Life on Earth will most likely exist after climate change but it won't be any of the life as we know it.
Life on Earth will most likely exist after climate change but it won't be any of the life as we know it.
The stragglers, probably mostly primitives plus a bunch of rich bastards, will repopulate the Earth and pick up in what is left.
May I suggest looking back into the rich history of doomsaying? All the way back to Malthus who, even though he was wrong in his prediction of the planet being incapable of feeding more than a billion human beings, actually did touch upon the problem of overpopulation which is a larger threat than any of the ones subsequently dragged up by the latest crop of doomsayers.
To name a few causes more worthy of attention than the current CO₂ hysteria:
- Population growth. Malthus thought the planet could not feed more than 1 billion people. He was wrong, he failed to foresee the industrial revolution which makes it possible to feed 7 billion and has the potential to feed the 10 billion which is expected to be the number of humans reached before population starts to decline.
- That industrial revolution has given its blessings but it also came with the curse of large-scale environmental pollution. While these problems are being tackled in some parts of the world the same can unfortunately not be said about others.
- Population growth also leads to increased migration which has the potential to lead to increased conflicts which has the potential to lead to the undoing of many of the efforts currently put in the negation of the negative aspects of the industrial revolution. People at war have different priorities from those at peace. Just like with the doomsayers it makes sense to use history as a guide here. Genghis Khan (who, when seen in the percentage of the world population killed (estimates range from 5% to ~10%) still reigns supreme as the biggest killer of them all [1]) started a wave of migration which was felt all the way to the west and north of Europe with one displaced population on the move jostling for space with the next.
So, what can be done about these? The population growth will, bar the intervention of any catastrophic events, probably follow the predicted curve with the total world population reaching about 10 billion people somewhere in the 2100s. It took the west more than a century to realise than unbridled industrial growth and the accompanying pollution was a recipe for disaster, hopefully the now industrialising parts of the world will have learned this lesson well so they don't continue to make the same mistakes. Migration will lead to conflicts, this is probably unavoidable. It can only be hoped that these conflicts don't escalate too far.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_E...