Man, I've seen so many articles talking about how shit's way worse than climate projections because we keep finding new variables that we didn't account for.
We've unleashed so many positive feedback loops, I'm not convinced that even if we all got thanos-snapped out of existence RIGHT NOW, full stop to pollution and such... Earth would still be fucked - albeit more slowly - because of those feedback loops.
Yep. The time when cutting emissions could have prevented wide-spread climate change suffering was probably in the 90s.
And here's my prediction for the future: Pretty soon a wealthy nation will decide it has no choice but to engage in global scale climate engineering. And it will do so still missing a shit-ton of those variables we aren't accounting for. At that point it's probably a coin flip as to whether it will make things better or worse.
Earth is only fucked from a human perspective. There will still be numerious vibrant life all through out nature without humans there because we made it unhibatiable for ourselves
Not likely. We're in the middle of a mass extinction event. 70% of all species have gone extinct since the industrial revolution.
Source? Could only find that populations have declined by 60-70%. Also there’s been 5 mass extinctions that we know of. There’s still life on earth. My point is just that nature will continue on without us. Life will adapt.
And the rats and cockroaches shall inherit the earth. Amen.
The only honest answer right now is that we have no idea to what extent climate change will go.
There's life that will persist after humans, but what's to say the feedback loops will stop in time to stay hospitable to those?
Earth could be on track to shed it's atmosphere, or go molten - there comes a point where even the most resilient of extremophiles won't be able to persist, and Earth just becomes another completely lifeless rock floating through space.
Or we die off, the climate stabilizes, and everything's just fine for the critters that haven't gone extinct yet.
Or anywhere in between.
But we can't assume one way or another.
/shrug
This is most likey the correct scenario. We may as well just continue with businesses as usual so we can get it over with. These pretend debates we're having about halting it are a joke at this point. It's pretty clear that greed and delusional denial will ultimately be the end of our civilisation.
Worse than I thought? I thought it is really bad so no.