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I try not to succumb to doomerism, but recent climate news has just gone from bad, to worse, to grim, to 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'.

The IPCC has traditionally been conservative, but all of their low rcp outcomes depend upon direct carbon capture, a technology we haven't really figured out yet, deployed to a wider extent than we've done with anything.

I'm not saying DAC research isn't promising, but a lot of folks are just shrugging their shoulders and assuming that everything is going to turn out fine. It's not. At this rate, it basically boils down to dealing with global warming or dealing with the effects of stratospheric sulfide injection. Neither are going to be pretty and honestly either could have effects so dire it ends human civilization as we know and love it today.

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"but recent climate news has just gone from bad, to worse, to grim, to 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'."

I'm in my mid-40s and don't have kids. In the last 5-6 years I've gone from figuring it'll be ok-ish in my lifetime but will suck for the next generation, to legit wondering if life will be a complete hellscape by the time I'm a senior citizen. And more important, what if anything that means in terms of how I live the rest of my life. For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.

I hope that it's just doomerism on my part, but the fact that someone like myself is already putting mental energy towards this does say something in my opinion

You are right to worry; these things are insanely nonlinear, and we're already well into the meat of several feed-forward loops / tipping points (e.g., melting permafrost releasing gigatons of methane which is 22x as effective at blocking IR radiation vs CO2, melting of arctic icecap leaving open ocean absorbing far more heat vs white snow/ice, etc.).

Worse yet is the threat that few are mentioning: the breaking of the food web. This incredibly delicate web literally keeps us alive and is under threat not only from anthropogenic climate change but also from everything from pesticides, plastic & microplastic pollution, habitat destruction, slowing and impending collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, and 100 other scaled-up threats. We're already in the anthropocene era marked by the sixth mass extinction in the planet's history, and everything from fish to insects are nearing single-digit percentages of their pre-industrial populations.

Disaster can be averted, but only if we take serious action. Good luck with that.

> For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.

As someone in the mid 30's who survived a bad accident with a TBI: it's never early enough to start living life to the fullest.

A lot of things you might want to do now and are able to do, you might not in your 60s for health reasons.

Do them now.

It's a hard call to make. On the one hand, you can live in the moment and hope the government or your family will give you enough for a modestly comfortable if frugal lifestyle in your old age.

Or you can save for a nice retirement lifestyle but end up with a terminal illness or sudden heart attack or stroke and not live to enjoy much of it. On top of that, the older you get the more and more people are scheming to drain you of your wealth. The Big Medical/Big Pharma complex, Long Term Care insurance scams, greedy relatives, everyone will be eyeing your retirement accounts.

> On the one hand, you can live in the moment and hope the government or your family will give you enough for a modestly comfortable if frugal lifestyle in your old age.

Living in the moment does not equate to "have 0 savings" or "spend everything you make on experiences". There's a whole spectrum of middle ground between the extremes.

I understand the argument you're trying to make, but viewing it through the lens of extremes is a baby mistake (maybe a consequence of polarized american politics?). As an adult, you should be able to find a middle ground that works for you.

>And more important, what if anything that means in terms of how I live the rest of my life. For instance do I live life to the fullest now? Or do I skimp and scrounge now to have some hope of surviving when things really go sideways.

I'm facing the exact same question. I think I've mostly resigned myself to appreciating the world as it is today, while it's still recognizable. I want to see glacier national park while there are still glaciers. I want to see others before forests give way to savanna. I want to see the old world before things really destabilize.

Don't get me wrong, I've made choices to reduce my impact on the world, and I'll continue to vote for anyone who I think will seriously help on the issue, but I'm not going to live some 'hairshirt' existence of climate piety when my sacrifices amount to a fart in a hurricane compared to the actions of corporations and the ultrarich.

> I want to see the old world before things really destabilize.

To future generations, the new world will be their "old world". And so it goes.

> to legit wondering if life will be a complete hellscape by the time I'm a senior citizen.

Climate change is one thing, but another is resource scarcity which will also hit (some of) us within our life time. We owe our lifestyle to fossil fuel, and we'll have to reduce it at the time we need it most.

This is a big part of my quandary.

If resources, including livable land, become scarcer then it stands to reason having accumulated more wealth would be the only possible path to help ensure you survive. And even this isn't a guarantee, as the wealth might become worthless and or taken away from you.

