The human body is already close to thermal limits in many regions
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/05/ip-on-carbon-tax....
From the end:
"Climate policy was headed to this kind of bipartisan technocratic resolution in the 1990s before it became a tool of partisan warfare. The challenge, from both sides, is to remove the political baggage that climate policy has accumulated."
He then makes that appeal to both sides:
"To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage. To my green-warrior friends, if the government is actually going to reduce carbon, not just subsidize cronies and engage in worthless value-signaling gestures, a trade of carbon taxes for absurdly costly regulations and subsidies is the only way to get anywhere."
First, that starts off with a false premise. You don't know that the government is going to regulate carbon.
Second, ignoring the "climate change is a myth" crowd, there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await. That attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way is not worth the unknown outcome of attempting to save the current state of climate.
This isn't even a "not my problem" situation. I've heard this from folks leaving in a coastal region that already suffers some amount of regular nuisance flooding. It's not as if rising tides will skip over them.
Failing to understand that viewpoint is going to result in two sides yelling past each other. One side thinks we must do everything in our power to preserve nature's status-quo, the other is firmly of the mind that it is an impossibility and to try would be wasted effort with much risk and unclear gain.
Your first task is convincing them of the horrors that await for them.
Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".
It's unclear to me what you mean by this.
If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.
What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.
If a family member or close friend dies - you hang out with friends, you go to therapy. You certainly don't buy some weapons and decide to finish off the rest of your friends for good measure!
A climate that continuously changes by a few degrees every decade is going to be impossible to adapt to properly. We will effectively never be able to build permanent structures again.
What's the goal here? 800ppm? 1200? Literally just whack the thermostat up 10c and have every city in the world suddenly be in the wrong place?
> attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way
It's unclear to me why pricing in externalities would do this.
Shifting consumption to more efficient "happiness/usefulness per damage" stuff wouldn't ruin anything.
It's difficult for me to understand why people would think that carbon pricing pushing people towards different foods or smaller cars or cycling or whatever would "destroy the economy". I think they have a different definition of the word 'destroy'. Consuming a bit less is not destruction. Your hometown being underwater is a destroyed economy.
Why would we not be able to build permanent structures?
> It's unclear to me what you mean by this.
I thought it was very clear:
> If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.
> What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.
They're arguing against something like fining the person whose farm caught on fire.
Arguing for pricing in externalities is more akin to arguing for the fine, trying to make people change their ways so such fires are less common, while giving no thought to the people affected directly (unnecessary extra costs on top of recovering from the fire), or who couldn't avoid it (lightning strike causing fire / infrastructure not in place to avoid the cost and it getting passed to the consumer instead of dealt with).
It represents fixing the economic incentives.
If a beef burger is 10x more environmentally damaging than a vegetable one, it should cost approximately ten times more.
As I've posted below - this is child-level logic. It's time for us to sort our shit out. There really is no option.
We need stable homes, nutrition, and a bit of entertainment. We don't need no-holds-barred competition to literally use as much of everything as we possibly can; and we _certainly_ don't need that to be apportioned essentially randomly - the more damaging activities should cost more.
If it bothers you to be confronted by that - if your first thoughts are "economic damage" and the fact your life might slightly change - I'm sorry for you. Because you really are fucked, you're coming down with all of us.
I believe climate change is coming but trying to convince someone they should change because they are a Bad Person if they don’t change their ways, or that some unspecified type of fuckedness is looming, is not very successful.
> It's unclear to me why pricing in externalities would do this.
Well I'm not here try to tell you they will, and why. I'm telling you why you run into intelligent people who aren't gung-ho about reforming our economy in regards to climate change. That if you're trying to have a conversation with to get the desired result, politics, how you need to approach the "other" side.
Of those that I've talked to about this, the belief is that the necessary changes to pricing would result in an economic downturn, as bad as if not worse than the "Great Recession," which is still in recent memory for just about every adult. That's the milder hesitancy, some believe the necessary economic changes simply aren't possible, that to do so wouldn't even help make things better. That we're past the point of no return, so might as well just roll with it and adapt as needed.
Your problem is not telling them "bad things are going to happen if we don't deal with emissions" but rather "things are going to be so bad that your fear of economic decline is the lesser of two evils." Secondary is convincing them that necessary pricing can be put into place without destroying the economy.
That's literally the opposite of damaging the economy. If we actually took climate change seriously as a challenge to civilization itself, we'd have a boom economy like it hasn't been seen in at least 50 years.
This makes no sense at all. Climate change is not a binary effect, it's compounding.
Climate change is inevitable but the amount of change can still be affected. Preventing carbon emissions now will absolutely be cheaper that paying for mitigations in the future.
The amount of warming is very important. An increase from 1.5C to 2.0C will kill an additional 100 million people from air pollution alone.
I am not sure what i think about this argument yet, but it seems like it may be reasonable.
Climate change isn't a technical problem; it's a social problem.
“Advanced” economies rely on otherwise-unnecessary consumption of resources, irrespective of environmental damage, because there's no effective social penalty for harming the environment.
Clean energy won't help: demand always increases at least as fast as supply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v._Environmental...
In this way carbon tax would increas marginal costs of using carbon-intensive products, but does not increase overall taxation.
Like the comment one higher up mentioned, one way to get around that and do effectively the same thing would be to split the revenue among citizens. This is what a bunch of economists have called for doing: https://www.econstatement.org/
Hence Chomsky's argument that the Republican party is the most dangerous organisation in human history: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/noam-choms...
So I agree we need carbon tax, but I find it frustrating to pretend this is a issue both sides are at fault for.
Cochrane thinks (not sure I agree with him) that the onus right now is more on the traditional left than the right.
