War definitely can end technological civilization. Bootstrapping it again will be quite difficult as a lot of the easily accessible natural resources are already depleted.

You seem to forget about hydrogen bombs. War can 100% end everything.

Depends if that war turns nuclear. Perhaps a few million will survive with sustinance living in areas like patagonia, new zealand, global population of nomadic tribes around the same level as pre-agricutural civilisation - say about 10k years ago

The present has accepted this challenge. As Wiki states: "The scientific consensus is that severe AMOC weakening explains the climatic effects of the Younger Dryas." And with the news about AMOC weakening today, we could as well be off to quicker temperature swings (particularly in Europe) than we've seen the last decades that might well challenge the Younger Dryas.

"in the tropics, the cooling was spread out over several centuries" but "2–6 °C in Europe and up to 10 °C in Greenland, in a few decades. Cooling in Greenland was particularly rapid, taking place over just 3 years or less"

That's indeed a lot more extreme in a shorter amount of time, at least regionally. Feel like I should have known that! Thanks

I think you missed my point. What’s coming will obviously not be the middle age, that’s in the past. It will still be bad.

> 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.

It is easy to write provocative things when we do not let ourselves bear the weight of their implication. This is horror being outlined.

In earnest conversation, these are sombre and sobering implications, not frivolous or minor things.

This is a sea of humans, extending from one end of the horizon to the other, hungry, lost, frightened, confused, sad and angry. It is the loss of culture, history and fascinating things that one cherishes.

There are several highly problematic areas, but they are local (very, very big, but local, not remotely close to covering the whole of human civilization).

I agree.

I find it very difficult to maintain an even tone and address statements that posit climate change positive effects on society.

There are so many incredibly bad things about climate change it boggles the mind.

I try and believe people are burying their heads in the sand to avoid the pain of reckoning with the end of everything they hold dear. This ends up with punches being pulled.

That's the correct level of pedantic answer my comment deserves. Everything is true. Clima change will stop, how much of humanity or human society survives is open, but yes it will stop.

I think they meant "end before the near-extinction of humanity", but yes, it eventually will reach another steady state one way or another.

Yes absolutely. They are different things . I am using "level of abstraction" in a sense to find a useful amount of details to drop or keep, which in turn makes an analogy/comparison possible.

It will just take at least three or four generations to get back to 90's climate, provided we don't trigger any irreversible tipping points, like the melting of the permafrost, in which case the climate is messed up for millennia.

Or solar geoengineering? Which is scary but becoming more likely it seems.

> and being a moment away from conquering Europe while simultaneously being too incompetent to beat Ukraine

TBF, I don't think anyone has seriously espoused this fear since the war in Ukraine bogged down. It's become very clear that NATO folks overestimated Russia's conventional military capability - and along with the Russians, underestimated how rapidly drone warfare was evolving.

The cold-war era risk still facing us is more that one of the unhinged megalomaniacs currently in power in Moscow/Washington decides to press the big red button and end it all

An animal is most dangerous when deeply wounded.

Let me remind you that launching nuclear weapons close to your border is an issue, launching them half a continent away not so much.

Russia is great at stuff that can be automated cheaply like influence campaigns. They're not so great at physical hardware and logistics and so forth. Not everyone is good at everything.

Messing with elections by fooling the most volatile and eager to be fooled is not a genius move.

I think you're measuring one method against a goal it wasn't set for. I assume you are referring to Mammoth direct air capture in your comment -- Stratos in Texas will soon be up, at ~15x the size of Mammoth. But DAC is only one method, and it's the hardest to scale. Just look at options outside of DAC, like Vaulted Deep, whose costs (financially and energy-wise) are far lower.

I do agree that it's unlikely that we can ignore reduction and just depend on purely scaling capture, especially if we care about avoiding more negative climate effects as the scaling goes on. But to say it is "completely infeasible" is not accurate.

We did not see a massive decrease. We saw a short-lived drop to levels normal in the mid tens. It is barely a blip on the graph. WFH won’t save us, unfortunately.

Your question betrays the fact that you simply don't understand the scale of what's happening.

Imagine a line chart. It displays average global temperature over millions of years. It goes up a little, it goes down a little, it fluctuates over time. That's the natural change. It occurs over thousands and millions of years.

Looking at the last few decades on that chart, you'll see a wall. It's going almost straight up compared to the rest that just meanders lazily. You can see a few other similar peaks on the chart many millions of years in the past, they generally correspond with things like apocalyptic meteorite impacts etc. And even then the change occurs much more slowly than what we're seeing now.

It's honestly insane to me that we're watching the world end and half of people are like "but are we sure this isn't normal?"

Yes we're sure. We double checked. Just look at any "global average temperature" chart and try to predict where it's going. This isn't the stock market it won't just randomly start doing something else. The movement we're seeing is directly correlated to our ghg emissions, and there's a lag - the effects of current emissions won't be fully seen until up to two decades from now. So even if we stopped right now it would continue warming for decades.

Warming also releases more GHGs. As poles and permafrost thaws, enormous amounts of methane are released that was previously trapped, further accelerating warming and acting as a positive feedback loop on top of our steadily rising emissions.

In short were fucked, we know it, and anyone who doesn't know is not paying attention.

It isn't the fact of change but the rate of change which is anomalous.

Let's just say that, if we're talking likelihood, climate change is the "we've already smashed the button and are now debating whether we should get in the vault" category.

Climate change also greatly increases the chance of a huge global conflict breaking out.

Don't get the portable ones. I made the mistake in 2019 and the thing is abysmally loud, barely gets the temperature 2 degrees lower in a single room, uses twice as much electricity as the rest of the household combined, and you still can't work from the heat and noise. That's with a window replaced by an insulating panel with a round cut-out for the hose, not a cracked window like you see most people needing to do. I've compared about two dozen units in a spreadsheet and this one was clearly the best buy, so I don't think it's just my unit

I totally recommend airco but only the split units that actually provide relief. Still a lot of energy but I feel differently about that consumption when it's not mostly wasted

The mobile ones are nice to aim at you though, I'll give them that much. For the effect they give, you might nearly just as well run it outside (anywhere in the shade) and aim it at you. Then the noise also doesn't reflect off the walls so that's more bearable, too

Btw the split units, as a bonus, can usually also heat the room(s) they're in. The UK has quite a lot of (planned) wind power year round, so reducing gas consumption will also cut back on the fuels that are causing this

> people having children well below replacement levels

You do realise that the global population is still increasing? While birthrates are falling, we aren't even predicted to hit the peak for another half-century. Even pessimistic estimates put it in the 2200s before we fall back to current population levels.

Which is ~100 years longer than current estimates give us before the effects of climate change starts taking a bite out of the world population

Both are temporary. Hopefully the reduction in population leads to a more sustainable humanity that changes the climate less.

BTW both of these have been predicted since the 80s.

Popular Mechanics, March 1912 — an article titled “Remarkable Weather of 1911: The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate.”

https://www.livescience.com/63334-coal-affecting-climate-cen...

Have you read this before? Great read.

These are 20 year periods, not decades. How did you think there were 13 years in the previous decade? It would be 18 vs 13 if every year up to 2039 went over 30C.

They’ve rendered that in a rather confusing way. 13 incidents is for _two_ decades, not one.

The time frames they are looking at are 2 decade intervals, not 1 decade

That used to be once in a lifetime event. Now we have temperatures like that two or three times every decade and soon it's going to be a normal summer temperature.