On the other hand if you assume we're all fucked and proceed as if that's the case, if the shit hits the fan before you expire then you're even more likely to be on the outside looking in.

Move to New Zealand. It'll be kinda OK, the government's stable and democratic, and they aren't gonna be machine-gunning waves of climate refugees (or else getting overrun and seeing QOL plummet) like most other democratic countries will in the next few decades.

I reckon that's why there's been a trend of billionaires buying citizenship there. Guaranteed entry if they get citizenship, even if things get bad, and they're not autocratic so they probably won't seize all their stuff.

> the fact that someone like myself is already putting mental energy towards this does say something in my opinion

Wouldn't it be expected that you'd have the mental energy to put towards such things, lacking the tried and true distraction of having puppies?

Look at how climate related deaths have dropped dramatically over the past century.

https://www.humanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/cha...

https://images.wsj.net/im-428434/?width=700&height=434

What are you worried about, exactly?

This doesn't mean much if you consider we may have just gotten better about predicting and avoiding human loss during extreme weather events.

A better indicator IMO is the amount of property damage from extreme weather events, which has been trending up sharply since the 80s: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/summary-stats#temp...

That's because there are more buildings.

Wait, are you suggesting current climate related deaths are a good indicator of what the climate will be doing in 30 years from now?

Are you suggesting you can predict the future 30 years from now?

It's just a media doomerism. Life in western/eastern societies improved every generation. I speak as someone who talked to a lot of old people in my family and is interested in genealogy. When you don't have kids, someone else will have 5 and that someone else will most likely be a religious fanatic. In couple of generations they will overwhelm our socities and then it will be the end/modern Dark Ages. What is happening in Israel right now is prime example of this demographic disbalance.

I love how some people find a way to inject "Israel Bad" into any discussion on any topic.

Don't know why you get this impression from my comment. I lived in Israel and still love Israel but what is going on there is a concern to me. I want it thrive and be a jewish home for many generation to come and not to have a repeat of 2000 years ago scenario.

Here, have a white pill:

Last year, Two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years. Corals have survived millions of years and are already bouncing back in other places as evidenced by the Great Barrier Reef, which we were all worried about not long ago.

True. To quote George Carlin: “The Earth will be fine. We’re fucked.”

The Earth has been much warmer than this in the past. It’s been much colder too. Life will adapt. The question is whether we will adapt, and more specifically whether our current civilization will adapt. I severely doubt that Homo sapiens would go extinct, but massive civilization collapse would kill billions.

Then there’s what civilization might do short of full collapse. A moderate limited duration refugee crisis and some inflation has led to a full scale resurgence of fascism in Europe. Imagine if we see hundreds of millions of refugees from equatorial regions pouring into countries with better climates while we have crop failures and coastal cities getting flooded. Can our political systems remain sane and rational through that or will we succumb to demagogue cult leaders with easy “solutions?”

The thing that’s likely to kill the most people from climate change is how people react to climate change. Remember that totalitarian schemes were a leading cause of death in the 20th century. Add up the death toll from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot and scale to current population.

> a full scale resurgence of fascism in Europe

This seems hyperbolic. The current spate of "fascist" elected leaders (Orban, Meloni, et al.) don't seem as such to me, though I will admit I'm not keeping a very close eye. Perhaps you know more.

> The thing that’s likely to kill the most people from climate change is how people react to climate change.

I agree. As the human population more than doubled in the past 50 years, climate-related deaths are only a third of what it used to be[0]; not a third of the rate, one-third in absolute numbers. This is mainly due to the increasing material wealth of developing countries that better lets them handle the challenges of climate.

In my opinion, the increasing centralized authority demanded by those that think climate change is a risk so urgent that it transcends legal safeguards against precisely that kind of centralized authority will harm more people than climate change ever will.

[0]: https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=10989

Valid point about hyperbole, but I meant ideologically in the sense that this kind of ideology crept back into the Overton window. The same occurred in the USA and refugee issues were part of the fuel.

Neither Orban nor Meloni are themselves that level of bad. I wasn’t thinking of them but of the discourse.

Now imagine tens or hundreds of millions of refugees combined with massive food cost increase due to crop failures. Orban and Meloni might be way on the moderate end compared to what might surface.

yep. life will adapt, though it may not life that we recognize.