"...climate policy advocates have gone far beyond a technocratic idea of simply, well, reducing carbon. 'And nuclear energy' is usually noticeably absent. Carbon capture technologies, equally good at reducing carbon are usually noticeably absent. Other agendas like 'climate justice' creep in -- worthy or not, anything else that creeps in means less carbon reduction per dollar. A carbon tax reduces carbon any way that reduces carbon, which is really good at, well, reducing carbon, and not getting distracted with other agendas. That is a strong reason why carbon taxes, and especially such taxes in return for less regulation are resisted on the left."
Whether you agree re: who is at fault, given that most people on HN are prob on the "do something about climate change" end of the spectrum, if you are personally skeptical of a carbon tax vs something like the green new deal or Jay Inslee's climate change plan, I'd encourage you to look into it more.
Cochrane's blog post and and also this would be good places to start:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/this-is-n...
First, people on the left who are resisting carbon taxes are mostly because they believe cap and trade is a better solution, which many economists agree with.
Second, what has some notion of "climate justice" got to do with anything? I don't see any evidence politicians on the left are somehow getting distracted by "value-signaling".
Third, where does the idea come from that a carbon tax must be matched with less regulation elsewhere? That's a pure right-wing dream to try to match the two together, there is no connection.
What this essentially sounds like is a Republican talking point that it's all Democrats' fault because Democrats aren't succeeding, despite Republicans refusing to help and therefore making it impossible to succeed. The doublespeak and hypocrisy makes your head spin...
This is the first thing that comes up when you google 'green new deal':
"A Green New Deal is a big, bold transformation of the economy to tackle the twin crises of inequality and climate change. It would mobilize vast public resources to help us transition from an economy built on exploitation and fossil fuels to one driven by dignified work and clean energy."
https://www.sierraclub.org/trade/what-green-new-deal
And here's AOC's chief of staff on the green new deal: "“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” "
Second is Jay Inslee, the democratic running for president who has made fighting climate change the centerpiece of his campaign.
https://www.jayinslee.com/climate-mission
Look at his four points. Point three is "fighting for environmental justice & economic inclusion". Two of the other points are subsidies, one for clean energy, the other for a jobs program. The last one -- getting rid of subsidies for fossil fuel industries -- is a good idea. Control f'ing for the word tax (as in carbon tax) gives no results. Neither does cap, nor trade.
Only I assumed that the "dirty" lobby killed that.
We're now at the point where if we want to keep a similar quality of life without destroying the planet something like the Green New Deal is going to be needed. Not necessarily from a technical standpoint but from a political one - such as change drastically improve the situation for a lot of people and will greatly decrease the risk of amoral fanatics winning again in the biggest economy in the world.
Note that measures to actually address climate change are unpopular even among Democrats. Sure, they like it when it’s articulated as a jobs program (“green new deal”) but they still oppose things like carbon taxes, which experts have offered forth as the solution. State level measures along those lines got strong push back in very blue and very environmentally conscious Oregon and Washington
I'm sorry but there is no doubt that "both sides are at fault".
"Trudeau has never really stood in the way of Canada’s oil industry, despite years of platitudes about addressing climate change."
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Trudeau-Declares-...
ETA: In an ideal world I'd prefer NDP or Green, but as long as we're limited by first past the post, the best way to support climate change mitigation is by avoiding Conservatives via the Liberals.
Good idea. How do we make it happen?
Most likely effect of carbon tax is that it will kill more people than it will save.
I see how some taxes (such as gasoline tax for building roads) can have outsized advantages that are bigger than the tax distribution overhead. But carbon tax does NOT have advantages like that. At least not yet, considering that too much of the Earth land is too cold.
There is a high correlation between solar generation and air-con demand, although it's not perfect, as e.g. heat can persist into the evening, so you could have a grid connection to allow the air con to continue working in the evenings, and to absorb any excess power but in the event of grid failure, the air-con power should just follow the solar generation directly. I don't know if such a system exists commercially at the moment.
Even in the event of wide scale power outages, it would not lead to wide scale deaths as most people would have air conditioning that still worked. Air conditioning failures would be a very serious issue, though, requiring evacuation to another building.
An easier alternative for these rare cases is probably just to have a backup diesel generator.
In terms of emergency power outage in hot day situations, you don't need to cool the whole building, or cool it to a comfortable temperature, it just needs to be below a "wetbulb" of 35°C in a single room people can shelter in until power is restored.
First of all, most of the water is in gaseous form, i.e., vapor, not droplets. But even if it were in the form of droplets, the droplets would have to be small enough to remain in the air, and consequently just like the water vapor, they'd be in thermal equilibrium with all the other molecules of air with the result that removing them would not lower air temperature.
Do you have some sort of citation for that?
Because a dehumidifier is pretty much an air conditioner that doesn't make the room cooler from a mechanical perspective, so the premise that there's a wide gap in efficiency, or that the unit which blows it's heat indoors is the more effective one, seems unlikely to me.
Others recommend dehumidifiers as a compromise which uses less power, you can find this in multiple discussions in relevant forums
We need fundamental cultural and policy change. The question is how to achieve it. Despite popular believe I don't think voting matters. Think about any significant societal change in the last century or so. Women suffrage, civil rights movement, anti-war movement, gay rights. None of these were initiated by the parliament. They all started as a popular rebellion and direct action.
So what are we to do.
- Change your lifestyle. Less flying, driving, meat.
- Divest fossil
- Get out of the techno bubble and get your hands dirty with direct action and civil disobedience. e.g. [1]
In the end, voting is the only thing that matters. Individual choices by a small minority of the population are going to be completely ineffectual without government setting policy so that doing the right thing is also doing the most profitable thing.
But despite you being wrong in your core point in my opinion, you're absolutely right about the method. (change your lifestyle, divest fossil, direct action, civil disobedience)
The reason that voting is useless is because voters don't care about the environment. Climate change is #11 in the list of top priorities for voters.[1]. Fix that, and then voting might make a difference. And you do that by making it clearly visible that it's important to you, and by convincing others that it's important to them.
1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/244367/top-issues-voters-health....
