No one alive will experience a better climate than we have today. But young people will experience a much more dangerous and chaotic world in the future.

  • rekabis@lemmy.ca
    81·
    4 days ago

    Except that,

    1. We have already exceeded the “worst case scenario” path. We are quite literally in uncharted territory, as none of our climate models have been built for this scenario and we have no “prior art” to give any indications of what kind of climate changes might happen next.
    2. On this path, +3℃ will be reached within the next decade and a bit - likely between 2035 and 2038.
    3. At +3℃, lethally high wet bulb temperatures and chaotic weather will take out about 4 billion humans within a few short years. Chaotic weather itself will make industrialized agriculture impossible world-wide, as over 90% of all agriculture is shacked to rainfall. And too much is equally as devastating as not enough.
    4. The collapse of the AMOC - with a “most likely due by” in the 2050s - will supercharge this climate chaos, causing weather patterns worldwide to whiplash for up to a decade as the planetary climate tries to find a “new normal”. At this point, pretty much any agriculture aside from hydroponics - and less than 3% of crops can be successfully worked hydroponically - will simply be unviable.

    We are fucked. Right now, the best we can do is limit the wider environmental damage. Entire ecosystems will collapse, as changes are happening too fast for them to migrate towards the poles. The fastest prior example of climate change that we discovered happened almost 100,000× slower, so entire forests had the opportunity to migrate instead of perishing.

    I am all for massive action. Not for humanity - I see zero chance of us surviving as any kind of a going concern into the 22nd century - but for the planetary ecosystem. We must give it the best possible chance for recovery, so that whatever comes after us has the best opportunity to flourish.

    • Petter1@lemm.ee
      6·
      4 days ago

      And of course all those dictators will use the catastrophic events to throw shit at each other, tell the others are the reason for all this and can finally start their wet dream ww3 as well as get rid of all minority “parasites” that waste our now limited resources we all fight for

      Very nice

      😔

      • rekabis@lemmy.ca
        1·
        3 days ago

        Ironically, only unrestrained nuclear war could possibly save us now.

        1. It would move untold gigatonnes of dust into the atmosphere, cutting down on solar radiation in the short term
        2. it would destroy high-tech fossil fuel consumption and most human-caused CO2 production in the short to medium term
        3. said dust would slowly fall out of the atmosphere over the next decade, most into the oceans, releasing phytoplankton from their limiting environmental factors (mainly a lack of iron)
        4. even with reduced sunlight, phytoplankton populations would explode, sucking significant CO2 out of the atmosphere
        5. an extended nuclear winter would produce thin ice sheets across most of the northern hemisphere, dramatically increasing the planet’s albedo once the atmosphere clears up, reflecting most incoming radiation back out and (hopefully) maintaining lower temperatures
        6. lower temperatures planet-wide would produce a much wetter climate, with much more snowfall and more precipitation in arid areas, encouraging increased carbon sequestration by plants.
        7. human populations would crash massively in the first year or three, but - especially in the southern hemisphere - would remain present in relative technological sophistication. We could conceivably stabilize in the very low billion level or high hundreds of millions, with the technological knowledge to rebuild a high-tech civilization without the extensive use of fossil fuels.
          • rekabis@lemmy.ca
            2·
            2 days ago

            I know. It’s an exceedingly horrible path, but the alternatives are turning out to be immeasurably worse, and we are rapidly running out of non-catastrophic options.

            I am in the northern hemisphere, in a city that is virtually 100% guaranteed to be nuked if such a conflict arises. It’s not an option I want to reach for unless all the other ones are even worse. But “much worse” is likely to occur, sooner rather than later.