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Climate migration is already an issue. Extreme climate events are already increasingly problematic. Will civilization collapse in the next 50 years. Almost certainly not, but will we be better off then than we are now? Unless we rapidly increase the rate at which we address this issue, I don't see how that happens either.
No, the world is not ending. The clouds are not burning. There is no risk to life on earth. These are technical discussions about whether sea levels will increase by 2mm per year or 3mm per year.
I haven’t seen evidence of this. What I see is scientists making measured predictions about massive costs in human life, economies, refugee crises, and wars. Extinctions. Like, horrible stuff. But not extinction or even civilisational collapse.
Yes. Extinctions are horrible, but they aren’t an existential threat to us. Climate change simply isn’t an existential threat. That doesn’t mean it isn’t urgent. Like, the Bronze Age collapse and black plague and WWII weren’t existential, doesn’t mean they’re fine. But raising the stakes beyond what the science says like this undermines the credibility of the real warnings.
Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life. Which is also a totally valid interpretation of the phrase.
Ex ante survivorship is literally the delineation between existential and not.
> Even if we don't go extinct. It's still an existential threat to our way of life
You see why this comes across as bullshit, though. It’s needlessly redefining a word to seem more punchy. We have plenty of perils we massively mobilize against without imagining they’ll exterminate the human species.
The scientists aren’t, either, given how many times they have failed.
No, it’s not, and no, we don’t know that. Humans will survive climate change. Rich countries will survive, too.
We will all suffer. Economically, healthwise and aesthetically. But that’s not existential. Framing it as such is disingenuous and counterproductive.
There is clearly a temperature at which this planet will not support human life, and we could definitely get the planet to that temperature if we don't change course and reach net zero.
Saying its not an existential threat is just wild to me.
Yes, but that temperature isn't going to be reached by fossil fuels.*
The reduced brain function from the extra CO2 (if we burned all of it) may make us unable to adapt to the higher temperature, however.
* Ironically, unbounded growth of PV to tile all Earth's deserts could also raise the planet's temperature by 4 K or so, and 6 K or so if tiling all non-farm land.
Deserts are huge, this by itself would represent an enormous increase in global electricity supply; but also, current growth trends for PV have been approximately exponential (in the actual maths sense not just "fast") for decades now, so this could happen in as little as 35 years give or take a few (both scenarios are within the same margin for error, because exponential is like that).
There is such a temperature. We are not getting to it in half a century at current emission rates, even with zero curtailment. If you have a source that shows the opposite, I’d be happy to read it.
What about 2200? Humanity at 2300? It's the same planet with the same feedback loops after all.
You literally said “the existential threat happens in 100 years.”
And to your questions, we don’t know. I’d love to see the data. I’m still sceptical we hit “existential” levels for human survival. That wouldn’t even happen if we went back to dinosaur levels of CO2.
Edit: one of those crossfire situations where the downvotes could be coming from either direction. I'm going to assume they mean "don't be scared".
And that's certainly something to discuss, whether there exists a type of rube goldberg machine where higher levels of CO2 cause the permafrost to melt which cause even higher levels of CO2 which cause something else to release even more CO2, etc.
I certainly wont deny that such a sequence of events is possible, and it's worth studying. But on the other side of that you have basic physics, which shows that the warming effects go with the log of CO2. That really slows things down by quite a bit. It turns a doubling into an additive factor.
Now, could it be that the cascade of events is such that it overcomes the logarithm? E.g. that it is an exponential or super-exponential chain of events that would release exponentially more CO2. Uhh, maybe, but this is not something to try to terrify the population with. And it sounds extremely unlikely. So you need an extremely precarious set of assumptions -- or just deny physics outright -- to overcome Arrhenius' Greenhouse rule. Logarithms cover a multitude of growth sins.