[willio58]

To preface what I'm about to say, I'm anti-mass extinction and I definitely agree that as a planetary society we need to continue pushing to slow down and eventually reverse climate change.

But I really think the "all life is screwed" mantra is damaging to us, especially our youth. There needs to be a balanced take on this, because saying that all life is screwed gives no hope or even purpose to the kids growing up now who will inevitably need to fix what we're leaving them. I'm mid-20's and I grew up with some level of media telling me that the world was ending, but it was pretty muted and didn't make me feel like there was no way we could fix things.

I'm not saying people won't die or people won't have to massively change how they live to adapt to climate change in the future, but we need to stop basically saying that every single human dying is an inevitability with climate change.

As a thought experiment: Let's say in ~50 years 10% of humans die in a 5 year span due to catastrophic climate change (~800 million based on current pop.). What is the incentive at that point for governments to NOT force radical regulation legislation to go through? Money? In the past few years we've gotten to the point where renewable energy is simply cheaper than the alternative. Now imagine we have better batteries years down the line. Exactly who is profiting at that point? The oil companies? They can just invest in renewables and save the money they'd lose fighting uprisings from the people in their countries who have lost, in this thought experiment, 800 million fellow humans.

All this to say, climate change is a BIG DEAL. But let's stop wallowing in that fact, and let's focus all that energy in pushing for governments to force companies to do the right thing.

[amilios]

I think the issue is feedback loops. You're right that eventually governments will be "forced" to do the "right thing", but the problem is that it is likely going to be too little too late, and the climate feedback loops already set in motion may indeed "finish the job" and make the planet too inhospitable for any humans to feasibly live on.

[kulahan]

I don't think I've seen many (any?) studies which predict that we're going to scorch the Earth into an unlivable hellhole. That's what people are complaining about.

There will be mass starvations, mass migrations, mass extinctions, and more, but that doesn't mean life will cease for humans. We will see worse storms, and a generally less livable planet, but if we can have both Eskimos and Bedouin thriving on the same planet, it's weird to think we'd suddenly lose our extreme adaptability.

[djtango]

2000 years ago leaving the Middle East/Europe to go to America would have been as insurmountable as moving to the Moon today.

Humanity has gone through cycles of famine, war, exploration in the past. Feels like this could be the 21st Century parallel maybe...

Probably would also help to have a single figure who can unite us to share more and all take personal responsibility for the collective good.

[willio58]

> Probably would also help to have a single figure who can unite us to share more and all take personal responsibility for the collective good.

Part of me feels like climate change is this single figure. Instead of a single person rising up and saying "We need change and this is how we do it", it's the planet that we all share that's forcing our hand. I think that's great in a certain respect, it's reality smacking us and screaming into our faces. Of course it will mean a lot of death, but sometimes it seems we need to experience loss to stimulate progress.

[amilios]

OK sure life won't cease as a whole for humans, but living standards for the vast majority of us will enter freefall and stabilize at a MUCH much lower level than we're used to.

[dogcomplex]

Agreed. We should also consider the context that - yes - the damages of climate change are disproportionately going to affect developing nations and increase natural disaster risk and food security, but these dangers are coming in against a strong trend of those risks going down for many people. Things were bad in the past - and they're still bad in many places now - but that has been shrinking rapidly. Climate change could very-well slow or even reverse this trend for a time, but barring a complete destruction of our technological progress, people in the future in general will still be far better off than now, even with this mess, and even in developing countries.

Now, of course, this doesn't mean these benefits will be evenly distributed (this is going to even further increase wealth inequality and be a deadly disaster for many people), and we are pretty terrible at prioritizing e.g. protecting natural ecosystem biodiversity. There will certainly be irreversible (in human timescale) losses to our ecosystem and therefore the knowledge and potential of future civilizations from this. And there are even some truly catastrophic death spiral scenarios possible. But it's likely that even the cynical reality will end up being something of a widespread unfairly distributed uptick in disaster risk and continuation of the mass extinction we've already started - slowing quality of life improvements for much of the world, but not stopping them - with an eventual strong recovery in all areas if/when we engage our new levels of technological advancement and begin re-wilding programs to purposefully regrow thriving natural habitats. (This is somewhat inevitable if/when the average quality of life of people is high enough they have room to care about such things. Industrial processes applied to helping nature thrive would do a lot)

This is the "human nature sucks at scale and we're slow to change course" cynical view but with a "technology and industry is crazy good in the long term at achieving its goals and uplifting people" bullish caveat prediction - which I believe to be the age-old trend. We clearly need better global-level response organization to deter the worst effects of climate change and help distribute risk so it's not all falling on the poorest people, but industry-wise - if we have to dump a trillion into something stupid-inefficient like direct carbon capture machines, we will. (My preferred solution is mass-farming kelp - far cheaper per CO2 ton and numerous additional beneficial products that basically make it pay for itself at scale). The world isn't coming to an end. It's coming to a recession/depression - which will be felt to different degrees very unfairly - and it's spurring new responses.