This is tangential to your point about remaining on this planet, but it is much easier to survive on our planet, polluted or not, than it is to setup shop on a different planet.

I am fully in agreement with your view on how messed up things are on our planet due to human action. I just felt compelled to point out that any adjustments to be made on other planets can be done here. Can't breath on mars? Build a dome and generate air into it. The same thing could be done on Earth if the situation was bad enough. Can't survive on the surface of Venus due to hot and thick atmosphere? Live floating in the clouds. We could do the same on Earth.

The process of getting to another planet is so infeasible at this point and probably will be for a long time yet. We can hope, but I like to play devil's advocate. Also, Human's are very good at adapting and I'm sure the will to survive will keep our species alive even if pollution degrades our environment to the point of toxicity.

I guess my line of thought on my kids leaving this world for another has an additional assumption: that they, and the others who would do so, would leave to escape not just the planet's climate, but the people who screwed it up for them to begin with.

Don't you think that the problems with the environment sort of stem most significantly from emergent social phenomena analogous to (but not exactly the same as) such things as tragedy of the commons? It's not like this version of the human race just got lucky and got all the bad 'uns. Humans are humans, no point in bemoaning reality. But the social structures are in a sense an equally root cause.

I would say, yes, the economic theory of the "tragedy of the commons" is a major part of the issue. Good thing that the modern counterparts to those theorists have come to understand that the solution to the tragedy of the commons is to ensure that the costs of the consumption are borne by the consumer.

Regulation, societal norms drafted from the start to ensure transparency, and the "greater good" spirit that, one could easily argue, would be prevalent in those who would choose to risk their lives to leave this rock behind... all those things would form the framework by which our offspring would ensure that they're capable of learning from the mistakes of their forebears.

I believe that, as a race, we're too late to undo the damage we've done to our environment. The patient (our way of life) is terminal, we can only hope to make ourselves comfortable in our waning years without unnecessarily spreading the disease.

But, as cliché as it sounds, I am not hopeless, and I simply cannot allow myself to believe that future generations would do the same thing if they had another planet - or even this one - to start over again. I MUST believe that part of the human condition includes learning from and not repeating the mistakes that cost billions of lives.

OK so what disqualifies a polluter with a pile of cash from buying a seat from one of these kids?

I see the whole problem as related to manifest destiny, either economic or religious. Pure free markets will save us, and/or so will some deity. Because such faith can't possibly be wrong, can't possibly lead us astray to the degree the species ends.

Is that so?

I don't think a deity or a politician or a wealthy philanthropist will save us. We're beyond saving. I think I can teach my kids how to help save themselves and their like-minded peers, those very peers that would leave this planet behind if they could.

As for what stops someone buying a seat on that one-way ride to a brave new world? Two things:

1) Your hypothetical buyer isn't actually that brave.

2) The same reason people can't rush the cockpit of a fully loaded airliner any longer. The rest of the passengers know it's in their best interests, as a group, to prevent that from happening.

>>This is tangential to your point about remaining on this planet, but it is much easier to survive on our planet, polluted or not, than it is to setup shop on a different planet.

While true, this also means that we have taken our planet for granted, since survival on it is so easy. We have to plan things much more carefully and deliberately on the next planet we inhabit.

The environmental conditions of a 'scorched' Earth aren't themselves that big a problem. The bigger problem is the disparity between how many people are on Earth now, and how many people we can support in those new environmental conditions.

As usual: humanity's primary challenge is humanity.

* the inexorable slide into worldwide famine, war and anarchy*

The projections for increased CO2 emissions and thus warming are predicated on global increases in GDP, because greater consumption correlates to greater emissions.

Thus, we should expect that famine will not be the result of climate change, at least within any foreseeable range of change. Falling into famine would dramatically decrease GDPs, and thus forestall climate change. It seems people fail to realize this connection. The factors creating the problem are symptoms of overall prosperity.

I suppose it's possible for things to go non-linear and mess up that relationship. Perhaps we start to rely more on energy sources that are even dirtier (maybe people burn wood to economize, or misguided environmental regulations won't allow for cleaner natural gas to replace increasingly-dirty coal). Or, as I mentioned above, maybe some threshold is crossed where agriculture suddenly requires vastly greater energy input per calorie harvested. But barring very unlikely events like that, climate change will happen because we're ever more prosperous.

I think the problem with your idea is that there's huge lag in the system. Even if all human CO2 production ceased today, there would still be huge changes for decades to come. A global catastrophe due to climate change would eventually put a stop to further climate change, but by then it'll be a little too late.

It's a bit like arguing that you can't die from jumping off a bridge, because then you wouldn't be alive to make the jump. It misses the important temporal relationships.

