[whimsicalism]

Afaict, and I follow this significantly, we were never going to see significant climate devastation in our life time. With lag, it'll be our children and our children's children.

While the developed world has been able to offset emissions (renewable growth, but also just pushing manufacturing to the global south), it still has not been nearly enough to avert the worst impacts.

And we also don't know at what point positive feedbacks will become runaway and humans will stop being the primary driver.

Things are improving, but not so much that I would be actively optimistic.

[time_to_smile]

> we were never going to see significant climate devastation in our life time.

Curious your thoughts on just these two observations:

Rapid decrease in Lake Mead (and Powell's) water level: http://mead.uslakes.info/level.asp

Rapid decrease of summer arctic sea ice: https://www.arcticdeathspiral.org/

It's very likely within a decade or two we'll see so little water coming out of Mead that the Hoover dam cannot produce electricity.

We also might see a "blue ocean event" in the same time scale.

Do you not consider these "significant climate devastation"? There are many other examples, but since you "follow this significantly" you probably know about them, but for just these two I'm honestly confused how you can see these as non-issues.

[whimsicalism]

Sure, I guess when I am using that phrase I am using it in response to people who are suggesting that there is existential and/or civilization-collapsing level of risk within our lifetime.

Significant climate devastation to me means significantly degraded quality of life or difficulty staying alive.

You can definitely isolate a lot of things that are being impacted by the climate changing, but even if the entire Hoover dam can no longer produce electricity it will not reach those levels to me.

I don't think these are "non-issues."

[HelloMcFly]

To me, it's neither here nor there that the collapse may occur in our lifetime. It's the beauty of the natural world that I mourn, seeing it fail, and diminish, and the world becomes less colorful and whole.

My most comforting thought is that the Earth will continue, life will continue, and even in a worst-case scenario it's likely the complex ecologies will re-establish in the fullness of time.