This assumes the effects of climate change will be smooth and linear, rather than lurching and dramatic. It also fails to connect the dots between the nuclear annihilation you fear and the politically destabilizing effects of Climate Change.

Extreme weather conditions will be paradise, not the worst case scenario. When we reach 3 degree mark we are going straight up to 4 and then 5. Between 5 and 6 degrees the world is over in the most spectacular apocalyptic way you can imagine. How far away is this? I’m guessing your kids won’t want to have kids to spare them the suffering of 4 degree rise. At that point we will be fighting wars, billions will need to migrate north, nukes are on the table. The sad thing is, once we get there we have inevitable human extinction. Fresh water and food shortage will be a massive problem. A few or more billion people will die. How you get to extreme weather as the worst case scenario is beyond me. Look at how complex ecological systems are and how they affect one another. Acidification will bring about ocean life extinction and phytoplankton suffocation. Ice will melt, all of it, sea levels will rise, ocean currents totally screwed up, superstorms, flash flooding of biblical proportions will displace everyone in the coastal region. Migrations will trigger wars, food will become a luxury, methane will trap more heat, ozone will poof, enjoy your cancer.

This is a cheerful read.

So what's the solution? Can we get the global economy to change course and can we get most people in the West to change their destructive habits?

How are you preparing for such future? Move north and become a prepper?

The solution is likely a multi-faceted approach on all levels of society - policy, private enterprises, consumer, personal habits, education, social initiatives etc...

We need to be doing everything, not one or two things.

I think asking the West to change is an impossible task, but putting in place policy to guide decisions and to bring about mass education regarding environment is probably a step in the right direction.

Yes, it requires a radical change and I think we know what to do and we have solution in place already and we know how to research and develop more solutions.

Question is can we do it? Will leaders of the western world be able to trigger this radical systemic change that is required... keeping in mind that the orange leader doesn't even acknowledge that there is a climate crisis.

So with that in mind... what are your plans for the next 10 years or so? Move out of cities?

Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists [1] disagrees with both your statements: nuclear annihilation is out of public mind, but it is not much less probable, and climate change is, among other things, a risk factor there. Global catastrophic risks are often interconnected.

[1] - https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

The issues faced by previous generations were temporary. Wars end, new treaties are signed, etc.

Climate Change is irreversible if we don't act ahead of time.

How would they know they would be temporary? The Cold War lasted more than 40 years without stopping and no clear way out. People grew up knowing nothing but the Cold War. They had children who knew nothing but the Cold War. Each and every day people woke up realizing there was a very real chance this could be their last one on Earth. And in several instances we came extremely close to that becoming true. For instance a single man, Stanislav Petrov [1], is likely single-handedly responsible for stopping nuclear war at one point. We certainly wouldn't be here concerning ourselves over climate change had there had been a lesser man in his role!

And wars of time past were not like today's proxy wars or petrodollar warring. See Generalplan Ost [2]. Hitler planned to colonize central and eastern Europe by engaging in the mass genocide of native Slavic peoples, people who numbered in the hundreds of millions. And it's extremely unlikely he'd stop there. This is the sort of war where if you lose, the suffering has only just begun. And this was the reality of life for people in one way or another, for centuries.

'Irreversible' is somewhat misleading as used in climate discussion. It's used in the same sense as saying that the above consequences would be irreversible. And in that sense it's completely true. But many people interpret it, as you seem to be implying, to mean impossible to ever reverse. What it really means is that the expected return to a climatic equilibrium, through entirely natural processes, would take a length of time outside the scale of a human lifetime - hundreds to thousands of years. It does not mean permanently irreversible nor does it mean we go full Venus. And perhaps most importantly, technological changes such as carbon scrubbing [3] - which already exists but is not yet economically viable as a solution, altogether negate the notion of 'irreversible'.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber

> 'Irreversible' is somewhat misleading as used in climate discussion. It's used in the same sense as saying that the above consequences would be irreversible. And in that sense it's completely true. But many people interpret it, as you seem to be implying, to mean impossible to ever reverse. What it really means is that the expected return to a climatic equilibrium, through entirely natural processes, would take a length of time outside the scale of a human lifetime - hundreds to thousands of years. It does not mean permanently irreversible nor does it mean we go full Venus.

I'm not sure what your point is here. Yes, nothing is ever truly permanent—eventually the sun will die and all life on earth will likely go with it. When I say something is "permanent", I think I should have to qualify it with "until the heat death of the universe."

If a million species go extinct, they aren't coming back. The glaciers, once melted, will take millennia to reform.

This is entirely different from a normal geopolitical conflict, which can be ended whenever all sides agree to such. Wars can of course inflict permanent damage (and loss of life), but the time scale is generally of a different order of magnitude.

The point is not to be drawn into sensationalism. For instance you responded to my comment by comparing time frames of hundreds to thousands of years to the heat death of the universe, which is something on the scale of 10^100 years. For some context to that number, 10^100 is greater than the number of atoms in the entire observable universe. And to give that number some context, there are 100000000000000000000000 atoms in a single grain of sand. That's not really a reasonable notion.

The reason climate change being reversible on human timescales matter is because it becomes a self correcting problem even in the worst case scenarios. If we create conditions such that the regular flow of society and production is disrupted, we just instantaneously solved our emissions problem. And of course there are technological solutions which already exist to reverse climate change. Only holdback there is they're not yet economic to deploy at scale. Consequences get worse, and governments will consider that perhaps that 2 trillion spent trying to stabilize the petrodollar would be better spent trying to stabilize carbon output.

Of course I completely agree with you of course that some changes such as the loss of various species would be irreversible. But as this article emphasizes this is not just an issue of climate change: pesticides, plastics, poaching, overfishing, even things like people using bug zappers to get rid of mosquitoes are playing major roles. By some estimates we're already losing thousands of species per year [1]. Many of these things could be resolved by with relatively simple per-nation action (as opposed to global action) that'd have near immediate outcome (as opposed to a non-negative outcome on the scale of decades). That nations are unwilling to even engage in this, by contrast trivial, behavior should emphasize why it's quite relevant that climate change is reversible.

[1] - https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/el...

The above is why I said that 9/11 was really nothing in the grand scheme of things, but a lot of people got mad at me. Were we not the nation that faced down the Germans and the Japanese at the same time? And then a few years later, a couple planes hit a couple buildings and everyone lost their minds and let the government take away most of their rights. Makes no sense. And yes, they dug deep--look at all the spying they do on us now, all the rules for bank accounts, drivers licenses, the TSA, the PATRIOT Act and the absolute dragnet put on the Internet.

9/11 was the biggest bunch of nothing (yes, it sucks if you were victim or the family of a victim). We let the big gov statist MIC get such wonderful mileage out of it! Then that bastard Chertoff with the shoe bomber got his naked body scanners sold, too. Never forget!

The people who run the US since the 1950s are such pieces of shit. We the people deserve better and we need to do better at stopping this scourge.