"We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050."
An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar... and mull over survival.
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
All this shyt is going to collapse. There won't be enough quality land to grow food, the oceans will be too hot for organisms that fish eat to survive. Natural disasters will only continue to get stronger and droughts will last longer.
The wealthy are aware of all of this. They have their contingency plans:
It's a fukking wrap unless someone does the equivalent of a Manhattan project to completely re-engineer earth to return back to at least the early 2000s climate.
I'm talking blank checks. The best scientists from around the world all working with advanced algorithms and simulations to generate a plan, and then put it into motion with advanced technology. I'm talking shyt like massive ships running on nuclear reactors with gigantic cooling fans to keep ice sheets from melting. I'm talking robots whose entire job it is to CREATE glaciers.
At the edge of the Himalayas, an ancient tradition is reinvented for the era of climate change.
www.newyorker.com
I'm talking spraying material to cool the atmosphere like stratosphere aerosol injection.
I'm talking about transitioning to vertical farms to let the soil breathe and reintroduced certain chemicals to help it restore its balance.
Cloud seeding operations to limit the length of droughts. All of this shyt will involve literally billions of dollars spent every month and cooperation from at least two major regions(Asia and europe) otherwise, you'll see the following:
1. New viruses that wipe out a lot of people. Viruses that were released from the glaciers melting.
2. The price of food shooting up dramatically with riots and wars happening as people LITERALLY CANT AFFORD TO EAT.
3. Babies and seniors dying from heat stroke and power grids failing due to the demand on air conditioning.
4. The entire collapse of the home insurance industry as they will not be able to keep covering homes that flood or get swept away by tornadoes and mud slides.
5. Global industry being damaged because factories are getting destroyed (forest fires, flooding, electrical fires because the air conditioning went too hard) and shipping vessels too(from turbulent seas). Again prices will rise to account for the maintaining of these factories and replacement of the vessels.
The cost of everything will shoot up and you'll start seeing general strikes, walk outs or just straight up civil wars as people either blame the rich or each other. I cannot imagine the hell children born this decade are going to have to go through by the time they hit 30. It's going to be fukking INSANE if dramatic change doesn't happen. But unfortunately, the people making the decisions about climate policy won't live to see the next 20-30 years.