Not only that, but it's cumulative, all the CO2 from the past century+ is not going away very fast.

Right, that's a big part of the lag. If climate change causes civilization to collapse, it'll still take decades or centuries for the built-up CO2 to drop back to normal levels. Plus the fact that emissions won't stop right away just because a bunch of people start starving.

You seem to be overlooking the part of those predictions that deal with the societal effects that the forced migration of entire cultures would likely entail when those groups try to ensure their own survival as they leave behind their homelands because their land is under water / no longer arable / too hot / too cold.

War.

Not at all. If things ever got to the point of forced migrations, that migration would necessarily entail a plunge in their GDP, thus at least slowing the effect.

(The other replies to my GP point out a delay in the feedback loop. I'm still thinking on that part.)

We need a Mahnattan Project for carbon sequestration.

Or a carbon tax. Exxon is planning on a $80/ton tax, which is about $0.80/gallon of gasoline. It's a travesty that Exxon is taking this more seriously than the majority of US politicians.

I can take all that money if you'd like and plant a few trees?

Absolutely, that should be part of it. Fleets of drones planting forests. But artificial photosynthesis modules in the desert and engineered algae could also play a huge role.

The cost of taking carbon out of the atmosphere by not burning it is going to be far cheaper than taking it out of the atmosphere directly, for a long time. Hell, a lot of the things we are failing to do now are outright profitable through reductions in energy costs even without any costing in of carbon emissions.

The cost is not entirely relevant, even putting aside the need to take out the carbon that we have already emitted. There is a power law distribution of wealth, and people on top have just about all of the financial and technological means to combat global warning, but limited means to convince the people on the bottom to use their tools. Deforestation, automotive and agricultural emissions are just not going to stop fast enough. It's faster, easier and probably more morally sound to build something like a Gigafactory for carbon sequestration modules than to wage (even economic) war on countries that emit too much greenhouse gas.

>Anyone who cooks can instinctively understand how "carryover heat" works

My thermo professor was fond of re-branding "global warming" as "global heating." Right now we're just melting the ice cubes. If that heat-reservoir ever dries up, things will really start warming.

Intresting since there was an article a couple of days ago about how the arctic could be ice free in just a few years.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

I understand your despair, but there's hope to be found in the fact that this, too, shall pass. We've weathered worse crises as a species and come out of them smarter and stronger - and we'll do the same with this one, though it take a thousand years.

I do appreciate the sentiment. Truly, I do. It occurs to me that my pressing "submit" on that first comment was actually an important milestone for me, mentally.

Through the years of my watching my species demonstrate the law of triviality, I can see now that I've gone through the five stages of grief, as defined by the Kübler-Ross model.

Denial: Mainly, as a child. I can't think of a moment of my life after the executive function portions of my brain were developed that I was in profound denial, but I can identify spans where I felt that my negative impact didn't really count.

Anger: My early adult years, angry with the "political-industrial complex" for metaphorically writing the environmental checks I and my offspring would have to cash.

Bargaining: In my late twenties and early thirties, thinking "maybe if I make these changes, I can convince others to do the same, and together, we can effect real change in our government and in society." It's about this time that I also noticed that people who use the phrase "[foo]-industrial complex" come off as either idealists or conspiracy theorists.

Depression: In recent years, I've experienced a growing sense of despair while watching story after story showcasing the arguments between humans who, you'd think, would all prefer not to have to worry about how difficult life will become when the effects of climate change are really felt; grand ideas that couldn't possibly be implemented in time; seeing how my voting and writing politicians and commenting on web sites (ha!) failed to make a difference; thinking that my kids' lives will be harder, and as a parent, all I want is to make their lives better than mine.

Acceptance: And here we are. My "coming out" as a person who's realized it's too late gets (as I write this) 26 fake internet points. I feel validated, in a weird way, and it gave me peace to see those first dozen points roll in over just a few minutes. I've accepted that the climate is irrevocably (in my lifetime) wrecked, and there are things I can do now to help my children. I can help them learn the lessons my generation didn't. I can show what changes we can make that would make a difference, not because they will make a difference for me, but because there may come a time that those lessons would be passed on, possibly made part of a societal contract to stop arguing, stop fucking up the environment, and start doing what's necessary to ensure, wherever they live in the future, these mistakes won't be repeated. Teaching them the simple math behind it all:

When you spend, over just 150 years, a natural currency that took millions of years to save, you drive the environmental economy into ruin. From day one, a fourth grade student could've done the math and said, "hang on, guys... this doesn't add up."

And then I realize: I don't have to teach them that last part. My son figured that out on his own. Two years ago. In the fourth grade.

> When you spend, over just 150 years, a natural currency that took millions of years to save, you drive the environmental economy into ruin.

