While I deeply want to agree with this, I'm hung up on the fact that it seems like most scientists (ranging from environmental scientists, ecologists, and climate scientists) say we're already locked into civilizational collapse and possibly human extinction unless we decarbonize essentially overnight, and as such there's no time for this sort of consensus-building. Is there good evidence that these risks are not true, and we do have time to work through democratic processes? Is there any chance that the worst-case scenario under any circumstances falls short of total collapse/extinction, and is "just" so bad that we need to work hard to avoid it?
Thank you for the response, and links; they're much appreciated. Does this hold true though when the questions of mass extinction and biodiversity loss are also considered? There was an article published early this year where an ecologist explicitly stated that we won't survive a mass extinction and only have a few years to avoid such a fate, which has been echoed by various other experts I've seen on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/agriculture-mass-extinction-60-minutes-2023-01-01/
While I deeply want to agree with this, I'm hung up on the fact that it seems like most scientists (ranging from environmental scientists, ecologists, and climate scientists) say we're already locked into civilizational collapse and possibly human extinction unless we decarbonize essentially overnight, and as such there's no time for this sort of consensus-building. Is there good evidence that these risks are not true, and we do have time to work through democratic processes? Is there any chance that the worst-case scenario under any circumstances falls short of total collapse/extinction, and is "just" so bad that we need to work hard to avoid it?
Thanks for reading, and good question. In short, we can't know anything for sure, but climate change causing total collapse and human extinction is very, very, very unlikely. The world economy will most likely continue to grow, even considering climate damages, throughout the century. And so, the median prognosis for humanity is probably that we're better off in 2100 than today, in most parts of the world, though there is large uncertainty (it is possible that we won't be better off). Some articles: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214347119 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/26/magazine/climate-change-warming-world.html https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378019300378
Thank you for the response, and links; they're much appreciated. Does this hold true though when the questions of mass extinction and biodiversity loss are also considered? There was an article published early this year where an ecologist explicitly stated that we won't survive a mass extinction and only have a few years to avoid such a fate, which has been echoed by various other experts I've seen on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/agriculture-mass-extinction-60-minutes-2023-01-01/
There's also much of this sort of stuff around (https://twitter.com/climate_kev1/status/1697623631973798353), and while some of it comes from non-credentialed people, such as that tweet, other stuff comes from people like this (https://twitter.com/race2extinct), who are highly credentialed and apparently knowledgeable.