> We don't need to worry about the longer term beyond about 50-100 years

This is terribly irresponsible.

Creating a massive problem for other people, and believing that the future will solve it, is the very definition of magical thinking.

It isn't a massive problem, it is a tiny problem. Our ancestors have done much the same thing to us and nobody notices, cares or is even inconvenienced. Australia has some truly monumental slag heaps if you know which desolate wastelands to look in.

Thinking that you can run an industrial process with no waste is the magical thinking. Producing solar panels and wind turbines could easily produce more toxic waste watt-for-watt than nuclear does. Nobody is going to bother to check because the volumes are too small.

You just explained the same problem of waste in the petroleum economy.

Which one is worse?

Nuclear has one destabilizing factor: proliferation. Climate change will kill us more effectively however.

> We don't need to worry about the longer term beyond about 50-100 years.

If that's really the case, we should stop worrying about global warming.

I don't agree with this position, for what it's worth.

Wasn't global warming supposed to be critical in the next 5 years?

Which global warming impact is critical in the next 5 years? For climate, 5 years is nothing. It's difficult to even see the temperature trend over such a short timespan, given noise sources like El Niño that have periods of several years.

You'll have to wait longer in order to really see the effects of global warming, as far as I understand it.

I'm a global warming skeptic myself, but have been told that we need to take action within the next five years or else it will be too late. But I've been hearing similar things for the past 30 years, so I take it with a grain of salt.

Emissions are growing exponentially, and are accumulative. When you look at the CO₂ footprint graph, the damage done to the climate is essentially proportional to the area under the curve. What 30 years ago was just a concern of some scientists, today is becoming visible to people, and 30 years from now will be obvious (under current growth, between today and 30 years from now, we'll have emitted more CO₂ than we had between today and the dawn of mankind - a "neat" feature of exponential growth).

In the real world, exponents don't last forever. The economy will eventually give in, the question is how. 60 years ago the bet was that we'll run out of resources to burn. Today, the consensus is that we'll most likely destabilize the climate to the point of total civilizational collapse before we exhaust economically exploitable fossil fuel deposits.

As for the next years being critical in determining how the world will look like many decades from now, keep in mind that the damage CO₂ is causing is proportional to the integral of the yearly emissions curve, and also that feedback loops take time to settle at a new equilibrium. Models predicting average temperatures and sea levels take into account that even when we become completely net carbon neutral, the already accumulated CO₂ will still warm up the climate for decades. So it very much matters when we get to carbon neutrality, and the sooner we get there the (exponentially) better.

So it's within the next 50-100 years and on the list of things we should be worrying about.