Possible climate futures–from the optimistic to the strange

I just can't honestly believe how anyone who's lived through the past 18 months thinks anything but the worst case scenario is possible. Right now in parts of the US we have hospitals and ICUs that are at higher occupancy than they have been at any time during the pandemic, despite the fact that simple, safe, cheap and relatively unobtrusive measures that can prevent this have been widely available for months.

Compare that with what is needed to fight climate change, which is complex, expensive and at direct odds with the most straightforward pathway for billions of people to raise their standard of living (at least in the current moment). It is simply not possible with human nature to fight this calamity, at least how it has been presented.

I could see an outcome where advances in renewable energy and storage tech occur fast enough to make fossil fuels uncompetitive, but it's very difficult to see that happening fast enough to stave off disaster.

I feel like we've jumped off a tall cliff with no parachute, but because the valley floor is still a ways below we are trying to convince ourselves that we can knit a new parachute fast enough before we hit the ground.

Humans don't like to acknowledge that some situations are just not avoidable. I think the best we can do (at least at an individual level of you have the means) is to prepare for a much more unstable future world.

The sprinkling of bias throughout the article does not help it bring attention to the problem. Here are two words that have apparently been broadly discussed by the IPCC report [1] judging by the article, that the report itself never mentions: "nationalism", "healthcare". The best way to make climate change not a political issue is to NOT make it a political issue.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

> ... nations representing approximately two-thirds of global emissions have now committed to zeroing out their emissions by the middle of the century. If these countries are able to make good on their pledges ...

I don't know of any climate target/goal/pledge that was ever met by any government.

I think the most likely future is one where we do mostly nothing for a long time, until things get quite bad, and then one nation or a small group of nations does some kind of solar geoengineering to very quickly lower the temperature of the Earth. Mostly this takes the form of pumping aerosols in to the atmosphere to block out some percentage of sunlight. As far as I understand it we already have the technology to pull this off, and it's not so expensive (tens of billions per year) that a single very rich nation couldn't bear the cost themselves.

At the very least, I can't imagine a nation like China or India or the US staring down a relatively imminent existential climate change threat and not at least trying geoengineering. At that point what do you have to lose?

>Fossil-fueled Development – Taking the Highway (High challenges to mitigation, low challenges to adaptation) This world places increasing faith in competitive markets, innovation and participatory societies to produce rapid technological progress and development of human capital as the path to sustainable development. Global markets are increasingly integrated. There are also strong investments in health, education, and institutions to enhance human and social capital. At the same time, the push for economic and social development is coupled with the exploitation of abundant fossil fuel resources and the adoption of resource and energy intensive lifestyles around the world. All these factors lead to rapid growth of the global economy, while global population peaks and declines in the 21st century. Local environmental problems like air pollution are successfully managed. There is faith in the ability to effectively manage social and ecological systems, including by geo-engineering if necessary.

Compared to the other four scenarios this one sounds a lot better even with the massive environmental challenge it would pose. The economic outcome of the “best case” scenario sounds more like universal poverty.

>inequality is reduced both across and within countries. Consumption is oriented toward low material growth and lower resource and energy intensity

I am looking for an old page from 3-5 years ago that presented 4 or 5 short stories with possible futures and themed around climate change.

One of them started with people living in an artificial moving island, growing food from algae and based on nuclear/renewables energy.

Another one started with someone living in a dystopian building and references to a rampant plague.

I lost the bookmark and I could never find it online again, does that ring any bell to anyone ?

That webpage is absolutely determined to stop me from reading the article. It's like an obstacle course of popup crap.