I have friends who are climate scientists, and man, the amount of data they cannot yet publish because it isn’t complete or fully analyzed is crazy.
And that data pretty much points in one and only one direction: humanity is fked. Like, either stone-age fked, or full-blown extinction f**ked.
We are accelerating past 1.5℃ of warming. That goal is in our rear view mirrors already. 2℃ of warming is similarly inevitable. We are now looking - at the most conservative - at least 5℃ of warming.
So what does +5℃ of warming look like? Chaotic weather, which largely prevents any significant amount of industrial agriculture. And no, backyard gardens cannot pick up the slack, otherwise agriculture at scale would have never replaced it. Droughts that massively impact the 82% of agriculture that is rainfall/watershed dependent. Lethally high wet bulb temperatures that essentially make large parts of the planet uninhabitable for multi-week to multi-month portions of the year. And no - AC cannot help there. Beyond about 50℃, any consumer/commercial level AC becomes increasingly inefficient and unable to keep buildings cool. And only first-world countries have that infrastructure - it is largely absent from the 4.2 Billion people who live between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.
We are going to see the migration of Billions as they move to still-habitable regions of the planet. Can Canada take in 500 Million new residents inside of a decade, while still maintaining its infrastructure like housing and food distribution and sanitary systems? Because that’s what is going to happen by the 2050s - hundreds of millions eyeing Canada as a climate refuge, even from places like the southern U.S… How will we protect our own citizens from our infrastructure getting overwhelmed and collapsing? Eventually, something will shatter - either that infrastructure will collapse, bringing a nation-wide famine to our country, or we hold that famine off by putting our own citizens first, and deny entry to others via bullets and extermination pogroms.
When you combine ethnography and economics with climate science, things get truly terrifying. Our civilization depends on a fragile web of trade. Just look at what happened when a virtually-insignificant virus with a piddly 2-3% fatality rate (with modern medical support, 12-18% without) hit us back in 2020. Entire supply lines were disrupted almost to the point of collapse, and we are still feeling major effects three years later. Almost nothing you use or consume is produced entirely within 1,000km of you, which means when trade collapses, the food supply will also vanish almost entirely. That tin of peaches in your pantry has a supply route that likely involves 8 different processing points across 6 different countries, and all the elements of that can of peaches travels an aggregate average of 15,000km to reach your table. And almost 100% of the food you eat has a similar profile.
Now think what will happen when something truly disruptive, such as multiple climate disruptions hitting multiple sectors of our production and trade systems, happens at the same time. Things will collapse when people become desperate enough to tear apart the existing infrastructure in a bid to survive another day.
I have seen some very realistic (to the point of being almost ridiculously conservative) projections that see humanity’s population contracting by 40% before 2050, and 80-95% by 2070. And this was based on a 4℃ change in climate. We are currently pointing at 5+℃ of change.
There is no chance of anything approximating a high-tech civilization surviving a plunge of this magnitude. We have been leveraging technology to massively exceed the planet’s carrying capacity since the 1920s, and thanks to climate change, that bill is finally coming due.
And because we have effectively exhausted all surface deposits of natural resources - those that can be accessed and processed without modern tech, at least - humanity will become permanently stuck in a low-tech, possibly even stone-age form on a planet that is uninhabitable (cannot live year-round in most places) outside of the polar regions, and therefore can only support a few million of us at the most.