I think what people mean by 'humanity is doomed' isn't about whether the homo sapiens species will continue - it will.
The fear is more that society collapses. Our way of life may be doomed. With our extreme focus on career specialisation over the past century, very few, if any of us have the generalist skills to thrive in a world equivalent to pre-industrial times. It's not something to shrug at. What country can actually live as a self contained unit without global supply lines and dependencies? What families or individuals could?
It's also true that there will be substantial areas of habitable climate. The problem is that people who weren't lucky enough to be born and live in one, won't simply accept their fates and die. Eight billion people will surge into a relatively small habitable band - in the process this will destroy the arable land and severely strain systems like water, power, waste and healthcare.
Why do you think climate change is going to make industrialized society and global trade disappear? Are warming oceans going to melt container ships? Not to be snide, but this comment is just postulating the collapse of industry and trade as fact without a cohesive picture as to why climate change will cause this.
The overwhelming majority of the earth will still be habitable with even the most pessimistic predictions of 4-5 degrees of warming. Those areas that stand to become uninhabitable, like the Sahara Desert, are very sparsely populated. Only 2.5 million people in an area the size of the continental USA. A big swath on a map, but not a very big impact on global demographics. As far as resources go, the world already has a substantial overproduction of food. Water can be secured from alternative sources, like desalination (Israel already obtains ~40% of its water from desalination) and reclamation of waste water.
To reiterate, I see a massive gap in how the effects of climate change lead to the collapse of global civilization.
> To reiterate, I see a massive gap in how the effects of climate change lead to the collapse of global civilization.
some parts of the world/economy are stronger and more resilient than others
if, for example supply chains of manufactured goods from a few countries petered out, the effects would cascade up the chain to many other industries
just look at the effect of a covid, and microchip shortages, we can barely get capacity to build cars and even gpus now and its only getting worse
add some mass migrations here and there, political disruptions, markets pulling back investments (aka 2008) and more, and it becomes much easier to imagine our way of life being disrupted so such a degree that we "cannot carry on as before"
The fear is more that society collapses. Our way of life may be doomed. With our extreme focus on career specialisation over the past century, very few, if any of us have the generalist skills to thrive in a world equivalent to pre-industrial times. It's not something to shrug at. What country can actually live as a self contained unit without global supply lines and dependencies? What families or individuals could?
It's also true that there will be substantial areas of habitable climate. The problem is that people who weren't lucky enough to be born and live in one, won't simply accept their fates and die. Eight billion people will surge into a relatively small habitable band - in the process this will destroy the arable land and severely strain systems like water, power, waste and healthcare.