[eloff]

I didn't say nothing is happening, I said it's not the end of the world.

The effects so far are small compared to the direct damage caused by the air pollution itself, which kills over a million people a year.

I don't expect that will change in my lifetime. The predictions are not so dire that it is likely to take a million lives a year.

Over a period of several hundred years, it's a lot harder to say.

At no point is it likely to be the end of civilization. But we could get there if we're stupid enough to keep this up for a few centuries more.

[ageofwant]

This worldview is hyper human-centric. There are ~7735776725 people alive now. A million less is 7734776725. To keep this population alive billions of other lives are sacrificed. Yes humans and human civilization will be less affected in the short term, perhaps, or at least those that matter: i.e european northern hemisphere types. Short to medium term biosphere collapse will absolutely impact human civilization, but that is way to late for most other species.

[eloff]

The biosphere is not about to collapse from a couple degrees of warming. The earth has been a lot hotter, there was a time you could grow ferns in the Arctic circle.

The 10 degrees warming after the last ice age makes climate change small by comparison. Let's not forget the 400ft of sea level rise. In fact if you look at the climate record the last ten thousand years, the current level of warming is lost in the noise. It will take centuries before it's enough to really jump out on the graph.

Life will adapt and carry on, climate change is possibly only a temporary blip for the earth itself. It may even turn out to be a good thing on long enough time scales, because it's been a little too chilly for comfort here the last few million years. Repeated cycles of ice ages are no joke. If you want to see how bad that can get, lookup snowball earth. Warming is no joke either, see Venus, but a little warming might not be the end of the world.

I'm Canadian, my county was buried under 2km of ice that scoured it to bedrock just as civilization was beginning elsewhere in the world. If you are in the US, you grow your food in what used to be Canadian soil. I'm more afraid of the cold than the heat. People from Australia and the middle east likely have the opposite view.