Ask Lemmy

I don't see it affecting me too much, but I feel bad for the people it will affect.

I think I'll be dead before we see any life changing differences.

Unlike those who came before me, I DO care, and I want us to turn shit around, so my kids don't have to deal with an apocalypse, but, I'm not completely against a giant meteorite ending it all at any moment.

By calling it the "coming dystopia" and "a 2.7°C hell" you're starting this question off with a highly biased direction indeed.

The whole world isn't going to turn into some kind of Mad Max inferno of devastation and death. Some parts of it will become less habitable, and there may be mass migration as a result, but most of the world is going to still be perfectly livable afterwards. It's the disruption of shifting everything around that's going to be the biggest problem.

However, I have now committed a heresy by saying climate change is not the Apocalypse, so this will get downvoted. The answers more in line with the "it's the end of the world" narrative will be upvoted instead, people will have their fear reaffirmed (for fear leads to anger, and anger leads to dopamine), and ironically this may lead to less useful preparation in the long run that exacerbates the problem.

Doing my part to stop the spread of humanity by not having kids. I don’t really care what the future holds. The planet’s fine and will be so much better off without us (c’mon, meteor!) and I’m still pretty confident that the oligarchs will get what’s coming to them. Or their offspring will get what was coming for their parents. Regardless, that’s something to live for…

The last decade has shown us how stupid humans are and how unprepared we are for the complex future that awaits us.

We're fucked.

Enjoy what you can, while you can.

While I am responsible with my own trash and sorting out plastics, paper, metal, glass, haven't flown anywhere for over ten years, try to buy either quality and long lasting or second hand or both and am childfree that I try to remember that the only way to change course is through policy changes, politics and stricter rules - what I do in my own household doesn't amount to anything noticeable except make me feel less guilty.
The main risk in my area is ground water levels being way below normal, so if it continues my own well might go dry every summer. Other than that I imagine we will have climate refugees coming this way in the future.

Except for voting I'm not active in politics and instead focus on my own life and making the best of it - both in the now and in the next five and ten years. I'm saving money for old age too, so I guess I still hold some hope.

I try to limit myself o read the news once a day and I don't follow any non-tech news-related communities on lemmy. That in combination with gardening, DIYs, exercise and limiting screen time helps my mental health a lot.

I expect people to slowly transition to living more in underground networks like Toronto's PATH as the outside becomes more uninhabitable. Of course, realistically I don't expect anything to change in my lifetime.

Also rooting for the meteorite

I don't know. No one knows for certain.

Honestly? I'm not ready to give into some kind of fatalistic view that each 0.1°C difference isn't worth fighting for.

There are a few areas where we might see huge improvement in a short amount of time. With car electrification, we saw electric cars go from something like 0% of the global market to 20% of new cars in just 10 years. Meanwhile, the decarbonization of electric grids is happening at a rapid pace, too, with solar and wind representing a huge percentage of newly installed capacity.

And some game changing technologies are right around the corner. Grid scale battery storage is turning into a significant part of managing daily demand, and might soon become an important part of managing seasonal demand. Dispatchable advanced geothermal (using the oil and gas's fracking/horizontal drilling techniques to dig new hydrothermal sources) is right around the corner. And it's not exactly imminent, but researchers are making advances in fusion power.

If energy becomes cheap enough, carbon capture for net zero fuels becomes economical, too. That opens the floodgates for trucking, maritime, and aviation uses. Excess power generation at certain times of day can be used for the less time sensitive energy consumption: treating water, manufacturing certain chemicals, charging batteries, heating and cooling some kind of thermal storage system, etc.

Plus, cynically, indoor heating is a much larger driver of fossil fuel consumption than indoor cooling, so a warming planet kinda reduces overall emissions from indoor climate control.

And the thing with all of these factors I'm naming is that these don't rely on governments to enforce sacrifices by industry or commerce. The pricing has already fallen in line so that the cleanest option is the cheapest option. Policy can nudge things, but actually engineering improvement through price signals is going to create much bigger change: you don't need the government to shut down a coal plant when the power plant simply can't produce electricity cheap enough to turn a profit.

I live in a place where there's 5 months of winter with real snow. I work in agriculture and the short growing season is a huge limiter on what can be produced here and with what yield. Most people here wouldn't mind it being a bit warmer. Say having 3 months of winter instead of the usual 5. And in my industry at this specific region the farmers are actually looking forward to climate change and have already started benefiting from it. New crops are already entering that were not possible before. And farmers can now start harvesting grains in August while only 10-20 years ago september was the norm. All science-based projections predict yield increases for all crops here.

From a purely selfish perspective I should celebrate climate change. Farming here will just get better and if farming elsewhere gets worse the price for produce produced here will also increase. But while it's good for my career and maybe even my own enjoyment of the weather I would never say I look forward to it. The huge amount of future misery in the world that is and will be caused by climate change is not worth any improvement in this absolutely tiny piece of the planet I'm on. Still I take comfort in knowing I'll be alright. As long as the affected regions of the world don't invade mine...

I worry for my state; New Jersey is surrounded on three sides by water

Sea rising by 2100 is proyected on 0.6 meters.

And sea rising predictions made in the 90s haven't been the more accurate.

The harmful consequences of climate change have more to do with desertification, hotter summers, more energetic storms. And of course the fear of breaking some oceanic current and send Europe into an ice age.

In general is hard to say what will be that thing that will make people say "ok, we really fucked up". As it's incredibly hard to predict the consequences of such a fast climate variation. Sea level rise was the jam in the 90s early 00s but as predictions fall short on that front and even the worse numbers doesn't look like mass migration number for a few centuries at least, worries are more focused on other things that could happen.

In principle, I'm not particularly young, but in general, I expect to finally live by the sea (because the ocean level will rise), even though the summer is likely to be shorter and the winter colder and longer.

I think the Earth is in a state of transitioning to a hot era, which it has done many times before. We are coming out of a cold era as we speak. The future might look bleak while we scrounge as it happens. But the Earth will bounce back. I'm not worried.