Climate change How worried are you about climate change?

[Mmiikkii]

And there will be some collateral dammage, but humanity has faced many more threats and challenges in the past.
Humanity found solutions to overcome hunger, war and diseases and as a consequence, population grew exponentially, just like a virus.

You said it. Even though Climate Change won't extinguish us like the most anxious fear.
It will cause droughts(Yihadi-ravaged Sahel region has been like a decade suffering droughts), rising sea levels(trading metropolis are maritime), floods(there are already 2M displaced in a Chinese province) if go to worse will cause all the war, poverty, hunger and death you talk about.
The worst of this is that I think we've peaked the amount to which we can grow and avoid the impacts. Now the times of decadence are coming, as with every civilization. Or at least the time in which we stop to grow.

 

[don_joe]

I'm moderately worried. Not enough in a panic to be very worried, I'm more a fatalist. Nothing will change until we hit the wall. It's a global problem and we don't have any global solution. We are soon 8 billion people on earth and if I remembered the facts from Harari's (?) book right, we represent 20% of the worlds fauna biomass, our food another 70% and all the wild life only 10%. Sure the humanity had overcame a few challenges in the past. But with this rising number of individuals, it's a challenge to have a control over anything and our environment can't absorb that much any more as when we were more insignificant.

We are witnessing recently how we are not able to agree on anything, even when people around us are dying. You can appeal to reason, it changes nothing however, cause the reasonable are already reasonable and the others won't hear you anyway. Pure psychopats are leading countries with a few hundred million inhabitants and that's more than a half of the population that is blocked in any action. Environment is not a top priority for poor people (90%). Poaching kills slowly the rest of the wild life, deforestation isn't even slowing down. We can't even agree on nuclear energy. We don't have any central authority on earth (maybe to our advantage). No authority - no sanctions, just agreements. And we see how this is progressing, summits here, summits there, new goals for next year etc. Just broken promises. They are all waiting for that wall.

At the end, not enough people are worried about environment. We should keep on doing the right things around us, for ourselves, that's the only control we have.

 

[olivand]

I'm very worried about it. The risk of catastrophic climate change under certain scenarios discussed in many IPCC reports should spur action by humanity to at least buy itself some insurance. Yet we remain relatively inert and calls for such action are dismissed as hysteria.

This is an issue that has been neglectfully ducked since at least the 1992 Rio 'Earth Summit' when issues of sustainable development rose to the fore. Since then, scientific knowledge has progressed but political action to combat man made climate change and environmental destruction has been stymied by vested interests and fear campaigns about the loss of jobs and prosperity that would result from decarbonising the economy. Carbon emissions are poorly priced, not simply as a result of the many subsidies enjoyed by fossil fuel emitting sectors of the economy (such as energy, transport and agriculture), but mainly because the price of hydrocarbons excludes negative externalities associated with particle pollution and climate warming CO2. It beggars belief to hear that CO2 is plant food and is thus a positive gas for the natural world.

I'm personally very pessimistic about the outlook. By and large, the poor world will not forgo the opportunity to raise their incomes to the level of the advanced economies (and do this by emitting more CO2) and the rich world won't accept to 'impoverish' itself by cutting down on its carbon emissions. Even when rich countries claim they have reduced their emissions (which is true for some countries), quite a bit of their carbon intensive manufacturing has simply been exported to developing countries. This doesn't reduce the aggregate carbon footprint, it simply shifts the geographic location of where the carbon is emitted. So I endorse the many good arguments raised by some on this forum for intensive investment plans in renewables so as to change the energy mix.

I have little faith in the non-binding targets governments set at each COP conference - vested interests will make sure we adopt the slow lane for change and they will make sure to fan fears in the community about the dangers of listening to the 'climate warriors' and Dr.Doomsday climate scientists.

This is the biggest challenge facing humanity and our ingenuity and adaptability will be useless under a scenario of catastrophic climate change since it will be irreversible and it remains to be seen whether life support systems will be reliable and resilient in that state of the world to support habitation of the planet by over 8 billion humans (and rising), not to mention other life (plant, animal).

 

[PaleoRevenge]

Not worried from your perspective. The problems you mentioned, loss of biodiversity is not climate related but human consumption related.

I am worried that we are heading into little Ice Age conditions, shorter growing seasons and more extreme swings in weather that is well documented in the 1600s and 1700s Europe. That is worrying. Solar activity is the ultimate pilot that drives climate trends and it looks like another Maunder minimum event is materializing.

 

[firetown]

Not the least little bit.

 

[Duarte]

Between the speech of world leaders and the practice there is a big difference. The dependence that the modern world has on fossil fuels is alarming and this is evident with the continuation of the war in Europe, which causes the cost of energy to skyrocket across the planet and compromises all global supply, logistics and production chains, strongly linked to the cost of energy. If it weren't for the zero COVID policy in China that puts Shanghai and Beijing under lockdown and reduces the Asian giant's appetite for energy, the energy crisis in the current global conjuncture would be even worse. Global inflation is a reality today. The directives of several countries favoring the electrification of motor vehicle fleets only aim at the tip of the iceberg. Without a global policy to replace the use of fossil fuels with sustainable and renewable energies, global warming will remain an ever-present concern.

 

[Cloud7]

I'm not worried. I will be dead before climate change becomes a serious issue unless a nuclear fallout occurs. So i am more worried about nuclear war.