You also have to adjust for the fact that most of what climate scientists publish is already conservative. Get them talking one-to-one and their predictions for the next decades are dire.
Me, I take a pessimistic view - I don’t think you have to have a large percentage change in, say, crop production, or storm damage rebuilding costs, for economies to feel the effect - prices rise, labour is diverted from growth to maintenance, and adaptations are ultimately made, but in the intervening period expense has been incurrred, and by now the climate has warmed further. The costs end up growing astronomically, and at what point do governments fail due to popular discontent, at what point do further governments collapse and even wars start due to resource cost rises and the need for popular distraction, and mass migration caused by revolution and war nearby?
I’ve put my money where my mouth is - I’ve become itinerant, while I scope out where on earth to live this out - somewhere quiet, and remote, and self-sufficient, that hasn’t yet seen ecological disaster and might escape the worst of climate change due to geography. Sadly, everywhere I’ve been in the past few years, across all continents and hemispheres, even when these places as yet appear verdant and untouched, are feeling the wrath of a changing climate, and human-wrought ecological destruction, from drought to flood, from aquifer pollution to overfarming and desertification, and vast agricultural monoculture, highly vulnerable to moving growing zones and viable climates for pests.
I’d love to be able to do something to prevent this - I recycle, I don’t buy much, I travel overland wherever possible - but I fear we’re too far gone.
What humanity and our civilisation will be in 20 or 30 years I don’t know, but I fear it’ll be unrecognisable and almost unimaginable to us, even now.
I'm curious: if you think so much about climate change and its effects, and even plan your actions and location around it, have you considered directing your energy to combatting climate change with your skills on a systemic level? (For example, building sustainability companies, being part of climate activism, earning-to-donate?)
I'm in a similar spot but optimistic about systemic action.
I’m doing consultancy at a CTO level for a number of medium/large environmental technology companies while I travel, comprising everything from supply chain management around hazardous materials to sustainable living systems to pipeline management - and I’ve been contributing photography and footage to documentarians as I go.
I’m not optimistic about systemic action - the people taking it seriously don’t have the power to overcome a far more dominant system: our consumption-driven way of living, and the economies built around it. Mindshare may grow sufficiently in coming decades, but by then it’ll largely be too late, and that growth will likely come from more people witnessing and enduring the effects of climate change - and if we’re at that point, it’s already too late, as systemic collapse beckons as I laid out in my previous.
The climate is a chaotic system - it finds a metastable mode for a given set of inputs, and once moved by changing those inputs (e.g. CO2 ppm) from that point of stability can wander drastically before finding that point again. As forests die, as methane is belched from the thawing permafrost, as marine ecosystems collapse (everywhere is overrun by jellies - even Antarctica), as ice caps and glaciers melt, as coastal plains flood, as grassland turns to desert, core components of the current system of stability are yet further altered, thus pushing the current mode yet further from its stable point and making that stable point harder to reattain.
Like I said, get a climatologist talking in private, and it’s grim listening. They see the bigger picture in their work, but only publish studies on specific observations. Longitudinal studies end up being conservative otherwise they sound radically alarmist and don’t get published.
Anyhow. We should keep on playing while the ship sinks.
There were large scale demonstrations held on September 8. Hundreds of thousands of people marched and demanded change around the world. You didn't hear about it? Not strange. Zero media coverage.
tl;dr I got tired of people saying I was "lucky" that I could ride a bike to work and made a tool to help them do the same thing. It shows flats for rent on a map with transport and bike routes instead of roads.
Sorry if it sounds like a plug but it's the best answer I have to your question. I studied physics in college and hoped it would help me work on energy efficiency or renewable energy generation technology, but it turns out that when I graduated (in to the worst recession in a century) nobody had any interest at all in what I was able to offer. I'd still love to work on saving the planet if I could do so while paying rent or a mortgage.
> What humanity and our civilisation will be in 20 or 30 years I don’t know, but I fear it’ll be unrecognisable and almost unimaginable to us, even now.
This is certainly true when looking at 2018 from the perspective of 1988 (or even 1998).
Me, I take a pessimistic view - I don’t think you have to have a large percentage change in, say, crop production, or storm damage rebuilding costs, for economies to feel the effect - prices rise, labour is diverted from growth to maintenance, and adaptations are ultimately made, but in the intervening period expense has been incurrred, and by now the climate has warmed further. The costs end up growing astronomically, and at what point do governments fail due to popular discontent, at what point do further governments collapse and even wars start due to resource cost rises and the need for popular distraction, and mass migration caused by revolution and war nearby?
I’ve put my money where my mouth is - I’ve become itinerant, while I scope out where on earth to live this out - somewhere quiet, and remote, and self-sufficient, that hasn’t yet seen ecological disaster and might escape the worst of climate change due to geography. Sadly, everywhere I’ve been in the past few years, across all continents and hemispheres, even when these places as yet appear verdant and untouched, are feeling the wrath of a changing climate, and human-wrought ecological destruction, from drought to flood, from aquifer pollution to overfarming and desertification, and vast agricultural monoculture, highly vulnerable to moving growing zones and viable climates for pests.
I’d love to be able to do something to prevent this - I recycle, I don’t buy much, I travel overland wherever possible - but I fear we’re too far gone.
What humanity and our civilisation will be in 20 or 30 years I don’t know, but I fear it’ll be unrecognisable and almost unimaginable to us, even now.