1) We are not heading for "the end of the world". There are lots of projections of what things can go wrong. But the climate changes slowly, we are becoming richer and we'll adapt. Also a lot of what is reported is on "worst case" (or things might get as bad as so-and-so) that are often based on CO2 projections that have almost no chance of coming true.
2) Even if you disagree with #1: we are already on our way to solving the problem. We will still have warming, for sure. But we will likely be at or near the goals we've set for end of century. Tech is improving: we are deploying solar, wind and (suddenly) more nuclear; electric cars; heat pumps; and so on. We will eventually run out of fossil fuels. And, population growth is slowing faster than anyone predicted.
Yes, we should be vigilant and continue to try to reduce CO2 emissions. But the idea that "we're all gonna die!" -- or anything close to it -- is wrong. And it's not supported by the science at all.
We will not go extinct, but millions or tens of millions will die from climate change over the coming years and decades (and many have already died), many many more will suffer for it. No, technology will not fix this in the near term.
It's similar to air pollution, which we have many ways of stemming and are estimated to kill 7 Mio per year, much less however in todays rich countries which can invest to reduce it (and still do woefully little as everyone wants a big car). https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_2
Can you be specific?
Like, I get that every time there is a natural disaster, the media blares about climate change. But, for example, there's been no trend in hurricanes. Political leaders love to blame climate change for their poor policies (water management, forrest management, etc). And certainly some of the small sea-level rise we have seen is definitely from climate change.
But we've also seen "global greening". Productivity of crops keep going up: maybe in spite of climate change -- but maybe partially due to CO2 increases.
At this point I have to ask what's these countries excuse not to adapt. Isn't it the government's job to plan for these events? What makes it so difficult?
Perhaps this [0] has more to do with it than climate change...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
Add that to housing being increasingly out of reach for most people and it's hard to not feel disillusioned. In some sense, you could argue that "Work all your life to be able to buy a house on land that will be destroyed" is worse for morale than the Cold War's version of "We'll probably all just die from nuclear war at some point all at the same time".
Which cities and what timeline are you talking about? Sea level has risen like a half a foot in the last 70 years. That's not all that fast.
Meanwhile, places like Netherlands are increasing their land area over that time.
In some sense, sure, I guess - maybe mostly for those who bought a house on land like this a long time ago. But if you're choosing to buy a house on land in an area like this now, or in the future, or even the relatively recent past, when we all know the risk and/or inevitability of it's eventual destruction, then I don't know what to tell you...
Like, one of my "climate apocalypse" bingo squares was "Russia starts a war to prolong fossil fuel usage". It currently looks like that will backfire and, on balance, be a positive for sorting out climate change, but we're talking about the "positives" of a war with potentially hundreds of thousands of dead! Where people were gleefully predicting the collapse of Western Europe governments and replacement with right wing populists who would stop any attempts to continue supporting the "climate hoax"!
A war is the kind of thing that can go very wrong, and this is neither the first, nor the last, war that people could attribute to climate change.
So not only does it suck for those people, but in that context, Political and economic instability is a huge concern. Mass migration is already happening, but it will become more intense. People will try to gravitate to areas perceived as more stable. Border wars have the potential to become more frequent. Concerns about control over fresh water and arable land will be heightened. Demands to exploit currently protected regions (e.g. great lakes watershed) will be made.
We have an entire politico-economic system built on cheap fossil fuel energy. There are whole regimes whose power and control and prosperity is founded on petro-chemical extraction. If/as that collapses, there will be major crisis. We already seeing this.
In the context of raising my children, my wife and I are coming around to the perspective that our number one priority is to build resiliency. Not survival-prepper stuff (though we do have a modest 6 acres of arable land, that's not really the focus), but family resiliency: trying to keep kids local to us, concentrating family assets and committing to taking care of each other, making sure we're in a position where we can pass on a stable living situation (house, property), etc.
That, and emotional/ideological/intellectual resilience: understanding what climate change is, understanding what we can or cannot do about it as individuals and a family, understanding the role of collective action... and trying to avoid fear and anxiety by emphasizing knowledge over the unknown and distress.
