> In a word, sustainable. An advanced civilization should be able to develop..

> The near universal consensus of people who study natural systems is that we’re way, way, way behind.

What other advanced civilization is our benchmark for making such an assessment?

In terms of the definition of "advanced", the question I was answering was a subjective one. I think it's appropriate to use the term "advanced" for societies that can plan for their long term futures and continue to exist in stable equilibria in a given environment.

The second point isn't dependent on an external comparison.

Ok, then what is the baseline for comparison aka where we are vs where we should be?

If the goal/definition is concrete, then we can plan better and understand what is "enough" once we're caught up.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make or if you're objecting to anything in particular, but being global carbon negative seems like a good start.

If you're calling for action then we need to have clear metrics, goals, and standards that we can prioritize, plan for, evaluate decisions against, and measure the results against. Thank you for adding one.

Alternatively, if you're simply putting out a Vision to inspire enthusiasm or incite fear, then "we're behind" is sufficient and doesn't require anything more because at best, it's the "race to the moon" and at worst, it's the "missile gap."

> If you're calling for action

I mean, I guess I am, but really I'm mostly relaying my understanding of the scientific consensus. I didn't make my comment in some sort of vacuum where readers are supposed to understand the last few decades of climate science just from my comment...

I've been reading reports and analysis since the Kyoto Protocols. The most fascinating things since that time is that we (the US) were behind in those requirements but significantly ahead of everyone else. The Paris Agreement is roughly the same so far too.

In a situation where "we're behind" and "we're ahead" are both accurate statements point to a significant problem in the approach.

You choosing one of them exclusively means you're playing for "your team" instead of looking at reality of the situation which is neither useful nor honest.

I was talking about humanity as a whole, that's the "team" I'm worried about.

"way way behind" and "pretty bleak" are completely subjective and thus meaningless for trying to understand nature. If you can't quantify it, you're only able to think using feelings and feelings can't tell you important answers like what we should do. They can make you believe you know what we should do, but you'll be wrong because your feelings won't be accurately tuned to the reality.

Congratulations, you've discovered that I'm commenting on an internet forum rather than submitting something for publication. My assessment is based on my own reading, and on being involved in conservation efforts and trying to stay educated generally. Sorry I didn't prepare a set of bullet points for you, and instead went with an informal an easily intelligible lay summary.

To the best of my knowledge, my language (while imprecise) is completely and totally uncontroversial in the scientific community.

It's not an easily intelligible lay summary because the meaning could be anything. It only conveys emotion, not knowledge about nature. I suppose you're being an activist trying to convert people to your religion of doom. In that case, you do need to convey emotions like fear to fool people into imagining things are unboundedly bad. Quantitative predictions put a cap on how bad it is so they're not as scary as the unknown.

"I'm sorry Ms Smith but you have a tumour. The good news is that it is completely operable - at the moment. The bad news, well, until we can measure every conceivable metric relating to this tumour, and unless we can determine every conceivable path its progression might take, we are very reluctant to operate. We have chosen, instead, to wait until the outcome of this cancer is more certain and, having weighed these against the small but measurable risks of surgery, that we are comfortable that we are certain of the benefit surgery will provide."

"And when will that be?"

"Well, not to beat around the bush, but when the cancer has metastisized and is about to kill you, we will be certain enough of the benefit of surgery now. Yes, this will likely result in your death, but to move before we have solidified all of these variables to a five-sigma measure would be allowing too much emotion into our descision making."

Are you seriously suggesting that every mention of a negative issue needs to be a self contained and cited polemic piece? Stop being absurd. If you want to talk specifics, make a specific objection, or at least narrow in on an issue you want to get into in more depth.

Sometimes it's better not to respond, gbrown.

You’re probably right.

I found the “subjective” comment easier to understand than this one. Not every opinion or generalization requires citation. Your stance and reply are also subjective. I do prefer quantitative data and references, especially when the topic is at all scientific. It doesn’t automatically make qualitative or broad statements pointless though. It especially doesn’t mean they don’t contribute to understanding.

Sure, but the internet is awash with similar activist opinions when it comes to climate change, biodiversity, and sustainability. They go in circles reinforcing each other without being grounded in reality. Their aim seems to be to mislead people with fear instead of sharing understanding. I think that underhandedness is what grates on me when I read them.

Mind providing me some of that research? I've heard this a few times but when I go looking for it nothing really pops up, it's mostly things saying we need to act now but can avoid the biggest issues.

