> My most salient point is that proclaiming an "emergency" of an "existential threat" that requires centralized authority (held by decisionmakers who usually pay no cost for being wrong) is a playbook that's as old as history, and one that almost always resulted in great human toll.

We've known for more than 100 years that there might be an impact on our global climate from our use of fossil fuels. We've known for almost 50 years that there is an impact from our use of fossil fuels. After years of stalling and ignoring the ever stronger signals that something is amiss, the world came together in 2015 and agreed to limit the warming of the climate to 1.5°C.

Now in 2023 we've blown through that self-imposed limit.

The list of likely and dreadful consequences is long and known. I won't repeat them here. Many of them have grave consequences to our global society, some of them are very threatening to social stability. This will have dire consequences.

Up to now we've not really been acting. And we should, because with every passing day, the potential outcome slowly but surely slides more and more into the direction of global systemic collapse.

For me this is not a "climate crisis". It's a climate crisis, period.

The narrative about shrinking economies doesn’t make sense to me because for lots of countries like the US, they emitted more when their economies were smaller. We don’t want to go back to that.

I think pushing to reduce emissions by shrinking economies is unconscionable as it effectively corresponds to reducing standards of living across the world and particularly harms the poorest countries. I also dislike it because it is obviously politically unpalatable and so the people who favour it either long for some kind of authoritarian to impose it[1] or get to smugly say they were right while their desired plan doesn’t get implemented. I would much rather governments were pushed towards policies that would be desirable to people while also reducing emissions.

[1] I also note that the biggest authoritarian country is burning more and more coal with increasing emissions while the biggest non-authoritarian countries have falling emissions and growing economies.

Wouldn't surprise me at all to find the climate crisis receiving little substantial action until such a state of emergency has to be triggered to deal with it. It's all very well declaring a state of climate emergency as UK parliament did, and Ireland shortly after, actually treating it as an emergency has yet to happen.

So whether it's a good idea may not matter if it's left so long it's the only idea - I only hope that like in wartime, it's a temporary state of affairs.

The climate crises is one which will take more than one generation to fix. But the fight is worthwhile and not impossible to win.

We build social infrastructure that is incredibly resistant to change by design to protect ourselves and provide stability - but climate change is demanding massive changes which we are ill equipped to deal with politically.

Traditionally we solve these moments in history with revolution to demand change - but climate change is happening too slowly for complacent human mindsets to react that way at a scale that it requires as a crisis.

It is quite horrifying watching it play out in slow motion. This will not end well.

I agree with you to some degree, but I am not sure it is helpful to even talk like this at this point in time. It's basically a war of ideology -- we can change if enough of us want to change, we're not reliant on technical progress to react in time, there just has to be enough willpower from the population to force change.

We are highly confident that we're causing it. Let's not even talk about things like blame or ethics or morality, if that's not a helpful way of thinking. Let's be coldly pragmatic. The predicted consequences of not taking appropriate preventative actions are catastrophic. The predicted consequences of taking appropriate preventative measures are merely quite unpleasant. So we should do something about it, immediately. We've had the last 45 years for analysis.

Sure, more research is a great idea, but the action / analysis ratio should be tipped to about 99% action and 1% analysis at this point.

To end on a positive note, German citizens have made good progress on taking control of their local government, de-privatised their local energy production, and pushing a shift toward renewable energy. It provides an example that genuine change can be made at the local level, even when higher levels of government aren't taking sufficient action. In turn, then that puts pressure on higher levels of government, and the rest of society, and slowly we make progress

[1] - http://polyp.org.uk/cartoons/environment/polyp_cartoon_globa...

I want to hope people will adjust deliberately, but advertising has too much power over people. I cannot let myself gamble with the idea that humanity will be courageous enough to avoid destruction of this scale. The stakes are too high.

History always worked like this. It's a collection of new lessons that adjust the collective consciousness.

The future will progressively look like some Hollywood dystopia, until something will break politically, but it will be too late. Don't forget that the new deadline is the melting permafrost, which will snowball climate change into something that will make temperature rise much faster.

Another example, the war in Ukraine is accelerating the clean energy revolution in Europe, cutting down on air pollution. How's that going to help their drought? Will the EU act on national interests?

Or, correction, there's one way to get them to do that: Point guns at them.

(Un?)fortunately, the vast majority of the developed world lives under democratic government, and the same people who would rather not massively and suddenly reduce their wealth and quality of life in response to future predictions also would rather not have martial law imposed to convince them to do so.

So the "tiny ineffectual reductions from current emission levels" is the only possible framework under which any kind of preemptive climate action can actually happen. You're correct that there's no way this can solve the problem; the correct response is to understand that we're just basically fucked and the only ways out include things like "establish, by force, oppressive totalitarian global state oriented around climate management" which would damage the future world we live in just as much as climate change would, but in a different way.

We're just fucked. And there's a certain liberty in that! You don't have to worry about whether or not we'll fix the problem; we won't, so there's no troublesome uncertainty. Just go see the sights around the world you'd like to see before they're destroyed.

We will obviously settle on war.

Nature does not dole out milder climates to countries which pollute less either. We're all in the same boat.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act.

Yes, the proposed changes might be inconvenient but it’s time we suck it up and do the needful. Small steps are not good enough. We need drastic measures.

For us to get off this mindless hamster wheel of greed, some sort of climate catastrophe has to happen. Something like The Day After Tomorrow will have to affect the world for people to finally sit up and say, wow we let greedy corporations destroy the world we live in. Let's not live like this anymore.

I hate how cynical this sounds but I agree with you - I don't see a positive way out of this anymore.