I agree, with caveats.
The worst case emissions scenarios (RCP 8.5) are not likely to happen because we'll hit economic limits that prevent us from accessing every last drop. We're already past peak conventional oil and dipping into the low EROI tight oil. At some point in the future, there will be plenty of oil left but it will be the bottom of the barrel, too expensive to access at a profit. So even if we technically have enough carbon in the ground to spike CO2 to those levels, economic incentives and availability of alternatives are likely to prevent it long before we get there.
That said, I think we're underestimating the impacts of even low emissions scenarios. Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions today, we're locked into a wild ride of feedback loops for the next century or more. A low carbon future doesn't free us from climate impacts. I'm not saying we should give up on mitigation but we certainly can't ignore adaptation - no one is "fixing" climate change without a time machine.
The really, really bad scenarios depend either on the CO2 emissions not reaching an inflection point and decreasing (which I think will happen, but how quickly it happens will have a big impact on outcomes), or on some positive feedback mechanism kicking in, of which there are a few potential candidates but a lot of uncertainty for where the thresholds are (predictions range from 'already passed' to 'in the relatively far future'). These should neither be ignored as a possibility nor treated as inevitable.
Also, some of the frighteningly hard to stop feedback mechanisms have started, such as glacier melting has hit some extremes that scientists feared would be points of no return. Whether this will play out in the ways of those 1970s worst case predictions we don't know, and a variable here is that we are working to avoid them (badly, but still some avoidance work is better than doing nothing).
Some of that is like the Y2K problem: the self-unfulfilling prophecy. We've warned ourselves for decades what the risks are and what the worst cases are. We've put in a lot of work to mitigate/slow/stop the worst cases. We've partly failed, several times over, and had to invent new worst cases. We're still working to prevent those new worst cases. We likely will not ever hit a worst case, we're just in our own feedback loops trying to find the acceptable compromise. If the acceptable compromise "turns out alright" people will claim we never really were in danger of the worst cases, discounting the huge amounts of effort we put into avoiding it. "The prophecy was self-unfulfilled so it wasn't really a big deal was it?" "Y2K didn't happen, so why was everyone so worried about it?"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0
It might not be 1.5 degrees, or even 2--3 degrees, but the longer the current trajectory holds, the closer we will get to it. That's the tricky thing with climate change, if you sleep on it, it's not that you lose the opportunity -- you just suddenly face the next, even bigger challenge. I don't agree with 2) that we are on our way to solving the problem. If you just look at global emissions trajectories and GHG concentration in the atmosphere, there is no sign of slowing down. Everything we do, we just do on top of business as usual.
Most scientists don't want to be perceived as lunatic alarmists in the public, and most have a sentiment that you should try to convey some hope, and maybe folks also do that to keep their own sanity. The counterargument is that people who panic a bit are more likely to take action, but I don't see a lot of folks taking that stance. But a debate exists on dangerous tipping points that we could realistically run into, and it is lead by knowledgeable and famous people like Johan Rockström. Every opinion in the media though is already thought over for the effect scientists want to achieve, nobody just goes in guns blasting.
And how chaotic the climate has already become after just 1.2C of warming over pre-industrial levels! Deadly heatwaves, droughts and wildfires. Storms and floods. Millions of people have died, been displaced or suffer long-term health effects from these disasters. Species are going extinct en masse. This is just a taste of what may come. The science supports that many, many of us will die.
I don't want to adapt to plastic strewn all over the planet, air pollution that chokes us, or warming ocean waters that is having deleterious effects on ecosystems and our food chain.
I mean: yes.
We (including you) could stop using any form of fossil-fuel derived energy tomorrow. But that would actually cause a collapse of civilization.
Is that better than "making progress with renewables" and/or "adapting"?
WE are, sure, as in the people in this comment section having this conversation right now. Billions of people are not included in this "we" and have much grimmer outcomes predicted. Seems nasty to leave that out.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-per-capi...
...And then it'll simply magically stabilize, and will stop being a problem, right?
