The scenarios that fall short of ending civilisation, e.g. losing hundreds of millions of lives to famine or war, are obviously still very bad. This is not to downplay climate change in the slightest. It's just... at some point, people start dying, and that frees up ecological carrying capacity again. You need to make pessimistic assumptions about a lot of positive feedback loops in ecological and social collapse to predict that all human civilisation is going to be wiped out in the sense of regressing back to before the industrial revolution.
[0] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climat...
Global warming is scary because of nukes.
The timeline till we get widespread crop problems is 15-20 years.
God we did manage to fuck ourselves good and proper.
Carbon caused climate change isn't a carry-ing capacity / overpopulation / over utilization issue (and is now somewhat dwarfing those issues). It is a big change that has some chance of devastating a lot of biological based support systems all at the same time.
The risk to technological civilization is not in the direct effects, but in the human mediated effects. Not that leaving on yeast and water would be that good.
I'd put it in the low single digits or maybe lower, on the basis that a cascade of things need to go wrong: first you need a climate scenario that exceeds the IPCC estimates, then you need significant damage or conflict, then you need a potential collapse event to emerge from the conflict, then the event has to trigger collapse on its own or other events have to occur and combine with it.
Curious to hear your thoughts though, because I haven't put firm numbers on anything or looked deeply into any of the research on collapse specifically.
I understand that climate change is progressing rapidly, is going to cause very bad things to happen (my earlier comment mentioned hundreds of millions of human deaths as an example), and should be mitigated. What I question is whether the total collapse of industrial civilisation as a result of climate change is likely to occur. This is as opposed to economic stagnation, famine, war, widespread desertification, unliveable wet-bulb temperatures, or anything else short of a total collapse.
> economic stagnation, famine, war, widespread desertification, unliveable wet-bulb temperatures
For most people those are collapse and it's definitely going to happen and will come much sooner. The video shows it's going on the worst case scenario way.
But maybe like Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent book, it will all work together and we will make a new carbon based cryptocurrency backed by the bankers, switch to blimps and all ends well. I have kids and am teaching them to corporate with people rather than become preppers, so I guess I am optimistic de facto.
Being totally accurate when predicting the future is impossible, but discussion of the factors is useful in its own right.
People like the romance of dramatic and exciting extremes, of paradise and apocalypse. The mundane probability of having to adapt to somewhat worse conditions isn't that entertaining.
Why would anyone take the risk of messing with that?
It's as though they assume that there will be generalized devastation but there will be some "safe place" which some powerful group can defend and use.
Instead it's possible that maybe for one year New Zealand will be great, but then there will be no rain for 10 years, while previously uninhabitable Brighton (UK) will be a lush, tropical paradise for a couple of decades. Everyone will haul their gear to Brighton and massacre the indigenous, but then everything will change again, etc.
Or we could stop driving 2000Kg of metal to get to our jobs or buy a bag of chips and keep all the tourists at home that are destroying Venice and leaving their feces and plastic containers all over the Himalayas.
OK, I'll stop driving my 2000kg of metal tomorrow. The first grocery shop is 25 minutes walking, one way. Maybe with a good degree of planning my family won't starve. But we also need to go to work and school, and these are not within walking distance. Sadly, I have to take that back: I won't stop driving my 2000kg of metal, because I don't see how we can possibly live without it. (We're living within the boundaries of a large North American city, not even in the suburbs.)
And as to the more general argument you can get away with it as long as you have been voting for every proposal to increase taxes to pay for public transport and prevent centralization of services and stores.
I'm afraid I do not buy it. I have lived in what are supposed to be the most car-bound US environments and also in the countryside and it is all a matter of choice: not just personal choice (which I will agree can be a displacement from central planning), but most especially of people choosing low taxation over public services every time.
I can't see how you can possibly continue to live as you have done with your 2000Kg of metal. In fact it's looking very probable that you will be accelerating a decline in many aspects of your life.
