I imagine that 100 years from now(or significantly less than that) the ocean water level will be several meters higher, large parts of the world will be unliveable due to heat waves and wars will be fought over food and water. I doubt our species will last another 1000.
I'm very confident our species will last longer than the next 1000 years. Our current civilisation, though, now that's a completely different story.
Yeah if we're back to sticks and stones we might as well be extinct as far as I'm concerned.
You might try spending some time reading predictions of doom and gloom from the past. It should be very reassuring.
In not talking about baseless predictions. I'm talking about science. This is not speculation, it's not a possible future scenario, this is the world we currently live in and the trajectory we know for a fact that it is taking. We're setting heat records literally every year. All over the world. The polar ice caps, Greenland etc are melting rapidly, this is not speculation these are facts, these are things currently happening.
We know how much ice is on land, people have spent decades drilling the ice and calculating it's volume etc, we know it's melting because there's way less of it now than there was just decades ago and we know how much that melted ice will influence water levels.
We know the effect greenhouse gases have on the atmosphere and global temperatures, people have made scientifically informed charts predicting how the temperature will rise decades ago and we are right on track.
The prediction happened when I was a child, and all my life I've watched the prediction come true. The fact that there's still millions if not billions of people out there who are living through the same situation and still think climate change is a hoax is absolutely baffling to me. Just look at a fucking global average temperature chart for the past few decades holy shit man it's not a secret the planet is cooking. It's not maybe going to cook 500 years from now it's cooking right now and it's getting worse every year how can you possibly look at these simple clear facts and not understand that it's going to continue?
You guys annoy me so much holy shit open your eyes and just look at the world we live in
Greenhouse gas emissions are a huge problem, but there's no reason to believe we can't solve or mitigate the effects one way or another. It may come at a terrible cost, or it may turn out to be easier than you'd expect.
You're not using "science" to predict the future. You're just expressing a pessimistic belief that we're doomed based your own idea of how things will play out.
To me, optimism seems far more justified based on our track record, we've more-or-less solved some big problems:
- "Population growth is going to cause worldwide famine"
- "We are going to run out of oil and civilization will collapse"
- "The ozone hole is going to expose everyone to dangerous radiation"
- "Acid rain is going to destroy forests and kill lakes"
- "City air pollution is going to make major cities unlivable"
- and smallpox/polio/HIV/leaded gasoline/etc
The difference between the problems you listed and climate change is that those problems are solvable. That's why we've solved them. They're also not nearly the same scale as climate change which is apocalyptic. You just cherry picked a few things we've solved and ignored the plethora of things we haven't as if that proves anything at all. How about cancer? All the other diseases we can't cure? Most of the world still lives in extreme poverty. Lots of people starve every day. Russia is bombing Ukraine. Meanwhile everyone's bickering about data centers and ram prices.
Climate change is not solvable. There is no solution. The only thing I know of that we might be able to do is spray enormous amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere hoping to block the sunlight. This might backfire spectacularly, also might not even work. It's a hail Mary we'll probably try when things get bad enough.
That's it. That's the only idea we have that might help. Maybe there's others I don't know about, but they're not good or we would be doing them already. Carbon capture is a joke, it will never make a difference. We would need a million carbon capture plants, we can't build a million capture plants.
Even if we completely stopped emitting CO2 today we would be completely fucked, and we're not doing that we are in fact producing more CO2 every year. That will probably change eventually but it's already too late.
Obviously nobody can know for sure, maybe we will get lucky and someone will come up with a genius plan that actually works. But that's far from guaranteed, as far as we know right now it's impossible so just assuming that's going to change is extremely naive. It's a thin sliver of hope it's not what we should be expecting nor relying on.
We have no good solution, and given the scale of the problem we have almost no hope of finding one. Do you understand how much atmosphere there is? We've been burning fossil fuels as fast as we can for centuries, now we are finally seeing the result of that and it's so slow that lots of people still don't believe it's happening. It's way harder to reverse.
Also, ice. Ice is important. Ice reflects sunlight and essentially stores cold. Less ice means more heat. More heat means less ice. Do you understand how long it's taken to build the amount of ice on the planet? Absolutely no amount of terraforming will rebuild the ice we're losing and have lost, not in thousands of years.
> They're also not nearly the same scale as climate change which is apocalyptic.
This is a claim about the future which the science does not support, and you seem to be basing a lot of your worldview on it. Have some humility about predicting the future.
> Obviously nobody can know for sure, maybe we will get lucky and someone will come up with a genius plan that actually works.
Nobody can know at all. We're talking about predicting the future.
But it's not really a matter of luck. Humans are problem solvers, now with immense power, capable of doing amazing things when we decide to.
> This is a claim about the future which the science does not support
There is scientific consensus that +5C is a doomsday scenario. Civilization ending. This isn't my prediction, this is the scientific consensus. And obviously it's not like +3C or +4C is a walk in the park either. We will be close to +5C within this century unless something changes drastically.
That's not a prediction that's a projection, just like if you're driving your car at 100 miles per hour then in an hour you will be 100 miles ahead. The difference is when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions we do not have a brake pedal and there is no friction. We can't take back the carbon. The only thing we can do, and the only thing we are doing, is accelerate. And on top of that, we're going downhill - we're accelerating whether we want to or not. And it's getting steeper the further we go.
Ice reflects an enormous amount of energy back into space, as the amount of ice drops the amount of heat absorbed by the planet increases. On top of that, the ice traps enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. In the poles and previously permafrozen tundras that are now thawing. As the atmosphere heats up it is capable of holding more water vapor which is also a greenhouse gas. Warmer temperatures also lead to forest fires, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases and weakening one of the few ways we're actually removing some carbon from the air.
These are some of the feedback loops in play causing warming to rise exponentially the worse it gets.
> Nobody can know at all. We're talking about predicting the future.
Scientists predicted the future 50 years ago and we are right on track for those predictions. 50 years ago they said this is where we will be in 50 years, and here we are. Now you're like "but we can't predict the future" well we did. And to top if off you're waxing about how powerful we are - apparently not powerful enough to predict global warming, but powerful enough to stop it? When? Why aren't we doing it then if we're so powerful? Why are we just making it worse instead?