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> The question is: how do you feel about probably living in a state of global instability (including war) and famines before the end of your own life? Because t

> The question is: how do you feel about probably living in a state of global instability (including war) and famines before the end of your own life? Because that's what seems to be the most likely if we don't magically start giving a shit. That's pretty typical for the global civilization. We have a recency bias to the post-ww2 is the norm. That was a highly atypical peaceful time. It would be surprising that trend continued - even in a climate vacuum. How do we know that wouldn't happen anyway just given how many people have been born? How do we know that the planet getting 2C hotter is the cause, and exactly how much of the cause it is?

wat10000 2y ago
Maybe it would happen regardless. Do you think massive disruptions in agriculture would make it more or less likely?
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  We've had massive distributions in agriculture for the last 40 years. Are the going to offset productivity gains, and new areas being more productive? We could almost feed 50% more humans if we had less livestock (or even just more efficient - like more pork instead of beef). Livestock takes up almost 80% of ag land... We're not all going to starve to death if crop yields go down slightly.
  - jfim 2y ago
    Depends on who "we" includes. First world, probably not. People doing rainfall based subsistence agriculture, some will.
  - wat10000 2y ago
    You seem to approach this with extremely binary thinking. Either we all starve or we’re all fine. The Earth is destroyed, or climate change isn’t a problem. No, we’re not all going to starve to death. But it doesn’t take that much change in agricultural output for some people to starve to death. And it doesn’t take that many starving people to severely disrupt a society.
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      Hell, people all over the world are already and have been starving for decades, because we don't feed people because people need to eat; we feed them because it makes money. And in the areas of the globe where it doesn't, people starve, while elsewhere people throw away shit tons of food.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
      You seem to look at it as if we benefit nothing from the cause of the problem. My point is that we have caused a lot of "problems" through burning fossil fuels, and at least up until now, the "solutions" that we've gotten from all the progress we've been able to make has outweighed that cost - massively. Given that the rate of increase in emissions has slowed drastically and total emissions will likely peak this decade, and then fall pretty rapidly, I don't see any reason to believe that we're digging ourselves into a hole rather than building a better society for everyone.
      - wat10000 2y ago
        > You seem to look at it as if we benefit nothing from the cause of the problem. I haven’t said anything even remotely like that. Of course the benefits have outweighed the costs so far. The whole thing is just getting started. The costs are nearly zero so far. Total warming was under 1C until a few years ago. We’re looking at something like 4C of warming with current trends. Projected warming with current emissions reduction pledges is 2.8C and it’s very unlikely that those pledges will be met. The harms are almost entirely in the future. Things will get much worse before they get better. Or as the kids like to say, we were born at the end of the Fuck Around century and now we’re in the Find Out century.
        onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
        They could've still been born in the dark ages if we didn't go through the industrial revolution and burn fossil fuels. I'm sure they'd pick this world, with it's future.
  - palata 2y ago
    > We're not all going to starve to death if crop yields go down slightly. You vastly under-estimate the problem. We are talking about crop yields going down dramatically. The way we are heading right now, it's completely worthless to talk about livestock: the question is really how many billions will die because we can't grow enough food anymore.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
      0 billions. If you think 1 in 8 people globally is going to die any time soon because we can't grow enough food simply because it's 2C hotter, you are wildly out of touch. Sure, maybe we get hit by an asteroid or something or return to world war. But that's a different story.
