[nancyhn]

Here, have a white pill:

Last year, Two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years. Corals have survived millions of years and are already bouncing back in other places as evidenced by the Great Barrier Reef, which we were all worried about not long ago.

[api]

True. To quote George Carlin: “The Earth will be fine. We’re fucked.”

The Earth has been much warmer than this in the past. It’s been much colder too. Life will adapt. The question is whether we will adapt, and more specifically whether our current civilization will adapt. I severely doubt that Homo sapiens would go extinct, but massive civilization collapse would kill billions.

Then there’s what civilization might do short of full collapse. A moderate limited duration refugee crisis and some inflation has led to a full scale resurgence of fascism in Europe. Imagine if we see hundreds of millions of refugees from equatorial regions pouring into countries with better climates while we have crop failures and coastal cities getting flooded. Can our political systems remain sane and rational through that or will we succumb to demagogue cult leaders with easy “solutions?”

The thing that’s likely to kill the most people from climate change is how people react to climate change. Remember that totalitarian schemes were a leading cause of death in the 20th century. Add up the death toll from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot and scale to current population.

[gottorf]

> a full scale resurgence of fascism in Europe

This seems hyperbolic. The current spate of "fascist" elected leaders (Orban, Meloni, et al.) don't seem as such to me, though I will admit I'm not keeping a very close eye. Perhaps you know more.

> The thing that’s likely to kill the most people from climate change is how people react to climate change.

I agree. As the human population more than doubled in the past 50 years, climate-related deaths are only a third of what it used to be[0]; not a third of the rate, one-third in absolute numbers. This is mainly due to the increasing material wealth of developing countries that better lets them handle the challenges of climate.

In my opinion, the increasing centralized authority demanded by those that think climate change is a risk so urgent that it transcends legal safeguards against precisely that kind of centralized authority will harm more people than climate change ever will.

[0]: https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989

[api]

Valid point about hyperbole, but I meant ideologically in the sense that this kind of ideology crept back into the Overton window. The same occurred in the USA and refugee issues were part of the fuel.

Neither Orban nor Meloni are themselves that level of bad. I wasn’t thinking of them but of the discourse.

Now imagine tens or hundreds of millions of refugees combined with massive food cost increase due to crop failures. Orban and Meloni might be way on the moderate end compared to what might surface.

[Tiktaalik]

yep. life will adapt, though it may not life that we recognize.

As ocean warms say so long to Salmon on the northwest coast. Whether they will survive further north or simply go extinct altogether who can say.

Departing along with the salmon will be things that us humans in the area enjoy, such as smoked salmon and salmon on the BBQ. In the grand scheme of things likely trivial, but enormous losses to our way of life, not to mention local economies.

Greater than that are the impacts on local First Nations of whose cultures the salmon historically played a incredible role, which resulted in an outsized impact of the fish on their art, story and culture. Will be devastating when the fish disappears.

The biggest unknown impacts will be on the greater forest ecology, as it has been noted that the bears eat the salmon and drag it into the woods, where it provides food for other animals and nourishes the forest in general. As the salmon disappear there could well be a cascade of disruption and extinction on animals and ecologies well beyond what we're aware of.

The salmon will go away and yes earth will "survive" and I'm sure some another fish (or maybe just jellyfish) will fill the void. But the disruptive impacts will be utterly enormous.