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Very interested in hearing your best-case and worst-case outcomes for humanity over the next 30 or so years. Worst-case being, of course, the “business as usual” path that we have not deviated from at all.
I don’t know, but it’s bad.
At this point even our best case scenarios are still pretty bad; barring some massive breakthrough in carbon sequestration tech.
And the “business as usual” scenarios are down right scary, millions of deaths annually. Never mind the economic consequences.
In my other comment I talked about what needs to happen on the macro level.
But the micro level is another story.
I’m worried because the paths to mitigating the worst of it depend mostly on countries, people, corporations etc… making major changes to drive reductions.
I seen the strategies the big companies have… they’re not coming close to making the difference needed. And the small companies aren’t even trying to measure their emissions let alone reducing them. It’s that lack of data that’s a part the problem. The data needed for decisions at the micro level isn’t available. It’s difficult to even identify what changes to make because you don’t know what impact a change might have outside of your control.
So far it means we haven’t even got emissions to start going down. At best, they’ve just slowed the rate at which they’re going up.
Governments should be pushing harder to mandate emissions reporting, but it’s politically unpopular so we’re still largely guessing about what decisions to make and that’s what leads to us all pulling in different directions making little progress.
I recall hearing about this one informal conference between climate scientists, ethnographers, and collapse-aware economists. About two dozen ppl in total, IIRC.
Their exceedingly conservative estimate of the BAU path had humanity experience a 40-60% collapse (3.2B to 4.8B dead) by some point in the 2050s. And you don’t see that without a whole hell of a lot of secondary civilizational/technological collapse and loss of knowledge.
And they concluded that humanity existing past 2150 or 2200 was vanishingly unlikely due to polar restriction due to lethal wet bulb temperatures making the rest of the planet uninhabitable for year-round occupation, and the sheer lack of arable land in the polar region.
The problem is that we have been accelerating past 1.5℃ of warming in terms of CO2 production. We haven’t even begun to slow down, much less reverse to net zero. And since climate change has an inertia to it that is thousands of times stronger with our current change than in prior changes, there is now a non-zero possibility that - even if we go extinct - the planet itself could end up in a Venus scenario. Things are moving just far too fast for any ecosystem - much less the entire planetary ecosystem - to adapt and migrate in order to remain maximally productive in natural CO2 sequestration.