this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 65 points 3 months ago (53 children)

Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.

In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun's output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we've applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they're mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we've not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.

The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn't happen "too fast" (values of "too fast" may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We're so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun's output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us -- assuming we survive that long.

That doesn't detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.

[–] MTK 101 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

I think people are missing the point, it's not about who survives, it's about who dies and suffers.

If I told you (made up numbers) that in the next 50 years, 100 million people will die an average of 20 years early because of climate change. Sure, 100 million is just about 1.3% of humans, but it's still 100 million people, who will die at 50 instaed of 70, or at 25 instead of 45, these are people who will probably die from heat, from natrual disasters, from famine, from poor health as economies collapse.

We won't be fine, someone will be, but WE, as a group, won't be fine.

In fact, we are already not fine but it's mostly felt in poor contries.

Not to kill the mood but the harsh truth is that the generations before us doomed a lot of us, and the current generations are just starting to get it, and future generations will truly feel the ignorance of our past and the indifference of our present.

[–] BarbecueCowboy 28 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

We're estimated to have lost about 15 million additional people in 2020/2021 due to covid and a disturbingly large amount of us were salty about being asked to cover their mouths in order to stave it off. Might favor certain groups, but it's doom from every generation top to bottom.

[–] Hexbatch 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

If I look at it a certain way, we all come from a long line of millions of ancestors who barely scraped by or lucked out.

Our instincts only go as far as what we can see, hear, feel, taste, smell or vibe. We are not wired to react well to invisible things

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