I wonder what it'll feel like looking back at that point. There isn't anything that I alone can do right now to prevent this from happening, it has to be a collective action but still, we've been warned for decades, over and over, we knew what would happen. Will we regret not having mobilized more, joined every protest out there, not having written our representatives more than we did, not having made more sustainable choices than we did? I know the effect of personal choices and actions is marginal but still, I'm sure we'll feel lots and lots of regret.
Can YOU Fix Climate Change? https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc
and
We WILL Fix Climate Change! https://youtu.be/LxgMdjyw8uw
Make sure that you watch the second one if you watch the first one.
It will feel like nothing, because everyone will have conveniently forgotten about these sorts of reports and predictions when the world stubbornly refuses to end. Just like everyone conveniently forgot that in the 50s and 60s scientists were writing to the US President to tell him that the consensus of scientists was that the world was entering a new ice age, and that he should prepare agriculture and industry for the transition.
You wait and see.
> Possible 'adverse health impacts in Australia from climate change' by 2020. From Climate Commission's 'The Critical Decade: Climate Change and Health' report, quote: "We need to act now. Decisions we make from now to 2020 will determine the severity of climate change health risks that our children and grandchildren will experience. The longer we wait, the more serious the consequences. [...] Figure 8: Possible timeline of some future adverse health impacts in Australia from climate change". Graphic showing: "Extreme weather events: deaths, hospital admissions, mental health disorders", "Dengue fever", and "Gastroenteritis" to increase from 2010 to 2019 cited from an unpublished article by McMichael in 2011.
Many would say the wildfires in 2020 were one of the worst in history and definitely had adverse health impacts I would say, no? Yet the page says it didn't come true.
Many others don't consider that predictions were made waaaaay before we had the means to model the impact of climate change on a grand scale. Others are just silly, who cares what Prince Charles said. Well, I guess denialists made their point once again.
W.R.T. the one you picked, the extinctionclock assessment is correct. The claims being made are about "deaths, hospital admissions and mental health disorders, dengue fever and gastroenteritis".
Deaths from extreme weather are down drastically over time. Very unclear why they predicted a rise in mental health disorders from climate change, but nobody outside the most extremist climate change fanatics are trying to claim a link there. Contemporary discussion about mental health problems focus on the effect of social media on teen girls.
Dengue fever in Australia is also trending down (figure 8 here https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/wpro---documents/eme...). I didn't bother checking gastroenteritis.
Finally, wildfires - not mentioned in the actual paragraph you cited. Here is a graph of wildfires in Australia over the last decade.
2019 and 2020 were abnormal years for Australian wildfires. As you can see, 2021 reverted to the mean which is stable. There is no increasing trend in wildfires, just a couple of bad years that the media cherry-picked to try and make you think the world is burning.
You have to be so careful when listening to climatologists, because they love to engage in data truncation and cherry picking to make deceptive claims. This video shows the problem, and I linked you directly to the part about how they do the same with wildfire data in the USA. The full data shows that wildfires have been in steep decline in the 20th century in the USA, but that the data is being truncated when shown to policy makers to make it look like it's increasing:
https://youtu.be/8455KEDitpU?t=146
If global warming caused more wildfires, then wildfires should have increased in the 20th century everywhere susceptible to them when emissions were ramping up so much, but they didn't. Thus the claim is falsified.
> Using bogus ‘net-zero’ pledges to cover up massive fossil fuel expansion is reprehensible.
Understanding a problem, and being able to hold on to power while making the hard decisions is a classic unsolved problem in politics.
But it's infinitely harder with very few (two!?!) high centralized litmus-tested groupthink political parties, incentivized to lock up power unilaterally, and marginalize the power of other parties, not skills conducive to governing.
And also infinitely harder with unlimited spending by corporations (who are not citizens, and don't share the interests of citizens), where tiny groups of executives get to leverage all their companies resources toward tilting the political field in their favor, in order to get massive bonuses for feeding insatiable shareholder demand. But without reflecting any of the decency that shareholders might actually have.
It's the moloch beast. The whole system is the problem, but it's near impossible to improve the system's design because it will fight that at every step.
It mindlessly cares about its own survival. Which is how it came to be.
Even if every single person in the system actually wants to do the hard things that will keep the planet in good shape.
Option A implies at some point in the future, massive social unrest due to mass migration.
Option B implies massive social unrest today due to a large decline in standard of living. And no, it won’t be the “people in capitals” suffering here.
Option C is option A plus some geoengineering that will likely be undertaken when the situation is desperate enough.
As for geoengineering, good luck. While I also think this may be necessary, a precondition for spraying stuff into the sky is convincing people that this kind of intervention is necessary. Good luck doing that while enormous financial interests are trying to convince the world that it’s safe to keep digging up and burning fossil fuel deposits. They may not object to geoengineering itself, but they can’t afford to permit the kind of consensus it would require to get geonengineering done, so they will throw resources at fighting that consensus until it’s too late.
Luckily that aligns with the singularity timeline. AGI will have a very good carrot for us to agree on its terms.
We'd need another state to pick on, though. Probably West Virginia.