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At what cost does humanity survive? I don't want to become a climate refugee. Even the 1.5C model has millions of climate refugees. People still talk about Miam
by drekk 5y ago
At what cost does humanity survive? I don't want to become a climate refugee. Even the 1.5C model has millions of climate refugees. People still talk about Miami and Dubai as if they'll be around in a century.
I am not so arrogant as to think without humans the planet dies. But maybe unlike most Americans I don't want to sacrifice my grandparents so that people can dine in person at Applebee's, nor do I want to live in a worse, less human-friendly world so that oil executives can make another few decades of profit.
We can decarbonize with the technology we have today. We know it will be more expensive economically to wait until it's too late, but it'll be more expensive for taxpayers instead of maybe the companies doing so well they can spend millions on lobbying every year.
Farming isn't really the issue, we can eke out 10x the calories by cutting pork/chicken/beef. Wet bulb temperatures (where you can't cool off by sweating and die cooked inside out) are a larger issue. Tons of other cycles that we're fucking with besides carbon, like nitrogen and phosphorus. We're also losing arable land to desertification. I don't even have to get started on our available freshwater reserves.
To think humanity will just kinda coast by and that it will all mostly fix itself must be a very nice thought, but it flies in the face of what every single person we pay to study this is saying. And they're not saying humans go extinct.