Worst case scenario seems to be that people will stop migrating to Europe.
And it's not just food. Europe is a major producer and exporter of fertilizers. If European industrial and agricultural output collapses, the ripple effects hit global food supply chains hard. Countries that depend on those imports will face famine.
Then there's the knock-on, hundreds of millions of people in food-insecure regions losing a key supply source, simultaneous disruption to Atlantic weather patterns affecting rainfall in West Africa and the Amazon, potential shifts in monsoon systems affecting South and East Asia. It's a cascading global food security crisis.
> lots of time to adjust
This assumes a gradual slowdown, but paleoclimate evidence suggests AMOC transitions can happen within a decade or even less. The idea that we'd just smoothly adapt to one of the most dramatic climate shifts in human civilization is not supported by what we know about how these systems behave.
You must have missed it: https://xkcd.com/1732/
A 1C rise means hotter hots, colder colds, stronger storms and longer or more frequent droughts as well as the general climate of a region possibly changing.
Yes you can find crops that will grow in specific conditions, but you need to know those conditions and if you have a day that kills a crop that can mean you need to wait for the next season. That 1C rise corresponds with a lot more of these crop damaging events as well as changing the efficiency and possibly infrastructure needed in an area.
I'll also note that the last 1C rise is over a generation not a lifetime i.e. 25 years not 80.
Some humans will very likely survive. Millions, possibly hundreds of millions, will die.
Life as it has been known for hundreds of years will change dramatically.
An unwillingness or inability to conceive of this possible future as anything more than “it’ll be colder, but fine” would make it vastly worse for many people.
That's not the problem, though. The problem is almost nothing else can. Livestock, staple crops, pollinating insects, etc.
There is a pretty big variation in average temperatures by country [0]. Somehow People everywhere from Thailand to Greenland manage to find food. All else failing it is a possibility to trade for calories. Let alone technology improvements that might save the day by accident.
I mean, it might make places uninhabitable over the course of a few generations, but things that change so slowly are't actually much of a threat on an individual level. Worst of the worst cases people can move or not have children - the statistics suggest that is an acceptable option to a lot of people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_y...
This won't end humanity, no. But it is likely to cause absolutely catastrophic levels of upheaval and probably billions (with a b) of deaths—from famine, disease, exposure, and war.