I'm very curious how someone who holds your beliefs imagines the world will be in 10 years. "Short, brutal life" sounds like you're picturing billions of people roasting to death in the sun or maybe some sort of ecological inspired genocide?
When you visualize the human race on planet earth in 10 years, what are you imagining?
This isn't a snarky question btw, I'm genuinely curious.
A lot of people seem to misunderstand the 12 (now 11) year deadline. It's not that suddenly an apocalypse will occur in 2030. It's that after that point, we'll no longer have any realistic hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change that will arrive in the following decades and centuries.
Maybe we need to explain it to people like cancer treatment: if we'd caught it early, maybe chemotherapy alone would have been sufficient. Today, we need invasive surgery, plus chemo, plus radiation therapy, and we also need to hope that untested immunotherapy treatments will work.
If we continue to leave it untreated, then our prognosis is very grim indeed. We won't die immediately, but our cancer will be inoperable.
U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,” threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.
″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said.
...
The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.
The difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago.
Brown said if the warming trend continues, ″the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.″
He said even the most conservative scientists ″already tell us there’s nothing we can do now to stop a ... change″ of about 3 degrees.
Maybe it won’t seem so accurate to you when you realize the baseline in your link is not the 1989 level.
Edit: But you might have a point on the C/F question. I don’t know what Dr. Brown meant. The quoted 9 degrees difference relative to the Ice Age may suggest it’s not Celsius, but even in that case we would barely be at the lower end of the “conservative” range of 0.6-3.9 C rise.
I'm going to assume you've had some sort of vehicle accident in your life.
You know that moment when you can see the inevitable, but you can no longer do anything about it? That's roughly where I see humanity in 10 years. Maybe it will take 15 or 20, but it seems highly likely that we will be passing the point of "oh shit" quite soon. There are too many reports, of too many extremes, too close together. Far too many "sooner than expected", and "more than expected". All the consequences won't be home to roost, but they'll look inevitable... Maybe first phases of normal climate isn't any more needing a new normal or "no such thing as normal", or first signs of farming failures. Comparable to say 1937 appeasing Hitler, it all seems vaguely OK, maybe he's not really that bad, but it's very, very clear where it's going and soon. Some parts of the world will be fully living the nightmare.
If that's the case, we'll also have passed all the easy and affordable routes out that were available when people started talking about it 30 or 40 years ago. Several tipping points may have clearly tipped. All that will be left is emergency drastic action to try and mitigate. Fix or avoid it? Too late. Reverse it? Good luck with those tipping points.
I have children, I dearly want to be badly wrong. This decade's events makes me think I, and the IPCC may be at the optimistic end of things.
When you visualize the human race on planet earth in 10 years, what are you imagining?
This isn't a snarky question btw, I'm genuinely curious.