I think you wanted to write:
Climate change is #11 in the list of top priorities for voters _in the United States_...
In many countries it is a lot higher on the list of priorities.
For example, in the UK it is on the 4th place for voters [1].
In Denmark it is the highest priority in latest polls [2] (sorry danish only)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/21/environm...
[2] https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/ny-maaling-den-groenne-dagso...
Voting matters when (1) laws ensure all people have roughly equal influence when voting, (2) laws ensure voting translates into action instead of an empty gesture to appease the population, and (3) the rule of law is respected and consistently enforced.
When one or more of these is compromised, then the actions of the government are illegitimate, and there is a continuum of actions people can take beyond voting.
Writing letters -> peaceful street protests -> nonviolent civil disobedience like blocking roads -> sabotage -> violent street protests -> armed insurrection -> civil war.
So no, voting is not the only thing that matters.
But before that being vocal, determined, and incessant is what matters [1]. At first, nobody knows about you, then, nobody believes you. The climate change discourse is still not past that second stage.
[1]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
USA is spreading conservative and fossil-fuel interests propaganda all over the world, it's very harmful, but it's not some inherent "voters don't care about X". It's simply that people paid a lot of money for voters not to care about X, and much less money to make them care about X.
Voting in most of the world is just a spectacle. If someone was elected that would in fact challenge the status quo (private property and police dominion for instance) they would be instantly murdered or imprisoned in a coup d'État.
At least that's how the story goes for revolutions in Europe/US and much of our modern colonies. As Emma Goldman once said, « if voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal ».
> Individual choices by a small minority of the population are going to be completely ineffectual
This is for sure. The problems are deep and structural and no individual action (however radical) can bring change. The issue is the people profiting from human exploitation and nature's destruction (the wealthy ruling classes) will never stop until it's too late. We have to stop them. Under some circumstances, voting can be a part of this process. But most times social change comes from the people, not a piece of paper.
Some Harvard Business people suggested that we could curb this issue by a three pronged approach:
1. Open primaries to prevent minority duopolies in the general
2. Gerrymander with an open source algorithm or a "shortest split line" method
3. Implement single transferrable vote, ie ranked choice, instead of first past the post (plurality voting), which spoils votes and results in sub-par representation.
It was clear from the rest of your comment that you aren't one of those, but I fear they would find support in your comment. Confirmation bias would lead them to emphasize the "voting doesn't matter" part and ignore your call to action.
[edit]: Rereading your comment, you're much more clear than I originally thought about all change being grass roots. Did you edit? If not it really emphasizes this point. I read "voting doesn't matter", hitting one of my hot buttons leading me to misread your comment. We're obviously in fairly close agreement, yet my response was to spout off an angry denunciation...
2. Deforestation is destroying the environment: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...
3. 24 billion tons of fertile soil disappears every year: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/26/land-deg...
4. Large animals are dying out: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/10/807/223613...
5. At the other end of the scale, insects are disappearing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071...
6. This is because we're in the middle of the 6th major mass extinction event the Earth has experienced, and this is our doing: https://truthout.org/articles/sixth-mass-extinction-ushers-i...
7. And we're polluting the planet so badly, plastics are showing up inside our bodies: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/news-...
So public policy can both incentivise everyone, not only activists to make the right choices. And it can save a lot of lives.
If a suitably large group of people refuse to vote for politicians that don't support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade and other climate policies, it will lead to better outcomes.
The simple solution is to build more nuclear. When energy generation doesn’t require burning things, this solves itself. A carbon neutral grid means we can use as much air conditioning as we want. I was in Rome and France last week and “less AC” would have meant vulnerable people potentially dying in the heat.
That said, binding environmental costs to actual prices would be terrific.
But if households only generate 1/5 of overall emissions (depending on data and negligent of consumption), we might need other mechanisms.
You can control many things through taxes, but I believe this to be inefficient. I would have no problem with paying double for fuel. But that isn't the reality for most people that are dependent on cars.
Better than nothing perhaps, but I have very low expectations for this tax.
I'm reminded of how the German word for "tax" is "Steuer", i.e. steering/control, which encourages smarter thinking about tax policy because it acknowledges precisely this effect on incentives.
A carbon divided, which is to say redistributing the income of the carbon tax equally and directly to the people should at least in principle be uncontroversial because it is both socially equitable (richer people live more carbon intensive lives and thus contribute more), and it sets the right consumption incentive without taking money out of people's personal pockets (which should please conservatives).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
Fixes that really work will have to be at the source - the energy generation stage, making existing lifestyles zero carbon. Bear in mind that billions more people have yet to achieve the comfortable high-energy-use lifestyles that we enjoy.
If we stop now and find a way to get the carbon out of the atmosphere fast enough we might even have a chance to go back to the old normal, but we have to act fast. Please help to push for it!
It doesn't seem possible to do both things without failing at both with terrible consequences.
the solution is to buy higher quality clothes, but less often.
In the US, if you could just get more registered voters in Texas to actually vote it would completely flip the balance of power between the Dems and Republicans. The issue, supposedly, is that Texas has a "disproportionate number of young, poor, and uneducated citizens." This means that the (actually quite popular) idea that voting doesn't matter mostly benefits the party that has adopted ignorance as most of its platform.
Scared people are only going to run in panic and will do the first thing that is presented "because something must be done".
I also see that you have fallen into the trap of thinking that there is anything you _can_ do personally.
There is only one way to get what you want: build what is effectively a world government and coerce everyone to reduce their consumption. That includes people in countries such as India, China, and Indonesia. They'll need to be told by rich westerners that they can't do the things that we did to get rich. Good luck with that.
A far more practical solution is to innovate our way out of the problem. That means more cost-effective green technologies, geoengineering, and adaptive technologies (such as air conditioning, building underground, heat sinks, etc). Those would allow us to keep growing economically, maintain people's quality of life, and it doesn't fail if China or India continue on their current path.
