I don’t usually write about climate change, because as dire as my views are on economics, they’re even more dire on global warming. As I understand the science it’s already too late—we’re going to get hit with runaway temperature increases over the next century, and they are going to make a good chunk of the globe essentially uninhabitable.
Huge climate change events are the sort of events which end civilizations. While it is always possible that something I can’t forsee could occur, of course, it seems to me that we’re on the glide path for disaster. With the best will in the world, and a great deal of competence, we might keep the deaths under a billion or so.
I hope we get that level of competence. Unfortunately, my guess is that by the time we do, by the time things are taken seriously, it will be so far past too late that all we can do is mitigate.
That mitigation, of course, is important, as is every little bit people can do now to mitigate. Every .1 degree centigrade the world’s temperature doesn’t rise by date X is some people who live, some people who live better, some more time to get out act together.
Sometimes our role in life isn’t even “to hold the line” it’s to engage in a fighting retreat, to buy time for others. For most of us alive today, that may be our job. It’s not glorious, it’s not fun, but it is necessary.
[Written as commentary on Sara Robinson's excellent article on possible futures.]