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The Paris agreement has not been kept to. This agreement will not be kept to. What will happen is climate change will continue, perhaps accelerating a bit mor

The Paris agreement has not been kept to. This agreement will not be kept to. What will happen is climate change will continue, perhaps accelerating a bit more slowly than it would otherwise have done, becoming more and more destructive and harmful, until the situation is so up-front right-now deadly serious that action is finally taken, by which time action will not matter, because of the huge lag between cutting emissions and reduction in the rate of climate change. What will be needed at that point is geo-engineering, on a global scale. The technology for this does not exist, it will need to be invented, and then cost-reduced, and then deployed on a global scale on a point-blank timescale - like going from zero to manufacturing every single car in the world in five or ten years. I have no hope this will actually work, and it's madness for civilization as we know it, and to avoid the deaths of billions, to depend upon it.

ahevia 5y ago
I agree with you except the last part. We are certainly on track to experience the worse case scenario and have to fallback on geoengineering. However there is work we can do to start testing geoengineering in the field today. Some countries like the UAE already work on cloud seeding pilot projects & the cooling effects/mechanics of volcanos are still being understood. I am hopeful that the generation of leaders who will be in power by then will have what it takes to deploy even a fraction of a geoengineering solution. What the solar geoengineering field needs today is funding for research & modeling methods
WithinReason 5y ago
How will billions die from climate change?
- roenxi 5y ago
  How will we avoid billions dying even if we avoid climate change? The future is almost never rosy on a global scale. Peak oil & a lack of available cheap energy continues to be the #1 threat for massive death and destruction. Climate change is distracting people from the actual problem which is energy security.
- MaxGanzII 5y ago
  Famine. Consistent crop and fishery failures induced by ecological collapse and massive environmental change, and attendent economic failure. The world has billions living on one or two dollars per day. These people barely survive now; what happens when food shortages cause prices to strongly rise, across whole belts of countries at a time, and they stay high because crop failures become normal, and where the loss of wealth generation, from the loss of crops, hammers the economy? Bear in mind farmers cannot just "change crops". Each crop requires a particular set of skills, technologies and experience, and these are extremely poor people, both financially and in other forms of capital, such as knowledge resources. These are the billions of people without mobile phones. In poorer countries - populous countries - the production of crops is the main production of wealth for the mass of the population. For those people, with significant, systemic, sustained food price rises, there comes a point where you have had so little food, for so long, you either die from it directly, or you become ill and can't fight that illness off, and it kills you.

ahevia 5y ago

I agree with you except the last part. We are certainly on track to experience the worse case scenario and have to fallback on geoengineering. However there is work we can do to start testing geoengineering in the field today. Some countries like the UAE already work on cloud seeding pilot projects & the cooling effects/mechanics of volcanos are still being understood. I am hopeful that the generation of leaders who will be in power by then will have what it takes to deploy even a fraction of a geoengineering solution. What the solar geoengineering field needs today is funding for research & modeling methods

WithinReason 5y ago

How will billions die from climate change?

roenxi 5y ago
How will we avoid billions dying even if we avoid climate change? The future is almost never rosy on a global scale. Peak oil & a lack of available cheap energy continues to be the #1 threat for massive death and destruction. Climate change is distracting people from the actual problem which is energy security.
MaxGanzII 5y ago
Famine. Consistent crop and fishery failures induced by ecological collapse and massive environmental change, and attendent economic failure. The world has billions living on one or two dollars per day. These people barely survive now; what happens when food shortages cause prices to strongly rise, across whole belts of countries at a time, and they stay high because crop failures become normal, and where the loss of wealth generation, from the loss of crops, hammers the economy? Bear in mind farmers cannot just "change crops". Each crop requires a particular set of skills, technologies and experience, and these are extremely poor people, both financially and in other forms of capital, such as knowledge resources. These are the billions of people without mobile phones. In poorer countries - populous countries - the production of crops is the main production of wealth for the mass of the population. For those people, with significant, systemic, sustained food price rises, there comes a point where you have had so little food, for so long, you either die from it directly, or you become ill and can't fight that illness off, and it kills you.