Just to take one counter-example, the UK has reduced CO2 consumption by 38% since 1990.
> A far more practical solution is to innovate our way out of the problem
Technological approaches are part of the solution, but it's far too risky to gamble the future of our civilisation on technical breakthroughs that may or may not occur. We're up against some tough physical limits and we certainly have no guarantee that we'll get any miracle breakthroughs in the next few decades.
Besides, with our current technology level we almost certainly have the ability to solve the problem now; we just lack the political will. How would a slight improvement in technology change that?
The UK is a country, not a civilization. They don’t have to solve the same coordination problem that the entire world has.
consumption or production? also, isn't CO2 increase offset by increase in forests (that consume CO2)? so reducing CO2 should lead to reduction in forests, right?
Energy efficiency improvements and water conservation efforts have been spectacularly effective in many first world areas.
That article says we need to build a global organization that can coerce everyone reduce their carbon emissions. I don't see how my statement was incorrect.
Electrified rail.
Low CO2 concrete. Real, already used.
The list is almost literally endless.
But anyway, all of these are simply cost based choices. A carbon tax would literally overnight shift the consumer choices. And the cost effectiveness depends on the market, and that is usually the best we can get.
So I'd say it's lifestyle change, direct action and voting.
If voting doesn't matter why would giving women the vote matter?
I suppose it's possible that we get wise enough to deserve continue on as a species, but at this point I doubt it. I don't see anything in humanity that would lead me to believe it's capable of making the cohesive decisions to remedy the situation. Something else will come along in a few million years and maybe they'll do a better job of it.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-canadian-start-up-is-removing...
- get locally sourced food
- get less things; waste less; buy less
Packaging and cargo are the two big problems, one for the plastic pollution, the other for the co2 emission. It's not meat consumption.
Cutting personal driving/travel is also good but more for environmental well being - eg less noise. It will not make any big changes in the longer run.
Downsizing and less stuff will.
According to a 5 year Oxford University study, the single best thing we can do at an individual level to decbarbonise is to say no to dairy and meat.
Which "anti-war movement" or "parliament" are you talking about otherwise?
Will your movements have the same traction in India or China?
- I don't have any (direct) influence on the Chinese government. I am gonna do my part and hope that like-minded people in China will do theirs.
- A fair share of Chinese emissions are actually our emissions anyway. Haven't we outsourced our industry to China? What's the US - China trade "imbalance"?
1. Tragedy of the commons
When a country/company wants to make money by damaging the environment in the process, the money come to the country/company now, but the damage is spread world-wide. If the pollution would stay only in that country/city, it would be different. So, the choice is natural, especially considering government 4-year terms.
2. We always put ourselves first, rest of the city/country much further, and rest of the world... doesn't matter. What people want, by human nature, is to satisfy their own needs & comfort.
Examples:
* Why wait for a bus or use an electric bike when one can just drive a 2 tonnes car to move oneself? It's comfortable and cheap.
* USA-specific, but spreading to other countries as well: people huge SUV-style cars to transport 1-2 persons, when a small one could do the job as well.
* Norway refuses to drill for billions of barrels of oil in Arctic, leaving ‘whole industry surprised and disappointed’. Government made the right choice, but a few (prosperous already) affected by making less money complain: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/norway-oil-drillin...
* France introduces a diesel tax, to reduce pollution, which affects everybody's health. But, wait, some need to pay a little more? Let's protest! Tax was cancelled: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/11/french-protes...
* The Bełchatów Coal mine & Power station in Poland. Hundreds of people employed there, they are happy with it. Should the plant be closed to stop pollution? What about our jobs? No way! And no, getting only 20% of salary for free (basic income) and having to learn stuff to maybe find a new job in renewables is not acceptable. So, the coal plant goes on, but it's easier to point to China for doing the same (with more plants, of course).
3. Delayed effects of current actions
The environment effects of what a one person/community/country does, bad or good, are hard to see in the short term. Only the downsides are clearly visible in the present. So, taking the correct action is quite hard.
Unfortunately, I don't see how to overcome these. Would be glad to be proved wrong!
FYI, my personal environment footprint is much smaller than the average in EU/USA, but we are too few to make an impact and others won't listen/change.
What leaves me hopeless is that any lifestyle restrictions Americans might make are being vastly outpaced by population growth in countries that are doing much less (personally and nationally) than the US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Here's a solution at the international level: https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/
At the national level I believe the problem is slightly easier (though still extremely difficult). We generally have effective national institutions, so we "just" have to convince the populace that the pain is worth the gain. It's easier to stomach a little bit of pain for the common good as long as people believe that everybody else is also doing their part.
Perhaps at this point in time we could just make things work by cutting back our lifestyles: but 20 or 30 years later the grown population would again need more food and more natural resources. And hungry people don't care about changing the world but about getting food for today, sustainable or not.
What is your point? Should we kill everybody over 70 years old?
Because: there is no overpopulation, and if there was it is not caused by too many babies but by people living longer.
When it comes to CO2 by agriculture: we are eating way too much (meat).
In my opinion you're putting the bar way too high if you require anybody on this forum to only reply to a discussion when he/she not only can point out a failure in the arguments but has the correct solution as well.
Finally, you are putting some rather dubious solution in my mouth with your comment "What is your point? Should we kill everybody over 70 years old?". Of course I didn't have that solution in mind.
It is true that this is nothing we can change, but the source of the problem shouldn't be ignored.
Of course we can eat as much meat as we want. It just doesn't scale to 7 billion people.
So yes, there is overpopulation, we just cannot do anything about it. But don't dismiss the fact.
I don't agree that overpopulation is the root cause, and I'm not a fan of talking about it much either. However, assume for the sake of argument that it is:
Reducing Earth population in the long run doesn't have to involve harming anyone.
For example, we could use changes to politics, technology and culture to provide better skills, education, even healthcare and assisting the old to live longer, and assist with more fulfilling lifestyle aspirations, and generally empower as many people as we can to lead happier lives.
