[srgpqt]

Like the boiled frog, perhaps we have not even realized that we are already cooked/doomed.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I don't know, I feel like it's already pretty obvious that we're "cooked/doomed", with some caveats:

1. Even in the worst case I haven't seen any level-headed scientists argue that the Earth will be uninhabitable a la Venus. We'll get a hotter planner, sea levels will rise considerably inundating coastal areas, the current anthropocene extinction event will accelerate, storms will be a lot more intense, etc. Obviously a major set of problems, but I think it's important to be specific about what those problems will be as opposed to "we'll all be dead".

2. Whenever someone even remotely argues that we'll be able to stick to some reasonable emissions targets I like to show this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emission.... That is, it's good news that global emissions have largely stabilized over the past decade, but we're still pumping out over 35 billion tons of carbon every year. We need to find a way, somehow, to bring that to near 0, and while tech may get us there eventually I don't see that happening in my lifetime (I'm middle aged).

[snarf21]

Agreed .. A lot of people will die as places become uninhabitable for a very very long time .. Access to clean water will become a major issue and the poor will lose (even more than they already are) .. Humans are a greedy species and this planet just can't support 8B+ (and counting of us) .. I don't know what it can support but we'll soon find out .. We are still decades away from near zero fossil fuels globally and yet we are still growing crops in the desert and watering it so people can have fun hitting a white ball .. Even if we can get to near 100% wind/solar/battery, we'll be busy polluting anything and everything with rare earth minerals as we churn through batteries like candy .. I don't see life being very fun in 50 years, even for the richest people

[jlarocco]

It seems pretty optimistic to say it's "stabilized over the past decade".

If I'm reading correctly, between 2011 and 2021 (the last year in the graph) there was an increase of 5 billion tons, and that was certainly helped by the big drop during the pandemic...

[hedgehog]

Depending what all the other effects you describe do to food production and communicable disease spread "we'll all be dead" may be only a moderate exaggeration of the effect over say a century or two.

[mullingitover]

The vast majority of human history has been the Stone Age. It’s the stable state. What’s doomed is this temporary blip that has resulted from the explosion of free energy.

The human species will survive and will simply go back to the Stone Age and stay there another million years, this time without the risk of stumbling onto vast amounts of easy, free, dangerous carbon-based energy.

[WeylandYutani]

Nah we realise. But there's nothing that you can do about it.

Reminds me of Dutch Jews in WW2 who tried to live a normal life until the police came to collect them.

[netsharc]

And if your area's electricity grid goes down?

Even France had a problem with keeping their nuclear power plant running last year, the rivers didn't have enough water for cooling, and they weren't allowed to dump overly heated water because it would hurt the environment, so the only solution was to reduce production...

[paganel]

We weren't cooked/doomed for about two years recently. Sometimes I miss the pandemic and those two years only because that apocalypse at least had an end in sight when it came to the "educated" public's reaction to it, this climate thing is the new year 1000 hysteria [1], it's just unfortunate that it will spread over the next decades.

[1] https://www.bu.edu/history/files/2011/10/11.Fear-of-an-Apoca...

[anon25783]

The ten hottest summers on record happened in the last fifteen years. The number one hottest is this summer we're experiencing right now. And you call this "hysteria"?