As ocean warms say so long to Salmon on the northwest coast. Whether they will survive further north or simply go extinct altogether who can say.

Departing along with the salmon will be things that us humans in the area enjoy, such as smoked salmon and salmon on the BBQ. In the grand scheme of things likely trivial, but enormous losses to our way of life, not to mention local economies.

Greater than that are the impacts on local First Nations of whose cultures the salmon historically played a incredible role, which resulted in an outsized impact of the fish on their art, story and culture. Will be devastating when the fish disappears.

The biggest unknown impacts will be on the greater forest ecology, as it has been noted that the bears eat the salmon and drag it into the woods, where it provides food for other animals and nourishes the forest in general. As the salmon disappear there could well be a cascade of disruption and extinction on animals and ecologies well beyond what we're aware of.

The salmon will go away and yes earth will "survive" and I'm sure some another fish (or maybe just jellyfish) will fill the void. But the disruptive impacts will be utterly enormous.

It's obviously a good idea to pursue new technologies if they can make a big difference, but I'm not convinced that putting sulfides into the stratosphere is a good idea as we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be. History demonstrates that there's often unintended consequences of introducing novel animals/chemicals/humans into environments so we should have some caution.

The simplest solution is to stop digging for yet more fossil fuels to burn and to put our efforts into moving completely away from oil/coal/gas use. However, there's a lot of powerful money invested in continuing to make vast profits from fossil fuels and so there's going to be pushback from politicians that sit in their pockets.

>I'm not convinced that putting sulfides into the stratosphere is a good idea as we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be.

Neither am I, but everything I've read seems to indicate that SSI is cheap enough that many nation states could comfortably do it. That all but guarantees it will be done when places like china or india start losing tens of thousands of people to heat waves (See 'The ministry for the future' for a fictionalized account). We as a species are short sighted. We'll go for the quick fix and hope we can deal with the consequences later. The bad thing is we have no idea what those consequences will be or how to address them. It's completely uncharted territory.

> we don't have a sound understanding of what the effects would be

Inaction is also a choice, and a terrible one.

That sounds to me like a politician's logic: Something must be done, this is something, so we must do it.

The first rule of finding yourself in a hole is to stop digging. Unfortunately, the world is continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere at an increasing rate - we should focus on stopping that before we try untested hail Mary's that are quite likely to cause even greater problems (e.g. disruption of ozone layer).

"Stopping digging" is a coordination problem on the global scale, with no one to actually coordinate it or enforce penalties on defectors.

Injecting sulfur into the stratosphere is a simple enough problem that many governments, and a few individuals, could be doing it within a few years.

I agree that the first of those is preferable to the second; it's just that the first of those isn't going to happen.

Sulfur injection may be technically easy, and who knows: it might even work. But it won't happen as long as large parts of our society debate whether climate change is serious. This kind of geoengineering requires a level of political consensus and commitment that we don't have (and that has been actively been thwarted by political parties and emitting industries.)

If the people who don't believe we have measurably changed the earth's environment by dumping carbon into the air for centuries suddenly decide that dumping sulfur emissions into the air is something we must avoid because it COULD measurably change our atmosphere I think it's time to consider them actively hostile actors.

I omitted to enumerate corporations above. Plenty of those have the resources for it, Exxon and BP included - the estimates I've seen are in the order of tens of millions of dollars per year, with capex amortization included. It's not as if oil companies haven't known about the externalities for a long time, probably longer than a lot of participants in this discussion have been alive. Do you think they're more likely to declare their entire business model obsolete and close shop, or to investigate the option?

Resource extraction companies have huge investments in existing and future wells. They're not dumb -- they know that continued extraction of fossil fuels at today's rate isn't sustainable -- but they also know that their current stock price is propped up by the perception that it is.

The game here is to extend the period of time during which those resources can be plausibly exploited. Every additional year translates into trillions of dollars. Allowing the development of a popular consensus that global warming is "bad enough to spray stuff into the sky to cool the earth down" would be absolutely catastrophic, since it would also reduce the window they have to exploit those resources. These companies aren't good or evil, they're just amoral: and they'll do everything they can to prevent and delay that consensus from forming, even if (1) sulfur injection wouldn't directly hurt their business, and (2) opposing action kills us all.