      - palata 2y ago
        > If you think 1 in 8 people globally is going to die any time soon because we can't grow enough food simply because it's 2C hotter Where did I say that? The way it's going, we are likely to reach 4C in some decades. 4C means that human beings cannot survive outside in a large part of the Earth. That literally means that billions of people have to move away. > Sure, maybe we get hit by an asteroid We don't have to: what we are doing to the climate is worse. Dinosaurs died because of the climate change that was the consequence of the asteroid. Did you know that their climate change happened a whole lot slower than ours? > or return to world war What do you think happens when billions of people have to move? No need to wait for 4C: wait for enough ice to melt, the sea levels to raise and... well do you know how many people live close to the sea? What do you think happens when billions of people are starting to compete over oil (because we are going there, too) in order to eat? When you start having extreme events (like drought), you rely a lot on energy to compensate. But even without extreme events: if tomorrow you remove oil, big cities starve. Because they need trucks to bring food into the city. > But that's a different story. Nope, it's becoming more and more likely that it will happen. Because what we observe is that the climate is worsening faster than we expected, and because instead of slowing down on the carbon emissions, we are still accelerating.
palata 2y ago
> How do we know that wouldn't happen anyway We don't know what would happen if we didn't screw ourselves, but we have some idea what will happen from what we are doing. > How do we know that the planet getting 2C hotter is the cause, and exactly how much of the cause it is? 2C? You're being optimistic. We've past 1.5 this year. The consequences of climate change have just started: right now it's minimal (people die from natural disasters, but globally that's minimal). What we see, though, is that "bad things" (e.g. natural disasters, extreme events) are happening faster and worse than what our models predicted. In other words, every day we observe that the consequences of us screwing the climate is worse than what we thought. Let's now think a bit about that part: the "optimistic" scenario: * We are now heading towards 4C unless we dramatically change the way we live. 2C is already out of reach, 1.5C is already here. * At 4C, you have a whole strip of countries around the equator that becomes unlivable for humans: it's too hot and humid, meaning that we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, meaning that we die. We are not talking a few millions refugees, we are talking billions. * Imagine billions of people, from entire countries, deciding to move to livable territories. We're talking billions of people, with their military, moving into the lands of other billions people with their military. We have never seen that in human history, but it doesn't seem good. * Apart from that strip of land and the 4C, in a much shorter term we are talking droughts. Imagine first world countries not having enough food for everybody. * And last point: all of this (and more) happens in a world were the amount of oil is dangerously reaching a peak (in some places it already has: the European economy feels it since 2007 because access to oil has become harder since then). Not only it means more wars for oil, but also it means that globally we will have less oil to tackle those challenges. There is no real alternative to oil, that's just a fact: we will have less energy, whatever it is. * Of course, in order to tackle all those challenges, we will need energy. So we will be more likely to keep using oil as much as we can, which makes it even more likely that we are going towards a world with 4C. Last fact: the climate changes that made the dinosaurs (and countless other species) disappear happened orders of magnitude slower than what we are measuring (I'm not talking predictions, but actual measurements). So it's not completely stupid to wonder if our species (on top of the countless others that have already and will disappear in the next few decades) will disappear entirely. And again: all that I wrote above is the optimistic prediction from our current models. And from what we measure, it's actually coming faster, harder and stronger. You can rationalise as much as you want: if you are not alarmed, you are either uninformed or irrational.

