I agree we will hit the 1.5 degrees for sure. There's a lot of inertia in climate change anyway. Even if we stop tomorrow it will still continue to rise for years.
But I don't agree we're all going to die. It's not a human extinction type problem. There will still be habitable places and some places will become more habitable (the Russians even had a crazy plan in the 60s to dam the Bering strait and melt the Arctic with nukes to make Siberia more habitable.... :X )
The problem is mostly that a ton of people now live in the areas that will become much less habitable and the resulting mass-migrations will lead to extreme societal disruption and possibly wars. And the areas that will become more habitable have no infrastructure. This is why it's going to be more expensive to deal with the problem later than to prevent it.
I'm not saying it's not an unprecedented disaster. It certainly is. The country I'm from (the Netherlands) might mostly disappear. But it's not an apocalypse. There will still be places where people can live.
In fact climate change is normal in the scope of earth. The situation we are in now has become this way also due to change from the ice age that was before. The bigger problem is that we made this a phenomenon on the scale of decades where it was previously millennia. So society and nature can't adapt quickly enough.
> But I don't agree we're all going to die. It's not a human extinction type problem. There will still be habitable places and some places will become more habitable (the Russians even had a crazy plan in the 60s to dam the Bering strait and melt the Arctic with nukes to make Siberia more habitable.... :X )
It is a "human extinction type problem" (and likely most if not all life on Earth) … not necessarily directly killed by the climate itself, but by the way that stressed out stupid "people in power" react to the stresses brought on by that changing climate. We have entirely too many literally insane people in positions of power commanding weaponry that could conceivably wipe out all of humanity (and much if not all of the other life on this planet), and we're doing very little to rein them in or control them. Feels like a very real danger to me.
I agree that climate change will bring about human suffering far beyond anything most people envision. But I am mostly confident that extinction is not in the cards. Nukes could only erase a few thousand square miles, not enough to kill a majority of humans much less all of them. Starvation and collapse would kill many more, but still far from extinction.
If you mean novel bioweapons then I can see that being a problem.
For the record, when I stated: “We are all going to die!” I meant it as a hyperbole. I actually don’t believe a literal total extinction of the human species is a likely scenario (even in a +4° horror scenario; even with a nuclear holocaust on top of it). “We are all going to die” is more of a you and me are personally very likely to die because of climate inaction, or at the very least, our lives will suffer, and there is nothing we can do about it.
I understand, I just objected to it because I see in my environment that there are seriously people thinking now that climate change can be a human extinction event (though it will be for many other species of course)
There seems to be a 'project fear' movement that thinks it's ok to overblow scientific conclusions in order to sway people to act. I personally think this is a very bad idea as deliberate lies will only lead to deep disillusionment with government and the scientific community. It can also lead to fatalism where people won't act because they believe the worst outcome is already locked in.
And really, the truth about climate change is scary enough as it is. But we do still have the opportunity to mitigate some of the worst of it.
I honestly don't believe "climate change" in and of itself will kill us all off (although there's always that possibility, depending on tipping points and other factors). I'm more worried about how the humans in control of some of the deadliest killing technologies ever devised are gonna exacerbate an already horrifying future as things progress and ever more tension is created by the situations climate change will bring about. Humans (as always) are the scariest part of the equation.
I hold the same worries about A.I. The tech itself (currently just a tool, and honestly not nearly as "advanced" one as many seem to believe) isn't nearly as scary as how the dumbest of our number (our so-called "leaders") are gonna use and / or abuse it.
I honestly believe that if there is a true extinction of humanity (or life in general) on this planet, it's far more likely that a small group of exceptionally stupid humans will inflict it upon us than almost any other "doomsday scenario" I can imagine.
>I'm not saying it's not an unprecedented disaster. It certainly is. The country I'm from (the Netherlands) might mostly disappear. But it's not an apocalypse. There will still be places where people can live.
The Netherlands will be fine if they just dam up the North Sea. The main problems with this are 1) the English Channel is a huge trade route and damming it (without a way of passing ships through) would destroy the EU economy, and 2) Russia would be very hostile to anything that restricts their access to the ocean from the Baltic.
It's not too wide: the Netherlands actually did a study on this.
It is a pretty extreme proposal of course, but it is possible. It would have some big benefits, not just to Netherlands, but all the countries around it, because all of them (UK, France, Germany, Belgium) stand to lose a lot of land to rising sea levels. Instead, with this dam, they could actually create a LOT more new land in what's now the North Sea. Remember, much of the North Sea used to be dry land (we call it "Doggerland" now), only about 8000 years ago, and had human settlements.
I think shipping could still be an issue. Sure, dams can have locks, but the sheer amount of ship traffic there might be difficult. Maybe they should build new some ports and use freight rail to move cargo around.
But I don't agree we're all going to die. It's not a human extinction type problem. There will still be habitable places and some places will become more habitable (the Russians even had a crazy plan in the 60s to dam the Bering strait and melt the Arctic with nukes to make Siberia more habitable.... :X )
The problem is mostly that a ton of people now live in the areas that will become much less habitable and the resulting mass-migrations will lead to extreme societal disruption and possibly wars. And the areas that will become more habitable have no infrastructure. This is why it's going to be more expensive to deal with the problem later than to prevent it.
I'm not saying it's not an unprecedented disaster. It certainly is. The country I'm from (the Netherlands) might mostly disappear. But it's not an apocalypse. There will still be places where people can live.
In fact climate change is normal in the scope of earth. The situation we are in now has become this way also due to change from the ice age that was before. The bigger problem is that we made this a phenomenon on the scale of decades where it was previously millennia. So society and nature can't adapt quickly enough.