War won't end human existence. If there's one thing you can learn from the recent wars in Iran and Ukraine, it's that conventional air-bombing has acquired a terrible cost:efficacy ratio that cannot be sustained, that drones have leveled the playing field on the ground, and that attackers generally appear to lack the stomach for mass mobilization and mass casualties in war.

Again, there'll be winners and losers. Some in fortresses; others in famines and droughts. It is, of course, imperative that we do what we can do now to mitigate this. But the continuation of the human species is, I am sure, not in doubt. Our ancestors in prehistoric times have, assuredly, gone through FAR worse, including real population bottlenecks.

Prehistoric climate change was sometimes much more sudden than anything we've experienced. See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

There are others.

The middle ages were in the middle of something called "the little ice age" which was entirely different and, obviously, mostly had the opposite effect.

The most dramatic story about that is what happened to the settling of Greenland (more than once). Basically during a cold spell the city was gradually abandoned, with sometimes the last few people literally freezing to death when their fuel ran out.

> collapse of society due to the ensuing refugee crises

Society won't collapse. Humans will do amazingly evil things to survive. The British were happy to starved millions of Indians to death until the country gained independence. All to support the British empire. We live in an era of basically unprecedented niceness in the history of humanity. Even the great empires of the past oppressed and killed multitudes more through slavery or serfdom or constant expansionist wars or other such means.

> refurbishment of houses

Perfect work for refugees to do at gun point.

Billions may die but society will go on with a somewhat lower regard for life and a larger amount of nationalism. Arguably what we consider western society will collapse but that's only existed for under a century.

In some ways that is more depressing than society simply collapsing. We will leave behind a rotting zombified corpse of our society to future generations.

Even anatomically modern humans have gone through similar events several times in the history of our species, let alone our ancestors. Climate change itself will not be the end of humanity, but it may be the end of the current civilisation.

> the collapse of society due to the ensuing refugee crises

This is what worries me.

At some point more northern facing countries will decide enough is enough and start mass genocide of any population attempting to flee.

Europe will be ok with just killing a few hundred million trying to flee in boats, and the eastern frontier is securable, especially with drones, but even with conscripts. Hell Ukraine has done a solid job on its own against an organised army on its doorstep.

America will act as a buffer for Canada and will have no problem with wiping out refugees. Argentina will be interesting but it's too small and isolated to matter globally.

The big global risk is that India and Pakistan have nukes and will be trying to flee into China and central Asia.

Setting aside refugees, far bigger risk for Europe isn't reurbishment of housing, it's tropical diseases in the south, it's the collapse of food security, and the general collapse of society as the economy falls over.

Of course it will. There is a finite amount of fossil fuels and it'll become uneconomical to use before those are fully exhausted. Give it some more years (say, a few hundred) after the last car fleet and power plant switched away and the climate will have triggered any tipping points it's going to tip. Then the animals that haven't adapted will soon have finished going extinct, the ocean finished warming up with its lag effect, and climate change is finished changing

After that it's 'over' no? The world map is redrawn (many countries' shapes will look different), people that needed to move have moved or got killed (quite possibly by territorial humans refusing to let them onto livable land), but it'll settle into a new normal eventually

The word abstraction does not mean the same thing as the words analogy or comparison.

It can change, if we get to net negative emissions. Not probable but possible.

> The cold war ended

You wouldn't know it based on how everyone talks about Russia pulling the strings of just about every election (and being a moment away from conquering Europe while simultaneously being too incompetent to beat Ukraine).

Nuclear winter may cancel it out.

If you actually look at the numbers of carbon capture its entirely obvious that it can't work. It's honestly strange to me that they even waste money on it, personally I think it's a distraction - "look we're working on a fix, now let us just pump up the rest of this oil in the mean time and we'll definitely fix it later".

In order to just offset our current emissions, we would need around a million carbon capture facilities equivalent to the largest one we currently have. For comparison, the number of power plants in the entire world is a few tens of thousands. So we'd need maybe like 50 times as many capture plants as we currently have power plants.

Like it's not even in the neighbourhood of realistic, it's just completely infeasible and I am sure engineers know that. You basically need to suck the whole atmosphere through facilities, and there's a lot of atmosphere.

>The conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so.

During the covid start lockdowns when everyone was forced to WFH and nobody was driving to work for a couple of weeks, we saw a massive decrease in CO2 and emissions. So it can be reversed, we just don't want to because we gotta keep the GDP hamster wheel moving

> it will take millennia for the climate to return to normal

No. There is no such thing as "normal" climate. It's ever changing. We're just making the change a whole lot faster.

Won't the climate change naturally even in the absence of fossil fuels? Like it has during all of history? What's "normal" is based on a small slice of human history, which itself is a small slice of the planet's history.

Space weather that would bring down our systems is not such low likelihood.

I am not convinced nuclear war or biological warfare are as unlikely as you think. We have historically had narrow escapes from nuclear war.

yes, essentially. But gets hidden behind wealthier countries tucking away the debt.

uk here. I've been trying to by a portable AC unit for a couple of weeks and every single retailer is sold out nationwide.

It does when people start talking about a heatwave as being the "start of the end of human existence." It strongly implies that these trends will wipe out humanity in very short order. Perhaps even within the lifetimes of people in this thread.

What I find most amusing is people somehow think climate change will end humanity faster than what's _actually_ on track to do so, and quickly: people having children well below replacement levels.

We were somehow on the good path after covid, then world leaders decided killing each other folks was more relevant goal, followed by making big tech bros even more rich with AI centers.

Meanwhile paperstraws, and glued bottle caps, are supposed to save the planet.