wat10000 2y ago

Maybe it would happen regardless. Do you think massive disruptions in agriculture would make it more or less likely?

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
We've had massive distributions in agriculture for the last 40 years. Are the going to offset productivity gains, and new areas being more productive? We could almost feed 50% more humans if we had less livestock (or even just more efficient - like more pork instead of beef). Livestock takes up almost 80% of ag land... We're not all going to starve to death if crop yields go down slightly.
- jfim 2y ago
  Depends on who "we" includes. First world, probably not. People doing rainfall based subsistence agriculture, some will.
- wat10000 2y ago
  You seem to approach this with extremely binary thinking. Either we all starve or we’re all fine. The Earth is destroyed, or climate change isn’t a problem. No, we’re not all going to starve to death. But it doesn’t take that much change in agricultural output for some people to starve to death. And it doesn’t take that many starving people to severely disrupt a society.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    Hell, people all over the world are already and have been starving for decades, because we don't feed people because people need to eat; we feed them because it makes money. And in the areas of the globe where it doesn't, people starve, while elsewhere people throw away shit tons of food.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    You seem to look at it as if we benefit nothing from the cause of the problem. My point is that we have caused a lot of "problems" through burning fossil fuels, and at least up until now, the "solutions" that we've gotten from all the progress we've been able to make has outweighed that cost - massively. Given that the rate of increase in emissions has slowed drastically and total emissions will likely peak this decade, and then fall pretty rapidly, I don't see any reason to believe that we're digging ourselves into a hole rather than building a better society for everyone.
    - wat10000 2y ago
      > You seem to look at it as if we benefit nothing from the cause of the problem. I haven’t said anything even remotely like that. Of course the benefits have outweighed the costs so far. The whole thing is just getting started. The costs are nearly zero so far. Total warming was under 1C until a few years ago. We’re looking at something like 4C of warming with current trends. Projected warming with current emissions reduction pledges is 2.8C and it’s very unlikely that those pledges will be met. The harms are almost entirely in the future. Things will get much worse before they get better. Or as the kids like to say, we were born at the end of the Fuck Around century and now we’re in the Find Out century.
      - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
        They could've still been born in the dark ages if we didn't go through the industrial revolution and burn fossil fuels. I'm sure they'd pick this world, with it's future.
- palata 2y ago
  > We're not all going to starve to death if crop yields go down slightly. You vastly under-estimate the problem. We are talking about crop yields going down dramatically. The way we are heading right now, it's completely worthless to talk about livestock: the question is really how many billions will die because we can't grow enough food anymore.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    0 billions. If you think 1 in 8 people globally is going to die any time soon because we can't grow enough food simply because it's 2C hotter, you are wildly out of touch. Sure, maybe we get hit by an asteroid or something or return to world war. But that's a different story.
    - palata 2y ago
      > If you think 1 in 8 people globally is going to die any time soon because we can't grow enough food simply because it's 2C hotter Where did I say that? The way it's going, we are likely to reach 4C in some decades. 4C means that human beings cannot survive outside in a large part of the Earth. That literally means that billions of people have to move away. > Sure, maybe we get hit by an asteroid We don't have to: what we are doing to the climate is worse. Dinosaurs died because of the climate change that was the consequence of the asteroid. Did you know that their climate change happened a whole lot slower than ours? > or return to world war What do you think happens when billions of people have to move? No need to wait for 4C: wait for enough ice to melt, the sea levels to raise and... well do you know how many people live close to the sea? What do you think happens when billions of people are starting to compete over oil (because we are going there, too) in order to eat? When you start having extreme events (like drought), you rely a lot on energy to compensate. But even without extreme events: if tomorrow you remove oil, big cities starve. Because they need trucks to bring food into the city. > But that's a different story. Nope, it's becoming more and more likely that it will happen. Because what we observe is that the climate is worsening faster than we expected, and because instead of slowing down on the carbon emissions, we are still accelerating.

palata 2y ago

> How do we know that wouldn't happen anyway We don't know what would happen if we didn't screw ourselves, but we have some idea what will happen from what we are doing. > How do we know that the planet getting 2C hotter is the cause, and exactly how much of the cause it is? 2C? You're being optimistic. We've past 1.5 this year. The consequences of climate change have just started: right now it's minimal (people die from natural disasters, but globally that's minimal). What we see, though, is that "bad things" (e.g. natural disasters, extreme events) are happening faster and worse than what our models predicted. In other words, every day we observe that the consequences of us screwing the climate is worse than what we thought. Let's now think a bit about that part: the "optimistic" scenario: * We are now heading towards 4C unless we dramatically change the way we live. 2C is already out of reach, 1.5C is already here. * At 4C, you have a whole strip of countries around the equator that becomes unlivable for humans: it's too hot and humid, meaning that we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, meaning that we die. We are not talking a few millions refugees, we are talking billions. * Imagine billions of people, from entire countries, deciding to move to livable territories. We're talking billions of people, with their military, moving into the lands of other billions people with their military. We have never seen that in human history, but it doesn't seem good. * Apart from that strip of land and the 4C, in a much shorter term we are talking droughts. Imagine first world countries not having enough food for everybody. * And last point: all of this (and more) happens in a world were the amount of oil is dangerously reaching a peak (in some places it already has: the European economy feels it since 2007 because access to oil has become harder since then). Not only it means more wars for oil, but also it means that globally we will have less oil to tackle those challenges. There is no real alternative to oil, that's just a fact: we will have less energy, whatever it is. * Of course, in order to tackle all those challenges, we will need energy. So we will be more likely to keep using oil as much as we can, which makes it even more likely that we are going towards a world with 4C. Last fact: the climate changes that made the dinosaurs (and countless other species) disappear happened orders of magnitude slower than what we are measuring (I'm not talking predictions, but actual measurements). So it's not completely stupid to wonder if our species (on top of the countless others that have already and will disappear in the next few decades) will disappear entirely. And again: all that I wrote above is the optimistic prediction from our current models. And from what we measure, it's actually coming faster, harder and stronger. You can rationalise as much as you want: if you are not alarmed, you are either uninformed or irrational.