First, if we have clean energy, are we going to shut down fossil fuel plants that have already been built? If not, then fossil fuel will just become cheaper as demand drops, making burning fossil fuels attractive again. Countries currently plan to reduce their emissions, but none are planning to reduce their fossil fuel exports. They just hope it will show up on another country's emissions balance sheet.
Even if we did develop super cheap clean energy, that would only reduce emissions in the future. Past emissions hang around for centuries and contribute to warm the planet (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...). We would need to pay huge amounts to sequester that CO2 and I don't see anybody volunteering to foot that bill.
This paper summarises both issues well: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Both are just aspects of the fundamental issue - although technological solutions perhaps could be developed, there is no political or economic will to do so, and no indication that will change.
That depends entirely on how cheap the alternatives are. Fossil fuel mining is not zero cost in itself, so there is a minimum price it can’t go below.
Indeed, quite a lot of coal plants are being shut down — they can’t compete as the fuel itself is too expensive. This is not universal as not all coal is the same price and transport costs are also relevant, but it is happening.
If that’s what you’re quoting (I’ve not seen any recent attempts to calculate the costs of oil extraction), each barrel has ~1.7 MWh of energy. By way of comparison, PV solar records are around $0.02/kWh = $34/BOE.
That's not how markets work, at all. Oil has an extraction cost, and once the price falls below the profitable threshold, the production will absolutely shutdown.
This highly visible with the boom/bust cycle of the more expensive extraction areas (dakotas, canada, etc).
So as demand continues to drop due to competition from cheaper energy, oil supply will start to collapse as well because none of it comes for free and taking it out of the ground will become a money losing proposition.
This is untrue. If cost to extract >> market price, then existing operations may well just be shut down. To quote Hemmingway it would likely happen "gradually then suddenly".
Key here is rate of change, and what humans can survive. We are changing the climate many many times faster than ever before. Nature does not have the time to adapt. And the wars, famines and mass displacements coming from ecosystem collapse is like nothing we've seen in human history. Think we have a problem with a few million migrants? Try a billion or two!
P-T Extinction event "The Great Dying" took on the order of 100 000 years to elevate CO2 and still killed off 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates. The largest mass extinction ever(?) We're going strong in that direction over a few hundred years.
And a very hot earth will have large areas that are not survivable by humans, by traditional crops and food animals, and so on. Storms and floods massively more powerful than we see today.
Frankly, how can you not be afraid of that future? It's very likely your descendants won't survive it.
Life on Earth will be fine, but that life will be different to the life we have today.
The only thing not fine is whether humans survive what they/we ultimately have brought about.
But in there is a kind of beautiful justice that the universe has in it's self-correcting algorithm... if you create imbalance, the imbalance will correct in time but perhaps to do so it kills you.
If we care about the human race, it means to care about the whole ecosystem and all other life on Earth. But the evidence of behaviour by people and governments is that they only care for themselves as individuals and not the wider human race, and other life on Earth.
I no longer see hope for significant change in the behaviour of humans, and I've shifted my view to believing that what is needed to provide massively long-term stability in the ecosystem for life on Earth is another mass extinction that includes humans.
Which sounds depressing, but doesn't feel it. I'm positive about life on Earth, just not about humans.
TBH statements like these really grate on me. Yes, Earth will be fine in the same sense that you'd be fine if you surgically removed your arms, legs, eyeballs, ears, and tongue and then were fed intravenously and your waste disposed of for you. You might live a long life and have lots of nice dreams.
The reality is that we are in early stages of kicking off a cascade of effects that could wipe out the majority of the food web on Earth--let's say, everything larger than your finger. Yeah sure, insects and microbes will reboot it all--in a hundred millions years, if ever. Wonderful!
To make such flippant remarks about so profoundly annihilating the bioversity of this very special planet is not helpful in the dialogue.
Let's please work on this problem seriously.
So far we've really only scratched the surface, but there have been hundreds of local mass die-offs (billions of individual animals each). https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/01/150113-mass...
The Great Barrier Reef is about half dead now. In two years. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-20...
But look at what happened at the end of the Permian age. 96% of species were lost. It was due to CO2/methane causing climate change. https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinction...
(btw we still have no idea what caused the extinction at the end of the Triassic).