Much of the scientific study we have suggests that will both reduce world population and improve quality of life across the board, because of how humans make choices about reproduction.
Nobody needs to be killed, nobody needs to have medicine withdrawn, nobody needs to be sterilised or even discouraged from having children. No odious racism or elitism or eugenics is required.
It's enough, to just improve lives, and it looks very much as though humans may naturally reduce their population replacement rate in the long run.
So that leaves only the climate problem in the shorter run, for which "temporary solutions" could be good enough.
A bigger deal than population increase is that energy use is going to rise massively with just the population we have, as people move out of energy poverty.
We need to make the energy zero-carbon.
--
² i belive it was this event http://longnow.org/seminars/02019/jan/14/prospects-humanity/
By eating vegetarian you cut one or maybe several factors of ~ 0.1 out of the equation. I'm not vegetarian but have reduced my meat consumption by a lot while not having the feeling that I miss anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
Its complicated, but not eating meat would account for somewhere between 3-8% reduced greenhouse gas emissions. And as more of the world's population becomes "first world" demand is going to go up unless we start reducing cultural dependence on meat throughout our diets.
Meat is significantly less efficient to produce than a balanced vegetarian diet.
That entirely depends on the land, no?
Sheep and goats can thrive on land you can’t actually use for any other sort of farming. We have lots of that land here in Wales.
Particularly organic vegetarian diets need a lot of land.
Anyway it is a worthy goal but people shouldn't think they are doing their part of they are successful. I believe the numbers are that if all cows disappeared tomorrow, that'd take care of something like 5% of our worldwide carbon-equivalent emissions.
I used to be a bit baffled how people could say "fake news" at obvious facts and data and science. Then I read something Fulton Sheen said: never think too much about what someone says, but why they say it. He made this point about atheists, saying that they only choose not to believe in God so they can continue living an evil life. The same can be said of people who deny climate change and the seriousness of the matter, or any clear and demonstrable truth really.
To be honest I hear a lot of people talking about actionable efforts all the time, but if they're so actionable, why aren't they happening? Isn't that the definition of the term?
20 years ago, Germany raised taxes on fuel, but that didn’t make anyone drive less. I’m guessing the same would happen with a tax on CO2. So I‘m favoring emissions allowances: Politics dictates a threshold of how much CO2 is permitted and gives out allowances, then the price develops on the market.
But it feels like, for those „rebellions“, capitalism is the root of all evil.
People in Germany advocating an additional tax have either never worked, payed bills, are stupendously rich, just insane or don't have responsibilities towards others.
Sorry, there is a limit on how much you can use taxes and that limit is staunchly in the red because of naive promises made in the past.
I think the current little pupil rebellion is something very worth supporting. But their demands are naive.
Your proposition would be a more efficient mechanism.
Currently there is a discussion about giving people a fixed amount of money for the additional costs this tax would cause.
What a waste of time...
It turned out the taxes are not high enough. If people really were depended on cars, but were hurt by the high taxes, car makers would sell smaller cars. They don't. Extremely big cars, totally unneeded by almost anyone, are still the most popular models. Why? Cause the costs of having and using one are not as high as you make it sound.
> People in Germany advocating an additional tax have either never worked, payed bills, are stupendously rich, just insane or don't have responsibilities towards others.
Yeah, sure. Everyone who doesn't agree with you is one of the above. It couldn't be that they tend to have a bit more foresight than you.
> Sorry, there is a limit on how much you can use taxes and that limit is staunchly in the red because of naive promises made in the past.
Taxes in Germany have never been lower than in the last 20 years for significant parts of the population. The problem in Germany right now isn't high taxes, it's low wages. A problem which hits parts of the population that usually don't even pay taxes (or if they do almost none).
And yes, this all requires drastic lifestyle changes. That's the point. No lifestyle change, no climate effect. Simple as that.
The system already exists, isn't it? The so called "cap and trade" https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en
But the cap is too high and the prices are too low. Would you accept it's ok to rebel to force the politicians to lower the cap?
But also, wouldn't a lower cap lead to the "drastic life style changes for people" anyway (at least in the short term while the economy adapts)?
Yes, but not for all industries.
> Would you accept it‘s ok to rebel to force the politicians to lower the cap?
If people rebel for realistic solutions I‘m all for it!
> wouldn‘t a lower cap lead to the „drastic life style changes for people“ anyway (at least in the short term while the economy adapts)
Yeah, probably! Surely not to the same extent like the carbon tax demanded by climate activists. But the idea is to incentivize companies to find more climate-friendly solutions. Certainly some companies would lose their competitive ability if they depend on high emissions, though.
But the reality is that there many, many things to do that are more effective before even starting to look at aviation.
I don't understand the point of calling for "civil disobedience" (which is usually an euphemism for blocking roads and airports, and alienating public opinion in the process). What does it achieve? If you want to use your individual power do it constructively by changing your everyday routine and behaviour.
Yes, that's the usual 'argument' except that this does not even seem to be true (return flight from London to New York seems to emit about 1t per passenger when a typical Brit otherwise contributes 7+t, so that's 1/14th of personal annual emissions per flight).
In any case, not everyone flies over the Atlantic every year, so that overall and in the grand scheme of things aviation should not be held as a priority.
Focusing on aviation is a distraction.
It is not as hard as: just stop driving with your car to work! Hmmkay?!
The issue is that it focuses on something that is not a priority and it is so largely on ideologically grounds.
Your second sentence is actually highlighting a real aspect of the issue: Many people prefer to do something easy rather than something effective.
We have been systematically strip mining the planet for decades. We need to take a step back and calm down.
If you're banging through your credit card, you knock it all out. You start from the bottom up, not the top down. You look at what you absolutely need and slowly add things back in.
We've hit the credit limit on our ecosystem.
