Still, there's reason for hope. Many people care very strongly about saving the planet/biosphere, new businesses and research are cropping up all the time in this space. By the time 2050 rolls around, we very well may have technical solutions to some of our pressing environmental issues that seem to be killers now. Just consider 2019 -> 2050, that's 31 years. Back in 1988, wind and solar were a dream, EVs were nonexistent outside the golf course, and very very few people were passionate about fighting climate change.
Also, climate change doesn't have to hit your area specifically to be harmful. Crop failures will lead to wars and displaced people. Water shortages in India lead to angry people that want to fight over Kashmir, increased migration from climate affected areas to richer areas cause ethnic tension (from North Africa to Europe, from South America to the US). As an aside, clearly the policies of nationalists are abhorrent, but they don't occur in a vacuum, and, in the US at least, the left hasn't provided a clear path to a solution to this issue.
Here's the CIA being worried about such things (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30012019/worldwide-threat...).
Yes, this is very doom and gloom. The facts are gloomy and connecting the dots on our possible futures spells out, in all likelihood, doom. How can you not see this?
I’d rather be on the side of the border that’s angry about the immigrants than the side of the border the immigrants are fleeing from.
Perhaps in the days of tomorrow, we will once again be in the mercy of Nature? Of course not, as long as we retain our technologies. Ergo, even if you (and I agree) don't think climate change will doom humanity as a whole, I'd still be sympathetic to rational campaigns reducing it's effects.
Um, what? On what are you basing this likelihood on? These are scientists that study this for a living. This sounds like complete fabrication.
All it takes is one asteroid to invalidate all the predictions. Or one war. Or one biological contagion. Or one technological innovation.
Indeed. We'll just get to deal with a rehash of the anti-immigrant rhetoric we're seeing now thanks to a refugee crisis our policies and consumption rates created.
You're listening too much to alarmist stuff. Things may get bad. It's not likely to be the collapse of civilization. Make sure you're able to survive the continuation of civilization, since that's the much more likely scenario.
I highly doubt we're going to get past 2050 without the foundations of society collapsing.
Second: Things look ugly right now. You'd have to be blind not to see it. But the advantage of being 57 instead of 18 is that I've seen this before, and I've talked to people who've seen even more. I don't know that this looks blacker than the 1980s, when nuclear war looked like a very real possibility - not just sometime in the future, but tomorrow. I'm not sure it's blacker than the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'm not sure that it's blacker than World War II, especially for those living in Europe, Russia, or China. I'm not sure that it's blacker than the Great Depression, when it looked like society - or at least the economy - had broken permanently.
Yes, it looks bad. It is bad. It's not worse than it's ever been, though. We probably will make it through this, though it will be a bumpy ride.
If.
There's two ways to try to analyze this. One is to look from a 2019-centric perspective, where we know that nuclear war didn't cause the collapse of civilization, but we don't know whether climate change will. From that perspective, "might" looks worse than "definitely didn't". But I think that's kind of an unfair comparison.
The other way to try to compare is to look at how likely it looked when you didn't know the outcome. That's kind of subjective, so I can't really argue with your opinion if you're evaluating things the second way. To me, though, having been in both places, the 1980s frightened me considerably more.
(There may be a stage-of-life thing, too. I was 18 in 1980. Maybe the danger that you see around that age is the danger that you fear the most.)
Anyway, those are just some thoughts. I can't prove you wrong... but I sure hope you are.
We've basically built our entire global economy on the idea that externalities don't matter. Recently, I came across this (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190808115117.h...) - between 1970 and 2012 there has been an 88% decline in large vertebrates (ie fish). We already know that plastic is poisonous, our entire economy is run on fossil fuels, etc. We've got less than ten years to completely change how the entire planet operates socially or we'll just cook to death. How likely is that?
It's gotten to the point where I'm walking down the street and the cognitive dissonance is just unshakeable. What are people working so hard for, accumulating so much "wealth" for, when the idea that anyone is ever going to retire is laughable? How are people doing anything that involves a time horizon of more than 5 years?
The recent shooters are evil sad people, but I understand. The world is terrifying and it's driving everyone crazy. I just don't know how people are coping.