Joke aside, even if we were to stop driving a car and flying a plane in US (the biggest pop-enviro boogeymen) it will cut 25% of USA greenhouses emissions. US greenhouse emissions is 15% of the world. Completely eliminating the automobile and the plane from US will only cut global emissions by less than 4%. The world energy usage is growing at 1% per year, so all that was accomplished was to push the inevitable about 4 years into the future.
Lets up the ante and ban the automobile & plane globally. (Or wipe US economy off the map). That would only save 15% of global emissions, i.e. push the inevitable 15 years into the future.
Here's a challenge: go find a city of non-trivial size that is living a sustainable life according to Paris accord energy targets. Bikes, Passivhaus, local agriculture, solar rooftops, windmills, the works. You won't find any, other than perhaps 3rd world slums. The only known lifestyle that fits the Paris accord energy envelope is subsistence agriculture. And we can't go back to subsistence agriculture, there is too many of us.
(Obviously) Malthus was right.
edit - a better link since someone didn't appreciate my google-fu: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/544472-the-mo...
Stop moving goalposts. The media has a problem with peddling misinformation and shitty climate predictions.
I`m not a climate change denier, but shitty predictions definitely hurt the cause of legitimate concern.
Here's another quick Google search from a (more?) legit site: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/544472-the-mo...
Of course anyone in the Gen X/older millennial category should know what I'm talking about anyway (unless they slept through the first decade of their schooling).
We have like 15 years. Perhaps you dont think +1.5C does anything to farming?
The sea levels rising is not the issue.
Do you think that your educators were climate scientists? Maybe you just had educators which misestimated the reports of actual scientists.
Is a grade-school teacher supposed to understand climate forecasting?
You're an adult. You should have realized by now that your grade school teachers didn't actually know everything about everything.
you may have gotten to see the absolute peak of society.
> to accept the things I cannot change;
> courage to change the things I can;
> and wisdom to know the difference.
Civilisation as we know it, and perhaps even humanity is in the process of ending. The ending is inevitable, whether it is now or nearer to the heat death of the universe.
If you can personally try and affect change, then you should do it. But more likely, you are a slave to the same system that everyone else is. I'd recommend working on acceptance at this point.
Edit: yeah, not positive but a knee-jerk reaction to the grandparent comment that essentially said "I got mine, Jack -- sucks to be you".
There's so much we can do to mitigate the damage but that won't happen through complacency.
Maybe you could post your own attitudes and provide some justification for them instead? This may convince the other poster to change theirs. Currently your comment is pointless.
The money we spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars could have paid for true energy independence using renewables. We have a pending budge proposition to try and address it but some say we can't afford it.
How can we afford endless war but not afford investing in power that civilization needs but doesn't kill us?
I try to choose the most useful response, which for me is volunteering time in organizations that develop solutions. This way I can use my personal expertise and contribute something, however small. If I find a more useful path, then I will take it.
The requirements involved with contributing to slowing (or stopping) climate change do not include worrying about it. If you are losing sleep, you would benefit from changing your attitude towards it.
Civilisational decline is a constant. It is coming. Accept it now, and work to delay it if you can make a meaningful change. If not, don't lose sleep over it.
I'm doing what I can to invest in future green tech and trying to limit my consumption. I am NOT losing sleep over the fact that we probably don't have much more of a future as a race.
If we ignore all that, then it sounds like I'm saying to give up. But if we take the context into account, it is evident that I'm actually giving OP advice on how to mentally and emotionally survive the coming apocalypse.
Though, maybe I should have been more clear.
> which could easily be interpreted
Perhaps there are more than one way in which to interpret certain concepts? Or maybe I'm interpreting your comment wrong?
That makes a huge difference. Even having it wind down over a period of a few thousand years, or even a few hundred, would be a hell of a lot better than what is looking like the increasingly likely prospect of having it wind down in a few decades. That is going to cause an incalculable amount of pain.