We need to put our countries on a 'war footing'. We have so many people who could be working to fix these problems stuck in offices doing stuff that there isn't really a need for (i.e. most all software development) because that's what the 'market' rewards. We need to completely overhaul what we think of as value and how we reward it. I don't see how that's possible under the current capitalist system and I don't see the majority of people supporting alternative systems.
Imagine if we deployed the people power and innovation that currently gets wasted in competition between rival social media applications and redirected it to doing something about climate change. It's not possible for individuals to make that change however because at the end of the day they need to pay their landlord (who I regard as largely parasitic leeches on productivity) and buy food at the shops; and the roles that would allow them to contribute to this don't exist in the number, or at the wages, required.
The cost of moving to zero emissions here in the UK was estimated as being £1 trillion so it was kind of kicked down the road to maybe slightly after 2050. Which is just mad. Sure China and India might be bigger emitters but someone has to make the first move. The innovations can then be shared for free with those countries, we can spend money to help them transition. This is our long term survival, we need to be less squeamish about taking what we need from "private property" (read tax havens, the stock market, etc). But clearly these changes aren't achievable at the speed and scale needed solely through voting. Democracies tend to limit themselves to a small range of acceptable views around a midpoint and take a long time to change even if there is a moral imperative, like the previous changes you mention; so I don't see how they can react at the speed necessary to fix this.
In addition addressing climate change without addressing social justice won't work. As the article mentions the people most affected by this are going to overwhelmingly be poor and in less-developed countries. They're going to need to come somewhere when their regions become uninhabitable and while it's possible our response is to erect barriers (see Europe, US, etc) or build prison camps from a moral standpoint it can't be.
I've gone through that stage too. Then I came out and decided I'm gonna do what I can, however little the impact might be. I am not hopeful or optimistic. I don't expect to succeed or fail. I am just gonna work on it.
Got a source? My share of that is 16 grand (1T/63M). Let's just bloody do it. My god. That's a biscuit, it really is.
It just feels like people are suffering from a massive streetlight syndrome where they feel like the only valuable thing they can contribute with their skills (which includes the ability to control unprecedented computing power) is more inconsequential mobile apps.
It reaches an even more ridiculous point when you consider that Silicon Valley is considered "hubristic" by a lot of pundits. What?! No! Silicon Valley's ambitions are underwhelming at best. We should expect a lot more from it.
That's because the carbon-taxers are manipulative and playing on your emotions. You need to feel that it's an absolute dire situation that needs rectifying immediately. They believe the only way they'll get their way is shouting above everyone else.
Truth is, some of us are starting to feel 'I'll lite the world on fire myself before I capitulate to your infantile tactics.' You need to adjust your strategy to offer incentives to actual people that have actual problems, not blame and shout.
The kind of "solutions" that involve not changing any of the behaviours that are causing the problems are the ones that are not really solution.
Why not?
We'll have to. It can either come from us, from policy, or from the laws of nature. Our choice.
The most actionable item (that is of course MUCH harder than not eating meat) is doing something to to convince the nations with most children per woman [2] to have less. But this is not easy - joining organizations that would educate women and doing volunteering or even dangerous work is insanely hard. Not buying meat, recycling and not riding your car seems hard for western people and so you FEEL like you are doing something, but you are not.
I will not have children but do 50 transatlantic flights this year, eat all the meat, hell, I'll even teach myself to drive a car just to show off how useless these individual actions are. You can't convince the world, stop CHANGING the world and change yourself, seek data and find the most actionable item. Jeez!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_action_on_climate_c... [2] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...
Why can't we live more sustainably and work on reducing global human population?
I think you are just signalling a different kind of virtue. You are scientific, sceptical and ever so smart. But you are not saving the world either.
The question is still valid though: are we thinking things through and what are our leader's intentions in case something like that happens and are they thinking about how to prevent it in the first place ?
Ten years ago we talked about how the India/Pakistan nuclear arsenal could end up in the hands of Al-Qaeda. What were the plans and which one was put in motion (if any) ?
"consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam's bursting, it's not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after you get just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam's breaking is found to be highest, concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That's because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one's sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possiblity that it could burst. " - page 436
It's a fun story but it doesn't prove causality. Maybe their faith in the dam is why they moved there.
I mean I think if I was living right next to a dam or a chemical plant or whatever I would be more worried about an accident.
Although I suppose in real data you could get selection bias - those people who are terrified by nuclear power are unlikely to continue living next to a plant for long, leaving behind only those who are not bothered by it.
If we are right this time, why worry about it? If we are wrong this time -- as we have been for the past 70 years -- why worry about it?
Related:
One of the predicted problems was mass starvation. One of the mitigations was the Green Revolution. Quoting Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech (he has been credited with saving the lives of 1 billion people):
> It is true that the tide of the battle against hunger has changed for the better during the past three years. But tides have a way of flowing and then ebbing again. We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts. For we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction. ...
> There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. Fighting alone, they may win temporary skirmishes, but united they can win a decisive and lasting victory to provide food and other amenities of a progressive civilization for the benefit of all mankind
In context of your comment, the predictions of mass starvation didn't happen. Was that because the predictions were wrong? Yes and no. The predictions were right, but people listened to the predictions and worked to mitigate them ... fully aware that they were only mitigations. Thus, those prediction did not happen ... yet.
It was for the people of the future - you and I included - to work to find the real solution. If we don't worry, the work of people like Borlaug to give us more breathing room to work on a more complete solution seems pointless.
The fact that I don't lose sleep over worrying about doomsday scenarios doesn't mean I'm doing nothing about it, a point I've repeatedly addressed in this same thread.
If you have an emergency and dial 911, the person who answers remains calm, cool and collected. If they send police or ambulance to your location due to your emergency, those folks also remain calm, cool and collected.
I'm not in denial here. I just think that not only is it not helpful to run screaming across the stage of life in a panic while flailing my arms like Kermit the frog, it's actively counterproductive.
