If you’re younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it.
People hardly ever mention this, but a lot of the people coming from Central America right now are coming because of a drought there.
I don’t think we’re really capable of facing the truth, of either the impending climate disasters or the likely social and political collapses that already seem to have begun. Even on this forum where many of us range from cynical to fatalist and believe these things are more likely than not to happen in our lifetimes, we still don’t seem to really believe it. We would behave differently if we did. There’s some part of our brain convincing us that any problems effecting us personally will be manageable and any really bad stuff, if it happens at all, will be far away and be suffered by other people.
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Because they will be. We live in developed nations in the global north.
Personally I’ve decided to see climate change as an enormous business opportunity. Yes I’d like to get rich, and I suspect that helping to stop/mitigate climate change is going to be a huge business in a very short time.
I’ve always assumed we’d never be able to collectively sacrifice to address prevention. I agree with the article’s premise that pretending the world is going to suddenly band together to reduce carbon emissions to zero over the next 3 decades is folly.
What we are good at is mitigation. Massive public works projects. Maybe tiny mirrors - who knows.
I really don’t see any of that happening in the current political climate, and I’m not expecting any improvement there either.
If there’s one thing I’m confident in about humans it’s that we’re pretty good with our backs to a wall. Over and over again through human history we’ve done crazy big stuff crazy fast when we had no choice. I don’t think this is going to be different.
It’s already to a point where my crazy climate change denialist grandfather has come around fully that it’s a real threat (because he lives in the Myrtle Beach area and the weather has gotten super weird). This dude would have called you all kinds of names if you tried to talk to him about climate change ten years ago… now he’s acting like he was worried about it all along.
Denying that it was even a problem is how the people who profited off carbon emissions held off the tidal wave of public opinion this long. Now people are flooding while the sun shines and they have questions about what’s really going on… and they want answers that have solutions in them.
This is happening all over the world at the same time. I think Trump is the last president to pretend like this is a problem we can put off much less pretend doesn’t exist.
Also I think the probability that some kind of geoengineering takes place are approaching 100%.
I like your optimism, but I think there are other potential outcomes. IMO, there’s a real chance that no meaningful change or action will happen on climate change until a massive fraction of the world’s human population has already suffered severe impacts.
The reason is that the rich and powerful who are in charge won’t feel the effects of global climate change any time soon. Beach property gets flooded? Pick up and move somewhere else. Food gets expensive? No problem (how much can a banana cost, $10?), they’ve got all the money in the world. Peons get restless? Walled compounds and armed security will keep them safe.
We already know that this group of people are selfish as fuck, why should they do anything to disrupt their cushy situation? Our democracy is hanging by a thread so even a broad popular movement for change/action might not be effective.
Yeah the thing is their power rests on supports that are a lot more precarious than is obvious. All that power comes from other people being willing to sell them power in exchange for money. People demonstrably stop caring about money when that money can’t buy what they want it to.
I see global capitalism and every government on earth hanging by a thread. It is physically impossible to hold territory in the 21st century without the will of the people on your side. This was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt with our wars in the Middle East over the last eighteen years. If a country with the military expenditures, economic resources, and population of the US can’t subdue a country with the military expenditures, economic resources, and population of Afghanistan there is zero chance that anyone anywhere can hold more than a few city blocks of territory without the cooperation of the majority of the people who live there. The resources required to hold that space go up exponentially with the amount of space you want to hold. The relationship isn’t linear at all.
So either this government will give people what they want (which will absolutely include some kind of path to safety on climate change once the real ramifications of it start rolling in… which we’re already in the first inning of) or it will fall. And when it falls the people who take over will either have the legitimate will of the people behind them or we’ll almost immediately get another round of chaos. It’ll rinse and repeat until the average person is satisfied enough to no longer be willing to do something about it.
I definitely think it’s going to get worse before it gets better, but one of the few things I’m sure of is that the status quo will not hold more than another decade tops. And if it holds that long there will be blood.
Thankfully it’s pretty obvious that the powers that be know all this. There’s a reason why you’ve got guys like Ray Dalio, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates all but begging for a major reform of capitalism. It’s not because they are great humanitarians. It’s because the alternative is way worse and they know that they could lose literally everything including their lives and the lives of their children.
It wouldn’t exactly be unheard of for the rich to have the military slaughter millions to keep the rest of us in line. I don’t see any qualities in the plutocracy that makes me think they’ll behave nobly or rationally when their backs are to the wall.
I don’t mean to pick on you specifically, since I’ve seen this argument floated around a lot by all sorts of people, usually in defense of doing nothing. It has an incredible fatal flaw (among other problems with a line of reasoning like this) in that it assumes we are capable of realizing when our backs are against the wall. To use an animal analogy, we aren’t the dog being backed into a corner who will put up a fight, we are the frogs in a near-boiling pot of water. Just one more degree warmer won’t be so bad, right?
We will never come to agreement on when we’ve hit “the wall.” As ZZ is pointing out, the well-being of the class of people that have the power is specifically dependent on their rejection of the solutions we are putting forward for climate change (or outright rejection of the premise itself). Until something there changes (guillotines?), mankind will not make meaningful progress whatsoever in fighting this.
I often think that our only hope now isn’t the power of science, it’s actually the opposite–our only hope is for modern scientists to be wrong.
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On 2p2 there was an interesting take from Thremp of all people as to the likely medium-term effects of climate change, figured it was worth throwing in here:
I always assumed people were counting on geoengineering and there was just a gentlemen’s agreement not to talk about it in polite company.
Look at how Europe reacted when 3 million refugees arrived. Try to imagine what happens when 300 million Africans start marching because their homelands stricken by droughts and famine become unlivable.
I gotta be honest… I’m almost looking forward to it just from a Schadenfreude perspective. Here in the US we have plenty of open space to settle and will continue to be good at growing food… and if we aren’t there are vast chunks of Canada that are currently nearly uninhabitable that will be quite nice.
The world is going to change, but it isn’t going to end. And everything I just typed assumes we don’t just blot out the sun with artificial clouds of some kind while we get the carbon situation under control.
None of this is going to be pretty, but the people telling us that we won’t die aren’t wrong. Mesopotamia used to be a heck of a lot more green before humans ruined the soil with subsistence farming. This isn’t the first major ecological disaster the human race has caused. Life is going to get harder for everyone, but we’ll probably all still live similar middle class lives to the ones we live now when we’re old.
I don’t think schadenfreude is the word you want to be using when referring to 100’s of millions of people dying in developing countries.
I’m just hoping to fade the banking system collapsing before I can get my IRA into gold coins or something that isn’t being held by a corporation when society starts to break down. Because the first hint of real trouble will be too late. They aren’t giving that stuff back.
Then of course I have to worry about how to hide/defend my gold coins.
Not totally joking. Do bullets have a shelf life?
I was talking about the European reaction to it… because they absolutely won’t be able to stop that many people in any meaningful way. You’re right that I’m being pretty dark. Probably too dark. I just find their whining about the dilution of their culture super annoying given their legacy of colonialism in Africa.
Hopefully in historians won’t look at the rightward move in politics in the US and Europe as the precursor to devastating wars against people fleeing the warming in the south.
Oh, they could if they really wanted to. Pray that they never experience the conditions where they find the will to do so. First world genocide of third world refugees is a very real possibility. Perhaps even likely.