> Allowing the development of a popular consensus that global warming is "bad enough to spray stuff into the sky to cool the earth down" would be absolutely catastrophic, since it would also reduce the window they have to exploit those resources.

Would it? The entire global economy runs on those resources. I think you're overestimating how willing governments and publics worldwide would be to accept "spray stuff into the sky to cool the earth down" over "change literally everything about how everyone lives everywhere," especially when the second one has a cost in lives much more easily measured (and propagandized!) than the first.

We’re already in the process of making that change. Wind and solar and storage are going to wipe out most fossil fuel usage within a few decades, and it’s pretty obvious that fossil fuel interests realize this — you can see it in the way firms are shifting investments from new resource development into profit-maximization. This will happen even if governments don’t put their thumb on the scale, but they certainly are doing that: the political pressure to transition is only going to get more intense as we see more severe weather events.

The question isn’t “can we keep using (substantial amounts of) fossil fuels long term”, that’s decided. What’s up for debate is how quickly we’ll reach the tipping point where it becomes obvious to investors that existing reserves are stranded. This will be a long time before we stop using lots of fossil fuels! The battle that (smart) fossil fuel companies are fighting is to push that date a decade or two into the future.

I hope and wish for a future where there is a reasonable accommodation and fossil fuel interests support action on global warming, even if it’s only SRM. In the real world I think these companies are fighting a vicious rear-guard action to get every scrap of profit out of the industry before it folds up and dies. It’s going to be messy and destructive and the strategy right now is to promote denial and sabotage anything that could result in further political consensus for rapid decarbonization.

Does it, though? Isn’t this a rich individual or small group of individuals can pull off in clandestine ways? Or at least get started developing the technology for? I know there are people on this forum who are doing exactly that.

Well the penalties will be enforced, by Mother Nature.

No. The environment will become (is becoming) less habitable for everyone, not only for those responsible.

I haven't set foot in a church in probably 30 years, except as a tourist for some that are architecturally notable.

Alternative hail mary solutions with fewer systemic downsides, like assassinating fossil fuel lobbyists, seems preferable to sulfides in the stratosphere for now.

I am embarrassed to admit that I agree with this strategy. It's a real Trolley Problem, and our own children are currently in the path of the speeding trolley.

I don't think it's a good solution, it's just insane to me that we're going to do massive experimental geo-engineering before trying it.

I’ve come to the following conclusion: scienctists have proven beyond doubt that anthropogenic climate change is real. Politicians and business interests have proven to be equally useless in addressing it. We know it’s a problem. Now it’s up to the engineers to solve it, or at least start implementing small-scale engineering-led solutions that go beyond “research”. It’s time to start building & figuring things out. Time to ignore the politicians and naysayers and just solve the damn problem.

By this time next decade, still rising temperatures but new UV resistant billboards!

Or the even simpler solution: raising gas taxes to discourage people from driving. Adding a tax on carbon pollution to make products reflect their actual cost. It's not hard, but anyone proposing "drive less" might as well be Hitler for how they're received by the general public.

Right, but you only need a couple crazies to put the fear of eco-terrorism into the heart of rich people.

Except that just leads directly to really really oppressive facism, because plenty of people already want that for various reasons, and the public news already has no qualms about calling people throwing paint on a picture "eco-terrorists" while being utterly mum about the people actively plotting to harm politicians because they aren't facist enough.

Politicians will happily jump at the opportunity to enact what they're actively trying to do.

  > raising gas taxes

The politicians have proven to not provide an effective front. This would be the preferred front if politicians really would enact taxes, however, history shows otherwise.

Hold on, are they before or after the billionaires for the guillotine?

Why not both?

Surely proponents of the guillotine must know that eventually the revolution eats its own?

But the fear of revolution might make the surviving oligarchs in neighbouring polities think twice.

'Pour encourager les autres', and all that.

While unfortunate, it still seems like ultimately a net positive (in at least several major moral calculi) even for the smallest ratchet down of the projections?

"eventually the revolution eats its own?"

All major nafions, France, Britain and US, famously obtained their freedomz through bloody revolutions.

  > Inaction is also a choice, and a terrible one.

First, do no harm.

... is not really applicable in this case as the physician's left hand continues to stab the patient while the right hand dithers about appropriate treatment.

> First, do no harm.