I do not know about Europe as a whole, but 1911 was pretty bad in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1911_United_Kingdom_heatwave

So even if it goes above 30 every single remaining year it will still be 9 vs 13 in the previous decade?

Why do you choose 1975/30C as your cutoff point for "record heat" when it should be 1976/36C? Clearly 30C isn't unheard of, even in the past.

Ask your grandparents about "Die große Dürre 1947" in Germany. Near entirely dried-up rivers and reservoirs, lakes three meters below normal, roughly half a million cattle emergency-slaughtered in Bavaria, hydroelectric shutdowns forcing power rationing, and forest fires along the Bavarian–Austrian border. Sure we have an all time high now, but currently there's still too much water as one could stick their head into the soil of the Elbe and Rhine.

You can’t. All you can do is realize every trip you take and every bite of beef is yet another drop in the bucket. Every vote for a denialist is probably worth 100s of burgers too, sad to say.

You must choose if your hedonism outweighs the good of our biosphere now and in future. The billions of unborn humans. The trillions of innocent life forms that might go extinct. That blue bird or cardinal in the yard with no AC. The coral reefs decimated. The poor humans suffering tremendously. We have a choice to slightly reduce these things.

Most people choose hedonism.

> What action will you take to ensure next year it's only 85F?

The time to take that particular action was 20 or 30 years ago. We're not in a position to do a damn thing about next year's heat waves, or the year after that...

What we're talking about now is taking actions that may prevent much larger heat waves 20 years from now

Absolutely nothing. In fact I'm trying to enjoy the things I can while it lasts.

Solar is far cheaper than other forms, despite he US subsidising fossil fuels and taxing solar

I mean, we do also need to eat less beef. Its not going to fix things on its own, but it is part of multi-solving our way through this crisis

Fine particulates aren't a problem if you wear a gas mask though.

> They're really not. Or it's just perfrmative environmentalism. Because they continue to support to politicians and the system that maintains the status quo.

There are a lot of wealthy people spending serious money on lobbying against fossil fuels:

https://spectator.com/article/revealed-the-shady-funding-of-...

> Europe loves importing electricity. It's the key to greenwashing

Yes, its also a potential problem transmitting .

> The UK has spent hudnreds of billions of pounds subsidizing electricity that goes straight into the pockets of the shareholders of natural gas companies and private utilities.

It has spent a lot of money subsidising wind power. The UK has hugely cut its CO2 emissions. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/co2/united-kingdom

Then I think the answer to your question is that the government is corrupt and paid off by oil companies and other interests to not do these things. So they will not happen.

So I've thought about this a lot. All the news orgs are owned by oligarchs and that's why even on this thread using green energy is equal to going back to stone age

When China India and now Phillipines and rest of South Asia is installing record number of solar and wind

Financial markets are the reason nobody has top-down control, because the market has control. I don't remember where I read that where employees in companies think AI is stupid but their manager wants them to, the manager also thinks AI is stupid but the CEO wants them to, the CEO also thinks AI is stupid but the board wants them to, the board thinks AI is stupid but investors want them to, and when they interview some investors, they don't give a shit about AI, why would they.

Nobody is steering the ship. It's just drifting aimlessly in random self-perpetuating cycles. That's because financial markets are steering the ship but they don have any brains. If we put humans in charge of the ship again, we might be able to actually steer it and then we could steer it away from the iceberg that is climate change before we hit that iceberg.

> Europe and the world in general obviously. 1000 people doed in France due to the heat wave.

Way more died during the heat wave in France in 2003. What did France do? Nothing substantial, because nobody is willing to bear the cost of substantial policies to fight climate change.

Both are still increasing their total fossil fuel usage significantly. Even if they're deploying renewables at a high rate.

Both are also increasing coal usage.

Total and cumulative numbers are all that matter for global warming.

https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-countr...

I agree with you that it's a long term problem. I won't stop until London is under a mile-high glacier!

There you go

https://xkcd.com/1732/

20,000 years enough?

Obviously. But as of now, AC means burning carbon (~50% of Europe's electricity production). Demand for even more electricity may accelerate the transition, hopefully, but right now the projection is that all the extra capacity and much more will be taken by data centers and consumer electricity bills are going to double or triple. Hopefully that will never actually happen but who knows.

Obviously consuming even more should never be the solution to problems caused by overconsumption. We should be figuring out ways to keep electricity use in check rather than consuming more and more, but that's a fact that people would rather not accept.

~50% share (in some countries much higher) fossil-based electricity is still 50% fossil-based electricity.

If I'm wrong in my thoughts then note how.

> And the consumption habits of the USA are responsible for how many more tonnes of CO2 emissions that are not onshore within the USA ?

Probably quite a few thanks to globalist politicians among all major political parties to offshore production to countries with fewer regulations and much higher emissions intensity of production. But it would not be the highest emissions per capita.

Much the same as the EU.

The handwringing and self-flagellation still does not suffice for actual evidence for blaming one idiot politician in one country performing a political stunt. You clowns think this is a Captain Planet cartoon where there's a few evil moustache twirling dudes setting out to wreck the environment and you just need to defeat them and everyone around the world joins hands and its smooth sailing for the rest of eternity. You must be forever bewildered about the state of the world and shocked at the news of completely normal and foreseeable things happening, like energy being very valuable, and people wanting to buy things cheaply. I can assure you if Mr. Snowball here had never been born, there would be absolutely no difference to the current situation. If the North American landmass did not exist at all, fossil fuel use would still be causing the same kind of global carbon pollution.

> The USA was far and away the very worst global source for a very long time, that only changed by offshoring the processing and manufacture that feeds US consumption.

Petrostates have been much worse by emissions per capita.