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It’s mass extinction level bad, but humans probably won’t go extinct. The humans who may live 200 years from now will have a much less beautiful world than we do.
This is the coldest year you will experience for the rest of your life, and this is the hottest year you’ve ever experienced.
There will be fewer humans, perhaps 5% of what we have now - that’s what I glimpse from all the literature. That is not good news: as life will be much less “developed” as a result.
Not in a mere 200 years. The human population of Earth will peak somewhere around 12B, and then likely stabilize at a few billion below that.
Two forces at work here: (1) humans will get fewer children, leading to leveling off (2) climate change, the exhaustion of resources, breakdown of our ecosystem will lead to hunger, disease and political disruption and culling of our species.
I think (1) will have a much bigger impact on the human population than (2). We aren't going to exhaust Earth's resources in 200 years, and it will take much less time than that to switch over to renewables. The transition is already underway, and shows no signs of stopping.
I admire your optimism, but I definitely do not share it . You should read this; https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/facultyresearchandpublications/52383/items/1.0437324 There are many more scientific publications and newspaper articles and assessments about this topic - it looks very grim for humanity.
Yes I agree on the likely outcome that the world will be "less developed". But this always makes me think that we should choose this outcome rather than wait for it. That way we'll have more control and we may limit some damage.
If we have to go "back", whatever that means, I'd rather do it voluntarily as the urge to always go "forward", whatever that means, seems to be an underlying cause of our problems.
Basically you are arguing for a soft landing of the climate collapse. Most scientists agree to that.
Whew! Good thing the scientists are in charge
Not sure there is a sensible way to "choose" the outcome of having 5% population.
Reducing the fertility rate already happens on a steep level, even if the fertility rate is reduced to something like 0.1 births per woman, it will still take 50-70 years for that to have a meaningful effect on the population size.
The only way to reduce climate change via population control would be to kill the large majority of the world's population. And we know that it won't hit the wealthy high-polluters.
The other way would be to limit the pollution per person, at least until the natural population decline has gone far enough that we don't have a climate change problem any more.
That's, btw, the only thing that's something of a reason to be optimistic: Climate change is dependant on the population, so if the world population drops back to a few 100 millon, climate change will also go back down comparatively rapidly (in the order of maybe 50-100 years). So if we manage to limit it now, it will likely automatically become a solved problem.
Limiting the pollution now would be quite easy. We'd just have to remove the world's top 1% (preferrably by cutting their wealth down to manageable levels), stop motorized travel, stop globalized production, stop building new buildings, stop any livestock keeping, stop using fossil fuels and a handful of similar things and climate change is gone within 12 years.
We'd basically have to get rid of capitalism for that to happen.
I was talking about choosing less development.
But yeah, I agree on the necessity of getting rid of capitalism for these scenarios to work out
So it depends on what you mean by less development. At this point since most of easy fossil fuels have been mined, we may no longer be able come back from a civilization reset. There’s no way to fuel an industrial age.
Consider LED lighting and solar panels. These are vital to have any hope of turning things around but they require a certain level of development of civilization. If we drop below the ability to k produce things like this, we’ve suddenly increased our dirty energy needs. And some people are hoping for nuclear or even fusion saving us but the require even more advanced civilization.
Hence my phrasing: going back, whatever that may mean, or forward, whatever that may mean.
We will always progress into the future. Going "back" to a more local agricultural society coexisting with nature can also be seen as progress. Progress is not the same as technological advances, we can progress as a society or as humanity. And we probably need a mix of both: coexistance with our environment and technological innovation. A framing of the question being either about progress or regression is utterly useless.
I don’t even see how that is the problem. It’s inertia, literally conservatives, corporate lobbying.
We’ve known what we need to do and have known for years but it requires change and different corps to profit so we never get anywhere. We need to move forward. According to science. Not to preserve existing business models and profits.
At this point I don’t see how regressing civilization even helps more than moving forward. We have the technology. We can rebuild it.
For example EVs are a small part of the problem. Yes, too little and too late but if we can stick to the 2035 phaseouts, the line starts heading in the right direction. Pretty much the entire developed world will have decreasing carbon emissions at that point. It’s nowhere near enough but at least we’d be headed by in the right direction. Think of it like being in huge debt. We still can’t make our minimum payments but at least we’re no longer adding more and more debt
And we already are in a place where birth rates are far below replacement value. It’ll take a while because humans live like 80 years but as the current large generations die off it will plateau and start dropping. Maybe uncomfortably quickly.