I guess we've decided that temperatures in 1850 were the perfect temperatures, and we're going to stick with them. If humans continue to live in a peaceful and technological world over thousands or millions of years, the natural climate ups and downs will seem to be suddenly forced into an unnaturally straight line, starting somewhere around now, due to everyone being unwilling to allow change.
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.
The climate will be changing, there is plenty of science supporting that. It doesn't take much change to push a lot of places into unlivable territory, it doesn't have to be apocalyptic to cause immense instability. If temperatures keep trending upward where I live I don't plan to stick around, it's already peaking at 50c.
Agree. Still, most people seem to be under the impression that there's a "tipping point" and then temperatures will spiral into infinity.
It's disruptive, but nature and humanity is adaptive. Many species will also thrive, and total agricultural output will rise with more co2 in atmosphere.
We are not going to a new normal, because even if we stop everything feedback loops will keep worsening things till we can't adapt anymore, will be no mark in the sand saying that we will stay there.
It is not just about temperature, or sea level, is a system where we thrived while it was stable enough, going to a long period of chaos. Agriculture and food production in general, infrastructure, travel and more will be increasingly disrupted.
Passive adaptation may not be the way out, just letting the water to boil up till the frog is cooked, or risk ending things faster with the some of the surprises that climatologist are getting year to year. Stopping or compensating emissions, and aggressive/extensive carbon capture may be a way out. Going into silos much like what happened in Wool may be another (where a lot of things can go wrong, anyway).
The issue is that we crossed those previous thresholds and ... the world kept improving?
If you look at sites like Our World in Data then nearly all metrics of human progress have dramatically improved over the past century, while temperatures increased 1°C.
So it isn't clear that another degree increase will lead to catastrophe. The numbers are round and arbitrary. Our increased wealth and technology has improved lives far, far more than the increased temperature has diminished them, and I don't see why that trend won't continue.
Temperatures rising and falling over hundreds and thousands of years is indeed natural. The system is in constant flux, with or without us. Our acceleration of this process by releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gasses in a relatively short period of time, however, is not.
Limiting our interference in this natural process will necessitate vast methods and quantities of 'control'. Nevertheless, it should be done. And fortunately, this process will herald a new economic expansion providing jobs and creativity outlets for countless people worldwide.
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.
When will this torrent of panic porn related to 'climate' let off? Probably only when there is a more immediate, more tangible, more real threat to write about - war, famine, pestilence and death come to mind and all seem to be champing at the bit to be let free. It is not as if the climate has been static during the evolution of Homo Sapiens and still we made it through, through the Roman and Viking warm periods, through the little ice age, through the volcanic winters of Tambora and Krakatoa, through the several plague epidemics, through the decimation of the population due to several famines, through the most recent glaciation and through the massive changes caused by the industrial revolution and - lo and behold - through the more intense warm period of the 1930's which (together with certain agricultural practices) gave rise to the Dust Bowl in the USA.
Earth will abide. Mankind will abide. The climate will keep changing as it has always done. Some areas will become more amenable to agriculture, others will become less so. The planet will become greener due to the increased carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and later it will become more barren when the carbon dioxide content goes down again as it has done countless times already.
That doesn't mean conditions will be to our liking under those regimes. We built cities along coasts assuming a certain mean sea level. We built farms assuming certain weather patterns.
If we cause large changes to these patterns in a relatively short period of time that's bad. The long-term trends you are talking about happened very slowly - slowly enough in theory a city could move back from the shoreline without anyone noticing it was happening. Slowly enough that species can migrate or adapt to them - slow enough natural selection can produce individuals more heat or cold adapted.
Climate change isn't going to cause humans to go extinct or anything like that. But it is going to have large and sometimes unpredictable effects, most of which are not useful or helpful to us. Many of which are actively detrimental.
Since the oil/coal/natgas will eventually run out anyway and the world so depends on them that gives leverage to people who really really want to hurt us: we might as well just deal with it and move away from burning things as much as possible.
Source? We are destroying a lot of the negative feedback mechanisms (e.g. clearing rain forests, destroying the tundra, etc) what makes you sure we will be okay? A 4-5 degree Celsius increase in temperature is looking likely by 2100. If that is extrapolated out a few million years doesn’t seem plausible.
Well, I think that people will have major changes to the status quo as climate changes become more extreme and habitable zones start to become inhabitable.
It's going to be at least one of the following:
incremental changes while we transition (and learn to tolerate the warmer climate), political upheaval and/or civil wars, OR geoengineering. And probably some of each.
I somewhat agree. A climate several degrees warmer than recent history seems like it would be beneficial; in the past, warmer periods coincided with a lush and rich biosphere. More energy is available to life.
Like you, long-term, I'm more worried about the upcoming ice age than runaway global warming. We know how to fix global warming, and will in the next hundred years: Nuclear and solar.
But... warming can still be very disruptive in the short term. Coastlines moving a few hundred feet might be disastrous for entire regions. Staple crops failing in one nation and blooming in another may cause refugees, famine, and war. Politics is local.
A warmer world in equilibrium would not be the problem; our main problem is that we are set up for this configuration as stable (location of cities, local knowledge, crops, culture, ..) and it will be hard to adapt on the way to a new equilibrium, because the conditions are constantly changing.
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