We're basically on the way to combining all of these causes of mass extinctions in a super-short timeframe that may mushroom into one super-massive extinction.
And as far as what-if's go, if climate change sets off a global conflict, and there's a nuclear war, forget it.
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/news.2010.379.h...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/volcano-carbon-emissions/
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits...
https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warmin...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how-...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...
> According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world’s volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide
But I guess you're more knowledgeable on the subject than the US geological survey?
> On average, human activities put out in just three to five days, the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide that volcanoes produce globally each year
https://www.usgs.gov/news/human-activities-produce-more-carb...
Humans will be fine, as a species. But the human and economic costs will be large.
Compare it to the Hurricane Katrina: most people in New Orleans weathered it fine (i.e. by evacuating the city). The city itself also survived mostly okay (it's still there). But the economic cost of cleanup was huge; and while most people survived without injury, many did not for various reasons.
The choice of "spend a bit of money now, save a Katrina later" versus "save money now, have a Katrina later" is pretty clear. Unfortunately in the case of Katrina we didn't have much of a choice, but for climate change we do. If we invest resources now we can save a lot of problems later on. Or we can spend our resources on other things now, and pay a huge price later.
Alarming "zomg we might all die" stuff isn't really all that helpful or likely to convince politicians or businesses to actually do something. It also invites the "meh, the earth has been warmer" counter-argument, which is missing the point. I think more level-headed risk analysis which lists potential costs/benefits is more useful.
For example, is it worth for some country to "invest", say, $100 billion in reducing emissions - which, at least unilaterally, won't be sufficient to prevent the effects of climate change but just mitigate them - or can they achieve better mitigation by a comparable investment in reinforcing their shoreline, updating or relocating buildings, etc?
If USA had to vote on whether to spend (or lose by restricting growth) $1 trillion of USA resources to prevent $10 trillion of future losses in SE Asia, then I'd assume that such proposals would be swiftly declined; spending our resources on other things now and having someone else pay a huge price later would be considered a quite good deal by many governments, as the countries that most need to take action are not the same countries that will bear the harshest consequences.
Economic, human, and ecological costs. I am not hugely in favour of reducing everything to economics (although it's definitely an important part).
I also don't think that it's as simple as "$1 trillion of USA resources to prevent $10 trillion of future losses in SE Asia". Globalisation means that "local" economies aren't really all that local; so problems in e.g. SE Asia will also affect other parts of the world.
Humans will survive. They will adapt. It may not be in the same numbers and lifestyle as today, but the human race will likely be here for a very long time.
As individuals, we're not much more interesting than any other animal. It's our technological civilization that makes us interesting in the grand scheme of things, and that civilization is both hard to bootstrap and extremely fragile.
Well yes, nearly ('extreme' perhaps: 'ultimate' sounds a bit magical), but that's the problem. Darwinian evolution has created a creature than can avoid most sources of population limits that permit ecosystem stability. This same creature has the flexibility to repeat the trick in all regions on the planet, crashing one after another.
And then although our species is (for better or worse) remarkably resilient, agricultural civilisation is far too new to be able to make similar claims about it. The 21st century signs aren't good. It's hard to imagine major climate collapse convulsions not resulting in ongoing wars, probably nuclear.
So yes, literal extinction of humans doesn't seem likely. Some people may enjoy the idea of a dystopic 'The Road' style rag-tag dog-eat-dog existence (though they're probably mostly pale wormy teens who in real life panic when out of reach of a screen). But the breakdown of a planetary society of 7-12 billion (depending on how far into this process we can jury rig nations to hold together) is going to be nothing but a litany of sorrow & pain.
Have to agree with you there. Things will probably get much worse before they get better. Now there are 2 possible attitudes, either depression from obvious lack of adequate action, or acceptance of what's about to come will come, whatever it is.
By acceptance I don't mean ignorance, by all means promote moral, 'green' solutions, recycle, vote for sane people who at least pretend to care (I am looking at you, US). Or do gazillion of other things that help, and avoid those which don't. I know I do my part, however insignificant.
But change is inevitable. Even though on paper we can still avoid most dark stuff, we won't. Mankind as a whole will react properly only when it really will start to hurt, globally, and rich won't be able to comfortably escape or hide from it.
Some will die because of this. Some will profit from it. On enough long-term scale, it won't matter unless mankind will go extinct which I don't believe will happen.
