I would consider all of these to be "catastrophic" but some may not consider migrations + damagaes to be "catastrophic."
So what will happen if that gets disrupted? And badly disrupted, while at it. And while that is happening, multiple other things pile up in different ways everywhere?
Thats the danger. You don't die from climate change. You may occasionally die from increasingly frequent extreme weather, a flood because rains, some dam break, extended forest fires and so on. But that is not a single catastrophic event that kill billions. What will kill billions are losing food security in big scale, no safe/climate controlled place to live, violence and wars, widespread diseases and no way to help. In some years to decades millions to billions may die by that combination of factors.
So no, it wont be a single day, sudden event that will kill billions. Is the breakup of the system that holds it together. Agriculture needs a stable climate, megacities need food, the economic system depend on more things, and everything else is packed together. And the first wave of deaths will be just the start.
Really underestimating the amount of deaths that will occur when our food production systems start collapsing.
I have not seen evidence that there will be food system collapse driven by climate change that would be worse than those events, but my ears are open if you have some.
If our food production goes down significantly, that will raise prices which will let wages for farm workers rise to the point where more people will be willing to do the job. Will it be unpleasant? Sure, but not to the point of famine, we'll just go back to spending a larger portion of our household budgets on food like we used to fifty years ago.
The higher global average temperatures alone are already a yearly catastrophe, by this standard.
An expensive liability? Definitely. A civilization or nation ending event? Unlikely.
If you draw the line at the year 2100, things are uncomfortable but maneagable. If your horizon is 2300 or 2500, you get a different story. But you would hope that in tha sort of time frame, we have time to adapt.
Would Canada be able to build a seawall to protect Vancouver? I am not sure.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-announces-high-spee...
I fully expect no workarounds will be done just like Climate Change Mitigations. Getting off fossil fuels should have been seriously started 30 years ago, and maybe even 50 years ago. Instead the politicians have been adding hot air talking and fighting instead of doing real work.
We are now seeing this repeat with "engineered workarounds", no one wants to pay for it, so yes I call BS on the article.
All I can say is I feel real bad the past generations did nothing to really reverse CC, people being born now are looking at a very bleak future.
The sooner we start, the cheaper it will be, so we shouldn't put it off, but it's not going to kill everyone or even convince everyone to leave NYC in the foreseeable future.
These underlying assumptions being incorrect are the reason climate alarmist move the goal posts every year.
Most others in the climate science debate have been far more realistic and measured. Similarly, I tend to ignore everything from David Wallace-Wells, another person who has written a ton on climate but from a very different political perspective, who has also been quite wrong.
How about explaining why he is wrong? Don’t just respond with incredulousness and generalizations and assumptions.
Unless AMOC collapses and we foolishly trip into another glacial period, the 200ft increase in sea level is inevitable in the next thousand years, but totally manageable for the continents. It's the oceanic mountaintops, aka, low level islands, and coastal cities that are at risk. Most of those cities are already filled with happy rich people who will have been long gone decades, or even centuries before Florida and Bangladesh are submerged and Russia, Australia and Canada are booming with happy with abundant rainfall, crops and awesome weather.
It just seems like focusing on ameliorating pain and focusing on the making the inevitable a better outcome is the most important focus for the next few decades.
What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.
That's not a reason to not do anything about it, but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.
Earth's climate has been stable during the rise of human civilisation. It has changed more in the past 100 years than in the past 200,000.
It's true it's changed often over the course of the 4 billion year history of the pkanet. It's not true to claim it's fluctuated wildly over the course of human civilisation.
> What causes this climate change, how much infuence humans have on it, and how much we could possibly do about it is unclear.
False.
It's clear the cause is the increased insulation factor of the atmosphere. It's clear this change has been in the majority due to human activity dragging up millions of years worth of past captured C02 via fossil fuel extraction.
> That's not a reason to not do anything about it,
Naturally, because as stated it is false to claim the cause is unclear.
> but there's also no reason to be super intense about it.
Sure. It's true that no one alive today in a G20 non equatorial country need fuss much about it - all the real serious consequence will fall after their lives have passed.
