If a large country with many poor people are faced with this situation, maybe it's likely that they might try one of these geoengineering efforts as a last resort? The environmental effects are unpredictable, but if it could save a lot of lives...
We rich westerners will most likely only be inconvenienced. We have our AC and we can afford more expensive food. If you live close to the coast or a river you might need to move.
The greatest problem we will have to face is probably the huge waves of refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Not only from starvation, but from conflicts about e.g., water.
I'm currently working through Whole Earth Discipline which calls for work on three different fronts: Reduction (of emission), Adaptation (to unavoidable change) and Geoengineering (to prevent the worst of it).
Without significant government ran/funded geoengineering projects we'll be living with at least ~1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. We'll need to do some adaptation as is.
One of my favorite quotes in this vein is "We are eating bait and moving on to jellyfish and plankton", referring to overfishing and climate change changing Americans' seafood diet. From http://articles.latimes.com/2006/jul/30/local/la-me-ocean30j....
Of course, many cultures have always eaten and enjoyed jellyfish, but that's beside the point. The ethnocentrism is what sells it to the conservative American audience.[1] ;)
[1] Well, older conservative audience. Many younger conservatives grew up only eating trash fish, at best.
* No more building in flood-plains or low-lying coastal regions.
* Flood insurance in those areas will lose their subsidies and will become expensive.
* Areas in Florida, Louisiana, etc will become poorer as those who can afford to relocate do so.
* Farming will slowly move north; southern areas that are currently farms will dry out and become non-viable.
* Alternative energy might take the place of farming in the south. Solar farms? Wind Turbines?
* Inland cities will become more popular because of their reduced risk of climate-related events. Denver, Phoenix, Dallas, Washington, will likely all get net-positive migration.
* Conversely, the big coastal cities will become more expensive and cause people to start leaving. NY, LA, San Francisco, Boston, etc.
We don't care about the billions who can't afford to live in the current world.
But we do care about the ones who can't afford to live in the new one!
Why is this? It took a rich silicon valley dude to care about polio. But every layperson wants to destroy the current economy for future people.
Being from the future they are super rich compared to us, like every new generation now, so perhaps they just are better at writing Twitter hash tags?
If you simply restored the majority of the US great plains back to a bison centered ecosystem instead of cattle, you'd produce a similar resource (bison meat) in large quantity while reducing emissions, and the tall grass would sequester an enormous amount of carbon.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/major-land-uses/maps-...
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn-and-other-feedgra...
[2] https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...
It's a sink of fixed size, not a bottomless barrel we can dump infinite amounts of CO2 into. That doesn't make it useless though.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-...
You can track down the 8 years of followup articles and research papers.
There is no evidence it didn't work. There's evidence it did.
The trick is, tie it to fishing and it might make a difference. Or it might just take pressure off fisheries.
You have billions yet to eat more meat, so hurry up with your lab grown meat or start doing things like this, that also should get the same subsidies as things like solar power.
Further, we've already destabilized the global system by injecting carbon. It is now our responsibility to find a way to stabilize it again.
I agree with your statement, too.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?tab=chart&xScale=li...
Just because it's not enough and it's been slow doesn't mean it's nothing.
China one of the highest carbon emission rates per GDP of any large developed nation, but China can't exclusively be blamed for that. China is the "workshop of the world." It's where other countries send their polluting industries to get that pollution out of sight and out of mind, as well as to exploit cheaper labor and a high concentration of manufacturing expertise. China is blasting out CO2 to manufacture products that are exported back to the US, Canada, Europe, and so on, making the latter's carbon emissions look better than they actually are.
I'm not saying China couldn't be cleaner, just that the economy is global and so is this problem. If China switched to cleaner but more expensive energy and took other steps to reduce CO2 emissions, their costs would go up. This would just push manufacturing to whatever countries are willing to ignore climate change.
* rate of World co2 emissions continue to rise.
* we don't just need rate to stop rising, we need rate to fall to pretty much zero.
* and if we could magically get rates to stop rising, and fall to zero, tomorrow, we'd still have about 2 degrees of warming from all the emissions already up there.
People have completely missed the point: the rate of growth of rate of emissions might have improved in some places. But the problem is total amount emitted.
Oh, and you don't avert climate change with per capita cuts if population keeps growing. Which it will, till about 2100.