Do I like it? Not at all. Can I change it? Same answer. Am I content with it and not waste my time, energy and mood on being depressed about it? Absolutely.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080619142112.h...
The ice core showed the Northern Hemisphere briefly emerged from the last ice age some 14,700 years ago with a 22-degree-Fahrenheit spike in just 50 years...
For a recent example look up the younger dryas on Wikipedia. It seems like the average global temp moved about 5 degrees over a few decades.
Closest I can get to supporting your client is that the local temperature of Greenland went up a lot at the end of that period. Not global. And given the article talks a lot about global thermohaline circulation, extreme local variation is not surprising.
I can’t follow the link from there to (Brauer et al. 2008) as that link is paywalled.
The Greenland graph is essentially vertical, but the Cariaco graph looks like it’s relatively spread out as well as being much smaller magnitude — though even then, the delta is double the current estimated maximum sustainable excess over pre-industrial temperatures.
http://gergs.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/All_palaeotemps_...
Areas where more than a billion people live today will become uninhabitable to humans if they warm up by 14 degrees. Actually, much sooner than that.
That will be a giant migration crisis, on an unprecedented scale, sure. Maybe even a world war. Nothing good, not in slightest. Something best avoided at all costs.
Yet, the point is, if this won't be avoided - humanity as a whole is still not in danger. We're not going extinct if Earth will warm up. The world will change drastically, many millions will die, ecosystems will be shattered - but H.sapiens aren't going to disappear as a species.
If the climate situation gets to the point of crashing global supply chains, say goodbye to all modern technology. Whatever's left will degrade quickly, and we'll be back to preindustrial levels, but with no easily accessible dense energy sources to bootstrap another industrial revolution.
This is why I keep saying that the most important goal right now is not to protect the planet, not to protect the human species, but to protect our technological civilization. If it collapses, we'll still be there (albeit in reduced numbers). But our civilization won't recover for millennia.
Sure there are dependencies, and some technologies will collapse and become unachievable for generations. But others are essentially free of dependencies - the germ theory of disease, the staff system, democracy, air travel, bicycles. Easy to bring back or keep, and with tremendous benefits.
I've always been sad that post-apocalyptic scenarios have no bicycles, and no biplanes. They just postulate people being the same as people were in the stone age, maybe with some recycled trash thrown in.
Consider that food production is very much dependent and looped with all the existing supply chains. As some say, modern agriculture is essentially pouring petroleum into the ground and harvesting crops that grow from it. Could we use our scientific knowledge to get better results than preindustrial people did with the same tech level? Sure. Will it be enough to feed even 20% of current population, especially given the battered climate? I doubt it. And the way I see it, a lot of our "social technologies" - as well as more "physical" ones - seem to depend on population size and density.
Speaking of science fiction tropes, I read an interesting book once - "The Windup Girl". It featured a post-climate-change world with depleted fossil fuels and collapsed technology, that still sort-of worked thanks to machines being powered by mechanical work (with spring systems for storage and special breeds of animals providing muscle power). I wish more books and movies would go into this territory.
--
[0] - not just because it's what we'll need come climatepocalypse, but also because I believe there are many unexplored "low-tech/hi-science" solutions that could let us achieve similar results in many areas of life, while using much less energy, or with much less dependence on existing infrastructure. For instance, I feel that mechanical energy storage (springs) and gliders are underexplored and underapplied, since energy today is too cheap to bother.
--
EDIT and a tangent: I am really interested in the possibility of combining gliders with computers and sensors to enable extremely energy-efficient (if not time-efficient) flight. If anyone knows of work being done in this space, I'd love to get some directions or resources about it.
Farming is more of a 'trickle petroleum into the ground and harvest crops'. Its one of the most efficient of technologies now. With good timing and no-till and ammonia fertilizer, even eroded clay hillsides produce bumper crops. It is a fragile technology tree but much simpler trees could be forged, having a good whack of the same benefits.
RE farming and other technology trees, it might be worth it to hedge our bets by trying to develop such simpler tech trees right now. In the worst case, we'd be making life much easier for the survivors. In the best case, maybe we could reapply some of those ideas to further reduce energy waste.
