The world is going to be much awful-er as climate change unfolds. Climate change is not being addressed seriously currently, at all. And the trend is towards it not being addressed.
The world isn't going to be much better until climate change is addressed - if then.
I think this trumps literally any statistical measure of well-being you could come up with.
The world has been getting better, and continues to get better. Unfortunately, I don't have a reference to it, but I recall attending a talk that charted out some kind of measure of wealth/welfare/well-off-ness based on various climate change scenarios. The thing that stood out to me was that even on the worse climate change predictions, future generations will STILL be better off than us. Just not as better off as they would be with better climate change action.
Whether or not the data used in that talk was accurate, I'm optimistic about the future, and I think it will be better, with peaks and troughs on the way there. I'm glad to have been born no earlier than I was, and would prefer to have been born later than I was! The main thing that concerns me is that it's going to be the poorest people in the world that will suffer as a result of climate change. I think that's where climate action should be directed primarily -- aimed at either preventing the great harms that will affect the poorest, or compensating them for the harms that can't be prevented, so that the harms of climate change are spread more fairly among us.
If we miss something in the forecast that results in a rapid ecological collapse, then reality will look different. Additionally, a slowing down of progress is actually a worrying sign if it’s driven by pushback from our world. The reason is that even if we stopped all human CO2 emissions, climate change would continue to get worse because it takes time for the climate to stabilize. And we’re not at net 0. We’re still pumping out more each year than any other in the past and we’re just starting to level off the acceleration of that growth. My point being here that even if one or two might be slightly better, three or four might be slightly worse and the downward slope from there is significantly faster (easier to increase entropy than decrease it).
The only thing that gives me the tiniest bit of hope is that two generations of progress is a significant amount of time for scientific breakthroughs. If we can really unlock our green energy production (which we can with nuclear fission today and hopefully fusion not too far off) and get our sequestration up by many orders of magnitude (which with fission and fission we could conceivably enable but there are other logistical roadblocks), then we might be able to unwind some of the damage. Some damage will be permanent obviously. Still, I think betting on that outcome is a fool’s wager. The outcome scenario of a loss is quite bad. Much better to try to arrest the damage as hard as possible now.
We're in a similar boat. The winners (survivors) of the climate change disaster will be better off. But if we're to be good Rawlsians [1] then we shouldn't assume that we will be among the survivors.
We no longer live in that world. Assume climate change kills off 100 million people (more than any estimate I could find), i.e. slightly more than 1% of the current world population. The resulting increase in resources per capita would be less than a single year of global GDP growth. This is very much not zero-sum. If a farmer who used to till the fields by hand switches to using a tractor, they're feeding many more people than they harm with the tractor's greenhouse gas emissions.
I presume this is highly dependent on which 100M people are killed.
Of course if you personally kill a very rich person and take their stuff, that might be a life-changing event for you, but unlike during the black death, the average person's income is not significantly derived from dead people's stuff.
* Health/medical technology and access
* Abundance and variety of food
* Education
* Life expectancy
* Quality (in terms of health) of life
* Child mortality
Looking at life expectancy alone, I'd be surprised if their life expectancy was higher (is this what you had in mind? https://sc.edu/uofsc/announcements/2014/05_sharondewitte_bla...). Certainly some individuals would live longer lives than some individuals, but I wouldn't expect the life expectancy to be higher, nor would I expect the quality of health of that life to be better.
In some ways I could imagine they'd be better -- e.g., amount of land they could own. If you have some data or information about their life quality, I would be interested in seeing it.
Regarding Rawls' veil, I did say, and do think, that we should be ensuring that everyone gets brought along. For someone who isn't convinced about that, the veil may be a good thought experiment to help them along.
Similarly, the people who will survive the coming climate catastrophes may well live better lives than we do today, and thus some future Economist may well claim that it all turned out OK in the end. But that analysis ignores the billions of people whose lives will likely end because of global warming.
...that number is not even remotely plausible. Where did you get billions from?
Example: 250,000 extra deaths estimated between 2030 and 2050. That means an extra 5 million deaths in that period (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...).
Another: 83 million extra deaths by 2100, and I suspect that's under the more pessimistic scenario (https://www.forbes.com/sites/dishashetty/2021/07/30/climate-...)
Action on climate change is very slow, but happening. Climate change is not going to be even remotely as close to as bad as you appear to think it will be.
Perhaps the tiny surface of the world you interact with now has more conveniences than before, but that is very distant from a reality where things are getting better.
Your perception depends on taking many factors for granted, not acknowledging we depend on multiple concurrent progress traps.
If you go to the supermarket and the shelves are empty, if there's no water running through your pipes, if there's no power coming from your outlets, if there's no internet connectivity, and so on, your reality bubble will be popped.
