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.