Maybe we’ll have a rennasaince. Maybe we won’t; but Paper Books will be critical
If so it's simply cheaper to entirely fix global warming. If not, what are we planning on eating?
We're already seeing species can't react quickly enough to changing conditions. Flora especially takes time to move. If it's only humanity that is adapting, isn't the point rather moot?
Another is sea level rise. For +14C that's on the order of +30 meters as currently predicted.
And of course such drastic changes don't come alone. Weather patterns will change, food production will be threatened, governments will be destabilized, wars will happen.
We can tech our way out of some of this but who's to say that we will be given enough time and resources. The universe doesn't owe us anything.
Many things are like that. And we don't have decades to wait for the Earth to become congenial again, we need to eat every day.
What about industrial civilization?
I think you are fundamentally missing the point of the question. The question is what we can do to prevent climate change, not how we should align our beliefs not to worry about it.
> So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.
This perfectly exemplifies my problem with this attitude.
You call this "levelheaded optimism", but you're basically throwing your hands up hoping for someone to apply some sort of sci-fi solution to the problem at some point in the future. Calling for Jurassic Park to restore extinct species is the opposite of levelheaded. To say that there's nothing we can do about it now is really just thinly veiled defeatism and not at all optimistic.
Meanwhile, for example, the demand and supply of rhino horns is decreasing overall, not because people are content with speculating about how someone else in a future generation will solve the problem, but because deliberate action is being taken to change the attitudes towards rhino horns, campaigning to educate people about the medicinal myths surrounding them, to destroy smuggled horns and to protect the animals from poachers.
If the people engaging in these actions had just laid back, convinced that someone will be able to beam rhinos from a parallel universe by 2100AD anyway, they'd probably have been extinct by now.
My point is that this is unfortunately what human nature is and I don't see any great change tool that unless we get to some kind of post-scarcity situation but I'm reasonably optimistic about that.
I wish there was a prediction market where I could bet against you on this outcome...
There are things you can do to take personal action. The ones that actually matter are usually disruptive (e.g. eliminating your daily commute is orders of magnitude better than eating local). Most of the mainstream 'sustainable living' tips are just a drop in the bucket designed around minimizing disruption and maximizing showing off.
I wrote a series of posts on this recently with more to come. Far more than I can fit in here. It's a classic tragedy of the commons but there is hope.
https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...
This is disingenuous because humans have been around say 2M years, and those hot climate years were >5M years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record).
We don't need Earth to have Venus conditions for it to be a big problem for us.
Who knows what the future will bring. I have little doubt that the planet and human species will survive in the longer term, but the ecological, human, and economic costs will be huge. It's a stupid gamble: the benefits to ignoring climate change are small, and the dangers are huge.
It bothers me to no end that even in Europe many parties that acknowledge that climate change is real and a serious problem (basically everyone, only the US/GOP is a mainstream source of climate denial) kind of ignore it because "zomg the economy might shrink 0.001% the next quarter". It's spectacularly short-sighted, and it's one of several examples where our democratic system is failing massively in addressing serious problems.
For example, in the currently worst recent hurricane years, cars killed something like 10 times more people in USA than these hurricanes. If we got people to drive half as much (which would help but not be sufficient), then the most impact on deaths and injuries would come directly from the change in habits, not from the effect on global warming.
If we're not willing to drastically reduce driving so as we'd save some of the 40000 USA road vehicle deaths/year (and we're obviously not), then why would we be willing to drastically reduce emissions just to save some of the 2000-4000 hurricane deaths/year?
The same goes for massive flooding. OK, Bangladesh will plausibly get many deaths from the sea level rise. USA? Not so much; it can probably afford a massive infrastructure investment to do Netherland-style dams for all densely populated coastal areas.
You speak of this as if space migration is going to be scalable.
The thing about the that is that it's not high tech. It's an engineering problem not a science problem. A massive engineering solution I'll grant you. I'll also concede that there are going to be a lot of steps on between.
The future is going to be very mundane. Conventional reusable rockets are going to be enough. The fuel cost of a launch is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of whatever satellites you're bringing into orbit.
I used to be a big believer in this. But, from a pure waste heat standpoint, if we ever have to worry about having enough area in Earth's surface for solar panels, we have much bigger problems.
We are nowhere near that point now, but given a small but steady exponential growth in the energy supply, we'll get there in a couple hundred years.
