Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.
In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun’s output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we’ve applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they’re mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we’ve not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We’re so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun’s output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us – assuming we survive that long.
That doesn’t detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.
Dude, shut up, I’m trying to doom scroll over here .
My gf calls me a “radical optimist” for believing in people eventually doing the right thing :)
How can you be so optimistic? With everything that’s going on in the world, I get more pessimistic everyday. At bad days, I’d just think “let just humanity perish because we just keep repeating the same horrible things over and over anyway”.
For me its because if you zoom out, the world is a better place to live in now, than it was 1000 years ago. Progress moves in waves, and right now it definitely feels like a significant low tide, but over time the coastline keeps creeping forward.
-
Humanity is the only meat eating animal that has significant percentage of its population willingly avoiding eating meat and instead finding ways to obtain essential nutrients without it (need to add that I am NOT one of those animals, I’m personally waiting for lab grown meat before I obstain from death based meat, if I ever do)
-
Humanity by and large no longer needs to leave its sick and wounded to die because we invented technology and infrastructure to both heal, and take care of those we cant heal
-
We’ve progressed to the point as a species where in order to bring more prosperity to our community, we no longer have to take from other communities, and that wasnt always the case (unfortunately this is only a recent achievement, and as such, not all of our population has adapted to this, hence our current problems)
not all of our population has adapted to this
“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
-
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever
Let me introduce you to Facebook.
Allow me to introduce you to: an abstract concept of facebook-
People, separated by thousands of miles, tap messages into their glass topped smart rocks that can then be seen by other people with smart rocks - it does this communicating with big metal trees that talk to magic caves, where millions of smart rocks think about those messages and pass them over to other magic caves by a glass wire, which in turn pass the messages to another metal tree and over to other glass topped smart rocks for people to read.
As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it.
This and I keep repeating this: don’t fight the global warming, let’s think how to live with it.
2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely.
So much of our modern economy is rooted in assumptions about where and how to mass produce food stocks. Climate change threatens all of that.
Obliterating breadbasket regions in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran would devastate the regional populations.
Then you’ve got the wars in places like Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, further strangling access to fresh food stocks.
People joke about the looming “water wars”, but consider how much Israel and the Saudis have invested in desalination and what dehydration is doing to the million plus Gaza residents who have lost access to reliable drinking water.
What happens during a substantial crop failure in the South Pacific? It isn’t as though India and China haven’t experienced massive famines in living memory.
You can argue the finer details, but it is easy to see a scenario in which a billion or more people are wiped out over the course of a generation, because of substantive shifts in access to basic living needs.
And you’ll never believe the rent prices on the other ⅓
@Kedly@lemm.ee, the world may be a better place than 1000 years ago but it’s still worse than it was in the 90s.
Tell that to someone living in rural India or China in the 90s
I’m not from there, so I don’t give a shit. All I care about is that 90s had no climate collapse, no AI, no fuckups every 3 years or so and live in general was better.
Were it for me, 70s, 80s and 90s on a loop forever and whoever loses from it… well, shucks, I’m not one of them.
White, male, late 30s? Just trying to see whose behind the keyboard a little bit.
Coming late to the party, but early 20s, white, male. I care more about climate change not being as bad back then than whatever was happening to Bumfuckland at the time tbh.
I’m going early 30s white dude. Yea I remember it used to be way worse as far as emissions. In the 90s the sun was yellow lol
And yet the climate wasn’t as fucked as now.
Hence why I said low tide and zoom out. Right now shit seems like its regressing, BUY WE ARE STILL AHEAD of where we used to be, so the TREND is still hopeful, even if the right now sucks.
tldr; in the immediate present/future things are looking worse, but the overall timeline/trend things are looking and have been getting better
The nineties was the pinnacle of humanity, the music, the video games, films, …
Presses X to doubt
I mean if you’re straight and cis it was…
And living in the US/western Europe. Eastern Europe and Asia weren’t doing so hot
OK but which third gets out alright I want to move there.
Canada or Russia, take your pick.
Please remember that they are both virulently opposed to immigration, particularly by POC.
Wait Canada is against immigration? That’s news to me as a Canadian.
The news source of this post could not be identified. Please check the source yourself. Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
Humanity is nothing but a cancer, a pox upon this world. Pathetic.
Climate scientist is 1/3rd wrong.
I don’t think she’s saying 1/3 will be unaffected but 1/3 will adapt.
For example, I’m set for more climate change than most
- I live in the north
- at least a bit away from the coast
- we don’t historically get tornadoes
- plentiful reliable power and water
- air conditioning
And most importantly, both the region and myself have above average income/wealth. We can afford to adapt somewhat.
Thinking of global population, I can see being in the 1/3 least affected
If there’s a death sentence to 2/3rd of the planet, it’s very doubtful it will stop there to leave the remaining 1/3rd livable for long.
The 2/3rd may die sooner, but if it does, the rest will follow. Because there will be runaway global warming.
If we can stop or even reverse it, there is no need for the 2/3rds to die either.
