[waiseristy]

Of course the globe warming 3 degrees isn’t going to cause human extinction. But it will kill hundreds of millions due to inevitable war and genocide over the changing landscape.

Thinking that mass famine/flooding/heat events in Africa, India, or South America isn’t going to affect you is incredibly naive. Instability ain’t good, and we can’t just welcome it with open arms. Shit that happens in Wuhan, Donetsk and elsewhere do affect you

[missedthecue]

Global warming is going to increase food supply because carbon is an input to photosynthesis. Several studies have shown that increased carbon in the atmosphere increases crop yields and increases water usage efficiency by reducing plant transpiration.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-...

On social media I've noticed a trend where people attribute every bad thing that immediately comes to mind to climate change. War, extinction, famine, disease and pestilence, I've even seen people confidently throw increases of rape in there when describing the impending hellscape sure to befall humanity in the next x years due to climate change, citing some very dubious chain of correlative logic.

The truth is that a warming planet will change things but not all changes are bad for humans, and those that are bad are not all catastrophic or unmanageable. I think it will do everyone some good to take a step back and look at things with an analytical and curious eye, and reject the urge to panic or spread addictive but harmful fear porn.

[ok_computer]

I'm against the hype that every storm is "omg gobal warming", getting a stream of existential dread in news headlines and personal discussions or posts is tiring.

That said, the globe will be easier to live on if the +x degrees C is minimized from pre-industrial temperatures. Like I'm sure humans will make it but it's up to us the quality of that existence and if we'll share it with current species.

I also get that the globe goes through cycles and the suns heating up in solar cycles, etc. Still pushing more ocean water into the atmosphere, sinking thermal energy into the oceans where we are using up the latent energy of ice melt, (after which there is less cooling capacity available in liquid water than surface ice at constant temperature), acid-ification of oceans that provide food for much of the globe, accelerating arid-ification of already progressing geological areas like US southwest or sub-Saharan Africa, all of these could in part be natural progressions. But if its in our control to reduce the greenhouse gas concentration (that has mechanistic explanation for heat capture, it is not blind correlation) in air or do something crazy like atmospheric geoengineering more people and plants and animals would face a better shot.

Global average temperatures are one part of the story. There is high-frequency temporal variance and spatial variance. Its possible to make a rough order-of-magnitude approximation for energy released in a hurricane. Higher incidence of high wind and heavy rain hurricanes is a measured (~100 years) value. We won't get rid of storms or famine & flood magically. But maybe transitioning from burning stuff for all energy and adopting more scalable living models wrt density and transportation could slow down the bad effects. Its not a conspiracy. Plenty of companies want to capitalize on teh movement but that doesn't invalidate the underlying motivation to change from the current state.

[oblio]

You're missing the point. Many places won't be able to grow food anymore, not in sufficient quantities.

It's irrelevant if Ukraine produces 20% extra if other countries can't make enough food. You can't always assume international trade is there or that poor countries, especially, can afford it.

[monero-xmr]

Plants like more carbon and more heat. Areas that are currently too cold to grow will become capable with longer grow cycles. We can enrich soil with fertilizer to make it better.

In the past, current deserts (Iraq / Mesopotamia) were much more hospitable to plants and life. Now they are not. Climate change has been a fact of life for all of human history. Now it may be man made, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have lived through this before. The Bible is full of stories regarding drought, famine, floods. That is part of nature.

[acdha]

Those past changes were quite disruptive, causing malnutrition and death, wars, etc. The current rate of change is much faster so we should expect all of those to be worse because there are far more people alive now and neither humanity nor the ecosystem have much time to adapt.

[monero-xmr]

I disagree - I think modern society, international trade, and communication systems make such disasters far, far less likely.

[waiseristy]

> For wheat and soybean crops, in terms of yield the median negative impacts are fully compensated, and rice crops recoup up to 90 percent and maize up to 60 percent of their losses.

That’s quite a buried lede. At best it evens out all the bad effects

I honestly don’t know how to reconcile our worldviews here, and I envy your optimism. But “just wingin it” isn’t what brings about good change. Those with curious and analytical eyes should see that our actions vis a vis climate change and other things have consequences. Good or bad, who really knows. But why are we committing ourselves before knowing?

Seems pretty dumb