alt Hacker NewsI doubt that even younger folks in developed countries will be affected as drastically as "livability" perhaps implies.
I get the feeling that many are confused and fear the literal destruction of our planet by accelerating warming.
The reality is that the underlying physics fundamentally work in the opposite way, with warming slowing down rather than accelerating. I understand that for warming below 2C, the confidence is high that it is roughly a linear relation to additional CO2 emitted.
I'm optimistic about most things in life, perhaps it's a flaw of mine.
I do think we have decades, if not centuries, to develop solutions to climate change. Our planet will remain livable.
That said, I understand some ecological damage that may occur with global warming could be irreversible, and it makes sense to reduce emissions as soon as possible.
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> I doubt that even younger folks in developed countries will be affected as drastically as "livability" perhaps implies.
From what I have seen its more linked to affluence of countries than anything else.
I think the whole framing of climate issues as "saving the planet" is misguided. Yes, the planet will remain livable pretty much no matter what. The threat of climate change isn't the literal destruction of the planet, or even the literal extinction of humanity. Rather it's such severe changes to the planet's biosphere that human civilization would be threatened.
Potential climate catastrophe scenarios where rapidly rising sea levels submerge many inhabited areas and various knock-on effects disrupt the food chain, even in those scenarios the planet is fine on geological timescales. What's not fine is human civilization, on human timescales. And I think this is what gets inadvertently hidden behind planet-saving rhetoric. If the worst case scenarios are "only" about billions of people dying due to resource scarcity and conflicts over said resources, this is something to be avoided.
I see a parallel with global nuclear war. Such a war would probably not end the species, there would be groups of survivors here and there. But human civilization as we know it would be over, with the global population being back to what it was in the hunter-gatherer era.