It's important to mention that the current-ish (started 10,000 years ago in the Younger Dryas) warmth of Interglacial era made us able to settle down and practise agriculture. Before that, for millions of years - we're stuck as Hunter-Gatherers, forever in the mercy of Nature.
Perhaps in the days of tomorrow, we will once again be in the mercy of Nature? Of course not, as long as we retain our technologies. Ergo, even if you (and I agree) don't think climate change will doom humanity as a whole, I'd still be sympathetic to rational campaigns reducing it's effects.
Humans and other species adapted to deal with climate change in the course of thousands if not millions of years.
If we seriously managed to change this within a century, I am fine with us being doomed.
the only thing that really worries me is humanity going back to pre-modern technology levels, this time with full-on communism added for good measure, all in the name of climate protection.
otherwise i find climate change to be something that prepares us for colonising other places: planets and climates change; 300 million years ago Venus was the place to be, today it's Earth, tomorrow it will be the outer planets, specifically their satellites. we weren't really aware of these changes, especially their magnitudes.
climate change brought it all out. it's up to us to learn from it so that we can control it. especially for the moment when we will unshackle ourselves from this solar system.
yes, i am extremely optimistic about the human race.
Climate change has caused famine and strife for humans in the past. It's one of the more common reasons for civilizational decline. Sure, this round of climate change is worse. But our ability to fend for ourselves is better.
My tongue-in-cheek answer to this question would be 'my genetic heritage' since that has 'survived' - nay, thrived - through far larger threats than that posed by the current iteration of the changing climate. Glaciation, really lethal pandemics, murderous hordes from the east, volcanic winters, you name it - Homo Sapiens came, saw, and conquered. We're a really adaptable species with a knack for solving problems.
A more down-to-earth answer is that I do not need a 'climate change survival strategy' just like I do not need an 'ice age survival strategy' or an 'asteroid strike survival strategy'. Yes, the climate changes just like it always has. It was warmer in the 1930's - the Dust Bowl years - than it is now, it was colder during the little ice age, it was drier. it was wetter, it was whatever you care to name and will be in the future. Add to that that I live on a 17th century farm which is heated by wood only - which I also use for cooking - and has access to a well which has never run dry in known history, with a 15 kW solar array on one of the barns and enough acreage to satisfy our needs we're well prepared for whatever comes our way.
Past human civilisations have fared poorly under even modest climate change. There's a strong argument that technological civilisation dependent on vast nonrenewable resource utilisation is not favourably positioned by comparison.
Large animal populations (> ~10kg) have responded poorly to larger ones, of the scale we're facing in < 100 years.
Your first statement makes sense. I don't agree with the rest though.
>> Yes, climate change will cause issues. Then again, the last glacial maximum was fairly recent, only ~20k years ago. Climate change has happened and will happen. And the world won't end. Either the Earth's systems will adapt, or we'll find a technological solution. Or maybe everyone will simply move to Canada, Russia, Greenland and Antarctica
There is a limit to the rate at which the ecological systems can cope up with the damage we are doing. We have no right to go on abusing the Earth's systems just because humans can save themselves using technology.
Civilization existed for around 10-15k years, around the time climate got stable enough to get agriculture in a scale to support big cities. The changes that had been since then in global climate weren't sudden enough to put that in danger. Eventually plants and animals adapt to hotter climate if given time and don't surpass some critical thresholds.
But we are changing climate at a speed which precedents were around mass extinctions. Adaptation will be hard, adaptation of what we need at the scale we need to support a civilization will be harder, and we don't know yet if we will cross some threshold that may be lethal for us, at least at the time scale we live.
And that is just about averages. In recent years we had big heatwaves covering most of US and Europe, reaching near 50ºC even at high latitudes. You may be able to survive averages, but what about peaks for 55ºC or more? Check your cooling devices and electrical grids safe margins if you think AC will save from that.
I do not doubt that the climate is changing nor I doubt that humans play a large factor in that. Yet I cannot gather the will to be afraid. It is true that we haven't faced this challenge from a prevention standpoint, at least not beyond small mitigations, but when has humanity embraced prevention from the start? We usually leave that as a lesson for the second time...
Climate change will stress our civilization and we will deal with that stress, becoming more capable and sophisticated in the process. Well that, or we will die. But that has been the deal since the start. Lets stay awake people, there will be lots of adapting to do!
Earths history has had many extraordinary climate changes, we already know of events like Permian–Triassic extinction.
I appreciate many people feel an obligation for humanity to minimise its effect on climate change, but the way I see it, change is constant. If we don’t cause an extinction event, earth will do it just fine without us.
The best result for humanity is if we get off this rock asap and improve our technology. The quicker we do this the better. If we have to ruin earth and its beautiful climate in the process, so be it.
While climate change is a serious problem it’s nowhere near an extinction level event for humanity.
While not an excuse to fuck up the planet more than we have had, we can pretty much turn it into a wasteland and still survive with modern technology it won’t be fun and it would cost many lives but realistically if you are living in a western country today you are both unfortunately and fortunately going to be shielded from most of it.