However, space based solar power could help with intermittently of solar/wind if battery tech doesn't outpace enonomic orbital launches.
1) We don't have enough time to wait for those solutions to be implemented.
2) Climate lag. We're now only seeing the consequences from the emissions from the 80s. Since then we've emitted a lot more CO2. Not only we need to reach zero emissions asap, as in in the next decade, but we also need to reach strong negative emissions very soon.
Don't get me wrong. I think if all humanity was focused working towards that goal it might be possible to get a shot at this, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Can we have that before 2040 please
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-repo...
Exactly. You can spread doom as much as you want and it won't help. You won't get a critical mass to listen to you. They won't change their behavior based on some event that will most likely happen in the far future. Sad, but true.
As a species, we don't have a history of planning and preventing. Instead we have always been adapting to change as things happen. This is essentially the same.
If technology caused a problem, technology can also solve it.
Sometimes. If it's economically viable. Sometimes many decades later.
Take PCBs as an example. Their absurd longevity means nearly all of it is still around, causing a long list of harms, and will probably continue for decades more. Long after production ceased.
In that context:
* Economic viability is a matter of time. Have commercially viable fusion reactors? You better recalculate your econ viability all over.
* PCBs: Nanotechnology, robotics, AI
What do you want people to do? Stop living their lives and give up tech? To what level? Can we keep the wheel?
That's not how things work in reality.
Just saying that because some people don't understand that there are good reasons to give up those clumsy wheel things, they ain't the bees knees.
In the post nuclear war movie 'Threads' there is a quick loss of education and language in the nuclear winter years. A girl is shown with a record player and records, this scene is about how the girl has no idea what this is for, the very culture of music is not conceivable, it has been lost.
All tech is given up in the apocalypse. As is language and civilisation. It becomes a life of harsh survival. Violence becomes the universal language that everyone understands, that's it.
This is still an outcome our politicians have not gone to rule out for us. With our taxes we pay for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons to be pointed at us.
If we just give up the cult of militarism then we will be fine.
You're looking at big, broad patterns and assuming they will work out on the huge scales necessary for civilisation to continue. Other people are looking at the big broad patterns and assuming that cascading failures will make problems accelerate.
It's a mindset and a positive attitude that is constructive instead of spreading fear and doom, which does not yield any positive outcome at all.
That's not true. You are keeping saying that in several of your comments. There are many examples where things have changed because of
Spreading fear and doom -> Politicians pass laws -> Industry is forced to react -> New technologies developed/deployed/...
If you read the comments again you will see that all that was said is "you won't change the outcome this way", which means that political action alone is not enough.
Look at what's happening currently. All that fear and doom may lead to political decisions, but have they changed the carbon level in our atmosphere? You try to regulate something without looking at the overall outcome. If you want to do something, it's much better to do something positive, e.g. passing subsidies for renewable energy tech.
I think it doesn't make sense anymore to discuss this here. HN is not a good place to discuss different opinions which could be interpreted as being political. The people with the downvote power decide what's valid and what's not.
It's sad as otherwise we could have a fruitful discussion here.
Okay, that makes sense and, even better, also works sometimes. In fact, renwable energy is a good example where incentives can trigger changes (see the solar market in Europe). However, there are also many examples where incentives have not worked, although running for decades, because people are too lazy or because the financial incentives are not big enough. People and (by design) the industry are waiting that the goverment pays and says "please, please, take that money and prevent that we destroy human life for next 100000 years".
At some point you have to say "fck you, stop that behavior, otherwise you will kill us all". In my opinion, we are very close to that point with the CO2 level. In contrast, OP seems to suggest that we should continue and hope that some miracle in technology will help us, because saying "Stop that, you idiot" doesn't work, right? The market will fix it and regulations and deep states are bad, right? But the fact is that regulations have worked many times. See leaded petrol, asbestos, catalyzators, pesticides, and basically all laws that we have had in Europe for the protection of the environment in the past 50 years. I am not a child waiting for christmas, but an adult who knows that the parents bought the presents.
I don't get why it's necessary to start a left vs. right, regulations vs. non-regulations war on this. This is effectively destroying the discussion about real solutions.
I got a completely different impression of op's comment. Namely, that we as humans cannot control everything, but there's ways we can get real progress when we combine our talents to come up with great technical solutions.
