The initial pain will be diffuse and not obviously caused by global warming.
For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.
Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.
Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.
That's the sum of climate change. "GDP growth of 3% instead of 5%."
Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount of otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.
And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.
That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.
By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and is cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives.
Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.
And then when the GDP finally collapses, there will have been nothing that could be done about it for the last 50 years and they'll ask wtf we were doing in 2040, why we didn't stop it then.
That's the nasty thing. It doesn't "finally collapse".
The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going.
There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse". A loss of what could have been.
Whether there will be a global catastrophe or not, it is unknown yet and unpredictable.
There are many mechanisms of positive feedback that can accelerate global warming instead of just reaching an equilibrium at a higher average temperature than now.
If some of those mechanisms of positive feedback would be triggered, a global catastrophe would be possible, due to the excessive speed of the climate change, which does not give enough time for the biosphere to adapt to it.
Instead of hoping that we will be lucky, it would have been much better to avoid such risks and prevent further increases in CO2 concentration and average temperature.
I am old enough to have seen a dramatic change in climate from the time when I was a child, when the seasons were still exactly as they had been described for centuries and millennia at that location in Europe, to the present time, when winters are no colder than autumns were before and I have never used again my winter clothes and boots for about 15 years.
I find such a radical change during my lifetime quite scary and I see no evidence for claims that "the world will keep going". The truth is that nobody knows whether this will be true and hoping that this will happen without doing anything to guarantee such an outcome is reckless.
There is not enough "positive feedback" going around in the system to do anything of the sort.
Plenty of feedback mechanisms were proposed, investigated, and found lacking. It's a "makes climate change 10% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing, not a "makes climate change 1000% worse than it would otherwise have been" kind of thing.
Making the temperature rise 10% worse doesn't mean the GDP impact won't be 1000% worse.
There's only so much worse things can get before the fundamentals of civilization aren't there any more. 3 meals a day from anarchy.
The world got hit with WW2 and moved on. It takes a lot to destroy "the fundamentals of civilization" on a global level. Climate change is woefully insufficient.
The problem is that we will not move on from WW3, and famine, water depletion, resource exhaustion etc. are all existential problems for individual countries that will cause conflicts between previously peaceful nations. At some point the nations in conflict will have alliances and nuclear weapons, and people will use them when the choice is between that or starving to death by the millions. I would be somewhat more optimistic about humanity's ability to weather worsening circumstances if we didn't develop the human extinction button in all of our grand technological wisdom.
Climate change is not the great equalizer people want it to be.
Nuclear superpowers are among the least likely countries to actually collapse from climate damage.
US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk.
First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices. Countries where the same food price spike would come with a major death toll don't have the tools to kick off WW3.
Pakistan and North Korea have nuclear weapons. What makes you think that other countries won't develop them when push comes to shove? Right now the status quo is such that smaller countries find violating international sanctions on nuclear weapon development to be disadvantageous (no immediate benefit from having them; expensive to have them; economic punishment for having them). The calculus on the status quo changes considerably when famine or other ecological disasters are threatening to wipe out half your population. Is the US going to invade all potential nuclear weapons developers like it did with Iran? Do you have complete confidence that will always work and never escalate towards anything larger?
You know it. The country that was probably the closest to "developing nuclear weapons" is currently in the process of being bombed to shit for it.
Not the only reason, no. But their nuclear ambitions certainly did contribute to their current predicament.
Nuclear weapons take time, expertize, resources and sustained political will to develop and deploy. If you have all of that, you might be able to put all of that towards climate adaptation instead. Or: go for the nukes and bet hard that you aren't going to get bombed to shit for it. Worked out for NK, but doesn't seem to have worked for Iran.
I think the level of tolerance US has for marginally stable autocracies with nuclear weapons has receded permanently.
Not to mention that merely having a nuclear bomb doesn't automatically allow one to cause WW3. Nuclear weapons were used in a world war already, and that didn't even destroy a single country - let alone the world. It takes a lot of nukes, and a lot of delivery mechanisms, to actually move the needle on the matter of human civilization existing.
> Is the US going to invade all potential nuclear weapons developers like it did with Iran?
Invade? No. Bomb? Probably. Same if for India if e.g. Sri Lanka decides it wants nuclear weapons.
