This take is seriously dangerous.
"1.5C is not so bad, chill people"
When the fact is - we don't know the impact - if we go beyond 1.5.
What we do know (because it's already very much measurable) is that much of the worlds glaciers will melt, causing drought.
What we do know is that eventually the sea levels will rise and drown many extremely valuable coastal areas.
The oceans rising is more a problem, but it's not going to end human civilization and will happen slowly enough that adaptation is possible, albeit expensive. "Drowning" is hyperbole.
Uncertainty is just that, uncertainty. It will be positive for some areas and negative for others. Those of us who benefit from the status quo (myself included) can argue it would be unwise to mess up a good thing, but the simple fact is we have no idea. There will be winners as well as losers. It's quite possible that the midwest becomes wet enough that American farmers will become even more productive through double-cropping, for starters. Likewise the Russians look forward to their northern coastline thawing.
The sky isn't falling, it's shifting, and while we probably should minimize the shift as much as practical, we shouldn't plunge ourselves into an economic depression to do it.
English is not my first language.
How would you describe something previously on land becoming submerged by the ocean?
A tide. Sea level rises are small and highly predictable over time. All claims of dramatic sudden flooding or drowning are based on assumed correctness of models that, as scottLobster points out, have always been wrong (they always overshoot).
Drowning is when a living organism is submerged, flooding is when buildings are submerged.
That's some "shifting."
Yeah, this person offers nothing but condescension. Immediate downvote.
To your point, we know quite a bit, and it's pretty bad.
Will 10% of the world's population perish? Most likely. There's already a population die-off in progress in many areas of the world as the birth rate continues to decline. People don't have to drop dead for the population to die off, they can simply not be born in sufficient numbers to replace the existing population.
As for those who are alive - adversity leads to war. What we should be thinking about is how much disruption is required to foster chaos - especially in a political environment that has become so divisive.
All in all it's easy to imagine a population decline of 10% over 100 years. Chillingly, it's also easy to imagine a lot higher percentage. Over the next 100 years people are going to rediscover that we are, in fact, animals. Animals who will react violently should our existence be threatened. Hopefully we'll also rediscover that we're social animals and that the key to our survival will be working together.
The old saying is it's darkest before the light. I'm afraid of how dark it's going to get. There's thousands of years' worth of junk in humanity's attic we have to sort out before we come through to the other side. People are fooling themselves if they think sorting through all this will be easy and that the price won't be paid in lives lost.
There are two very different points being conflated here. What's the time scale for the reduction in population? 10% of the world's population disappearing today is very different from a gradual reduction over the course of decades. 10% of the world's population disappearing over 100 years is almost certainly a good thing at our current population level, when every indication is that sustainability just isn't possible with 8 billion people. At the very least, it'll force us to challenge existing economic models that are all predicated on endless growth.
And I don't see anyone saying that things will be easy. In fact, I think most acknowledge that the opposite is very much true. But a) on an individual level, there's not much you can do when income, consumption, and emissions are all Pareto distributed -- I can no more instigate a bank run on my own than I could affect carbon emissions -- and, b) the species has survived worse population declines than this before, on numerous occasions. The black plague in Europe and the Mongols tearing through Central Asia both come to mind. Tomorrow has never been guaranteed, for anyone.
As an average person who does his best to live sustainably, there's only so much I have the time and energy for. I live semi-rurally within an hour of a major population center and on the edge of a state park, so believe me, I get it. But if it gets bad enough, at some point it really is out of my control. There's only so much I can care when I have bills to pay and a life to live. I'd imagine most people are in a similar position.
Peoples quality of life globally has been consistently improving and that’s unlikely to change with global warming. China had one of the worlds largest famines in living memory 1958-1961, it’s simply been the norm for most of human history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines
The argument of "look back, it always got better in average" is ignoring the fact we're dealing with a global chaotic situation in a world that fragile, it is already shaking because of interrupted supply chains due to a pandemic or a secondary bank for techbros going down.
We have no clue what we'll be dealing with in 30 years but what we know, it's definitely not gonna be good.