Later, she's depressed since it's 1°F hotter than it was in 1956, and doesn't want to go to school, feeling like she's dealing with the end of the world.
The episode is available at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8gyxf5 if you want to verify this yourself.
That was a fictional portrayal, certainly, but I doubt it was made up whole cloth. If so, the writers were extremely good at predicting how kids would react!
Things are significantly worse now than in 1989 - why wouldn't even more kids be worried?
Climate change fears have been in the pop culture air for longer than a lot of people realize.
Moreover, climate change didn’t happen because of gay marriage or women’s rights, so trying to force the clock back in terms of social progress won’t make the real problems go away.
It's rather like teaching kids why signing onto an adjustable-rate mortgage is a bad idea. It just makes them better prepared for the future.
However, the fossil fuel sector and its financiers don't even want to admit there's a problem, as that increases the pressure to stop using fossil fuels and switch to renewables, which is probably what motivates articles like this.
For most time periods and for the average mortgage holder ARMs are going to be cheaper. Fixed rates mortgages are superior when interest rates are rising and you intend to be in a home long term. So this isn't universally good advice to give people.
I am never entirely convinced by this.
First because it does not need to, it only needs to support exponential growth for (say) 100 years and that is plenty of time for me. Or 1000 for me and my grandchildren's grandchildren. Then we can go to "stable state" etc
Second because economic growth is not purely a matter of physical resources. Oil use cannot grow forever. But Dollar value can.
>If the people ever became convinced that after tomorrow the growth will stop, the system would collapse overnight.
This is 110% true though. The main source of growth is optimism, the main source of optimism is growth. God help the government that cannot sustain those (like now here in the UK).
Don't get me wrong, climate models and predictions of their impacts are important for planning our future. I keep up on the literature but I don't expect an elementary school child to. Until he has the foundation to understand the models and a framework for how to do risk assessment with them, we'll be working on the fundamentals.
Also important to emphasize that climate in not the only issue. There is a "polycrisis" of other environmental, economic, and social problems that threaten our civilization; climate change has to be dealt with (or adapted to) alongside these concerns, not with blinders on.
“I’m on a mission to go and reduce greenhouse gases worldwide,” Schwarzenegger told CBS, “because I’m into having a healthy body and a healthy Earth. That’s what I’m fighting for. And that’s my crusade.”
Unhealthy is a bad thing in plain terms and it is a categorical imperative in complex terms. Therefore pollution is morally bad. [Schwarzenegger the philosopher]
[Schwarzenegger the philosopher] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/30/schwarzenegger-no-one-gives-...
I completely agree with this. I'm also familiar with people I've talked to, and myself at times, falling into doomsday scenarios.
No, we aren't all going to die, not in rich countries st least. It's just going to really, really, suck.
I don't think the coverage is the climate scientists fault.
I was reminded of this watching my garden this spring… things didn’t germinate until we had a freak day cool enough so the seeds could pop. Think food is expensive now, see what it’s like when temps rise and we’ve got to develop even more new varieties and growing techniques to accommodate.
I'm not sure gaslighting them will work.
It's definitely a sign that the children are correct.
We are an incredibly polarized society, and not even leastwise because we are spread across many different countries. There are so many ways that we are polarized.
I think, that makes climate change the best thing that could be happening in terms of a unifying common evil. While it is human caused, it can be human solved. The fixing of it is something that could unify humanity. And the only thing we really need to do to get there, is to focus on how it is a common evil for all of our children.
My only concern is that I don't actually know if we can unify/fix this in time to save our planet. They seem to think we can. I don't know if I'm that optimistic.
The big change isn't actually one that I need to see from kids. It's one I need to see from the parents of those kids. Cause there is a controlling minority of this country that is throwing caution to the wind as if this is already solved. That's the real danger, to me. I think kids understand that better than pretty much all baby boomers I've talked to about this...
Progress is a process and, like grief, there are no short cuts.
Stop short circuiting acceptance. It’s step 1
Leave the kids out of your delusion. It's hard enough to become a well balanced person with everything else going on.