I wish very much I could get more traction for certain things. Perhaps someday I will.
But I am quite confident that histrionics will play little to no part in any success I manage to achieve.
- worst pesticides (DDT)
- sulfate aerosols from coal
- CFCs
- chloride based plastics
- asbestos and dust
- leaded gasoline
- heavy metals
- nuclear non-proliferation
We have also made strides in monitoring our environment.
So it might look like lots of doomsday predictions, but the reason why these didn't pan out was that humans actually put the work in to prevent that from happening.
So you get us in the middle who just ignore it all because after hearing both extremes for so long you again get desensitized to it all.
I liked what Arnold Schwarzenegger said "I don't give a if we agree about climate change.". We should just work to reduce our emmisions anyway and make everything cleaner.
I do know people tend to be more receptive to slow change. You take their SUV's away in 5 years, there will be issues. You start slowly phasing them out, it will probably work better. Also efficeint cars seem to expensive. You can buy a used car that will last 5 years for $3000 that gets crappy gas milage, or a new hybrid car for $20,000. one can argue about saving movey on gas, but you will never save $10k worth of money and for people with little money that is what they need to get by.
A full-out nuclear exchange might last anywhere from 1-3 hours and kill every human on Earth. Thousands of nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert is literally on the verge of wiping ourselves out. It almost happened, at least twice.
We're lucky to be here. But survivorship bias is a psychological distortion; it has zero predictive power. You can say the same thing at the individual level. "I've been hearing my whole life that I'm gonna die. Still here." And that's true up until the day you actually die.
" Some things that help:
Walk more, especially as a form of transportation.
Use more daylighting and passive solar. This can be as simple as opening the window instead of cranking the AC.
Eat less meat. "
Opening the window: To make it hotter and more humid in my house?
Eat less meat: I dont mind using turkey instead of beef anymore but good luck convincing most others.
If we are right, why worry about it? Because there are things you can do to help, but only if you acknowledge the problem.
If it's not enough because so many other people can't be arsed, my quality of life does not go up if I add sleepless nights and ulcers to my experience.
Not to mention that fearmongering is the basis of politics and so we're constantly being bombarded with "studies" showing a million different things to be fearful of, very often contradicting each other or at the very least not including the full story.
Are we saying people should go out on the streets in a mass hysteria? That's worse than climate change itself.
Are we saying we need to have in depth nuanced discussion about it. Sure, please do.
His thesis:
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"
An example from the rest of the talk:
"Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.
I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.
And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realize you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1/8th; then a 1/16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realize there’s a problem?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
Every person feels like, often rightly so, that they have enough fiscal and social stress that immediately impacts their lives.
For an (U.S) example, Presidential elections: the results of which undoubtedly impact the entire nations population in, potentially, massive ways in every sphere (social, economic ect.). You cannot really escape it either, it permeates news cycles at all levels nationally and globally.
Since 2000 it turnouts have been bounced between 50-60%. Given that, how many people are really going to be concerning themselves with something like climate change? Tax policy rattles more people than climate change ever will, they may even recognize it themselves, and yet people just don't care (or have more immediate concerns).
If you want someone to care, they have to be moved enough by being directly impacted. In climate change's case, it will be too late to do anything. But that's just how people (including myself) work.
I get the desire for a single unified initiative that drags us out of this mess, even against our wills. But no entity capable of doing that exists. And the bigger ethical question is indeed whether it should exist to begin with. If we can't solve these relatively simple problems of ensuring our survival and provide a reasonably fulfilling existence for our fellow humans, why does our species deserve to exist?
Religious dictatorships didn't lead to peace or even actual embrace of the principles, communist dictatorships didn't help the working class, and green dictatorships won't help the environment.
It’s not directly relevant in a relatable way to most of us. If you can afford air conditioning, these conditions are survivable. Building empathy with faraway victims facing chronic problems is hard.
But I only have shallow knowledge of the major supply chains, maybe someone with a deeper understanding can chime in.
This article seems to imply that everyone will die from exposure once a certain temperature and saturation is reached, but doesn't seem to take measures into consideration. Even without A/C there are plenty of options available, e.g. evaporative cooling, living underground, heat pumps (that move heat or cold underground depending on season) and just building with possible heatwaves in mind.
I AM worried about these things, we've just had a heatwave that knocked my girlfriend out for two days. Tomorrow morning a guy will come over to make measurements to install awnings and screens to keep the sunlight (and heat) out. I am long-term thinking about installing solar panels on the roof, which can be used to offset the power consumption of another possible upgrade, the installation of a solid rooftop AC unit instead of the portable one we've used that just can't keep up.
And that's just my house, there's loads of actions that can be undertaken by individuals, local municipalities and governments - think about growing taller trees in residential areas, managing the water table to combat drought, providing aid and cool shelter to the homeless and economically disadvantaged, or even opening up public pools and fountains, and making (cooled) public spaces more accessible to spend a day at during hot weather.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/248027/americans-concerned-ever...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/26/climate-...
Notice that the worst scenarios, like the 4 degree warming, discussed in the article, happen lose to the end of the century. Most of us are dead then.
The response in USA is that people ask Trump to build a wall. In Europe, people vote for populistic right wing parties who promise to stop migrations.
They don't want to fix the root cause, which is that south is becoming inhabitable by climate change.
It's also just one of countless doomsday scenarios out there.
Where is the alarmism?
The problem for many areas is it’s not a dry heat. I like many other people as you point out have lived in 35c and above areas just fine, but the humidity was very low - it wasn’t really that bad if you could avoid direct sun exposure and didn’t physically exert yourself much.
Once that humidity creeps up then it’s a problem.
It's been hot and humid in a lot of places for a long time, but it's only just now beginning to be hot and humid enough to be passively deadly.
I bet, they were in a similar situation, people saying that we should stop. That it changes things. And... they didn't stop until the bitter end.
I think we will be like the easter island. We won't stop.
