That's what I expect this decade. My concern is that it is all happening faster than even many of the most pessimistic scientists in the field expected, and it seems to be accelerating.
What I see when I try to extrapolate from what is happening today: Less food and clean water for more people, sometimes dramatically so in places that are already stressed for food and clean water (again, this will strike the poor far sooner than it will hit the developed world...but, that doesn't make it less horrifying, to me, and it is merely a leading indicator of what we will all experience). More forced migration, more refugee crises, more war over resources (including resources we don't yet generally currently consider worth going to war over, like water and arable land), more disease epidemics (and with no effective antibiotics to treat them), more mosquitoes, etc.
All of these things are already happening. We can see and measure them. And, they are trending in the wrong direction, and accelerating.
I just don't see how to interpret what we see happening as anything other than a slow moving disaster. There's only so much "relocation" can solve, when speaking of a world with billions of people. If you consider literally millions (or even billions) of people dying off to be a non-catastrophic event, I guess it's not catastrophic. But, it looks like a catastrophe, to me. And, when that many people are put at risk of starvation and disease, the likelihood of war, even world war, seems likely to increase remarkably.
That seems like the current conclusion. But as people start dying, the population should decrease and that will limit global warming. Life as humans knew it has already ended, and civilization as we know it might end, but shouldn't mankind and civilization still survive pretty well? (Legitimate question)
I'm not sure what to make of that question. I think part of what makes civilization "civil" is that we don't accept huge swaths of the human population dying horrible deaths so that a lucky and rich portion of the human population can survive.
What I see when I try to extrapolate from what is happening today: Less food and clean water for more people, sometimes dramatically so in places that are already stressed for food and clean water (again, this will strike the poor far sooner than it will hit the developed world...but, that doesn't make it less horrifying, to me, and it is merely a leading indicator of what we will all experience). More forced migration, more refugee crises, more war over resources (including resources we don't yet generally currently consider worth going to war over, like water and arable land), more disease epidemics (and with no effective antibiotics to treat them), more mosquitoes, etc.
All of these things are already happening. We can see and measure them. And, they are trending in the wrong direction, and accelerating.
I just don't see how to interpret what we see happening as anything other than a slow moving disaster. There's only so much "relocation" can solve, when speaking of a world with billions of people. If you consider literally millions (or even billions) of people dying off to be a non-catastrophic event, I guess it's not catastrophic. But, it looks like a catastrophe, to me. And, when that many people are put at risk of starvation and disease, the likelihood of war, even world war, seems likely to increase remarkably.
Edit: A useful current article on the subject, with references: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/03/climat...