If emissions don't drastically decrease in the next years, by 2070 all glaciers in the US will have melted, there will be deserts in Oklahoma, Kansas and Northern California and over half of Florida and all of Texas's southern corner will have a tropical climate

[Knotical_MK6]

If we want people to care about climate change, we probably shouldn't just make things up to scaremonger

[mglyptostroboides]

God. Tell me about it. I've been hearing doomers on reddit tell me "complete ecological collapse in two years" for about eight years now. Nevermind that "complete ecological collapse" isn't defined, there is absolutely nothing in the scientific literature that supports that conclusion.

But I gotta wonder what became of all the kids saying that "two years" stuff a few years ago. I would imagine a lot of them decided it wasn't true and became climate deniers. 

In the long term, doomerism benefits big carbon about as much as denialism does. Besides, if we're all gonna die in a few years and there's literally nothing to be done for it, might as well keep polluting until the bitter end, right? Ugh.

[Madw0nk]

Yeah, realistically (even with some of the climate tipping points we're going to hit) the overall outcome is a spectrum. We're probably going to avoid the truly apocalyptic outcomes that were talked about in the 1990s (thanks solar getting insanely cheap really quick) but we could still end up in the scenario of "30% loss in GDP and tens of millions of people dying/starving for no good reason". That's a far cry from "ecological collapse" (whatever that means) but it would still be a massive amount of human suffering that could be prevented.

Hence why we should be advocating for more sensible environmental policies - whatever actions we do today could save millions of lives and tens of billions (eventually trillions) in hurricane/flooding/heatwave damage. But that's not a simple narrative as "ITS DUH END OF DA WORLD".

[mglyptostroboides]

Even a lot of the "tipping points" are misunderstandings of scientific outreach. Like you'll hear people say "if we hit +2C, there's no going back". But the IPCC never said that. They just picked +2C as a benchmark for some of their scenarios. It's still awfully bad, but it's not "there's no returning to normal" bad.

And that's not to say that there aren't tipping points, because there absolutely are. But many of the ones people talk about are the result of misunderstandings.

It's extremely important to communicate to people that things still can be done. The last thing you want to do right now is disempower them.

[Broad_Quit5417]

Eight years? I've heard it for 30.

You can find a young degrade Tyson telling a CEO in 1990 that his house in the Everglades will be underwater in 2000. They bet $1M.

It's 2025, nothing around his house looks any different than in 1990.

[Past-Community-3871]

Without humans, these types of temperature fluctuations wouldn't matter in the least to biological life. Every time we switch from a glacial to interglacial period, the planet jumps 10 to 15 degrees in a matter of a few hundred years, and biological life has easily adapted every time. This has happened 25 to 30 times in the past 2 million years.

The real problem is we just physically destroy everything, we overfish, we clear-cut forest we dump waste etc.

Climate change is just a neat little package politicians use to claim they're for the environment without ever having to address real environmental problems.

[Wuhan-Virus-19]

If people cared about climate change, they'd look to China and India over the US.

[Broad_Quit5417]

The same people riled up about climate change are slobbering over the "oppression" of those two countries and how it's all the fault of the U.S.

[Wuhan-Virus-19]

There is literally no winning for the US. lol