1.5°C climat goal is gone with 2024/2025 being every day being above that. A positive view of science says we are heading to a 2.7°C hell by 2100. Thought with current politics that is highly doubtful and we might already have that with 2050.
Especially fellow young people, i would like to hear your look apon the future, are you doing something now because you probably wont be able to do it in the future?
How will you imagine life will be like? Will you have to move because of the rising sea levels?
For me i see black. Its over and this is the coldest we will ever have it. I am enjoying somewhat livible summers and lukewarm winters (I remember when there was snow) as long as i can. The future is done for and im angry and sadend by all the people that dont care or actively fight against enviormental policies and living
I think I’ll be dead before we see any life changing differences.
Unlike those who came before me, I DO care, and I want us to turn shit around, so my kids don’t have to deal with an apocalypse, but, I’m not completely against a giant meteorite ending it all at any moment.
Ditto, except the kids part, decided against having them just right in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. I too wouldn’t mind a mass extinction event, as long as it’s quick.
I understand not WANTING everything to end at any given time, but it also just seems like the perfect solution to EVERY problem.
I mean just look at us a species, we’ve developed massively on the technological level, but underneath the clothes we’re still the same, fighting over imagined gods, resources etc. So yeah, fuck it, bring it on.
this is called ‘suicidal thoughts’
Is it?
I wouldn’t be the one doing the killing, so I don’t think it should count as suicide.
But, I really don’t know. Just seems like it should be a different term. Extinctual thoughts, maybe?
It definitely is. It’s a mental health problem, not a valid environmental or political take.
I think it still counts.
Passive suicidal ideation is thinking about not wanting to live or imagining being dead.
I mean, I’m living in hurricane alley. Very easy to see a future in which I’m through another Katrina or Harvey or Sandy. Only question is whether municipal and state services will be able to keep the lights after the next one.
Could very easily see a future in which a chunk of the city loses power or transportation to such a degree that it becomes functionally uninhabitable.
By calling it the “coming dystopia” and “a 2.7°C hell” you’re starting this question off with a highly biased direction indeed.
The whole world isn’t going to turn into some kind of Mad Max inferno of devastation and death. Some parts of it will become less habitable, and there may be mass migration as a result, but most of the world is going to still be perfectly livable afterwards. It’s the disruption of shifting everything around that’s going to be the biggest problem.
However, I have now committed a heresy by saying climate change is not the Apocalypse, so this will get downvoted. The answers more in line with the “it’s the end of the world” narrative will be upvoted instead, people will have their fear reaffirmed (for fear leads to anger, and anger leads to dopamine), and ironically this may lead to less useful preparation in the long run that exacerbates the problem.
“All opinions other than mine are only supported by dopamine highs” - wow, what a great new way of being condescendingly dismissive!
OP actually left the consequences of climate change open. No, it probably won’t be a Mad Max inferno. Probably not. But we also don’t know where the tipping point of the oceans is, because they are storing a shit ton of carbon. Hit that tipping point, and that carbon may well suddenly be released into the air, and then the shit hits the fan.
But even if that scenario doesn’t happen, and the world is still theoretically perfectly livable, you mentioned one of the main problems: mass migration. We already see what that’s doing today. We’re not far away from World War 3 anymore. So yes, the question is perfectly legitimate.
(And before anyone thinks it: I’m not blaming the migrants, of course they’re not at fault, they have every right to look for a better life. The people at fault are entirely different, but it doesn’t change the fact there is a causational relationship)
As I commented elsewhere, a lot of people in our generation are masking deep seated suicidal fantasies and convincing themselves that they are a valid response to the world around them. That’s obviously not good for anybody and makes them just as volatile as the other death cults currently in existence.
And ironically, it makes them quick to reject any attempts to make things better. Why bother attempting solution X when we’re all just going to die anyway? Eat, drink, and be merry!
The thing that bothers me a lot about this is how many people oppose even doing research into geoengineering. It’s like they fear the possibility that a solution will be found, thus disrupting the conclusions of doom that they’ve already come to and apparently found some kind of strange comfort in believing.
I can’t speculate to the motivations of random internet users but yeah, committing your identity to a catastrophe of any kind is some serious dysfunction. It’s like they have just discovered that the universe is unfair so their naivety demands that it leads to cosmic retribution.
