Have we reached the point where our impact on the atmosphere is causing so much imbalance that it's improbable that any efforts to curb it will be useful?
Humans are part of the ecosystem just like anything else on the planet, however, we are the only ones (as far as we know) that are cognizant of the impact that we make. Even with efforts to fight the drastic change in climate and atmosphere, are we now or soon coming to a point where our efforts to save ourselves and the planet would take too long to work, thus causing our own demise?
Answers ( 1 )
We can't return to where we were before we started burning fossil fuels, nor should we try. We're not doomed to baking to death, either, if we pay attention.
There is no way to know, exactly, what's going to happen over the next century or so if we stay on our current course. We have a pretty good idea, though, and contrary to denialist propaganda, projections from decades ago are remarkably accurate in predicting the current global average temperature. If they have a common flaw, it's that they were slightly too optimistic: we're about half a degree Celsius, a degree Fahrenheit, warmer than Hansen et al. projected in the 1980s. That's not a degree in your house, or your city, or even your country. That's everywhere, all the time.
That's the difference between a glacier staying solid, or melting. That's the difference between this year's crop barely succeeding, or barely failing. That's the difference between your house making it through the flood, or being condemned for irreparable damage. That's the difference between getting just enough to eat, or slow inevitable starvation.
No proposed solution to climate change will solve the problem. The world is getting warmer, and it will keep getting warmer, and bad things will happen. We're locked in for that.
Wearing your seatbelt won't keep you from getting in a crash, either. You'll still be a whole lot better after the wreck with your seatbelt than you would have been without it.
Everything we can do to reduce greenhouse emissions (or capture the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere) a little bit ... will help, a little bit. Maybe it will matter by a tenth of a degree, or a hundredth. That's the difference between billions of people's lives, and millions, and thousands. Which would you prefer?
Total human extinction is unlikely. We're a weed species, tough and adaptable: our ancestors colonized practically every environment, on every continent except Antarctica, back when stone hand axes were the height of technology. I'm pretty sure we can do better than that now. That doesn't say anything about any individual person's chance of making it through, or any particular people's. Equally unlikely—in fact more so; it's flat-out impossible—is that we keep going on the current course, farming more land and pulling more fish out of the sea to sustain an ever-growing population, building more houses and roads and cars and everything else we can think of, and powering the whole thing with oil and coal.
So between those two extremes, what can happen? Here are the options I see, in descending order of desirability:
We're more or less at 3 right now, but you can see 2 from here; say 2.8, something like that. You can also see 4, of course. I think 1 isn't entirely out of reach, but I'm not holding my breath. (High CO2 makes that more difficult, you know.) And I'm pretty strict in what I judge as "token." Any attempt that doesn't include nuclear falls into that category, for example, along with biofuels to keep the oil-based infrastructure running at least in the medium term.
The point is, it's a continuous scale, not a discrete one. Any outcome anywhere along it, from the absolute best to the absolute worst, is possible. And anything better than the worst is still a worthy goal. Any change, no matter how small—climbing from 2.8 to 2.6, or holding the line at 3.3 instead of 3.4—represents a massive difference in the amount of suffering.
We can't solve the problem completely. We can make things a little less terrible. Seems like it ought to be worth a try.