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Old 12-29-19, 06:14 PM
  #26  
rseeker
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The "end" is unlikely, if you mean the end of the human race or of our civilization. But how crazy is it we've gotten ourselves into a situation where we have to seriously ask, does this mean the human race will go extinct? Even if the answer is, fortunately, no?

What is probable is new and worsening misery for hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of people. The hundreds of millions are pretty much baked in at this point, with 1.5C of warming increasingly regarded as committed. Committed not for any scientific or technical reason, but because we've so far chosen not to do what could be done.

What misery? Becoming a climate migrant because your home or farm or city or country is underwater. Because of weather extremes that mean your crops won't grow or moving habitability zones made your ecosystem collapse. Because you don't have drinking water due to long-term drought and depleted aquifers. Because there's a war on over what diminished natural resources are left. Like that.

The billions are avoidable, and we should avoid that. We avoid that by stopping putting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as soon as possible, and also, by some miracle of thermodynamics which hasn't happened yet, we figure out how to remove, at scale, the CO2 we've already put up there.


https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...nderwater.html

Last edited by rseeker; 01-02-20 at 02:00 PM.
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