Ignorantly believing there will be minimal consequences to our unplanned terraform is why we are in this mess. The problem is not simply “climate change”. Ecological collapse is a much larger concern. We are significantly altering the chemistry of the entire biosphere; the atmosphere, land and ocean with literally thousands of chemical compounds. We have killed off ~70% of the natural worlds macroscopic organisms over the last 50-100 years, and are already at the point where 95+% of all animal biomass is our livestock. We consider species “not endangered” if there are like 10k of them. Does 10k humans isolated to one geography sound like a healthy, extinction-resistant population?
It’s not gonna be 2.7c by 2100. It will be 3-4c. We were told we wouldn’t hit 1.5c until ~2035 and we’re already there — as I’ve believed for over a decade, because I actually listen to scientists instead of fossil-fuel-operated political orgs like the IPCC — and we’re on track to blow past 2c before 2050. ~25% of all Co2 ever emitted was in the last ~15 years, and another ~25% will be emitted in the next ~15. We can’t predict compounding feedback loops we know little about, or any of the many unknown unknowns that are guaranteed to exist.
I’m not saying the world will definitely be a “Mad Max inferno of devastation and death” — the entire natural world has already been through the majority phase of “devastation and death” — but everyone living today would almost certainly consider 2100 to be a dystopia.
Whoever said the consequences would be “minimal?” I’m saying they won’t be apocalyptic. It’s not the literal end of the world, as so many people are fretting about. People are deciding not to have children because they think humanity’s going to go extinct in a generation or two.
I’m not saying the world will definitely be a “Mad Max inferno of devastation and death”
Well there you go, then.
People are not having kids because they believe their children will be worse off than they are; that persistent inflation, natural disasters, famine, resource wars, actual wars, austerity, mass migrations, fascism/feudalism are all but guaranteed for a majority of humanity over the next century.
Barely anyone believes or cares about us going completely extinct.
Stop straw manning, nobody said it will be the apocalypse or the end of the world, they said it would be a dystopia or at the very least pretty shitty to what we have right now.
This is like telling a Roman as the empire is falling: “don’t worry it’s not the end of the world, sure a barbarian horde might come through every couple years raping, burning and pillaging, but you’ll survive”
Natural disasters are gonna get worse, famine and food insecurity are gonna become more common, mass migration causes a lot of social strife. Again going back to the roman example a large reason for the fall was the huns moving into Europe causing cascading migrations that destroyed the empire. All of this sounds pretty dystopic to me, maybe not mad max levels, but definitely parable of the power levels.
There are people literally rooting for human extinction in this very thread.
The last decade has shown us how stupid humans are and how unprepared we are for the complex future that awaits us.
We’re fucked.
Enjoy what you can, while you can.
Doing my part to stop the spread of humanity by not having kids. I don’t really care what the future holds. The planet’s fine and will be so much better off without us (c’mon, meteor!) and I’m still pretty confident that the oligarchs will get what’s coming to them. Or their offspring will get what was coming for their parents. Regardless, that’s something to live for…
Same, but Coronal Mass Ejection
Same, but gamma ray burst.
Same. I feel better about my vasectomy each day.
Wildfire season becomes a thing on the East Coast as Canadian forests burn. People start spending more time indoors in the summer because of it.
The bad time of year shifts from winter to summer as snow becomes rarer and heat waves become common.
Coastal cities near me either harden their coasts or design their cities to not flood. Major tunnels are retrofitted to allow for saltwater intrusion with minimal damage.
More multigenerational homes form as retirees in Florida become climate refugees as several Florida metro areas collapse due to the increased number of hurricanes. They don’t call themselves refugees, though.
Several state parks form in the region, created as the state buys out entire communities to intentionally create new freshwater wetlands.
Areas that don’t flood see rapid densification as property values skyrocket and single family homes are pushed into apartment buildings like the urbanization of cities in the 19th century.
While I am responsible with my own trash and sorting out plastics, paper, metal, glass, haven’t flown anywhere for over ten years, try to buy either quality and long lasting or second hand or both and am childfree that I try to remember that the only way to change course is through policy changes, politics and stricter rules - what I do in my own household doesn’t amount to anything noticeable except make me feel less guilty.
The main risk in my area is ground water levels being way below normal, so if it continues my own well might go dry every summer. Other than that I imagine we will have climate refugees coming this way in the future.Except for voting I’m not active in politics and instead focus on my own life and making the best of it - both in the now and in the next five and ten years. I’m saving money for old age too, so I guess I still hold some hope.
