But its happening already right now, it will just become very much worse over the next three to six generations.. it is also clear what we would need to mitigate right now.. not doing it is robbing us of any future options.
But I'm still wanting and waiting to here just one concrete option (which if not simpler nor cheaper than preventing further greenhouse gas emissions I'm not sure why we would want to do those then at all) that could help the e.g. surely unavoidable famine problem that we will encounter if world cements its path towards 3-4°C? There is just none even imaginable..
> Or continued serious drought, or climate migration, or massive heat die-offs, etc.
It seems fairly obvious that we do not have the collective will to make the kind of changes necessary to meaningfully change the trajectory of climate change. Might as well spend our efforts planning on how we will live with it, as it happens. I doubt we will have any more success in the future finding the will to try geoengineering, either. We will just find millions of little ways to mitigate the pain.
It may be difficult to predict exactly what that scenario entails. Sure we have models etc but it’s still uncharted territory. Plus it’s not like there’s 1 magic threshold we can pass and then it doesn’t matter anymore — the main means of mitigation long term would still be the same as what is already being advocated for.
Regarding something like trying to do something to reduce the average global temperature…the risks of getting something wrong attempting that likely outweigh the benefits.
There are, but it requires sustained international cooperation at a level rarely (if ever) seen. The arbitrary flip-flopping of US policy regarding climate change mitigation isn't helping.
The closest we have come to such a feat would be outlawing of some ozone depleting chemicals 2 decades ago. It's highly unlikely we will be able to accomplish this. Any sustained international response will undoubtedly be reactionary instead of proactive.
I'm not saying that the climatologists need to make a plan. But someone does, and so far I haven't seen any credible road map that gets us to net zero quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change.
It seems there is no non-radical future - either we face catastrophic climate change or unimaginable changes to our way of life.
Unfortunately, even if we stopped all global emissions at this very moment we will not avoid all of the serious outcomes from climate change. That doesn't mean that we should give up, but we should prepare for the world to keep changing. That means that we need people working on solving emissions but also that we need people working on adaptation to the changing world.
Adaptation is a lot less sexy than directly solving climate change, but if we don't do it a lot more people are going to have a much worse quality of life than they need to.
We are already putting major stress to the environment, so we might need to experiment a bit with different methods to better understand and control climate. The problem is that changing the earth’s climate can only be done at a global scale, so this is a project where every country needs to cooperate and requires incredible amounts of trust on each other… (which I don’t think will happen soon enough)
- restrict the ability of communities and individuals to save and prepare.
- empower political elites to perform dramatic and expensive climate change mitigations, which simultaneously have no reliability based on prior successful predictive models, and enrich their powerful elite allies.
We can solve it. The Great Depression measurably delayed the impact of climate change, and with advances in fusion and solar technology carbon capture is rapidly becoming a reality.
That we so far haven't bothered trying because it would cost rich people some money is unconscionable, but that doesn't mean it is impossible. The science of environmental repair will need a broad base of support, but it is our best hope to still be able to exist as a species.
You say that like such a thing couldn't possibly happen in the future. We're an ill-advised tweet away from yet another military engagement that could drag on for decades.
There's also the possibility that the collective world will finally commit to action on climate change and start dumping money into technology, any technology, that could tilt things in our favour.
It's astonishing to me that during the Manhattan Project they tried every possible thing, both methods for uranium enrichment, both fundamental types of weapon, explored all possible avenues, and yet today the US can't be arsed to spend a dime on preventing climate change.
That would require policy makers admitting they were wrong, and having to take some initiative on the subject of climate engineering. I don’t see either happening any time soon.
if we can't even do one thing at once given decades of trying (deal with climate change), we definitely can't do that one thing plus another thing (deal with AI)
My point was more around addressing global warming from the perspective of mitigation rather than prevention. There seems to be a lot of reports that indicate our opportunity for preventing global warming has passed or will soon pass[0][1][2]. So if that's the case, it seems like it would be pretty important to work on solutions to survive the effects of global warming instead.
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