Does this mean we’re all going to die? Like humanity will be gone without a trace? If so, how soon?
No; at least, that’s unlikely. But parts of the world that are currently habitable will be made inhabitable, and biodiversity will continue to fall. We’ll likely see more extreme weather events, increased migration from areas that are too hot or underwater, and issues with global food supply. Coral reefs may completely disappear.
However, progress is being made, and while it’s not as quick as we’d like, carbon emissions for modern economies like the US and EU are on a downward curve. In 2021 EU’s carbon emissions were back to pre-1967 levels, while the US’s carbon emissions were back to pre-1979 levels (Source). So there’s cause for hope; the worst thing we can do is give up. Everything we do now lessens the scale of the problem in future.
Does this mean we’re all going to die?
No; at least, that’s unlikely.
Well that “unlikely” there merits some debate I would say. Yes there is reason for cautious optimism, but there is also the very real possibility of climate change becoming an extinction level event for humanity, specifically by a cascade of tipping points through several globally relevant climate systems being triggered. The damages that will be caused just by optimistic projections of warming are not well understood either:
Even without considering worst-case climate responses, the current trajectory puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 °C and 3.9 °C by 2100 (11). If all 2030 nationally determined contributions are fully implemented, warming of 2.4 °C (1.9 °C to 3.0 °C) is expected by 2100. Meeting all long-term pledges and targets could reduce this to 2.1 °C (1.7 °C to 2.6 °C) (12). Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories. Temperatures of more than 2 °C above preindustrial values have not been sustained on Earth’s surface since before the Pleistocene Epoch (or more than 2.6 million years ago) (13).
Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models. […]
There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (21) (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming (22). Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative “unknown unknowns” that are still being discovered.
So is the extinction of humanity through climate change certain? No. But is it possible? Yes, and the likelihood is very poorly understood.
Another aspect that is often overlooked in this debate is that the beginning of the holocene mass extinction is very much pre-historic, insofar as the spread of homo sapiens over the globe closely matches to the extinction of mega-fauna wherever we appeared, unsettling ecosystems millions of years old, and reducing biodiversity further and further. Other ecosystems will only be able to compensate for so long before they go extinct, and so on, and the explosion of complexity that usually follows after a mass extinction happens on timescales longer than humanities existence. If or when this cascades to the top of the food chain is anybodies guess.
If a system is poorly understood, then by definition it cannot be factored into predictions. When we say something is “unlikely” we mean “it is unlikely based on what we understand”. I don’t think it’s very useful to ask, “Well, is it unlikely based on what we don’t understand?”, because that’s not a question that can be answered.
There’s no way the climate crisis entirely wipes out humanity. However, we could be looking at a Mad Max style future.
What do you mean by no way? People cant live underground forever, and itll get worse for more generations than is sustainable.
Civilization couldn’t exist as it does today, but humans are a resilient species. We will find a way to continue living, pretty much as long as life remains on this planet. Be that underground, at the poles, in bunkers, in a dystopian desert wasteland, humanity will persist.
My understanding is that over time people will begin to move away from hotter regions. The most at risk will be children, small animals, the elderly and the poor.
Impoverished nations will be hit the hardest and we’ll see the most change happen to those places first. Scientists have said that as climate change gets worse and as temperatures get warmer, extreme weather events also become more common and worse as well.
As for how that will change for north America or Europe I have no real clue.
I live in a fairly northern location. We get down to -40°c sometimes in the winter. But even the winters are warming up and becoming more mild and the summers are getting hotter and less bearable. I would imagine we might face energy issues in the future if our countries don’t adapt. There’s going to be more demand as houses here will need AC going forward to stay cool. That or they need to start building new homes with better insulating materials that prevent heat transfer.
These measurements were only genuinely started within the last hundred years, and people have been prophesying the end of the world the entire way. Greta posted a now-deleted tweet that said we’d all be toast in three years…back in 2018, for example. Climate changes, sure. But who is to say this isn’t natural and we may go back down in the future? These CO2 greenhouse gases that are said to be smothering the planet are estimated to be deadly at around 15% iirc. The atmosphere contains a fraction of a fraction of a percent of these. So while I definitely advocate stewardship of our environment, I sincerely doubt climate change will be what does us in and the people hyping it up are often doing so with intent separate from making the environment better. The climate change religion is easy to lean on because it’s been so widely propagated.
While there has been significant exaggeration and sensationalization of the timeline of climate change and its downstream effects, to wholly dismiss it due to that is assinine. You’d have to be a fool to have a shred of a belief that the current trends we are seeing are not driven by mankind.
