Tuvalu is fewer than 10,500 people living on about 10 square miles of island.

Climate change is a real problem for them. But in terms of the cold calculus of global impact, the fate of Tuvalu is relatively minor.

Tuvalu is not the only place impacted by climate change.

No, but the resources spent in saving Tuvalu could be better used in rehoming its people elsewhere. This is a horrible thing to contemplate, of course, but I'm afraid that, lacking the resources to protect themselves, this is what will end up happening.

It’s the only one clearly having to balance books related to it right now in a way that can’t be hand waved or projected away though

If we were really going to prevent catastrophic climate change the realistic time to act would have be probably 50-70 years ago.

I've become fairly patient with climate deniers over the years since it is both a difficult to imagine idea and contains serious amounts of existential dread, making it very hard to reason about. Because of the latter I don't know anyone, climate scientists and myself included, that aren't in some way climate change deniers.

The only possible pathway to dramatically reduced carbon intensity in our economy is the potential of physical resource limitations, not intentional human action. If you study the way energy impacts our civilization (highly recommend Smil's "Energy and Civilization"), it's fairly obvious, if not hard to swallow, that we cannot reduce carbon emissions radically enough in a short enough time span without also destroying the global economy. Destroying the economy today to mitigate the worse case scenarios is risk that even right now no sane person earnestly wants to take.

That destruction, on the timeline somewhere in the next 100 years, is inevitable anyway, but nobody really wants to suffer now when the more extreme suffering we're putting off might be in 20 or even 60 years.

This is really the heart of the problem: the immediate cost of addressing climate change has always seemed too high given the perceived uncertainty of outcomes. In 1950 it would have been fantastically easier to put a cap on carbon emissions than today, but the real threat of climate change was more than a lifetime away, and seemed ludicrous to even most educated people.

But today, meeting the emissions goals required would make the pandemic seem like black Friday as far as economic activity goes. And at the same time, while we know the impact of climate change will be bad, we still don't really know how much we'll each live through and how bad it will be immediately. Maybe we'll see the AMOC shutdown in our lifetimes and Europe will suffer massive crop failure and starvation... and maybe it will just get unlivably hot at the equator, and people from the American Southwest will have to move to the Northeast.

As many have pointed out, the pandemic is basically a toy problem version of climate change. In order to really prevent the pandemic we would have had to globally shut down the economy for a few months, much like China did. The problem is if we did that and prevented the pandemic, our world today would remain an imagined counterfactual that would not be perceived as worth the harm by the majority. We completely failed to address pandemic, and we will completely fail to address climate change. We'll find out what that means.

Much of what you say is true. We could theoretically still avoid catastrophic change and stay below 1.5 degrees but I’m increasingly doubtful of that after COP26 and pitiful net zero (instead of net negative) commitments

Solar Geoengineering is something that could be considered. It is underfunded these days but we should do a better job of studying & modeling it’s effects if we ever hope to deploy it. Heck I think these island nations should deploy geoengineering techniques today. Albeit that last statement is partially in jest because the technology isn’t there yet. (It could have downstream consequences in the rest of the world, but clearly the rest of the world has geoengineered the climate using fossil fuels. These nations deserve a chance to protect their homes even if the method is drastic.)

That would require a high degree of international trust and cooperation (as it could be turned into a super weapon with only a little imagination). For something like that to happen, there often needs to be a clear and unambiguous external threat that is ‘worse’

> Destroying the economy today to mitigate the worse case scenarios is risk that even right now no sane person earnestly wants to take.

I consider myself sane, and I would take that option.

Then again, I also resent that the banks were bailed out during the gfc, for fear of "destroying the economy".

What does destroying the economy mean? The factories would still stand. The knowledge, science still exist.

I agree. We have lacked, still lack, will continue to lack, the ability to work cohesively at a planet scale to address climate change. That's the brutal, fundamental truth. Short of a tremendous shift in power structure, our future is to mitigate some damage with renewables, but ultimately only stop using fossil fuels when it becomes completely uneconomical to do so for every use case.

We will probably geoengineer local solutions so that the human race is not in any real danger of extinction but it won't be the nice high-flyin good times we have now.

No. The heart of the problem is this narrative. Granted, you paint the picture that is the prevalent narrative, but narratives can change.

There are profitable solutions out there today and many have a potential to scale. Paul Hawken has done some great work recently describing them and calculating their contribution potential (https://drawdown.org and https://regeneration.org)

>So have we moved from "climate change isn't real" to "it's real but we aren't gonna do anything"

Yes, but it's rude to talk about it. Like not mentioning politics at Thanksgiving dinner so we can pretend we all agree...

Rendering climate-science deniers irrelevant and allowing them no influence on the debate is a step forward.

Tuvalu has been relatively unique among small, poor nations in caring about climate change for a while

Which is ironic in some ways since even a complete end to climate change wouldn't make Tuvalu a reasonable place to try to live. Poor soil, no fresh ground water, minimal other resources, and even without sea levels rising the islands would still be sinking. Islands like this come and go (on geological time scales) independent of any human-induced climate change. When they're no longer viable the residents migrate somewhere else. I'm not trying to downplay the real disruption involved for the very small group that's made their home there for the past few centuries, but they're not victims of climate change to any meaningful degree; this is simply how life works for people who settle in places like Tuvalu.

If you really believe what you say, then find a way to short beachfront real estate and reinvest that humongous profit into fixing climate when shit hits the fan.

By the time shit hits the fan, it'll be too late. You can't "fix" the climate, you can only prevent it from getting to a state that needs fixing. (And we're failing at that)

Point is, the hand-wringing and the cries of "won't-somebody-do-something!!" are silly.

If you really believe what you say, then go and act. A time of great crisis is also a time of great opportunity.

Climate change is a collective action problem, just like the pandemic was.

If 80% of people took precautions to keep from getting covid, and 20% went out and lived their life, the decision of the 80% to stay inside was irrelevant because the 20% would keep the virus in circulation.

If 80% of people stop buying fossil fuels, and 20% of people buy 500% more fossil fuels because the price is falling...

This is not a time for individuals to act. We need systemic change, not me recycling more or whatever.

People like you trying to push the responsibility on the individual is why humanity will go extinct.

Systemic change is made from individual actions, and a time of crisis means individual actions get huge leverage.

tldr - if you really believed in a climate crisis you'd be acting differently.

You're both underestimating the problem and overestimating the individual.

What's the alternative?

I mostly agree but... I don't think anyone has taken geoengineering seriously yet so maybe some of that?

Rigorous global change... But we all know that's not going to happen.

So now the plan is just 'improvise, adapt and overcome'.