Move to high elevation and latitudes. Make use of shelter and caves. Make use of cooling technologies. Won't work for the large majority, but humans have survived ice ages and colonized the planet with much more primitive technology. I don't think any climate change scenario on Earth ends our species. Would end civilization as we know it.
But as a species we're too adaptable. Earth would have to turn into Venus, and that's not in the cards. Keep in mind that dinosaurs evolved in a 12°C warmer world. So it's not going to be deadly to all animal life.
Humans have an incredible history of adaptation and survival, and I do agree climate change is a big problem. The metrics are all going the wrong way, but I see the fallout (famine, disease, death, etc) as a natural corrective mechanism. Earth has a long history of hot and cold periods, the only difference being this time it's largely caused by humans.
We survived the plague, world wars, and much more, so I think we (as a species) will still be around on this rock for a long time to come.
We're just going to have to deal with the climate changes like we have since life first sprang upon the earth. Like it or not, most people are not willing to dramatically alter their way of life over this.
I am as concerned about climate change as anyone. I think it's the most serious problem we face today. But it is very important to keep some perspective here, if for no other reason, so that we who believe this is a serious problem don't lose credibility in the political battles to come.
1. Earth is not going to become Venus. The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead, hot enough to completely sterilize the planet. That is not going to happen here even under an absolute worst-case scenario.
2. Homo sapiens is almost certainly not going to go extinct even in a worst-case scenario. We are a very robust species capable of adapting to an extraordinarily wide variety of situations. We are very, very tough to kill en masse. We ourselves have tried to wipe out segments of our own population in the past and barely made a dent. The biggest killer in our history, bubonic plague, barely killed a third of us.
3. What is at risk, and what IMHO is worrisome, is the modern technological civilization we have built for ourselves. Our infrastructure and political systems are highly dependent on a stable climate. If we lose that, would could easily go back to the middle ages. (We probably won't go back to neolithic times because knowledge is also pretty robust, and we will almost certainly be able to keep basic technologies alive. But a Mad-Max type scenario is a real possibility.)
4. Colonizing the moon or other planets won't save us. All extra-terrestrial environments accessible to use with current technology are much harsher than earth will be even in a worst-case scenario. If we and our civilization can't survive here, we can't survive anywhere.
I think humanity can handle (adapt to) the combo of forests burning, ocean acidification, and thawing tundra. At great cost, measured in lives, gold, and lost opportunities, of course.
Until recently I considered the "clathrate gun" to be an extermination event. The earth hasn't had those level of CO2 and methane (in the air) since the Eocene (~2000 CO2 ppm). It's hard to imagine industry and agriculture functioning in that context.
But perhaps humans are more resilient. There's growing evidence validating the Young Dryas theory, where the global temps plunged and then spiked 1000 years later. Somehow humans survived, even though our fledgeling civilization was reset.
Human civilization has not flourished in a much warmer earth. That is 100% falase.
Human civilization has only existed during the Holocene, which has been a period of stability. We are now in the Anthropocene.
These changes are also very fast. By 2050, we will be living in a different world. Even in the 2030s, climate change will cause massive amounts of instability in developing countries due to droughts and famines, and huge migrant crises. It only takes 2-3 major food producing regions to have significantly failed harvests at once to have a famine on the scale of 1-2 billion going hungry. With a stable climate, this hasn't happened. However, it becomes more likely all the time.
The changes we are facing will lead to large portions of the tropics being uninhabitable without A/C and unsuitable for
agriculture. That is where most of the world lives. This change is happening very fast, faster than we can adapt. Our industrial civilization depends on immense resource consumption on a global scale. This will be completely disrupted.
Trust me, I know a lot about the climate and its effects. It is a bad thing. No one seriously says it isn't. It's delusional to think it could be a good thing. Your line of thinking is just a continuation of the denialist garbage that got us into this mess.
Can't we just take it for granted now the climate we've experienced as homo sapiens is going to change in a very huge way? We don't have the tech to direct the change, we don't have the political institutions to even stop our own contribution to the change. So let us start from the premise it will change and start working on ways to survive that change with some modicum of success rather than mass die offs.
Even as we start to see major changes to weather patterns globally, most people put up little more than nominal effort to avoid CO2 emissions and other damaging activities - for example, air traffic continues to grow [1].
We're likely to hit the point of no return on CO2 emissions within two decades [2]. Those with the resources to work towards reversing the damage at that point will also be the ones who can afford to comfortably adjust to changes in climate - which do you think will take priority? Meanwhile, those who are going to be hit hardest overwhelmingly cannot afford to avoid contributing to global warming, let alone actively combat it.
I'm sure civilization will survive - it's more a question of whether we'll ever do anything significant to stop climate change, or if we'll have to adjust to whatever new equilibrium the environment enters - and how much biodiversity and population loss will we sustain on the way there?
Perhaps in the days of tomorrow, we will once again be in the mercy of Nature? Of course not, as long as we retain our technologies. Ergo, even if you (and I agree) don't think climate change will doom humanity as a whole, I'd still be sympathetic to rational campaigns reducing it's effects.
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