I try to limit myself o read the news once a day and I don’t follow any non-tech news-related communities on lemmy. That in combination with gardening, DIYs, exercise and limiting screen time helps my mental health a lot.
I expect people to slowly transition to living more in underground networks like Toronto’s PATH as the outside becomes more uninhabitable. Of course, realistically I don’t expect anything to change in my lifetime.
Also rooting for the meteorite
I can imagine it sabbotaging some very basic thing that our society currently takes for granted (like growing crops) and then even just baseline functioning at our current level would become much harder, causing a global recession.
Honestly? I’m not ready to give into some kind of fatalistic view that each 0.1°C difference isn’t worth fighting for.
There are a few areas where we might see huge improvement in a short amount of time. With car electrification, we saw electric cars go from something like 0% of the global market to 20% of new cars in just 10 years. Meanwhile, the decarbonization of electric grids is happening at a rapid pace, too, with solar and wind representing a huge percentage of newly installed capacity.
And some game changing technologies are right around the corner. Grid scale battery storage is turning into a significant part of managing daily demand, and might soon become an important part of managing seasonal demand. Dispatchable advanced geothermal (using the oil and gas’s fracking/horizontal drilling techniques to dig new hydrothermal sources) is right around the corner. And it’s not exactly imminent, but researchers are making advances in fusion power.
If energy becomes cheap enough, carbon capture for net zero fuels becomes economical, too. That opens the floodgates for trucking, maritime, and aviation uses. Excess power generation at certain times of day can be used for the less time sensitive energy consumption: treating water, manufacturing certain chemicals, charging batteries, heating and cooling some kind of thermal storage system, etc.
Plus, cynically, indoor heating is a much larger driver of fossil fuel consumption than indoor cooling, so a warming planet kinda reduces overall emissions from indoor climate control.
And the thing with all of these factors I’m naming is that these don’t rely on governments to enforce sacrifices by industry or commerce. The pricing has already fallen in line so that the cleanest option is the cheapest option. Policy can nudge things, but actually engineering improvement through price signals is going to create much bigger change: you don’t need the government to shut down a coal plant when the power plant simply can’t produce electricity cheap enough to turn a profit.
I live in a place where there’s 5 months of winter with real snow. I work in agriculture and the short growing season is a huge limiter on what can be produced here and with what yield. Most people here wouldn’t mind it being a bit warmer. Say having 3 months of winter instead of the usual 5. And in my industry at this specific region the farmers are actually looking forward to climate change and have already started benefiting from it. New crops are already entering that were not possible before. And farmers can now start harvesting grains in August while only 10-20 years ago september was the norm. All science-based projections predict yield increases for all crops here.
From a purely selfish perspective I should celebrate climate change. Farming here will just get better and if farming elsewhere gets worse the price for produce produced here will also increase. But while it’s good for my career and maybe even my own enjoyment of the weather I would never say I look forward to it. The huge amount of future misery in the world that is and will be caused by climate change is not worth any improvement in this absolutely tiny piece of the planet I’m on. Still I take comfort in knowing I’ll be alright. As long as the affected regions of the world don’t invade mine…
Sea rising by 2100 is proyected on 0.6 meters.
And sea rising predictions made in the 90s haven’t been the more accurate.
The harmful consequences of climate change have more to do with desertification, hotter summers, more energetic storms. And of course the fear of breaking some oceanic current and send Europe into an ice age.
In general is hard to say what will be that thing that will make people say “ok, we really fucked up”. As it’s incredibly hard to predict the consequences of such a fast climate variation. Sea level rise was the jam in the 90s early 00s but as predictions fall short on that front and even the worse numbers doesn’t look like mass migration number for a few centuries at least, worries are more focused on other things that could happen.
I don’t know. No one knows for certain.
I worry for my state; New Jersey is surrounded on three sides by water
It will be increasingly important to have access to buildings able to withstand extreme climate events and have access to climatisation. Maybe our diet will change a bit. Surely there will be an impact on the vegetation, animals, and diseases.
For some parts of the world the future will be mass emigration and conflicts around resources.
In principle, I’m not particularly young, but in general, I expect to finally live by the sea (because the ocean level will rise), even though the summer is likely to be shorter and the winter colder and longer.
