Are the going to offset productivity gains, and new areas being more productive?
We could almost feed 50% more humans if we had less livestock (or even just more efficient - like more pork instead of beef).
Livestock takes up almost 80% of ag land...
We're not all going to starve to death if crop yields go down slightly.
No, we’re not all going to starve to death. But it doesn’t take that much change in agricultural output for some people to starve to death. And it doesn’t take that many starving people to severely disrupt a society.
My point is that we have caused a lot of "problems" through burning fossil fuels, and at least up until now, the "solutions" that we've gotten from all the progress we've been able to make has outweighed that cost - massively.
Given that the rate of increase in emissions has slowed drastically and total emissions will likely peak this decade, and then fall pretty rapidly, I don't see any reason to believe that we're digging ourselves into a hole rather than building a better society for everyone.
I haven’t said anything even remotely like that.
Of course the benefits have outweighed the costs so far. The whole thing is just getting started. The costs are nearly zero so far. Total warming was under 1C until a few years ago. We’re looking at something like 4C of warming with current trends. Projected warming with current emissions reduction pledges is 2.8C and it’s very unlikely that those pledges will be met. The harms are almost entirely in the future. Things will get much worse before they get better.
Or as the kids like to say, we were born at the end of the Fuck Around century and now we’re in the Find Out century.
I'm sure they'd pick this world, with it's future.
And it's far from certain. The dinosaurs (and countless other species) disappeared due to a much slower process of climate change (and that is a fact, not a prediction). We humans may well disappear, for all we know.
If climate change knocks humanity back to an 18th century level, that might be it. The species might survive for a long time after that, but forever at that level or worse.
Maybe the argument is wrong and there are alternative ways to get back to high technology in that scenario. I strongly recommend not running the experiment.
Do you know anybody who wants to live the complications that are coming? :-)
What I see is that on the one hand, there are people who think that we should try to do our best with what we know (cut down on emissions, accept that we have to do less with less, and optimise our society accordingly). And on the other hand, we have people who get into the religion of technology, where some god will bring them solutions that do not exist today and that likely won't exist, but that those people really want to believe in.
You vastly under-estimate the problem. We are talking about crop yields going down dramatically. The way we are heading right now, it's completely worthless to talk about livestock: the question is really how many billions will die because we can't grow enough food anymore.
If you think 1 in 8 people globally is going to die any time soon because we can't grow enough food simply because it's 2C hotter, you are wildly out of touch.
Sure, maybe we get hit by an asteroid or something or return to world war. But that's a different story.
Where did I say that? The way it's going, we are likely to reach 4C in some decades. 4C means that human beings cannot survive outside in a large part of the Earth. That literally means that billions of people have to move away.
> Sure, maybe we get hit by an asteroid
We don't have to: what we are doing to the climate is worse. Dinosaurs died because of the climate change that was the consequence of the asteroid. Did you know that their climate change happened a whole lot slower than ours?
> or return to world war
What do you think happens when billions of people have to move? No need to wait for 4C: wait for enough ice to melt, the sea levels to raise and... well do you know how many people live close to the sea?
What do you think happens when billions of people are starting to compete over oil (because we are going there, too) in order to eat? When you start having extreme events (like drought), you rely a lot on energy to compensate. But even without extreme events: if tomorrow you remove oil, big cities starve. Because they need trucks to bring food into the city.
> But that's a different story.
Nope, it's becoming more and more likely that it will happen. Because what we observe is that the climate is worsening faster than we expected, and because instead of slowing down on the carbon emissions, we are still accelerating.