Pick an area of science which intersects with human development and I'll find you something - the underlying truth is that we can't hope to disrupt such a huge percentage of our biosphere without nasty consequences, and we can't hope to have remediation efforts compete with the global engine of human development. We've essentially organized an entire global society around the injection of carbon into the atmosphere, while turning habitat into development at astonishing rates. To make things worse, humans are really good at adapting, so we're (by and large) comfortable while the world burns.

Press releases and pop-science articles tend to try to strike a more hopeful tone, because it's extremely tiring and depressing just hearing "we're screwed" all day. I try to stay hopeful, but my faith that enough people will care soon enough is basically gone.

OP asked for you to provide research and yet you've entirely evaded doing so.

I made a more specific offer which received no response, meanwhile others have posted a number of research articles in this very thread.

Nothing I’ve said disagrees with the scientific consensus, so you could also just Google it rather than whining that someone on the internet isn’t holding your hand.

Hi OP here way too many different talking points going on in the thread, your offer went right past me. I'd love to know more about our energy generation and how that is working against our climate change goals. I know that at the start of 2020 we produced 25% of our energy from renewable in the US and that we're moving more of that percentage yearly but understand we have more to do globally among other nations. I figure that's a perfectly specific topic that if you have all this damning research that we won't get there you can just quickly drop it on me.

> the scientific consensus

Can you prove what the scientific consensus is? What if I were claim the scientific consensus is different than what you claim it to be?

How bad are "nasty consequences" and "the world burns"? Maybe it doesn't matter if those things happen.

I can't tell if this is a joke or not. Where do we start?

Do you think running out of oil will go smoothly? We already can't stand still for 5 minutes without blowing someone up in a resource war and basically all of our resources are plentiful for now.

Rising sea levels decreasing usable land. Rising temperatures destroying key organisms in the food chain. Mass deforestation is destroying the very things that allow us to breathe.

How much climate change affects you is a function of your wealth and your country's wealth (cost of basic resources as well as required countermeasures are growing). Anyone who's been on the low side of one or both of those variables will tell you that it's already miserable. Imagine, if you even can, what being in a poor country will be like when all the oil is gone, food can't grow the usual way (you need either hydroponics or serious genetic modification), increasingly unstable weather destroys everything you build and everyone else is out to get you to squeeze out every last drop of resources you might have?

What people with no such experience don't realize is that unlike our economic system, which funnels resources upwards, ecosystem collapse doesn't funnel them anywhere. It's just an endless pit and eventually, everyone is poor.

One of the greatest features of mankind is the response to disasters. When situation gets really bad, we are capable of achieving incredible things that would normally be impossible.

Example: Second world war. You might argue that it was not disaster comparable to climate change, but it did turn entire world upside down, disrupting everything aspect of life of vast majority of world's population. But it also led to incredible advancements in many areas, new discoveries in all sciences, new technologies, massive changes in societies as well.

So I don't see the situation as gloomy, we will survive, because we always do.

Oh ffs. Yes, "we" will survive, as in there will not be a human race extinction event, most likely. However, that's ignoring the hunger, suffering, and deaths that are coming our way. Many of "us" won't survive, and/or will have miserable lives, especially those of us who happen to be poor. As just one example of many, have a look at the potential of large regions reaching a wet-bulb-temperature above human tolerability: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838

Taking an approach that "we will sort it out" ignores that the disaster is already unrolling, just too slow for most of us to notice. The longer we linger, the worse the situation, and the higher the human toll.

Sorry, I meant it differently. What I was trying to say was that we (mankind) respond best to disasters = sudden catastrophic events, but really bad to frog-boiling ones. It would be best to do nothing and let it all reach a critical point to trigger that survival instinct, because nothing short of that will be able to force us to do anything about it, other than some weak, irrelevant attempts.

One of the worst features of humanity is that we’ve proven ourselves incapable of planning more than a few years ahead. The fact that it takes acute crises to get us to take dramatic action is the problem: climate change and biosphere collapse take a while to start affecting people (especially the global rich), and once things get bad enough for mass action it’s probably too late to save our civilization.

I look at the insanity in how the US responds to small movements of people now and despair at the thought of how we’ll deal with simultaneous waves of millions of climate refugees alongside the predictable handful of domestic crises.

some highly advanced extinction experiments include large-scale rainforest fragmentation, and the collapse of coral reefs, with accompanied dieback of mangroves and seagrass. These are highly significant because of their advanced progress and the anticipated downstream planetary impact.

