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Please show me sources that the current emissions would lead to "lots of death"? Show me any decent modelling of emissions vs annual death?
This one shows a million more deaths annually if we have even more emissions in 100 years than now. Million more deaths is around 2% increase in death rate compared to the hypothetical without emissions.
This means even in the worst case of higher emissions in the future than now, also no technological progress, we would still be in better living conditions in the future than now.
What is your answer to this?
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bf26af29f187c6f3a9f...
https://iiasa.ac.at/news/feb-2026/course-correction-needed-q...
In fact I can justify not just net zero, but net negative emissions and stalling of all progress of humanity itself by using your article.
It would have been another story if there were some graph between emissions vs probability of hitting an irreversible tipping point. At least this gives us a prescriptive analysis on how to deal with the tradeoffs.
Your article contains NONE of that. And I posit that it doesn't contain it because the real probabilities are much lower.
You can't make serious policies by handwaving tipping points. No country should immediately go net zero because of your article or even the studies your article cites.
I get that it feels good to be in a position to scold people into stopping progress. I'm willing to learn new perspectives - at least come up with a emissions vs probability quantified. Till then its just scolding and handwaving.
I don't know what exact strawman you're arguing against, although I'm sure you can always find some idiots saying something like what you say. But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for. Of course, we can't know for sure what the consequences are untill we do the experiment, which in this case means potentially destroying large sections of the biosphere and living with increasingly destructive weather patterns. Surely that risk is worth at least legislating that hyperscalers need to spend some of their billions on solar panels?
Show me academic consensus showing that more than 1% of our species will go extinct within 100 years if we continue the emissions as now? I assume that's a reasonable characterisation of "mass extinction" and "on track for".
I was referring more to everything else. Corals, certain insects, polar bears, salamanders and so on. With some quick googling it appears that the "Bramble Cay Melomys" is the first species so far to be declared extinct because of climate change, but the number that seems to be thrown around is that an average of 18% of terrestrial life will be critically endangered by 2100 in a scenario with 2 degrees warming. I can't be bothered with figuring out what degree of academic consensus there is around that number, but I think it's reasonable to assume that there's at least some kind of consensus about "more than 1%".
Show me clear sources quantifying the pain vs the emissions.
Worse than voluntarily inviting masses of incompatible cultures into western countries like we're already doing?
And while the populist right love importing incompatible cultures en mass, that will have to stop.
We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Its exactly the people in the third world that don't need climate change lecture because it is absolutely needed to increase their energy and emissions output to reduce deaths.
Lots of people in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Africa, India _already die_ not due to climate change but lack of productivity.
They definitely don't want holier than though westerners to tell them to reduce their emissions as if it doesn't come at any tradeoff whatsoever.
> Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices
False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
> We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Its convenient to be vague about consequences. Then you can use the vagueness to oppose whatever you want. Don't like something someone's making? You can just say "but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is so you are not allowed to do that thing".
> False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000. The global average temperature anomaly has risen ~50% in the same period.
> but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is
We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse. For example, AMOC collapse would prevent much of Europe from growing enough food to sustain its population. Not an impossible problem but certainly not an easy one, especially in the context of a world already having to deal with moving fertile regions and mass migrations from North Africa and the Middle East due to drought and extreme heat.
This doesn't count innovation due to technology. For instance, a lot of data centres in the past like 1990's, indirectly contributed in a lot of ways in reducing poverty and deaths - improving supply chain logistics, increasing general efficiency, helping in biological and pharma science. Stopping industrialisation disallows any progress in such fields. In the last 200 years we have made progress in science and tech allowing us to fight back with the environment.
> The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000.
That doesn't count income rising, acknowledging you specified inflation adjusted.
You can verify this yourself: try to ask whether the average person today can buy more food with their income or less food. The answer is unambiguously more food because Americans have much more disposable income through social programs, better wages and so on.
> We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse.
Source? Please show any source that tells us something like: this much emissions causes this much death in the future with relative confidence. And the tipping point must map to some meaningful tipping point where death rate increases by a big amount.
The only few sources I can see tell me that even if we don't reduce emissions, even if we stall scientific progress we still increase the annual death rate by 2%. This puts us still much much better in the future than now because of poorer countries catching up. So even in this bad case scenario, we are still better off in the future than today.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bf26af29f187c6f3a9f...
That is unrealistic, but also not what a conspiracy is. It’s also a red herring, as nobody serious is claiming that. They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
At some point you have to engage with the arguments besides shouting "no, it’s you".
What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
It's hardly an existential threat to civilization or locally to societies it affects. It's a symptom of things going sough, sure.
It’s not that it did not happen before, civilisations rose up and disappeared several times in the past. It’s just that it is happening now, largely driven by climate issues.
What we are seeing now is regions becoming uninhabitable, crises sending waves of refugees, a dramatic shift towards nationalism in the West, which is terribly ill-equipped to solve global problem and is leading to a progressive crumbling of the international rules-based order. The US gave up on any pretense of sanity and went on a shooting match with Iran, throwing a wrench in the economies of a whole bunch of countries in Asia. Iran itself is in a terrible situation, with a lot of the country running dry. Trump of course is not a direct consequence of global warming, but it helps with the civilisation altering bits and adds to instability.
Europe is under its third heat wave of the year, all of them having been comparable to the historic ones from 1976 and 2003. This is also having a destabilising effect on several governments that are completely feckless, having spent 20 years trying to convince themselves that it was not happening, and was no big deal anyway.
These weather phenomena, along things like tropical storms in the Atlantic, are of course not new, but their frequency and magnitude is increased by global warming. They are currently costing billions and dealing with their consequences is not going to get cheaper.
> Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
I can. For example, the French Revolution was fueled by crop failures in the couple of years before due to particularly bad weather, related to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The revolutions of 1848 came after about 4 years of crop failures due to bad weather again.
The point is not that it never happened before. The Earth used to be much hotter (and also much colder). The environment used to not have humans around and it was fine. Revolutions and wars, and societal collapse are not new. Look at the late Bronze Age collapse if you want to have an idea of how bad it can realistically get. It’s not the end of the world, not even of humanity, but still a thoroughly unpleasant period to live in.
The point is that this is going to happen not because we rolled a bad dice, but because we’re bloody idiots and are doing it to ourselves.