Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it is. And I can continue that all day long. When you are standing on the rails with a high-speed train rushing towards you and your buddy next to you is yelling "LET'S GET OF THE RAILS OR WE'RE GOING TO DIE!", that's not alarmist. But you try to make it look like that. Seriously. Looking at your history of comments, climate change denials seems to be one of your things, so trying to reach you is probably a lost…
That's a pretty pessimistic view, with no basis in reality. Fact is, the world has more people than ever, yet is richer than ever, there's less poverty and hunger than ever, the world is more peaceful than ever, and there's certainly no signs of collapse and certainly not in 1 decade smh... If you truly believe that we're a decade away from collapse, why aren't you stockpiling food and weapons in a bunker? Because th…
Yes, we've got more people than ever. There is less poverty and hunger than ever. The world is more peaceful than ever. That's because we've been on a glut of predatory ecosystem exploitation for the last 150 years.
The signs that we are running headlong into a global ecosystem collapse are everywhere. So my view is pretty much based in reality, so here are my facts.
If you care to check them.
We've wiped out 60% percents of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since the 1970 (https://s3.amazonaws.com/wwfassets/downloads/lpr2018_summary...).
We've killed about 30% of the insect population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
Phytoplankton has been reduced by 50% since the 1950s https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09268 . You know, that's the stuff that produces our oxygen (https://earthsky.org/earth/how-much-do-oceans-add-to-worlds-...). An increase in temperature of about 5°C and more will probably kill off most phytoplankton.
These are just some documented and recorded facts. Now we get to the fun part, where we think about their impact.
Let's take for a given that the antrophogenic climate change won't stop at the blue-sky +2°C that everyone is hoping so hard for (hoping, not acting). According to IPCC 2018, we're CURRENTLY between +0.75 and +1.25°C, with the very real possibility of reaching +2°C by the 2040.
We thought that we had about 30 years to mitigate some of the worst damage. But now - holy shit! - the arctic permafrost is melting, about 70 years earlier than expected. And it's starting to release methane, a way more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Sure, it rapidly decays in the atmosphere, but not before kicking us to about +4°C. This is the temperature range where some Scientists fear that frozen methane from the ocean floor will start to be released.
(Do you remember that at about +5°Celsius the phytoplankton will start dying off? )
So, we have a massive temperature increase at an unprecedented speed that makes huge areas of earths most populous regions inhospitable or even inhabitable. Do you think the Syrian refugee crisis was bad? Think about ~1 BILLION PEOPLE on the search for greener (literally) pastures. Do you think they will be welcome with open arms? Yeah, you bet..
Agriculture will be severely impacted. Not only by the heat, but also by the massive die-off that ensues. Most of the animals on earth have a lifecycle that's very closely tuned to the hum of the seasons. At +4°C you can kiss all that goodbye. The only things that will survive are generalist species that have a lifecycle not tied to the seasons. (Cockroaches maybe. Certainly not butterflies. Enjoy them while they last!)
There will also be terrible conflicts and wars about the most precious resource of them all. No, not oil. We'll have oil in barrels, nobody will be lacking oil (at least at first). No, I mean water. We'll have water wars.
This will also be the time that the global economy will start to collapse. War is good for only one business, and that's weapons. Everything else will suffer. Don't expect any deliveries from your Chinese online shop of choice. Consumer markets will crash, everything will come to a standstill.
No, I don't stockpile. Because this is going to happen over the course the next 30 years and I'll be long dead when the really bad shit is starting to happen. I've trained my kids to be able to work with wood and scrap metals to improvise all kinds of tools and machines. All of them are also receiving training as horticulturalists, for what's that worth.
That's the least I can do for them.