I doubt that we will be able to turn the clock back, and I wouldn't want to participate in trying.
That doesn't mean that we cannot do something positive via political means meanwhile. I'm just saying that evidence suggests it doesn't solve the problem on a global scale and hence is obviously not the whole solution.
Personally, I'm impressed with the overall quality of discussion in this thread. It's going a whole lot better than most other discussions I've seen online. There's a certain irony that you are against "doom and gloom" arguments, but fail to see any hope for productive discussion. Stick around, keep discussing, and make it incrementally better.
It's becoming an echo chamber.
I am happy to continue a discussion, but not here.
But sometimes a brand of pragmatic, disciplined optimism serves to inspire without diminishing the urgency or importance of the matter at hand. This hit that mark pretty well.
That's an enormous "if". Fusion research has been underfunded for decades, we don't even know if we can sustain it, and for a reason I don't get, many ecologists are anti-nuclear. Plus fusion won't solve everything. You won't put a sun core into your car nor your plane, not in the next centuries.
> Even if we don't, the plummetting cost of wind and solar may solve that anyway (by "solve" I mean that as soon as non-fossil fuel power production is cheaper than fossil fuels it becomes economic to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn into hydrocarbons).
Oh, you mean the unreliable power sources that sometimes provide electricity, sometimes don't?
> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now
Well yes but 5°C is also the difference between an ice age and a hot age. We're currently in a hot age and the 4°C increase we're heading to are not very engaging. (Remainder, during ice age North America down to NY and Northern Europe down to Paris were covered by enormous glaciers. So what will the climate be in 4°C?). https://xkcd.com/1379/
Also in human history the Earth has never been this hot.
> Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.
Ha. To escape Earth gravity you still need to spend 6.2*10^7 J/kg. That's gonna be a long time before we get to 1$/kg given that rocket propulsion is extremely costly (and as far as we know can't rely on atomic energy either). We're still at ~25 000 $/kg. And anyway recent studies show that the human body is unlikely to bear a trip to Mars, let alone the health issues caused by weightless environment.
Edit, source: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/26/1807522115. Basically the study suggests heavy ion irradiation is dangerous for the digestive system. The only thing is I'm not sure about the number of mice they used.
> We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.
I mean it's not as if oil companies conducted their own research and reached the very same conclusion in 1977. Oh wait. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
I'm sorry but you're just burying your head in the sand, making the problem someone else's.
citations please..
My understanding is that without shielding about 5% of the voyagers will get cancer, and that many people consider this a reasonably acceptable risk. Does this make that number substantially worse?
Could you link to an article or study about this? I don't believe that humans will ever reach other stars, but if even Mars is too much, oh well.
Agreed with car - not sure I agree with plane.
Currently we have fission powered submarines and boats. Putting a fission reactor in a plane would be somewhat suicidal, but a fusion reactor would be mostly safe. A large plane is similar in scale to a submarine.
There were recently some rumours about the Russians producing a nuclear powered cruise missile.
I'm not sure a fusion powered plane would be any less crazy. At least with D-T fusion you have a MUCH higher neutron radiation requiring more shielding. OTOH if the plane crashes there's less worry about nuclear waste spreading over the landscape.
Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity.
One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of this.
Think there's too many people? You can easily show that the world could easily produce enough to feed a population 10 times what we have now in the very near future, thanks largely to automation.
Think we're dumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere? We no doubt are but that problem basically goes away immediately if we ever get economic fusion power. Even if we don't, the plummetting cost of wind and solar may solve that anyway (by "solve" I mean that as soon as non-fossil fuel power production is cheaper than fossil fuels it becomes economic to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn into hydrocarbons).
Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.
Worried about how we'll produce all that power? When getting stuff into orbit is sufficiently cheap it'll become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and beam energy back to Earth.
And all you need for this kind of optimism is the kind of technology we're widely expected to have this century.
So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.
The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now so I have trouble believing the doomsday scenarios of runaway climate change that'll turn the Earth into Venus just because the Earth has been here for 4-5 billion years, has been hotter than now and hasn't become Venus yet. We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.
Fundamentally this also seems like a "betting with the Mayans" type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we're screwed. If so, you'll be right but who cares? We're still screwed. You're probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there's a pretty decent chance they will.