I don't think so.
Look at sea level: 125,000 years ago, sea level was 8 m higher. 20,000 years ago, sea level was 130 m lower. [0]
So over the past 200,000 years sea level has varied ~ 138 meters. It hasn't varied that much over the past 100 years.
Everything that is "modern human civilisation" from, say, early Egyptian onwards (following the formation of the Sahara some 6,000 years past) has taken place in a period of climatc stability.
Point being, come climatic change on that scale again, the planet and various eco systems will adapt and move on, human civilisation patterns as we know them from history will be heavily jarred.
Cheers for that.
But what about the year 2200, or 2300? At three degrees warming per century, the earth looks like a pretty hostile place to live in a few centuries.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit", and all that...
In fact I suspect that Gates would be dismissed as too woke for making this one of his main points:
> But we can’t cut funding for health and development—programs that help people stay resilient in the face of climate change—to do it.
> It’s time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the Green Premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
This is just rehashed Green New Deal language for the global stage. (Something I fully support!!)
Nordhous: "The amount of warming that is conceivable … is not remotely consistent with the sorts of catastrophic outcomes … where tens or hundreds of million, perhaps even billions of lives were at stake."
Gates: "Although climate change will have serious consequences — particularly for people in the poorest countries — it will not lead to humanity’s demise."We've known for almost a decade now that the RCP8.5 scenarios are no longer on the table, and even that worst case scenario wasn't civilization ending.
I read Bill Gates' note as not an evolution on his view at all, it seems 100% consistent with everything he has worked for, but rather trying to place climate change in a more humanity-focused context for evaluating tradeoffs of where to put money. That's very important for governments and for wealthy philanthropists like him, and for the COP 3 audience he's talking to.
Did you see what happened in Europe with a rather small mass migration 10/15 years ago due to Arab Spring ? People have short memories.
Can you imagine what will happen when 100 of thousands start migrating north when they can no longer feed themselves and maybe even work outside ? Italy was close to sinking boats coming across the the sea. Other countries in the EU started building walls. And even Germany took a slight right turn. Once these large migrations start, I expect bombs will be dropped. Same applies to North America.
And yet, sentence from current top comment: " We're in a mass extinction."
Can you explain why you think these contradict each other?
At the rate that temperature is increasing, assuming it is not stopped, it's not a matter of will there be an extinction event within the next few hundred years, but how bad will it be.
my favorite was getting told we "deserved it" for being in Texas during the ice apocalypse, because Texas is a red state.
I hope that people exhibiting that kind of behavior are finally starting to question whether or not it's helpful. The article suggests that is perhaps beginning to happen.
If you want people to make sacrifices to improve the future, just maybe messaging that it's hopeless and anyone who doesn't see that is stupid isn't the best strategy for effecting real change
> for being in Texas
News flash: climate change by and large isn't about the US, and US will be one of the least impacted nations of first hand climate change effects.
The bullying and name calling were intolerable. Even suggesting that the earths demise was not immediate would label you a denier and ignorant about the undeniable science behind the alarms.
It seems the tide is turning and some of the leading voices in the earth-is-cooking camp are now walking things back.
Don’t wait for an apology, though.
Why would a serious author go with this image? Just a few years ago, misspelling "climate" and having nonsensical political cartoon to headline your article would have just been disqualifying.
Queue the “always have been” meme.
A. Have some relevance to the actual content.
B. Don't exhibit glaringly obvious AI flaws (polydactyly, faces like melted wax candles, etc.).
It's amazing how little time people take to vet images that are intended to be the first thing viewers will see.
Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the founding members of OpenAI) Twitter post on founding an education AI lab:
I'm not so concerned about disasters or economic impacts, I just have a deep moral belief that we should leave our environment the same as when we entered it. We know that fossil fuels release pollution that we have no technology to clean up. We we should not be using it. It's not rocket science.
Admittedly, it makes no rational sense go without today so that future humans can experience the earth in the same way I have. I understand why many people dismiss risks of things unlikely to effect them or their children, but to me to feels wrong, and I would like to have as little impact on the climate as I can.
https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/wmo-confirms-2024-warmest-...
