Illu-chi wrote:I'm surprised people think climate change is actually a huge deal. I was taught in school that global warming isn't a thing, but climate change is. A meteorologist who one time came to my school( to talk about the profession of meteorology or something like that) also said that climate change will just be some changes in weather patterns and its not some apocalypse.
Climate change isn't going to bring about human extinction (at least not the kind we're dealing with now, can make no promises about Snowpiercer-making human technologies of the future), but extinction is hardly the threshold for something being a huge deal. Coronavirus has killed 0.05% of the human population and global population growth is offsetting those losses by a huge margin. The global population grew every year of World War 2 despite tens of millions of deaths. Our species is persistent. The planet is persistent too, it survived asteroid impacts that lit every continent on fire and blocked out the sun for decades.
We're not talking about extinction of life on Earth, we're talking about things getting really shitty for a lot of people. More frequent and powerful hurricanes and typhoons, coastal cities being consumed by rising oceans, mass migration from unlivable places, and scarcity of resources, the latter two of which will cause wars, and if those wars involve nuclear powers, then it gets much, much worse.
How bad it is depends on your perspective. If you were some kind of Gaia life force of Earth, then climate change is basically a sneeze, but if you're one of the millions of climate refugees, it's a huge deal. And if you're living a comfortable life in the west, you might not feel the effects of nature, but you will feel the economic and political ramifications. Think. Just a few million refugees fleeing war zones to Europe has triggered a fascistic backlash all over the continent. What happens when 100 million people leaving uninhabitable Gulf States have to find a new home? Consequences are complicated but they are inevitable.