this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Musings and discussion surrounding the end of human civilization
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Have you read the pinned post at the top of this community, The Busy Worker’s Handbook to the Apocalypse? It's a long read, and pretty far outside the Overton window for normal conversation, so if you aren't a doomer already it might be hard to swallow. But the case it makes is pretty solid. Here is a highlight from it "we’ve put over a trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere that we cannot remove, along with other GHGs it will warm the globe by at least 4°C by 2100 (even if all emissions stopped today), agricultural failure is imminent within a decade or so." He means agricultural failure on a global scale. And with that comes the collapse of our rather brittle industrial civilization, not in 100 years, but probably in the next 10 or 20.
The best we have now for removing CO2 from the air is a plant in Iceland. It can sequester about 4,000 tons per year. Occidental is still building a plant in Texas they say will remove 500,000 tons per year and could scale up to twice that. But even scaled up we would need about 38,000 of those plants just to keep up with the CO2 we release in a year, never mind catching up with the over 2 trillion tons we already have released (over half of which was absorbed by the oceans). We can't stop what's coming.
It's not just the end of industrial civilization and adapting to new challenges. It's the end of the stable climate we need to grow food for ourselves at scale. And without that society as we know it doesn't exist.
I have, and I've also skimmed much of AR6. It seems to me like even in the worst case scenario human extinction is unlikely and most climate scientists are not doomers? I'm not saying we should do nothing, I'm saying I believe there is still hope to avoid human extinction and even for humanity to eventually recover and find a different, more renewable path (granted it might be after a century or two of returning to tribalism). I do think the future will necessarily involve an abandonment of our modern infrastructure and extreme de-urbanization, and that the sooner we do it the more likely Florida won't be underwater. I also think as terrible as it will be, food shortages and the trend we're already seeing of decreasing birth rates, combined with the near-term depletion of fossil fuels, will force this change rather humanity wants it or not.
Maybe there is hope to avoid extinction and for things to improve. I can't predict the future any better than anyone else. But almost every climate prediction made so far has turned out to be optimistic including those published by the IPCC. We are entering an era unprecedented in human history. The latest paper from James Hansen states that "Eventual global warming due to today's GHG forcing alone -- after slow feedbacks operate -- is about 10°C." And that's if we stop all emissions today. The earth hasn't seen temperatures like that for something like 40 million years. We're more resourceful than any other creature in history, so it's possible some of us will survive. But life will look nothing like it does today.
And I think it's too late for Florida in any scenario.