difference. Not emitting greenhouse gasses, as hard as it is, is still far cheaper than cleaning the mess afterwards.

It's hard to see how things can change right now, but if we can get the majority on board, I think we can see radical change happening quite quickly. The key point is that people must realize radical changes are required, now. Buying organic and recycling a few things isn't going to cut it.

I'm not very optimistic about the outcome in the coming few decades. But I'm hopeful.

When places like Miami, Norfolk, and Shanghai will be consistently overrun by tides, or when food supplies come under severe pressure, my hope is that there will be some kind of major wake up call and cleanup act. With the major polluters (the US and China in particular) leading the way forward with funding, bespoke technology, and (hopefully) clawbacks on the main polluters.

There are things that can be done:

Passive solar design

Pedestrian friendly design

More small homes

The central problem is convincing people that what they do actually makes a difference and it doesn't have to mean they cut their own throats for the greater good. People don't act because they think it involves a high personal cost without really making difference.

It doesn't require government intervention to change that.

Any mitigation action we take is worthwhile as it will reduce risks and future costs. I'm not optimistic we'll do enough to prevent serious change. But we can't give up on mitigation strategies as they could still make the difference between 'really bad' and catastrophic.

For all the reasons you give, bad things are going to happen. We don't have time to stop that, but if we start now, we can mitigate the severity of those bad things that do happen and prevent others. The cleanup scenario isn't an option in any respect if the earth is really screwed.

Do you think that things after Trump will be better? How much things improved when we changed from Bush to Obama, in most fundamental areas? We are talking about a different party, a different message, even a different skin color if you want. But still wars, economy, surveillance, care about climate and so on kept going in the same direction, and even got worse.

Something else will be a priority for our attention while the trends will keep going as usual, until is already too late to do something, or to force taking desperate measures (i.e. not fully understood geoengineering) that will do even more harm than doing nothing.

People in power don't need to fear the effects of climate change in their lifetimes, they can afford to live comfortably, and even profit over the ones that can't.

> In reality, does anyone see anything other than a bad ending to all of this?

Do I think we, collectively as humans, have the will and the actual resources to change everything about "our" modern way of life in 10 years? Nope. Not one bit. Should we stop trying? Nope, not one bit.

Do I think all living things will die? No. I do think large populations will die as a result of climate change, which means they will no longer be contributing to and accelerating the problem. I mean if 20% of the population (number out of thin air) die, that means the factories that generated the things those people were consuming wouldn't be needed, the food they would have eaten wouldn't be needed, etc. All resources those people were consuming, and the byproducts of creating those resources, would go away.

So, the "healing process" would start to accelerate and maybe after 100 years, we'll be back at the point where we get to do it all over again because we don't seem to collectively learn beyond what makes the most money the easiest way. "I know x is bad, but I gotta feed my family..." or "I refuse to see it as bad because that's my job and I don't want to feel badly about myself."

I think the sad fact that no one wants to really admit/mention is we are overpopulating the planet. I know, I know... "you could take the whole population of the US and put them in x state and they'll each have x acres," etc. But that doesn't take into account the factories generating pollution to create the things that sustain their lives, or the space it takes to grow the food to sustain them, etc.

I'm not a scientist nor a expert in this subject, but those are my layman impressions gathered over the last 45 years. People rarely change unless they are forced to, or it's too late. I hope I'm wrong.

Agreed. I wouldn't be so skeptical about the effects[0] if it wasn't because those researchers weren't being paid by big government, while recommending new taxes[1].

[0] it seems unlikely that humans have no influence on the environment. It equally seems improbable that we can predict sea levels half a century from now with any accuracy.

[1] before anybody puts words in my mouth, I reserve the same skepticsm for any other report coming out of the mouth of an institution which advocates it should have more funding...

[0] sounds like you're saying "my gut says its improbable that we can detect sea level rise 50 years ahead". Why does it seem that way? These scientists are using evidence for these estimates so they are not pulled out of the air.

[1] Are you going to remain skeptical without looking into it, seems more like you're dismissive rather than skeptical but maybe I am reading this wrong.? How could any researcher ever make the claim that something is a big issue and needs to be investigated further and fixed without triggering this skeptical reflex?

They're repeating the quasi-conspiracy theory that the reason climate scientists raise the issue of climate change is greed - they want more research money, so they can make more fake research, so they can get more money, because science is such a lucrative profession... sigh.

There's nothing more prestigious in science than being the one who proves the conventional wisdom of the scientific community is wrong. That's how you get your name in the history books. But this is lost on those who think of everything in terms of money.

"They" never look at the reverse situation though. The money to be made from government grants into scientific research pales in comparison to the profits made by the fossil fuel industry. An industry that a lot of the worlds most powerful people, corporations, and countries are heavily invested in.

Re: "it seems unlikely that humans have no influence on the environment. It equally seems improbable that we can predict sea levels half a century from now with any accuracy"

Shouldn't there be evidence about how past climate predictions fared? Climate change has been a hot topic (pun somewhat intended) for decades. Since Carter's presidency at least. There should have been at least a few environmental predictions that we can verify in retrospect.