Is there any reason to be optimistic about it, or are we all doomed? As far as I’ve looked it up, the more optimistic projections predict a 1-2° global temperature rise in the next few decades, which is pretty bad.
Is it a smart decision to start moving to higher/colder regions yet? What can we do?
And is there a good resource or video essay or whatever for this? There is so much misinformation and fearmongering around climate change. It’s a hassle to weed out any trustable information.
It’s mass extinction level bad, but humans probably won’t go extinct. The humans who may live 200 years from now will have a much less beautiful world than we do.
This is the coldest year you will experience for the rest of your life, and this is the hottest year you’ve ever experienced.
There will be fewer humans, perhaps 5% of what we have now - that’s what I glimpse from all the literature. That is not good news: as life will be much less “developed” as a result.
Not in a mere 200 years. The human population of Earth will peak somewhere around 12B, and then likely stabilize at a few billion below that.
Two forces at work here: (1) humans will get fewer children, leading to leveling off (2) climate change, the exhaustion of resources, breakdown of our ecosystem will lead to hunger, disease and political disruption and culling of our species.
I think (1) will have a much bigger impact on the human population than (2). We aren’t going to exhaust Earth’s resources in 200 years, and it will take much less time than that to switch over to renewables. The transition is already underway, and shows no signs of stopping.
I admire your optimism, but I definitely do not share it . You should read this; https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/facultyresearchandpublications/52383/items/1.0437324 There are many more scientific publications and newspaper articles and assessments about this topic - it looks very grim for humanity.