Global warming will unfortunately disproportionately hit poor, equatorial countries. (Also, starving countries can’t afford a nuclear programme. There is no breakout risk in Sudan.)
> US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk. First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices
And you think a second, much larger Syrian refugee migration will have 0 impact on France?
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything and everyone is connected.
WW2 hit the higher layers of abstraction. You could still grow food plants in those countries during and after the war, but the governance structures were bombed. Climate change is the opposite. If you can't grow food, you're fucked.
I am not sure how not directly linked to global warming. I am currently on the phone but I remember a study that mentioned that Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh would see a deadly heat (wet bulb temperatures) from basically 0 as it is right now to 30 days/year by 2050 or 2060. I can't remember right now.
If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
Chapter 1 of "The Ministry of the Future" describes a fictional wet bulb event. It's grisly and horrific and I highly recommend you read this chapter, it changed my view on climate change.
https://books.rockslide.ca/read/780/epub#epubcfi(/6/14!/4/2/...
Thank you. I will
> What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
We sink the boats.
Indeed, no reason to expect anything will happen differently from what is currently happening, but on a 150x bigger scale.
Y E S
Are you that excited to see innocent people die?
Or am I misunderstanding your comment?
There are also statistics showing that mortality because of cold is much higher than mortality because of heat.
About 9 times higher.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
"What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"
More taxes go to ammunition for autonomous border guard systems.
> "What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"
You think that’s bad... Up here in Canada we’ll have to deal with Murican immigrants as things heat up. Talk about killing the vibe.
I think the least of your worries will be immigrants when an imperialistic nation with superior military power realizes that the annexation of your land is necessary for its survival.
I actually am moderately concerned with that to be honest. If the US doesn't have free and fair midterms I don't think it's really that paranoid to be worried about it.
This is why it's so important we pass the America SAVE Act. We have to stop MAGA from cheating in 2026.
Why would the US annex canada? It is already in the american hegemony.
To distract from the Epstein files.
I'm surprised even the smarter democrats are saying that stupid line. Distraction would imply there are still to be people who have not yet learned and formed an opinion on the Epstein files. Everyone knows about these already and made their positions about it.
As it turns out the most abhorrent things can come out with those Epstein files and it doesn't seem to hurt Trumps support among his base any. Doesn't seem to be threatening any legal action for him or implicated parties. Once again only Maxwell is in jail, somehow, with dozens and dozens of witnesses stepping forward. Democrats have been grandstanding on this man for 10 years now and haven't been able to stop him. I think by this point it is clear he is going to get away with everything even if people want to write about him "flailing." Him flailing is literally him achieving all his domestic and foreign policy goals right now and his base couldn't be more pleased...
This is not inevitable. We have time, now, to prepare for the future, which doesn't have to be a carbon copy of today.
Unfortunately most political systems around the world reward short term results, not long term thinking.
Just look here in the USA -- the Democrats tried to do some forward thinking things like subsidizing solar and wind, and they were rewarded by losing at the ballot box (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).
There are no rewards for long term thinking, so it's hard to get anyone to do it.
> (of course that isn't the only reason, but it's one of many).
This is disingenuous. It's one of many in that it may have contributed 0.0001%. If they wouldn't have done that, would they currently have more power? Absolutely not, believing otherwise means being clueless about what has motivated people to vote in certain ways.
It's definitely more than .0001%. Look at the campaigns. How much time did the GOP spend harping on windmills and solar subsidies and "clean coal". Calling out democrats for trying to make the environment better at extra cost to US citizens was a huge part of their campaign.
I expected you to say this, but hoped you wouldn't. Of course I know they talk about it. GOP campaigns say and do a lot of things, there's dozens of topics they shout about. From Benghazi to Hillary's Emails to gender-neutral emails to immigrants to indeed coal/renewables and so on. You could easily name 30 topics.
The topics have different purposes. Fossil fuels vs renewables in particular hasn't won the reps a single race, I repeat. Every race they've won, they would've won without it. And every race they've lost, they would've lost without it. The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.
> The purpose of bringing up that particular topic for them isn't to help win close races.
How can you possibly know this? How could you know what is in the mind of every voter and why they make the choice they do?
They bring it up for a reason -- because their research says talking about helps them win elections.
