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Climate change is going to be our "great filter". I don't see any will to fix this at any level of society. As anthropogenic climate change worsens, wealthy soc

Climate change is going to be our "great filter". I don't see any will to fix this at any level of society. As anthropogenic climate change worsens, wealthy societies are going to turn inward and double down on xenophobia to prevent migration from poorer nations more affected by climate change. The deterioration of the climate and of our geopolitical organizations will make it increasingly difficult to solve this problem and I don't see a happy ending for our species.

wait_a_minute 5y ago
Gives me some hope: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/climate-change-impacts/predictions-future-global-climate https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/climate-change-impacts/... None of these tipping points are considered very likely to occur over the next several decades.
- tootie 5y ago
  Convincing people to make sacrifices for the good of the world sadly feels like a lost cause. The only solution to this is going to be innovation that makes the climate cost of consumption decrease.
  - wait_a_minute 5y ago
    I'm not sad that we can fix the problem without stunting people's quality of living tbh.
    - tootie 5y ago
      Well, we can't yet. And it probably won't happen until we have already started to suffer serious consequences.
- clydethefrog 5y ago
  A recent report confirms that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, whose mass-loss rates have been rapidly increasing, are matching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's worst-case sea-level rise scenarios. https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Space_for_our_climate/Ice_sheet_melt_on_track_with_worst-case_climate_scenario https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Space_f... "For near-term time horizons, we think it's actually the best choice because it matches cumulative emissions. What happened over the last 15 years has been about exactly right compared to what was projected by RCP 8.5." That holds especially true for medium-term planning through 2050. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03082020/climate-change-scenarios-emissions/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03082020/climate-change-s...
zenmaster10665 5y ago
that is one way of looking at it - It is strange to me that the technologies to fix the problem actually seem to be feasible, it is the willingness to build and adopt them that is lacking - I thin kit will come, but I don't think it will come fast enough to stop the drastic changes to society and climate which are coming. Unlike you, I am optimistic that there will be a solution...
ben_w 5y ago
There’s a massive gap between “disaster” and “Great Filter”. Even if we do everything wrong and burn all the fossil fuels that exist on this planet (releasing enough CO2 to make us noticeably dumber as well as melting all the ice caps and glaciers), that’s unlikely to knock us back further than the dawn of agriculture, when we had a population of 1-10 million, compared to the population bottleneck possibly caused by the Toba catastrophe when there were 1-10 thousand of us. Even if you take us back down to 10,000 humans, way worse than you should expect even in a nuclear war, after one or two hundred thousand years the CO2 will be gone. We’d get back up to at least as far as the early Industrial Age in a relative blink of an eye, though further than that would require a different path, one without fossil fuels, because those wouldn’t have regenerated over that period.

wait_a_minute 5y ago

Gives me some hope: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/climate-change-impacts/predictions-future-global-climate https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/climate-change-impacts/... None of these tipping points are considered very likely to occur over the next several decades.

tootie 5y ago
Convincing people to make sacrifices for the good of the world sadly feels like a lost cause. The only solution to this is going to be innovation that makes the climate cost of consumption decrease.
- wait_a_minute 5y ago
  I'm not sad that we can fix the problem without stunting people's quality of living tbh.
  - tootie 5y ago
    Well, we can't yet. And it probably won't happen until we have already started to suffer serious consequences.
clydethefrog 5y ago
A recent report confirms that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, whose mass-loss rates have been rapidly increasing, are matching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's worst-case sea-level rise scenarios. https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Space_for_our_climate/Ice_sheet_melt_on_track_with_worst-case_climate_scenario https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Space_f... "For near-term time horizons, we think it's actually the best choice because it matches cumulative emissions. What happened over the last 15 years has been about exactly right compared to what was projected by RCP 8.5." That holds especially true for medium-term planning through 2050. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03082020/climate-change-scenarios-emissions/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03082020/climate-change-s...

zenmaster10665 5y ago

that is one way of looking at it - It is strange to me that the technologies to fix the problem actually seem to be feasible, it is the willingness to build and adopt them that is lacking - I thin kit will come, but I don't think it will come fast enough to stop the drastic changes to society and climate which are coming. Unlike you, I am optimistic that there will be a solution...

ben_w 5y ago

There’s a massive gap between “disaster” and “Great Filter”. Even if we do everything wrong and burn all the fossil fuels that exist on this planet (releasing enough CO2 to make us noticeably dumber as well as melting all the ice caps and glaciers), that’s unlikely to knock us back further than the dawn of agriculture, when we had a population of 1-10 million, compared to the population bottleneck possibly caused by the Toba catastrophe when there were 1-10 thousand of us. Even if you take us back down to 10,000 humans, way worse than you should expect even in a nuclear war, after one or two hundred thousand years the CO2 will be gone. We’d get back up to at least as far as the early Industrial Age in a relative blink of an eye, though further than that would require a different path, one without fossil fuels, because those wouldn’t have regenerated over that period.