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You’ve missed the point completely, and very little of what you’ve said is relevant to the OPs statement. Famines didn’t suddenly stop because of global warmin

You’ve missed the point completely, and very little of what you’ve said is relevant to the OPs statement. Famines didn’t suddenly stop because of global warming. Quality of life and length of life have increased depending on which metrics you use, but in any case wealth inequality has never been greater, and length of life has increased due to medical technology, not increased atmospheric carbon. What constitutes a “marginal”difference in temperature? Keeping the rise below 1.5c is still far too much and too much to ask (apparently).

richwater 6y ago
wealth inequality is not a negative to quality of life.
samatman 6y ago
Famines drastically reduced because of modern agriculture, which is dependent on fossil fuels at all stages of food production. Quality and length of life increased, again, primarily because of modern agriculture, with vaccination and obstetrics as a second and third factor. Wealth inequality is up because of the unimaginably vast amount of wealth available, which has disproportionately accumulated at the very top. Poverty, as measured in simple material terms, has never been lower, except in the absolute sense that, again due to modern agriculture, we're able to sustain such a vastly greater population. How to solve the climate crisis, without a massive dieoff and collapse to a pre-industrial standard of living, must always be the question. Remember that it's always an option, and that cure would be worse than the disease.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  There is nothing in modern agriculture that requires fossil fuels.
  - samatman 6y ago
    I didn't say modern agriculture requires fossil fuels, I said modern agriculture is dependent upon fossil fuels. We can imagine a world with electric tractors, made with steel coked with biocarbon in solar-thermal furnaces, where the Haber process is run with hydrogen derived from clean electrolysis. But we don't inhabit that world at the moment.
    - pfdietz 6y ago
      That's a distinction that makes no difference. Agriculture uses only about 1% of our energy, so if we can move industrial society off fossil fuels, we can easily move farming off fossil fuels. Alluding to the specter of famine is just scaremongering.
      - headmelted 6y ago
        And even at that, moving everything that is not agriculture off of fossil fuels still means a 99% reduction in fossil fuel use. Then 100% when the solutions devised to get rid of the other 99% of use are adapted to agriculture and make the use there obsolete too.

richwater 6y ago

wealth inequality is not a negative to quality of life.

samatman 6y ago

Famines drastically reduced because of modern agriculture, which is dependent on fossil fuels at all stages of food production. Quality and length of life increased, again, primarily because of modern agriculture, with vaccination and obstetrics as a second and third factor. Wealth inequality is up because of the unimaginably vast amount of wealth available, which has disproportionately accumulated at the very top. Poverty, as measured in simple material terms, has never been lower, except in the absolute sense that, again due to modern agriculture, we're able to sustain such a vastly greater population. How to solve the climate crisis, without a massive dieoff and collapse to a pre-industrial standard of living, must always be the question. Remember that it's always an option, and that cure would be worse than the disease.

pfdietz 6y ago
There is nothing in modern agriculture that requires fossil fuels.
- samatman 6y ago
  I didn't say modern agriculture requires fossil fuels, I said modern agriculture is dependent upon fossil fuels. We can imagine a world with electric tractors, made with steel coked with biocarbon in solar-thermal furnaces, where the Haber process is run with hydrogen derived from clean electrolysis. But we don't inhabit that world at the moment.
  - pfdietz 6y ago
    That's a distinction that makes no difference. Agriculture uses only about 1% of our energy, so if we can move industrial society off fossil fuels, we can easily move farming off fossil fuels. Alluding to the specter of famine is just scaremongering.
    - headmelted 6y ago
      And even at that, moving everything that is not agriculture off of fossil fuels still means a 99% reduction in fossil fuel use. Then 100% when the solutions devised to get rid of the other 99% of use are adapted to agriculture and make the use there obsolete too.