This is flat out wrong. First we are likely to see more like a 6 degree than a 3 degree increase. But regardless, one of the things you are ignoring is how this will affect our ability to grown food. We are looking not only at a changed climate, but an unstable climate, more droughts, more floods, more storms, more heat waves, more cold waves. Most of us who are not farmers don't know how fucking hard it is to be a farmer. I don't care if you are an industrial farmer or organic. Farming is not only hard work, it is vulnerable work. When a crop is planted with expectation of one climate range, and the weather fall outside that chance are you lose the crop. And yeah, that includes one-straw farming and alterantive agriculture. Can we adapt. Maybe there are certain organic methods that are less vulnerable to climate change than other organic. No one has tested them in planet greenhouse conditions so we don't know that they work in those circumstances. If they do, they tend to be really labor intensive. One of the things our civilzation is based is the majority of people can do stuff other than growing food. If we end up needing half our population to work at growing food, forget capitalism or socialism. We are back to the material base for feudal ism.
Another alternative. Maybe we can grow food indoors - greenhouses. Ok but we are not talking tomatoes here, but glass buildings that take up many times the room our current cities do in order to grow grains and pulses. That is a huge capital investment. And if something that current takes little capital, agriculture, suddenly requires a ginourmous amount of capital, that is a drain on the rest of the economy. In that scenario, maybe we save civilization, but we have a much smaller economy. If we have huge population shifts due to loss of coastlines and riverbanks, that is a huge cost. Even if we manage to maintain stuff like anti-biotics and electric lighting and widespread literacy by the skin of our teeth, we will become much poorer. Forget luxuries like horses. Much much poorer, with a tremendous slowing in technological progress is the optimistic scenario if we don't do something to slow down global warming. Collapes of civilization is the median case. Human extinction is unlikely but possible. Our huge numbers existing numbers are no guarantee, Ask the passenger pigeons.
Normally I avoid dwelling on this privately or publicly. it is depressing, and I think not good politics. But when I see stuff like what SS is saying it reminds me that most people don't understand how fucking serious this is, and i guess it is worth putting forth a reminder. Also this idea that we can put costs on the next generation because they will be richer is nonsense. I mean maybe they will, but for most of history the next generation was NOT richer than the one before. Recent history where each generation is richer than the one before is an exception and there are no fucking guarantees that it will continue. (And has never applied to everyone in any case.) Continuing to shit where we eat on a societal level is one guarantee that this exception won't continue. "We'll be Ok cause most people will have air conditioning" is shallow and silly in addition to being wrong.
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