Ye, get the American police forces to adopt this motto

I thought climate researchers have a fairly good understanding of the outcomes of high-altitude aerosols, since the reason sea level rise is trending slightly below the central estimate of IPCC 1990 is volcanic activity. See: negative forcing from aerosols https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGI_AR5_FigB...

I don’t see complete collapse - but I do see the doom of billions. The security states that have been set up over the past decades, the increased hostility to migration, all of this is a prelude for what inevitably follows, when vast diaspora try to find a better life outside of their bankrupt, climate-change-ravaged countries.

It’s going to get ugly. Being anything but wealthy in a sufficiently wealthy country is going to be uncomfortable, to say the least.

There will be famine, fire, flood, pestilence, and all the rest - but unless we entirely lose our heads, which isn’t impossible but remains less than probable, humanity will go on, chastened and winnowed.

Yeah, it would be very hard to entirely wipe out human civilization in any form, even in the worst of scenarios; but I expect that the world as we know it today will seem like a lost paradise compared to the one I will leave when I die.

Start thinking about how FUCKED the tech industry will get when your average person can barely afford the basics, let alone the ballooned price of garbage goods that an advertising economy requires to keep up the current system.

I’m in my mid 20s and I’ll be having kids despite the doomerism. I believe it will get worse, I honestly think we’ve experienced 1% of how bad it will get. But I also believe we will overcome the effects of climate change through strict regulation, funding, and scientific + engineering developments.

I get the idea that you don’t want your kids to suffer. But what’s the alternative? Just let the climate change deniers populate the earth with little deniers who continue polluting? We need coming generations to help us solve this.

> all of their low rcp outcomes depend upon direct carbon capture, a technology we haven't really figured out yet,

I was flabbergasted when I discovered this, absolutely none of the media mentions this. You can read right wing, left wing, looney wing- unless you are one of the 0.1% of people that read the report, no-one knows this.

One you realise that the only 'hope' is a technology that will ,at best, just cost a colossal amount of money and needs to be deployed at the scale of the oil industry, the position changes.

When the primary persuasive technique is fear and the proposed solution is "send us all your money" then it's natural to be skeptical.

You seem to be getting the IPCC confused with your neighbourhood church.

Well, people don't want to cut back right now. Or at least not enough of us. So we're just going to have to wait for things to get bad enough.

We'll either find a way to fix it, or not. But we're definitely not preventing the problem in a meaningful way.

We're on a quest to remove a billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 2030. Join us!

https://airminers.org/

This problem is not solvable through capitalism without strong regulatory burdens placed on emitting carbon, a solution that oil companies actively "seek" because they know it will never happen, and their marketing directors are on video saying exactly that.

I was with you until the last couple words of your post.

> 'ah well, glad I didn't have kids and I'm dead in the 2060's'.

My kids can't afford to have kids so that'll be how my line escapes.

3 Million years ago most of Florida was submerged by water. The ice has been melting for 20,000 years and the water has risen over 400 feet [1].

1. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/coastline-eastern-us-chang...

Recent? This scare mongering is perennial.

""" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. """

https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

""" The following year that notable news magazine, Newsweek, April 28, 1975, under its Science section in the back, talks about the cooling world. There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may be bringing a drastic decline in food production throughout the world. """

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2009-12-15/html/CRE...

I’m going to have a hard time responding to this comment without breaking HN guidelines by being completely candid about how irresponsible, uninformed, and bad faith your comment seems to be.

But let me go ahead and try: one anxiety-riddled UN official and a random Newsweek article do not represent, or supersede, scientific consensus. Your points are not only irrelevant, it’s not even clear to me why you felt the need to bring up either of these links as if they carry any weight at all, or are corroborated meaningfully by any members of the scientific community.

If you care, Newsweek and Peter Gwynne, the author of your mentioned 1975 article, have both independently retracted and clarified their positions and recognize the nature and significance of modern climate change: https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-debunking-global-co...

Nonsense. This debunking will be debunked in due time once the party line shifts and the narrative will need to be updated. I am old enough to have witnessed these wild gyrations in real time.

According to you no links that deviate from the narrative carry any weight, but they were very on point, providing a bit of historical perspective and suggesting that ignoring these sensational headlines and cries about imminent death would be quite prudent. Greta had to remove her twit recently warning that humanity would die by 2023, quietly memory holing the message that used to be plastered all over the media. Irrelevant? How dare you!

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