> The difference is that an asteroid is an existential threat to humanity while climate change is just short of that.
This is a valid point.
To clarify, though, I don't think climate change is likely to make humans extinct, but I believe it has a non-trivial chance of destroying our civilization.
If/when the climate gets really bad, human irrationality will go into overdrive, and we'll be a massive danger to ourselves.
> the people claiming that humans will be extinct in 50 years because of climate change are completely out of their minds. It sounds like a religious argument to me, not one based on the science. Humans are cockroaches; we're not going anywhere unless an asteroid hits the earth.
If the clathrate gun goes off, that's an asteroid-level extinction event. It doesn't look super likely at this point, but we simply don't know enough to be sure.
Why is it so commonplace now to conflate climate change with basically armageddon? I thought that most models predict some hard times (mass migrations and everything bad that comes with it), but species extinction (or even, civilization collapse) is still a fringe belief among the scientists.
> Does sustainability or climate change matter if humanity goes extinct?
These can be linked, though. I have a lot of young people around me who are hesitant to have kids because of climate change and the period of instability their offspring would be born into. If we manage to address climate change, people may well enjoy the prospect more again.
> The last time we had this much carbon in the atmosphere was about 50 million years ago, and the global temperature was about 8C higher than it is now. That is not survivable for modern technological civilization.
Where is the source for dramatic statements like this, that Earth won't be survivable for modern technological civilization?
We literally have people living in the vacuum of space, the bottom of the ocean, and the antarctic continent. Sure climate change could be devastating to ecosystems, disproportionately affect poor people, and make things harder on ourselves, but I find the idea that it would be civilization ending kind of unrealistic.
> If an asteroid was about to direct hit in say 2029. Would society just argue on the internet and die?
I think many people would deny the asteroid exists and populists would claim it's a lie to put more money in the pockets of Big NASA government bureaucrats.
We might well die.
I think too many people are assuming that climate change will get worked out because previous threats to humanity have. As they say in investing, past performance does not predict future results.
Well yes, at our current technology levels ecological and climate based collapse has almost no chance of making humans 100% extinct. But I don't think that anyone is arguing the opposite.
The moral calculus for addressing climate change isn't that affected by differences in the survival rate of 0% vs 5% vs 50%. All of the above would be catastrophically bad in human terms.
> isn’t it folly as none of us will survive and it is akin to species suicide?
Do you have a link to a credible source that predict human extinction? Someone serious like the IPCC.
Most model predict huge problems and catastrophes. If the hot and low level part of the word become more difficult to inhabit, there may be huge migrations and perhaps wars.
Imagine something like: Everyone moves from the south of India to Siberia, and that makes India and Russia unhappy. But in most models the change is slow, so perhaps something like this can be done peacefully. (I guess not 100% peacefully, but I hope with a small amount of problems.)
What are the predictions for the increase of the sea level and temperature in 2119?
> But I don't agree we're all going to die. It's not a human extinction type problem. There will still be habitable places and some places will become more habitable (the Russians even had a crazy plan in the 60s to dam the Bering strait and melt the Arctic with nukes to make Siberia more habitable.... :X )
It is a "human extinction type problem" (and likely most if not all life on Earth) … not necessarily directly killed by the climate itself, but by the way that stressed out stupid "people in power" react to the stresses brought on by that changing climate. We have entirely too many literally insane people in positions of power commanding weaponry that could conceivably wipe out all of humanity (and much if not all of the other life on this planet), and we're doing very little to rein them in or control them. Feels like a very real danger to me.
> Climate change is absolutely not an existential risk.
That's an assessment based on what we know, but there's a lot we don't. For instance, it's possible that climate change could lead to a large scale collapse of food chains that could pose an existential risk to humanity.
It's also plausible that climate change will lead to resource shortages that result in wars between nuclear powers, and the nuclear calamity that follows kills us all.
>> The worst case scenario for global warming is that it's an extinction-level event and civilization ends.
>I don't buy that. Beginning of a new dark age with a breakdown of civilization and loss of advancements? Yes. Extinction-level event? No.
Extinction-level event is a scientific term which refers to the rate of extinctions and the associated loss of biodiversity, it doesn't necessarily mean that we all die. And if you think there's a meaningful distinction between "civilization ends" and "breakdown of civilization"... wow, okay.
> Usually the life responds by getting extinct, as seen in so many species lately.
Do you have a count of how many have gone extinct in the past decade?
> What makes you think humans are special?
Our brains. And yes, technology and science. Humans are extremely adaptable. Our ancestors survived an ice age with stone aged tech and spread around the world to live in all sorts of environments.
> Not even going underground en masse will work
LOL, what? Who is saying that the Earth will become so hot that we won't be able to survive on the surface? You think 3-4°C is going to have that effect?
>The notion that humanity would go extinct from any of this is absolutely unrealistic
Why not?
With the current societal focus on materialism and luxury, perpetuation of greed and glorification of power, climate need not do much. Wipe out some fraction of the population is all it needs to do.
The rest will be done by us.
The last two people will fire bombs at each other and kill each other for sure.
> There was a time when I was fairly sure that climate change would lead to the collapse of civilization, but there was no way I'd live to see it. Now I'm not so sure about the latter.
Even if climate change significantly affects our lives, why would it cause civilization to collapse? It seems just as plausible that adverse conditions will increase the necessity of civilization, of strong social bonds and mutal reliance.
It's very interesting to me that, when talking about climate change, we tend to assume everything is negative. Surely there are some upsides (the only one I ever hear about is Arctic shipping routes). But I think we have no good reason to be making claims like "civilization will collapse". This seems like millenarian thinking, people like the idea of living in the end times.
> I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects.
I'm not entirely sure. People seem to be convinced that climate change will destroy all civilization, but in the distant past the earth has flourished with significantly higher temperatures than what we have today. Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK.
And we can be certain that there will be a new equilibrium, otherwise life wouldn't have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.
>> If we're too survive we need to do both steps as of yesterday,
Huge supporter of climate change action, but scientifically is there any basis for the idea that current models point to human extinction? (Don't answer if you don't have a hard source, but I'd like what the projected point is for that)
Except that the planet has been warming and cooling for millions of years.
To put into perspective:
Age of Earth: 4.6 billion years
How long Dinosaurs lived: 400 million years
Age of humans: 200,000 years.
The human species is literally less than a blip on the earth's historical radar. I'm convinced whatever we do to the planet, it will recover, like it always has. Humans not adapting? That's the real problem.
This is a valid point.
To clarify, though, I don't think climate change is likely to make humans extinct, but I believe it has a non-trivial chance of destroying our civilization.
If/when the climate gets really bad, human irrationality will go into overdrive, and we'll be a massive danger to ourselves.
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