Apparently it’s no longer mitigation, now adaptation. The desire to avoid nihilism at point is tough. I’m pushing 40 and I hope I get 25 more years, family kids are in for it.:(
It's still a serious problem and we need to address it, but I keep seeing emotional reactions that ignore the science and the current predictions.
I do already, the weather is much worse than when I was a kid, much drier and the heat waves are harsher.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climat...
The effects so far are small compared to the direct damage caused by the air pollution itself, which kills over a million people a year.
I don't expect that will change in my lifetime. The predictions are not so dire that it is likely to take a million lives a year.
Over a period of several hundred years, it's a lot harder to say.
At no point is it likely to be the end of civilization. But we could get there if we're stupid enough to keep this up for a few centuries more.
The 10 degrees warming after the last ice age makes climate change small by comparison. Let's not forget the 400ft of sea level rise. In fact if you look at the climate record the last ten thousand years, the current level of warming is lost in the noise. It will take centuries before it's enough to really jump out on the graph.
Life will adapt and carry on, climate change is possibly only a temporary blip for the earth itself. It may even turn out to be a good thing on long enough time scales, because it's been a little too chilly for comfort here the last few million years. Repeated cycles of ice ages are no joke. If you want to see how bad that can get, lookup snowball earth. Warming is no joke either, see Venus, but a little warming might not be the end of the world.
I'm Canadian, my county was buried under 2km of ice that scoured it to bedrock just as civilization was beginning elsewhere in the world. If you are in the US, you grow your food in what used to be Canadian soil. I'm more afraid of the cold than the heat. People from Australia and the middle east likely have the opposite view.
I think you mean east:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2018/10/17/tornado-al...
So arguably, change during the next ten years will look more like change during the last 50-100 years.
Now imagine the turmoil and political ramifications that could spring, even in the short term, from the flooding of Bangladesh and the migratiom of its people towards the global north.
Not sure what you're point is unless to say that this problem is on a long enough time horizon (where the survival rate for everyone drops to zero ...).
Small changes that we'll see well before the end of this century will have huge consequences. Don't be surprised if the country doesn't exist at all by the end of the century.
...or they live in an area whose fresh water supply depends on current weather patterns or glacier levels.
Even if they don't, the water shortages in such regions could lead to war, and I believe some such regions include nuclear powers. A nuclear war between, say, Pakistan and India over water allocation will probably have serious economic effects well outside just that region.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/climate-change-timeline-st-l...
Your child, and your children's children will be fine.