>and this is a system that will take millions of years to recover (if it ever does)
Like Carlin said, Earth will be fine, it's been through worse before. It's the people who are fucked.
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I like Carlin. I like the joke. The problem is we're taking a huge number of species with us. That is after all what makes Earth special compared to any other barren rock.
A great joke. It makes a good point; almost. I'm still waiting for the doomsday that's always just around the corner. We're technologists here. Let's focus on solving problems rather than trying to turn back the clock.
It's not a joke. Billions of Dinosaurs, back then most of all live, have been wiped of the earth, with no human input at all. A 'healthy' earth is quite relative.
It's easy to frame climate change as some hippies protesting to save some obscure insect that nobody heard of and that will just end up on the list of species to have died, which is quite full of things we human did not cause anyway. It seems a lot more urgent when you frame it as keeping our own life support system running.
I'm agreeing with that part. The part I disagree with is that we are somehow "fucked". We have lots of smart people working on that problem. Which is why we've actually had some good climate news lately. Doomer-ish statements like, "we're fucked", are just as likely to lead to demotivation and panic as they are to helpful solutions or action. So I avoid that mindset completely.
It is a funny punchline. That's why I say it's a great joke. But let's not read too much into that.
It depends on the perspective you take. From my comfortable place here in Western society, 2C of global warming isn't going to destroy my quality of life. Goods might get more expensive, certain kinds of food products may become scarcer or disappear There might be more conflict "over there" because of water scarcity and famine. I may experience more political instability and degradation of some of the social fabric. But my day to day life probably won't change. However, if you talk about it from the perspective of the people who will actually bear the brunt of it, it's hard to see it as anything other than an unmitigated disaster.
Pessimism can be as toxic as unfounded optimisim when it's not strongly rooted in the reality of the situation. And to be clear. 1.5C is baked in at this point [1][2] and I suspect 2C is too but it's failed to obtain enough scientific consensus to get political buy in (for some reason scientific consensus in this space is extremely conservative). To me a realistic evaluation is that any "good news" there is is a drop in the bucket against the tsunami headed our way. Maybe we get lucky with fusion or some other scientific breakthrough. But I've not observed a pattern for humanity getting lucky in that way.
I also don't think it's demotivating to talk about it in real terms. For example, California's 2035 plan for fossil fuel cars is likely too little to late. It's better than nothing but also a lot can happen in 12 years to undermine that plan (it's also a pretty poorly thought out plan but maybe it'll work out well anyway). The US federal government is more lackadaisical about it with a plan to get to net zero by 2050. But you know what you don't hear politicians talking about? Net zero doesn't achieve any climate goals. Because we've been emitting so much CO2 for so long and will continue to do so for decades more, it's a runaway cycle. We would need to get to a substantial net negative to undo the warming that's baked in and to realistically try to avoid 2c. Lots of smart people are working on the problem. I think they've got the best sense of the urgency and import of the work and I don't think pessimism demotivates them as much as insufficient funding and legislative priorities.
[1] https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129912
> There’s “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” today, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) insisted in a new report, despite legally binding promises made at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference to prevent average temperatures rising by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-will-li...
> “Individually, in private, I don’t think I know of many climate scientists that think 1.5 C is possible (I could count them on a hand),” Glen Peters, a climate policy expert and research director at the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Norway, said in an email to E&E News.