The irony is that without them, you (wherever you are) and I (wherever I am) could not be trading messages. Every bit you send and every pixel lit has a fossil fuel cost associated with it.
Our world 100% runs on fossil fuels and right now there is no alternative that rids us of them that can be made without them. No replacement technology can be developed that won’t employ fossil fuels even further to excess in its creation. So “not using it” is not an option. Cutting back is not an option. The only way to replace them is to extract, refine, and burn more and hopefully that investment can be the one that gets us the returns we need to hopefully one day eliminate our dependency.
That is, if there are any people in 3000. Nuclear war is still the number one problem. AI is a candidate for number two right now; the next decade should clarify things.
If you look at the chart in the link above, it's very clear there has been a dramatic change in the last 50 years. There has also been a dramatic rise CO2 emissions in a similar period. I don't think its unreasonable to assume the two are linked.
Even if you were to concede we cannot prove that our emissions are causing the change, we should at least acknowledge that there is some chance that they are. We can't do anything about the earth naturally warming itself, so there is no action required in that scenario, but we can reduce our emissions in the chance they are damaging the earth.
Lucky for your conscience the world doesn't give a shit about global warming, nor your realization that you can't do anything about it
Of course the world is fucked
After 25 years of dire, ‘existential’ warnings, the political messaging is beginning to taper off and moderate.
It’s a necessary step. If you tell people the worlds about to end for too long, you lose credibility with all but the true believers.
Apologies are due to everyone that was fried on social media for suggesting things were not as bad as described. Anyone not fully radicalized was declared a ‘denier’ and accused of being ignorant about the overwhelming science.
It seems the people who acknowledged the climate was changing, but did not consider it an immediate, existential threat now have the high scientific ground. It seems possible they’ll keep it.
I'm ~50, and my whole life, back to the 80's, there have been these sort of breathless extreme articles about the existential threat that climate poses. I remember, as a kid, it was global cooling, and we were all going to have to deal with an ice age, which terrified me.
Then it was global warming, and the "tipping point" and hawaii and all of our coastal cities were going to be under water within 5 years.
Then it was "climate change" which was poorly defined to me, but humans were definitely to blame, and causing hurricanes and destroying the planet - even though when I bothered to look at the actual data, the rate of hurricanes and other events had actually decreased.
I've read some super compelling articles from what I'll call "measured environmentalists" that argue persuasively that to do the most good for people, we should shift our focus to immediate harms that we can actually control well - things like malaria, and reliable clean water and heating, that would have a far greater impact for tens of millions of people than something nebulous like carbon credits.
I'm far from an expert on this stuff, I just wish that the conversation (as with so many things) could have less yelling, and more considered thoughtful discussion. This article, and Gates' seem to be a great start.
This is the kind of stuff one should take in from one ear, and let it out through the other ear without letting it touch the brain.
[1] complexity in the sense of mathematics.
That makes it at least as valuable to me as any given "we're all going to die" article that pops up endlessly in these kinds of discussions.
I agree though, that a big problem with these conversations is dealing with complex systems, small signals and potentially large impacts and communicating all that in an effective way.
Most people (myself included) are simply not equipped to understand the details, so we rely on others to explain it to us.
My point was just that I enjoy a more balanced take on the issue.
In a well-established field like Physics or Biology, if an expert is talking about the established part of their field, they can just say things and you can trust that they are correct. If they saying things about the unestablished parts of their field - say a physicist talking about string theory - they need to properly cite stuff.
In a not so well established field like Climate Science, where there is a lot of disagreement, every expert needs to cite their sources so people in adjacent fields can verify what they are saying.
"To know, and not yet to do, is not to know" - Aristotle.
Everyone still flies on planes. Ceasing burning kerosene is the easiest possible thing you could do to reduce your climate impact, but no-one does it.
Everyone hates being called out on it, but it is true. No-one really cares, because no-one is prepared to make a socially costly signal, costly in prestige or relationships or group membership. It's all posturing.