So, those of us with no suede in this race, who will see no reward from the system anyway, are the only people who can be trusted to make change. That means you and I (and I dare say a significant portion of the populace).
It's not obvious what we can do (individual actions taken within the context of a system are dwarfed by structural forces of the system), but we're the only ones who are going to do it. So, let's assume we did fix things, and we're looking back from 2050, doing a retrospective. What things did we end up doing, that got us to that point?
There's nothing you as an individual can do, or even a small group of individuals. This is where government is supposed to work. Using its power to force everyone to do something for the collective good that isn't profitable.
Almost all emissions come from factories. There are only two ways to reduce that -- a global set of rules that increases costs to reduce emissions, and an overall reduction in consumption, via a carbon tax.
> Almost all emissions come from factories.
industry, transport and home use (heating & A/C mostly) are all roughly 30% of emissions.
(another way of splitting it says electricity, industry, heating, and transport are roughly almost 25% each. It depends whether you count electricity on its own or bundle it with how its used)
But I agree with you about solutions. The market will quickly bankrupt any companies that induce extra costs to decarbonify. It's the governments job to ensure that externalized costs like CO2 emissions are internalized via carbon taxes. (or alternatives to carbon taxes, which are worse)
Factories are staffed by people. Those people have the physical capability to change the way the factories operate. Any individual person attempting to modify / replace the factory equipment against their line manager's will would quickly find themselves out of a job, but collective action among factory workers (e.g. unions) might work. So might getting the line managers on board with the proposal, if you can get enough buy-in that "we used our discretion" is an acceptable answer: it's not like most companies actively want to pollute, rather that it's usually cheaper to do so, and they don't care about not. Being able to say "this move reduces turnover among our workers, slashing training costs; and you can probably use it in the B2B / B2C [delete as appropriate] marketing, since environmentalism sells in some markets; and this way, we're prepared for future legislation expected in jurisdictions A, B and C" may be sufficient justification. Alternatively, there may be ways to exploit the principal-agent problem.
I'm sure there are people who've specced out detailed proposals for this sort of thing. There might even be previous cases where they've succeeded, which we can learn from. Neither of those "two ways" you mentioned are things that I can do, but I may be able to slightly reduce the intensity of the opposition. (Companies tend to like when regulations require their competitors to do things they're already doing, after all.)
Right now things are getting worse in that regard, not better
Sure, but if you were to make that concrete, what would you recommend and where do you see potential for it to be implemented?
Patricia Anthony published a novel about this in '93. Cold Allies. It's good military sci fi. Doesn't pretend to offer answers.
> What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
Like let them build few of those sci-fi domes and let them keep buying disposable bottled oxygen? I don't get the pessimism. India makes its own rockets. Pakistan has nukes. Why are they supposed to be incapable of holding the nation together on Mars-like Earth?
Tokyo is already hitting 40C/100F at >90% RH during summers. It's already mildly unsurvivable. Nobody cares. Maybe in 10-20 years we'd be wearing spacesuits, but do anyone seriously think the equatorial regions will be uninhabitable and land prices on northern Europe is going to skyrocket???
The fact people already live in some of the hottest places in the world today should speak a little to human resiliency.
We can live in hot places if the air stays dry, which it usually does or historically did. If the air gets more humid we cannot anymore.
> Humans may also experience lethal hyperthermia when the wet bulb temperature is sustained above 35 °C (95 °F) for six hours.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoregulation
"Migration to the colder north..."
Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?
Wasn't a drought originally part of the cause of Syria's collapse into civil war? Climate change is already causing unrest in equitorial countries, mass migration and a corresponding rise in authoritarianism / right wing populism in Europe.
You're making the "It's snowing there can't be global warming" argument in reverse.
One local drought can't be attributed to or be proof of global warming.
It's like smoking causing lung cancer; (the following numbers are made up) 5 in 100 non-smokers might get lung cancer but 20 in 100 smokers do. 5 of those smokers would have gotten lung cancer anyway and 15 wouldn't have but there's no way to know which individuals are in which cohort.
Not necessarily. Climate change means there will be more droughts; and if droughts cause civil war, there will be more civil war (that's the GP's relevance); even if we can't tell which ones were caused by global warming, that's still bad.
Oh no, on the contrary, I'm saying it's already started and people aren't paying attention.