Overusing topsoil, overusing fresh water, killing all the pollinators, pumping aquifers dry, overfishing, using fossil fuels, having pollution festivals like halloween, air travel for trivial reasons, etc. We live our lives thinking the natural world will adapt to our stupid wasteful lifestyle which gets more wasteful every day. But that won't do. Everyone will have to adapt and have a lifestyle that is more sustainable, and that lifestyle will be very different to the one we have now.
Every society is 3 meals away from revolution, and that revolution is coming in our lifetimes when we finish ruining the planet for ourselves. Terraforming mars won't do shit for the political instability that will unfold as a consequence of failed harvests, water exhaustion, topsoil death, etc. War for the resources that are left is inevitable as resources become scarce.
Toxic optimism won't make things better. Only acknowledging problems instead of hiding them behind layers of abstraction will.
By MANY measures, the world has been getting gradually better for just about everyone: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit.... When we look at the facts globally, there is a clear and obvious trajectory.
> Toxic optimism won't make things better. Only acknowledging problems instead of hiding them behind layers of abstraction will.
Who isn't acknowledging problems? My optimism doesn't mean I think there aren't serious, present, and pressing problems (I do!). These problems must be identified, and we must take action to resolve them. I'm just optimistic that we will continue to do so, as we always have. I believe in doing the work involved, and my optimism makes me think it's worth putting in the effort, that it's worth doing the hard yards.
Our solution has always been to migrate to the next place that has resources. But soon there will be no such place.
...and as a result of that, the world's population has been growing and growing (and the standard of living of this population has also on average improved), which leads to more CO2 emissions, a higher consumption of finite natural resources etc. etc. Now there are two possible theories:
(1) things will continue to get better, if any problems will come up along the way we will surely be able to solve them.
(2) we are accelerating towards a brick wall which we can't see yet, but when we see it it will be too late to avoid the crash.
At first yes, but not recently, now the opposite is true, if anything. We haven't had exponential growth since the 60s and are currently headed towards a steady state population because of improved standards of living. Turns out health and properity leads to smaller families.
We do still have significant growth, but that is largely because we're filling out the older demographics in many countries, the birth rate is largely under control already, and once the current generations spread through we'll be in a stead state (around 11 billion). In fact, there's no way to _stop_ this growth now, short of killing or sterilising people, since the birthrate is already under control, we're just waiting for the last exponential generations to get old.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
Long term, we probably should encourage (slightly) sub-2 children per family to let the total population shrink, but that will take a long time (unless something disasterous happens)
https://www.science.org/content/article/experts-be-damned-wo...
While we could be doing better, we've made immense strides over the past ten years, to the point where we've already avoided the worst outcomes and could possibly even limit the rise to 2°C and avoid most harm altogether.
At least, according to Kurzgesagt.
The best source for the amount of warming we are heading for is the yearly UNEP emissions gap report, which takes all the national commitments and calculates global outcomes. With the currently planned measures we are heading for 2.7 degrees of warming by the end of the century. If the countries that have promised a net-zero strategy actually implement one we are headed for 2.2 degrees. Realistically there is at present no path to less than 2 degrees of warming without major political upheaval or technological revolution and we are probably heading for 2.5 degrees of warming. Even at 2 degrees the consequences are severe. We are looking at a near-total loss of coral reefs and one fifth of insect species, 40% of humanity will become exposed to extreme heat waves, many coastal areas will need to be abandoned displacing hundreds of millions of people. The effects get disproportionately worse when temperatures exceed 2 degrees of warming. So, the situation is not hopeless, but without further action we are still locked into some pretty bad outcomes, and we need to keep the pressure on with all governments to take further steps.
This is only perhaps true if you project the current progress into the future as if this is a foregone conclusion. That is dangerously wrong - most of what has been done to combat global warming is the table stakes, the things that its easy to do and should have either been done decades ago, or are simple economic shifts (transitioning some coal power to wind and solar).
But reaching net 0 emissions is going to be extremely hard, much harder than halving our past emissions. And we have to do that in the next 30-40 years to avoid 2 degrees of warming, which is already catastrophic.
To get to net 0, we would have to replace virtually all transportation in the world with BEVs (cars are easy to replace, planes, trucks and cargo ships almost impossible, and definitely not in 30 years).
We will need to produce at least twice as much electricity as today while closing virtually all coal and gas power plants (but we don't have anywhere near enough energy storage to run the whole grid off renewables, nor is there any realistic chance to do so in the next 30 years).
And finally, we will have to close down the vast majority of industrial animal farming pursuits, which supply much of the world's food.
There is no real chance that the current rate of improvement will lead anywhere close to curtailing emissions enough to avoid 2-3 degrees of warming. Plus, the appetite for these changes may well sour as the bigger impact ones will come to pass.