Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?

Geopolitics is one thing, but climate and environment are another. I remember in the 90s growing up as a kid hearing all this talk about the environment and if we act now we can turn it around etc. That turn around never came. Global weather events seem to be getting more extreme / frequent. The number of animal species we've wiped out is pretty mind boggling.

It feels like the combined trajectory of geopolitics, the climate, and biodiversity are heading in a direction that won't support life as we lived it in the 20th century.

Id be happy to be dead wrong about that. But it seems to me we've definitely wrecked the planet and that'll have huge consequences that'll change the nature of life on earth. It also seems to be the case that when a society collapses and another emerges the default seems to be an authoritarian regime with democracy being somewhat of an anomaly.

This is why I think that, even facing the chaotic "sloshing" due to projected >8C temperature within a century referenced in parent, a civilization that has practiced/standardized/mass-produced greenhouses at a hectacre-scale could fare well despite the projected drought/storm/fire/sea-rise/permafrost-methane-feedback that is being suggested as consequence. The only "silver bullet" specialty that I know would be beneficial at any point in the future anyways (ability to grow large variety of food in barren areas with limited resources).

Norway has large greenhouse production for higher latitude growth. Commercial sized greenhouse footprint to replace existing traditional outdoor grazing and staple crops would be enormous, which is why it may be more efficient to think of how to modify a biome instead of mass producing plastic/glass/steel enclosed micro climates (which may not be compatible with traditional tractors/combines/dusters which have long been mass produced).

Humph. I think the iPhone (actually, smartphones) is right up there with the biggest changes of the 20th century. It's what put humanity on the Internet. That may not be so obvious to someone from developed countries, where pretty much everyone already had a PC with Internet connection by then, but that was only about 1 billion out of our nearly 8 billion population... about 6 billion more were connected by smartphones over the last decade. The final billion can't afford those yet, but that's changing fast.

The thing is, the smartphone wasn't just cheaper than a PC; it's more accessible and provided greater motivation for connecting people. Messaging like WhatsApp has lowered the cost of what people were already considering essential (staying in touch with friends and relatives) enough to justify the higher initial cost, and voice commands and voice messaging made it usable even for people who were essentially illiterate. The impact on billions of people's daily lives has been enormous.

Personally I think it's true that the size of the climate disaster is absolutely enormous and we really do need radical changes throughout the global economy. But if you don't share that opinion then I see why you'd want to see a citation with such a statement, even if you don't deny that the CO2 in the air is man-made and causing the planet to become a lot less hospitable to us.

So I'll oblige and go to Wikipedia's climate crisis page, which provides under the heading of "Scientific basis":

> While powerful language had long been used in advocacy, politics and media, until the late 2010s the scientific community traditionally remained more constrained in its language.[13] However, in a November 2019 statement published in January 2020 issue of the scientific journal BioScience, a group of over 11,000 scientists argued that describing global warming as a climate emergency or climate crisis was appropriate.[14] [...]

> Also in November 2019, an article published in Nature concluded that evidence from climate tipping points alone suggests that "we are in a state of planetary emergency", defining emergency as a product of risk and urgency, with both factors judged to be "acute".[15] The Nature article referenced recent IPCC Special Reports (2018, 2019) suggesting individual tipping points could be exceeded with as little as 1—2 °C of global average warming

The page does warn for the backlash from the alarmist phrasing, but at least many scientists appear to find this phrasing accurate. They're not infallible but it does seem to be our best understanding of the situation.