It's not really so much the environmental economy - just ours; we're running out of runway, but the good news is, we don't go out of business if we go off the end. We just have to find a way to bootstrap with a lower burn rate.

i think moments like define science

accept an inevitability or try to understand a phenomena enough to affect it

if tomorrow we discovered an asteroid on inevitable trajectory with the earth i hope I'll be able to help either divert its path or catch and mine it

Thank god for negative feedback loops eh? I'm actually glad we have more CO2 in the atmosphere, because it will increase biodiversity and agricultural yields. I don't see any evidence that climate change is proceeding at a fast enough pace to cause damage.

There's a pretty solid factual case for quantifiable damage here: floods in Louisiana, Texas, India, West Virginia and France and fires in California, Portugal and Canada. There's also decreased crop yield due to droughts and decreased fish yield due to ocean acidification. This is non-zero.

Almost all of those cases can have explanations that are not global warming related.

For example, in Canada those fires were huge because of too-efficient fire suppression methods. Not enough controlled fires were done in that area and Fort Mcmurray expanded beyond its Fire Protection zone.

Not every weather-related catastrophe is caused by global warming, that just harms the credibiltiy of that argument

better go change wikipedia then because it basically says 'climate change'.

What's the evidence for increased CO2 leading to increased biodiversity and agricultural yields?

Under conditions of increased CO2 availability, plants tend to decrease waster usage and sequester more carbon. Growth rates are faster, but require increased mineral availability. Unfortunately, nitrogen levels in plants decrease in high-atmospheric CO2 conditions, which leads to lower protein concentrations. As a result, consumption crops provide less energy and nutrition when consumed.

So, all in all, the downsides outweigh the upsides -- faster growth, lower nutrition, more aggressive soil depletion, and increased water runoff. On the bright side, carbon sequestration increases up to 40%, so the efficacy of planting forests as a sequestration measure will increase.

As for biodiversity -- well, dieoffs are already outpacing speciation. Unless you believe in abiogenesis, the trendline is moving sharply downward.

Really?

You're going to extrapolate from lower nitrogen levels in plants in higher CO2 conditions (without a citation, might i add) to higher CO2 levels causing overall lower nutrition? and more aggressive soil depletion? Keep in mind that obviously more plant growth means more plant decay which cycles back int othe ecosystem.

Are you trying to suggest that we should be decreasing agricultural yields so as to prevent soil depletion? There are better ways.

"without a citation, might i add"

Odd card to play when your comment had no citations either, and you seem to be ignoring my request for them....

It's well established that increased CO2 leads to increased plant biomass, thereby satisfying my claim that it leads to increased agricultural yield (as per greenhouses for example).

My claim that increased CO2 leads to more biodiversity is more tenuous but is more likely than a decrease in biodiversity, all other factors being controlled for.

Typical double standard, your speculation is perfectly reasonable but the other guy's claims need scientific backing. Annoying, and not very convincing!

You must have never delved too much into science then. There are certain claims that have been well established for so long that citations are no longer needed. For example, we don't need citations to state the order of colours in a rainbow. Likewise, I don't need a citation to state that plant biomass increases with a greater concentration of CO2. That's basic science, it's unequivocal and not controversial. On the other hand, the previous dude made wild speculation about increased CO2 causing increased soil depletion. I'm sorry if you don't see the difference. Not everyone is suited to being a scientist.

Searching around, it looks like what you say is often the case, but is not guaranteed, and the full effects of increased CO2 concentration on real-world crops is still very much up in the air. For example:

https://www.mpg.de/6650626/carbon-dioxide-crop-yields

Sure doesn't look as simple as the order of colors in a rainbow to me.

Wasn't CO2 much higher in the past, hence why plants were so massive and could support big dino's.

Yes, CO2 was into the single-digit parts per thousand for much of the dinosaur era. I have no idea how that affected plant growth, but even if that's the cause, it seems tenuous to look at Mesozoic plant growth and assume modern agricultural crops will imitate them. Certainly far more tenuous than the evidence that climate change is causing damage and will cause more.

So you think that rising temperatures may be good for agriculture?

From a website:

As climate change leads to more frequent and intense natural hazards, it is expected that climate displacement will only increase in Bangladesh. The best estimates suggest that up to 18 million people may be displaced by sea level rise alone. http://displacementsolutions.org/ds-initiatives/climate-chan...

Europe us really struggling to deal with the migrants and refugees from Syria. I do wonder how we'll cope with future migrations. It really brings into perspective the idea of a border. Of a country. Just a man drew a line on a map.

What gives you the impression I think that?

It is not tenuous to suggest that modern agricultural crops will yield more in a higher CO2 environment (look into greenhouses). It is actually far less tenuous than speculating that CO2 is causing runaway global warming.