0
Evidence that we have been living in an increasingly risk-averse culture
(www.writingruxandrabio.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
0 points (NaN% liked)
Technology
59223 readers
3121 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're wrong. Scientific consensus is that this will be catastrophic. We're still emitting more greenhouse gases year over year, and the rate at which global warming is happening is still increasing year over year. Anyone who says this will stop at 1.5 degrees, 2 degrees, 3 degrees, whatever, they're all wrong because no slowdown is happening at all. It's wishful thinking. Climate predictions are being broken all the time, never in a good way. And that's not taking into account any tipping points that suddenly speed up climate change, such as melting ice releasing trapped methane.
There is no reason to say it won't be that bad. It will
My message literally starts by saying climate change is bad. It will be catastrophic. At no point have I claimed otherwise.
It will however not be civilization ending. It's not an existential threat to humanity like an asteroid impact or super volcano eruption would be.
According to WHO: "Between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 250 000 additional deaths per year, from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone."
Also: "Even after accounting for adaptation, an additional 1.5 million people die per year from climate change by 2100 if past emissions trends continue."
That's about the same as what road accidents or diabetes kills every year.
I think that depends on how you define 'civilisation'. My inclination is that most people would say civilisation has ended if life is drastically different to how they perceive their life/world they live in. Think 'civilisation as we know it' rather than a dictionary definition.
However, I disagree that it's not an existentisl threat, if only on the basis of possible crop failiures on a massive scale (reduced crop yields are a global issue already). Don't underestimate the impact of food shortages on everything else, we in the west have become accustomed to easy access to food.
An asteroid impact or super volcano eruption has the potential to kill every single human on earth and end the human race. That's what I mean by existential threat. I feel like many people think of climate change as something that's on the same scale but it really isn't. Saying stuff like "climate change will ruin us all" just isn't true. There are degrees of bad and while climate change definitely is up there in the bad end of the spectrum there's still events that are orders of magnitude worse.
If we trigger tipping point after tipping point, we can turn earth into venus. You're just wrong.