A shock-therapy style stop to fossil fuel extraction will kill millions of people through starvation, economic collapse and insufficient heating in winter. Depending how shocking the shock therapy is it could be billions.
But this has always been the problem with stopping climate change.
We are choosing between lesser, but certain immediate pain vs larger but less certain future pain.
In the 1880s we could have easily stopped climate changed, but been forced to slow growth. The pain would have been minimal for those living, but the probability of extreme catastrophe seemed remote so nothing was done.
As we move forward the probability of extreme catastrophe becomes more certain, but so too does the immediately pain.
I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.
Oh, much worse.
First off we, fertilizer or no, we're already facing crop failures in the US [0] and will continue to face even more extreme crop failures [1]. Even if we had unlimited fertilizer we've already signed up for massive famine.
But if you really want to talk about the unmitigated climate change path, which is what happens if we choose not to keep hydrocarbons in the ground, I really recommend reading Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky [2].
He's a respected geologist that makes a compelling case that the vast majority of mass extinction events were caused by rapid rises in CO2.
One of the realistic scenarios we're facing, he argues, is the break down of the AMOC ultimately leading to the oceans becoming anoxic and releasing hydrogen sulfide rather than oxygen. The entire marine ecosystem is essentially wiped out except for some cyanobacteria. The oceans are the foundation of all of our food systems. It would make the planet uninhabitable my most complex life of today. This has happened before in Earth's climate history.
All of the "bad-awful" but not-extinction event scenarios assume that we do not burn all of the fossil fuel reserves currently leased. We are already looking at a grim future, but given that we're rapidly pumping millions of years of stored CO2 into the atmosphere, upper bounds for the damage we can do are tremendous.
0. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/us/kansas-wheat-harvest-d... 1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/4/scientists-warn-of-c... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Under-Green-Sky-Warming-Extinctions/d...
