Aka do you live below sea level, raise the city, or move somewhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
The global food surplus is projected to continue even in the worst case. Energy and raw material production is similarly not a major concern. People continue to live in Dubai which demonstrate how extreme local conditions can get without forcing exodus. Further, few places are expected to get even that bad.
Yes, changes to weather patterns, sea levels, invasive species, even diseases are likely. But, collapse of civilization is only really a risk if WWIII kicks off.
Water availability is a concern for farming and industry, but not really people. Desalination is cheap enough for personal use even in India. Every 10 gallons a day is an extra ~4$ per year. Projecting US use age on global poor is unaffordable, but the global poor don’t use nearly that much water.
Last mass migration caused by ISIS. COVID caused reduced oil consumption is enough to make a trouble for oil exporters. Global warming is worse - drought, flood, fires. World is extremely fragile, resources supplied from another part of the world, even today cobalt mining is horrible, what would be then? I've heard of another civilization and broken supply chains [2].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#cumulative-co2-emis...
[2] 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Eric Cline, PhD) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4
I also think that you are assigning agency to the general public in ways that are unlikely to hold up. Clearly groups could whip up hatred over global warming, but they can do that over just about anything. The root cause is almost never as important as the people guiding things and the goals being pushed.
As to [1] what’s interesting to me is the US emissions are currently about 1/2 of China’s and dropping fairly quickly while China’s are still expanding rapidly. Dropping US emissions will continue to help, but it’s currently less important than slowing how fast China’s increase. And thus someone aims the mob at a slightly different target.
But coral can’t adapt to warmer more acidic waters overnight. Polar bears can’t darken their fur in a couple generations to hunt in perpetual summer tundra.
Air conditioning does not protect workers that need to work outdoors, or people that live in areas with limited access to electricity.
And this says nothing of the other effects we still have no way of combating, including forest fires, stronger hurricanes, prolonged droughts, increased pesting of climate tolerant species, mass migration of climate refugees from the worst affected areas, and—eventually—conflicts and even wars arising from this mass migration. There is no technology that can save us from these effects.
Yes the effects of the natural world is indeed devastating. But there is no way the society as we know it can survive these changes. At best I see humanity regressing to another imperial age with constant wars around the planet, massive exploitation of the majority of the human kind, technology only serving to increase this exploitation, frequent famines, no relief after natural disasters (except for the wealthy few). And even this can’t last forever as at some point the mass of humanity will not bear it any longer and we can expect a societal collapse at a scale not seen since the Bronze age collapse of the 12th century BC.
The world is awash in excess capacity.
In fact these worries—and the fact that we are calling for drastic changes to prevent this disaster—is in fact counter to any Malthusian theory. A true Malthusian would state this collapse is inevitable. We state they are certain if we allow the climate disaster to progress unhindered.
Agriculture can go a long way with animals, wood, and stone. Extracting energy from wind and rivers is easily attainable from that basis. At which point we would have serious energy to work with. Hydro electric dams provide 6.1% of the total U.S. electricity. That is plenty of energy to kick start industrial manufacturing and get to wide spread solar power.
The next civilization may be extracting most of it’s materials from our cities, but that’s an advantage if anything.