99% of the species that existed on earth are dead. There is no ‘get out of jail free’ card for humans.
Yes, we are very clever monkeys and can fix most things. However, to date, we are far from serious about global climate change. Perhaps that will change, hopefully not too late.
The fate of all species is extinction, eventually. But climate change isn’t likely to do it.
We’ve been serious enough about climate change, at least to avoid any realistic chance that climate change will make the world even close to unlivable for humans. We’re no longer on a track to 4 or 5 degrees. We’re probably not even on a track to get much above 3 degrees. We’re going to fail to stay below 2 degrees. There’s a massive amount of human misery that can be avoided if we hit 2.2 degrees instead of 2.7 degrees (for example), but 2.7 degrees still results in world where most of humanity is better off, in terms of having their basic material needs met, than today.
No mainstream climate models suggest a return to a world as bad as the one we had in 1950, to say nothing of 1150. Was the world so bad, for virtually the entirety of human history, that our ancestors shouldn’t have made our lives possible? If not, then nothing in our near future looks so horrible that it turns reproduction into an immoral act.
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But [avoiding possible future improvements], and not apocalypse, is the most likely path we’re on. This, strange as it is to say, is progress. As Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist, notes, many credible estimates from a decade ago put us on track for the average global temperature to increase 4 or even 5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels by 2100. That would be cataclysmic. But the falling cost of clean energy and the rising ambition of climate policy have changed that. The Climate Action tracker puts our current policy path at about 2.7 degrees of warming by 2100. If the commitments world governments have made since the Paris climate accord hold, we’re on track for a rise of 2 degrees or even less.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opinion/climate-change-sh…
See also:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/people-need-to-hear-the-good-ne…
…outlining the good news about climate change.
Very few governments are actually on track to keep their Paris commitments, which means we’re far more likely to end up near that 2.7 degrees than 2.0 degrees. But almost no nations are doing as poorly as the worst case scenarios from a decade or two ago, which means that we’re not going to be causing our own extinction.
And probably in about 20-30 years’ time, once more renewable energy gets (slowly) baked into the economy but we continue to use a lot of fossil fuels and the models show us clearly averting catastrophe, we’re going to have to get used to the smug “I told you so”'s from conservatives who will claim they had the right idea all along. We were able to drill ourselves to oil independence, and we probably will be able to avoid climate catastrophe without having to give up fossil fuels or pay a ton of money to third world nations to get them to do it.
Albaby