Early reports of visits to the island noted how friendly the islanders were. Then just a couple of years later they were aggressive towards visiting ships. I wonder why? On the first visit some islanders were killed "by accident" (shot one! oops!).
The "stupid natives cut down their trees" story is mostly propaganda to cover the real tragedy caused by external forces destroying the island life.
See for example: https://gizmodo.com/new-evidence-contradicts-theory-that-eas...
This article suggests they got all their stone from a single quarry, and so must have collaborated around that quarry.
....this doesn't seem to contradict the central claim of a society destroying its resource base. Am I missing something? It's also not incompatible to have collaboration around a central resource and conflict elsewhere. Though I mainly think it's a sideline to the tree story.
http://islandheritage.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/...
I don't think it does challenge the idea that the deforestation led to the collapse, but maybe it was not the only cause.
I have tried to reduce my carbon footprint by consuming as little as possible, but just I myself alone is not enough. This requires a whole refactoring of how our cities should be built, how our civilization should work and I just don't see that happening any time soon.
Sure. Start talking to your friends, family and colleagues. Join groups of like-minded people.
I wonder if in human history there has been such a long running dire topic to endlessly discuss without any solution in sight ?
Maybe the Cold War ?
Wars in Africa can be traced to shrinking rivers and lakes. Tensions between north and south Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda,
When you see pictures of people starving, they never hold AK-47 in their hand.
Historically this is a recipe for raising cheap armies, and finding something to do with them.
In another viewpoint on climate change, do remember that the Earth rotate around the Sun in elliptical manner, it's not perfect circle - there will be surely a time when a new Ice Age will happen - we're just at a period when Earth is getting closer to the Sun on it's rotational axis
The earth's orbit around the sun is an ellipse. But it's an ellipse that takes one year to traverse. The closest thing that gets us in terms of an "ice age" is winter. And, in fact, "winter" is what happens when you're closer to the sun, due to a change in the angle of incidence of sunlight (in the northern hemisphere).
Are you referring to something else?
> The wetbulb temperature includes the cooling effect of water evaporating from the thermometer, and so is normally much lower than the normal (“drybulb”) temperature reported in weather forecasts.
With 100% humidity, the air temp and the wetbulb temp are the same. At lower humidity levels, they diverge.
Name a catastrophe that can compare with this scale — even the effects of that city-killer asteroid hitting Brussels would be easier to deal with.
So this is the real reason for the US Border Wall, right?
That would be an ironic acknowledgement that global climate change is a serious risk.
It's the old orders of power and the conglomeration of corporate entities that actually create the shooting script for various events including the creation of a border wall.
The identity politics or the thin veneer of hollywoodesque narratives above most especially foreign policy is just exactly that, fantasy, while it's the military-industrial complex that in reality drafts the plans together with PR companies.
Look for example at military historian Gwynne Dyers's talk here from 2010 both foreshadowing the refugee crisis, Syrian War and the border wall all from climate extrapolation without the identity-smokescreen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY
The whole border issue is extremely muddy though as it's not classically right-wing to protect the working classes from wage dumping by not letting millions of people in but has become a left-wing issue because class consciousness and economic policy has mostly been replaced with superficial identity based issues because they are allowed by the status quo. This is because they don't interfere with the increase in inequality and fall in real-wages happening in plane sight while pop-leftwingers are busy screaming about identity based issues (not that those aren't important).
From a resource perspective one could argue that the ever more transnationally oriented elite couldn't give two f's about protecting the sovereignty of yesterdays empires and nation states - but i think the US is still seen as a very valuable asset because a somewhat stable country with a large middle class is still important in a global system of resource extraction and exploitation - and also as a buffer around the US military which in essence is just a mercenary army created to protect US corporate assets and interests.
All in all, the border will be created no matter who is president because the plan has been laid out in military circles for decades , because climate change has never actually been tabu in the corporate intelligentsia as we also see in the Exxon papers from 50 years ago. It's all part of a plan to squeeze as much value out of the global capitalist ponzi scheme and protect US assets just up until everything turns into chaos. Exxon has known this together with most other elite wealth management entities - that is why the next step is border walls with machine guns and watchtowers, then a short balkanisation with feudal rule and mercenary armies protecting the elite before everything collapses and the private jets are pointed towards a new Antarctica or new Zealand bunkers.
If this sounds conspiratorial look no further than to Jeff Bezos statement this week that his space travel efforts are very much because he knows we are headed for total collapse of earth ecosystems. Thiel, Bezos, Musk, the Rothhcild family, Saudi Aramco or whoever are all very much aware of the coming collapse and fragmentation - this is why they all invest heavily in "let's get of earth or into the ground" tech.
I don't have any insight into "military circles", but I do recall an action film (maybe from the 80s) that featured (among other stuff) a militarized wall and prison complex along the US-Mexico border. Some action/horror films (especially zombie ones) are loaded with ~prophetic social commentary.
Edit: And damn! Gwynne Dyer's talk looks amazing. And there's a transcript at https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...
Can we have a runaway greenhouse effect and reach a hothouse state like millions of years ago, or even worse due to the amount released all at once?
What do the models say in the worst case?
Will humanity barely survive at the poles, in that case?
This (I think) could cause an overshoot, then a reduction of the total greenhouse effect
If the permafrost melts it'll release a lot of methane and CO2, in part captured and in part from material beginning to rot a few thousand years too late.
Humanity might survive at the south pole, but we'll more likely go extinct in a worst case. Unless it's a venus scenario, life itself will go on.
At the absolute worst we'll reach a moist hothouse scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect#Eart...
The more likely worst case is climate similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
If you want to live in a colder climate -- just move North: Canada (almost empty), Northern United States (Alaska is almost empty), Northern Europe, Russia (almost empty).
I moved to Florida, because I like warmer temperatures. A lot of other people are moving to warmer South too (from colder North).
I will vote against laws that may bring temperature down.