> You can tell people the temperature will go up in 20 years

I think the biggest issue with the climate change communication is that the scientists decided to focus on a temperature delta.

There is no meaningful temperature delta, it's just something that you get after a lot of aggregation and averaging.

Sure it makes sense for scientists running their models and such, but it should never have been the primary communication tool to politicians and laymen.

I think it would have been significantly better if they invented some new scale, like the Richter scale or the hurricane severity scale, which instead incorporates the effects of the average temperature rising. A scale which directly communicates a sense of how many more fires will we see per year, how many more severe storms, flash floods etc.

I think we've gotten to the point where the question can be asked looking back, not forward: think back to your childhood and how much things have changed since then? If you've lived long enough you can notice these things.

I used to have snow for weeks each winter in my city and now if I get 2-3 days of snow a year it's unusual. Extreme weather events where it rains in one day as much as in one month have become a recurring event to the point we're re-planning sewage systems around these things.

Arguably it's rational (though selfish) to think like this.

Life is short, there's no point freezing and living off leaves for the next few decades when you'll be old in the blink of an eye anyway

Everyday people are generally more pro-renewables and climate action. The politicians can be targeted with bribes by anyone affected by the transition.

A classic collective action problem as described by Mancur Olson.

> Do you think that the far-right will care more about the climate crisis?

Far right, far left, far center, it's all the same: money, power, money, power, stay in the EU, free market, money, power.

> We need to act now.

What does this look like, precisely, in practice?

This is completely wrong. The climate experts are not surprised by this at all. We've known about it for decades. We just didn't give a shit because it was not impacting us directly.

Now it's starting to impact us directly, but we still don't really give a shit. In a few weeks it will be business as usual.

It will get worse every year, and we will be more and more willing to do something as it gets worse. But we will have fewer and fewer resources to do it, and less stuff to save (once a forest disappears, you as a human won't see it come back in your lifetime).

> but everyone has been surprised by unexpected acceleration and the very sudden swings

It's been predicted for decades, in multiple reports, over and over and over and over again... No excuses

> can anyone predict specifically what will happen "next" and "where" and prepare to mitigate the impact?

Something bad, duh? And reduce emissions, duh?

The things people have been predicting and advocating for during the past like 50 years at that point. Are we still debating these details lol?

While we haven’t known the exact trajectory of the crisis, it has been known for decades that the trend would generally and increasingly point towards “future is bad” if we didn’t reduce emissions. World leaders bet on having more time to shift away from harmful policy and lost.

The specific swings are a little surprising, but only in the way that a macaroni jumps around in hard to predict directions if you put it in boiling water. We’ve made the weather less predictable, but we knew we were doing it.

I'm not into blaming people like this.

What we all need to understand is that after oil, we just won't have enough energy to maintain our current way of life. Not just energy by the way: our way of life relies on petrochemical products (from fertilisers to electronics). Solar panels need electronics, we don't know if we can build/maintain them at scale without computers that need petrochemical products.

So we need as much as we can of everything. Both renewables and nuclear.

Who is opposing nuclear power? Or are you trying to imply that advocating for renewables is “opposing nuclear power”?

> what are you still talking about, it's done

It's not. The climate will warm as much as we emit CO2. Sure, the CO2 that we have already emitted won't leave. We've passed 1.5C, that won't come back in our lifetime. But the more we emit, the worse it will get. To keep what we have now, we have to stop emitting entirely, right now.

> We now need to worry about the hundreds of millions of people

We need to worry about the problems that are coming from the CO2 we have already emitted, that's true. But we also need to worry a lot about the fact that we are making it worse every single day. We are not reducing our CO2 emissions, we are increasing them right now.

Are you worried about hundreds of millions of refugees? The way it's going, we'll reach 4C. It means that billions of people will have to move.

I don't think we can still use the concept of "refugee" when its entire countries that need to move because their part of the world has become so hot that humans cannot survive outside without life support (that's what will happen to billions of people with 4C). At this point, it's entire countries moving with their military, it's just global war.