Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions

This is a whole part of the problem. Globalisation and the offshoring of manufacturing to the east has meant a corresponding offset of emissions from the Europe and the US to China and other places. We in the West have to take some responsibility for this. You can argue that globalisation does have a noble goal - i.e. to reduce global inequality by raising the standard of living of all to that of the most well-off nations - but the now obvious trends of climate change, global heating and emissions, are showing this to be a dangerous and unobtainable goal. It seems to me that we have to start looking at reductions of living standards in the West (to maybe what we had 30-40 years ago) with corresponding reductions in global trade. I have little confidence that we can actually achieve this in an organized and equitable manner.

Unavoidable. They're playing catch up.

It seems fairly obvious to me that we should say "Total emissions by some date (say 2080) should equal some value (say X) and we calculate from the Industrial Age to that date and apportion according to what percentage of the Earth you own". The West polluted from 1900 to 2020 and reaped the rewards. The cutbacks The West must make must be proportional.

Otherwise it's like inheriting all your wealth from a thief and then making thievery a blanket crime.

We're getting close to the point of no return when it comes to losing all of the ice. That melting process may take 1000 years, but becomes inevitable once there is sufficient CO2 in the atmosphere.

https://www.businessinsider.com/greenland-approaching-thresh...

https://www.carbonbrief.org/scientists-identify-melting-thre...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26102017/antarctica-sea-l...

I couldn't find a source for "all the glaciers will melt" but it's a pretty safe bet that if Greenland ice is gone in 1000 years, then so are pretty much all worldwide (mountain) glaciers, and the ice caps.

> Frankly this kind of doomsaying view has no basis in reality. While it's true that unmitigated global warming will impose a very large economic cost, it's simply not the case that it's going to turn the world into some unlivable hell-scape. There's just no basis for that belief in the actual evidence.

There's plenty of evidence for an unlivable hellscape, some of it is in your post, you just fail to see it.

> The best estimates say that global warming will lower per capita GDP by somewhere between 5-20% by 2100. That's a tragedy, because in aggregate it represents a huge amount of unnecessarily lost wealth. But a 5-20% in GDP per capita does not mean that we'll be dying in the streets.

A 5-20% drop in global GDP is not going to be a temporary drop, like what we have in a recession. It is going to be a permanent drop in global GDP. Bear in mind that the Great Depression was about a 15% drop in GDP over a few years. Think about how much pain and misery is represented by a drop as big or bigger that is permanent.

Furthermore, it's not going to be 2% year-over-year then suddenly in 2100 it goes backwards. Growth is going to stagnate, and start reversing as the consequences of climate change grow worse.

> Unmitigated global warming will make the people of the future substantially poorer. But not nearly by enough to cancel out the effect of continuous economic growth and technological development. It's almost certainly the case that the people of 2100 will enjoy higher living standards than the present.

I don't think you're grasping the scale and impact of destruction that is possible and indeed, probable if we don't address the problem. Ocean acidification and warming oceans means that coral reefs not only will die, but they will dissolve. Entire ocean ecosystems will collapse because a wide swath of plankton that forms the base of the food chain, will not be able to form their calcium carbonate exoskeletions. Overfishing is already a problem, when fisheries start collapsing, overfishing will finish the job. Today, 2 billion people rely on the sea for their primary source of protein.

Some regions are going to see heat waves that are several degrees above the 2 degrees C average rise. Heatwaves and droughts will drastically reduce crop yields and outright kill crops. Heatwaves can and will kill livestock as well. Disruption of global food supplies and water supplies will create multiple humanitarian crises.

And that's not even getting into the fact that something like 600 million people live in coastal areas around the world. A much hotter climate will not only result in several feet of sea level rise, it will result in much stronger storms and flooding that will destroy trillions of dollars in real estate, not to mention that it will kill people.

Put all of those things together, then think about how hard it's going to be for governments to maintain order. Especially in parts of the world that are already unstable.

> contention for resources starts triggering wars

There is no economic or historical basis for this. When resources become more scare people begin looking into alternatives or alternate extraction methods.

This is how the iron age came to be. Iron was common to many local areas, but the tin to make bronze had to be imported from far away. It took innovation to develop the necessary techniques for iron smelting which turned out to be a superior material for tools in addition to being extremely common and readily available.

They use to think this way about crude oil. That we would eventually run out or that everybody needs to go to war to protect their strategic assets in the middle east. This turned out to be complete non-sense. Techniques that revolutionized natural gas extraction were adapted to oil extraction following massive oil price fluctuations. Now Texas out produces Saudi Arabia. Europe now produces large amounts of petroleum from Norway.

They used to also think this way about lumber and rubber, both of which are renewable resources. Now the world produces plenty of both with minimal environmental disruption.

The US has plenty of coal and coal is relatively cheap to extract and ship, but there will always be a minimal fixed price to coal-based energy. Renewable energy scales more efficiently and now is cheaper than coal due to wholesale energy production, especially in Texas which now also dominates renewable energy production.

When there is sufficient demand people will find a way well before going to war. War is very expensive.