Maybe this isn't a big issue? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

While it's not good, it's not that bad. A lack of biodiversity may, if taken to extremes, limit the variety of things humans have access to. However, even in that case, we should be able to rely on our wind pollinated crops (possibly with more genetic modification, if required) to feed us while we research synthetic alternatives to anything we start to loose access to.

Not proper research but this is as visual as it gets: https://xkcd.com/1732/

And here's NASA and the general gov saying what I said in my last comment,

https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl...

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/can-we-slow...

Going to need something a little stronger than xkcd here. I'm not a climate scientist but a lot of the names attached to both links seem to be and they're saying if we act decisively in the next 29 years we can avoid the worst effects, which in that second link is defined as < 1.5C change this century

Edit: I also want to make it clear just in case anyone misinterprets my skepticism over the depth of the effects as skepticism in climate change or the urgency of it in general. I agree we need to do what we can to make sure things like this don't come to pass because I happen to like our somewhat diverse ecosystem and that we continue to damage it isn't great.

As someone who has studied modeling, these situations are fundamentally unmodelable with the tools we have.

Whenever you read a study saying that 'In complex system X, Y will happen in a decade' breathe easily -- we can't model what the stock market will look like in a day. We can't model what user demand for a sale will be in a week. We can't model most complex things in any large time frame, and believing any conclusions in the XX years for something as complex as climate is bizarre.

The first link says we can learn to adapt to the massive changes brought about by global warming.

The second link says we are unlikely to keep global warming in this century below 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) which has severe consequences for the environment.

I think you’re reading into their optimistic language a bit too much.

Do you watch the news? Have you seen a completely ice-free North Pole earlier in January? The ice in Norway, Russia and Iceland melting completely, permanently damaging the permafrost and releasing huge amounts of methane? Might be hard to notice from your apartment but the weather is going absolutely nuts in most of the world. Insect populations down by up to 90%. These are not “feelings”.

"It’s true that without dramatic action in the next couple of decades..."

You missed the first part of their sentence.

On the flipside perhaps you're a little too much into doomsday scenarios?

We've quite literally transformed the entire planet and way of living inside of 30 years since personal computation technology took off. I really don't see it as particularly farfetched that we can correct for our negative consumptive habits inside of the same timeframe, considering our rate of advance and change only accelerated within that same timeframe.

I'll live out just the end of this century if I'm lucky so I'll be able to eat my words just fine if I'm wrong, but I'll bet you I'm not.

How about these lines then:

> Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several more decades, if not centuries

or

> In the absence of major action to reduce emissions, global temperature is on track to rise by an average of 6 °C

There is not much major action going on (except for the electrification of vehicles which is being driven by commercial venture) so your hopes are just that, hope. Hope is not a strategy. It is quite far fetched to expect a correction when literally all data points are going the other way.

Your view does not reflect the common scientific consensus. We’re at a stage where changes are irreversible and all we can do is minimize and prepare for them, as seen in the article.

This is not fatalism, much to the contrary: I’m saying corrective action is much, much more urgent than you seem to believe and has to be started immediately. We don’t have another 30 years to sit on it.

You keep picking half sentences that leave off the part saying we can do things to prevent catastrophe. At this point I can only believe you aren’t coming from a place of intellectual honesty.

You also keep saying scientific consensus and data points but considering I keep finding information to the contrary and you’ve provided nothing I really think you mean your own personal and emotion driven stance. Of which I don’t buy.

Yup climate change is a big issue, we'll probably solve it to a point humanity and the broader earth will be fine in a reasonable time. Just like every other crazy things we've pulled off during the same geological instant.

I’m puzzled. The sentences I quote are straight from the article, and it doesn’t go much further than that. It’s five paragraphs long. It doesn’t show any possibilities for reversal or offer an alternative scenario.

All it offers is a meaningless “it’s up to us what happens next”. Where is the information to the contrary you see?

Here is an extensive report, from the same source, on the effects of predicted global warming: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-degree-of-concern-why-g...

Read it carefully, and note that the 1.5C scenario is extremely optimistic and assumes humanity will zero out emissions completely by 2050.

Do you seriously think we actually do this "dramatic action" in the next couple of decades?

If we manage to get it started, what if another Trump gets elected and sabotage it from the top?