Report Suggests 'High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End' in 2050 - Sensationalist Headlines

It reminds me of people who keep gaining weight and getting fatter. They don't see any problems, until one day they just realize that "oh no, I'm fat now".

We are the generations that will watch the world die or save it.

Definitely, I mean I'm a victim to deluding myself with that same logic, but I mean it now think if I try to think about it all at once I'll send myself into a deep depression. I guess I try to take it in spades

I want to be the cool guy in a bomber jacket in midst of all climate chaos, and then thrive for once in my life. Seriously though - for all intents and purposes - 2050 might as well be the next week! This "new" doom's date (on an even shorter notice) doesn't really come off as a surprise, and I always had a hunch it would come about sooner and sooner, as we're talking about past decades of excessive energy consumption and emissions, and the effects they bring are exponential and hardly predictable as there is no historical precedence and no accurate weather/climate models to make any accurate guesses, not to mention the unpredictable nature of human awareness and developments and attitudes towards the climate crisis. It's all very fucking hard, and we don't know any other way of life than the one that brought us here in the first place, but it also means we can clearly do anything if only we put our asses into it, from reforming to utterly destroying the entire planet.

I'd seriously advise reading the report yourselves. It's fairly slim reading and really just says a lot of the stuff that we have seen said over the past while, that the Paris Agreement is not enough and our previous estimates were too low. There is nothing truly groundbreaking here. That's not to say we shouldn't be worried about climate change we absolutely should be (I work in water management in a country that is INCREDIBLY at risk from rising sea levels) but I'd advise people read what the report is actually saying, it is far from a long read.

It's honestly pretty sensible when you realize that the alternative is just to lay down and wait for impending doom. I've been learning how to grow my own food lately, and I'm hoping to change my lifestyle to a somewhat more self sufficient one by 2030 or so. It's not much, but it's a start.

and its messed up that we can EASILY see no, scratch that its "EZ GG LMAO" levels of easy to see how the climate has changed throughout just a small handful of years, and yet, we're still singing to a very counter productive tune set by the governments and shit just keeps on getting worser and worser...

Moral teachings, religious cultures, fracturing political ideologies, overwhelming internet information, wealth inequality, ridged job policies, stagnant status quos. This lead to a spiraling feedback loop, from social complicity, to radicalizing influences, bureaucratic toothless justice. The ever branching diversity of human civilization, a double-edged sword, is slowly becoming more of a complex burden weighing down progress.

I don’t doubt the grave worst-case perditions we may be headed towards, but I do fear some hyperbole might be said in regards to full human extinction. Call it feeble optimism, but I can imagine some levels of survival. Or at they very least, the earth itself could gradually recover someday.

The problem is that right now, the worst people are reproducing, so if you don't, the future will be full of awful, stupid people who will probably bring about our extinction anyway...

"End of Human Civilization" is different from "Human Extinction" though. Humans will still be around, barring any unexpected hyper-extreme weather changes that totally do us in, but our living situation won't be pretty I'd imagine.

Sure Earth will recover, it's been through far far worse than us lol, but the recovery is a very slow process taking hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Humanity won't exist by that point, either through extinction of evolving into something else.

...probably because they are selfish and narcissistic enough to think that pussy-footing around in survival bunkers in New Zealand will protect them. (It won't protect them from everything, such as high concentrations of atmospheric CO2 impairing human cognition, or oceanic acidification killing off oxygen-producing phytoplankton - which also works its way up the food chain). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys – yes, all men – from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own. They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern. Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?” This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time. https://www.wired.com/story/why-the-tech-elite-love-new-zealand/ It’s a question that’s been whispered about Silicon Valley elites for the past few years, ever since Peter Thiel quietly became a Kiwi citizen; since LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman informed The New Yorker that New Zealand is the tech crowd’s favored end-of-days refuge; since Ellen Pao mocked her former Kleiner Perkins colleagues for coveting “private-jet escape routes to New Zealand.” Indeed, as of October the number of work visas granted to American techies was up 78 percent over the same period in 2012. What gives? Beyond Wellington’s obsessive coffee culture and Queenstown’s unspoiled landscape (a country roughly the size of the UK with just 7 percent of its population), New Zealand has established itself as an unlikely bolt-hole for the impending apocalypse. ... "Thirty years ago New Zealand’s biggest hurdle was the tyranny of distance," says David Cooper of Malcolm Pacific Immigration, who advises high-net-worth individuals looking to relocate there. But as our president subtweets Kim Jong-un and we brace for the next hurri-quake, that 13-hour direct flight from San Francisco to Auckland starts to look inviting. “If I’m someone with a lot of money who wants to survive the end of the world, New Zealand is far away from any place I could conceivably see a nuclear weapon hitting,” says James McKeon, policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. It’s also surrounded by vast expanses of ocean, which has a dampening effect on extreme weather, says James Renwick, a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington. “New Zealand is affected more slowly by warming trends than other countries, so we have more lead time,” he says. “It will be fairly pleasant here for quite a while.”

Jfc they're gonna leave us behind so we kill each other whilst they live in their own little paradise.

If it makes you feel better, their "paradise" will be short-lived unless they come up with solutions to address those problems I mentioned in parenthesis (which would by extension benefit the rest of human kind too).

I'm quite convinced the Earth will be completely fine, irregardless of our impact on it. The scenario outlined in the report doesn't sound implausible (though I'm admittedly skeptical of the 30 year timeframe), but there were a couple items that stood out. Maybe someone here can answer. Recently, attention has been given to a “hothouse Earth” scenario, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, where by further warming would become self-sustaining. This “hot-house Earth” planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even lower. I understand that feedback loops have a certain unpredictability about them, but I have a difficult time comprehending a 2°C rise as triggering a self-sustaining feedback scenario, especially given we know the Earth has been much hotter, with far higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere than now, and it still sustained life in abundance. In addition, the report notes that in its prediction, a 1/5 decrease in crop yields would be expected by 2050 due to current growing areas becoming too arid: is there a practical reason why these growing areas couldn't move further north and south to accommodate? There's no shortage of landmass, so is it that the soil wouldn't be fertile for growth or existing civilizations are already in the way? Now, hands in the air, the complexity of global climate is admittedly way above my head and maybe someone here can provide a good explanation/prediction as to how this would all pan out since the report is rather light on details.

If everyone concerned about climate change didnt have kids, the only people raising kids would be those either ignorant of or denying climate change. Solid plan! I kinda hate climate change being used as a reason not to have kids. There's a lot of valid reasons we as a generation might not want kids, but this shouldn't be one of them. Having a kid is only futile if we think that literally every single person will die from climate change. It won't. Or, it would be redundant if we plan on adopting instead. "The future is going to be fucking rough" isn't good enough reason to give up your contribution to it. It's an easy excuse. Unless we're notable people making history ourselves, our only real way to affect the future beyond your death is our families. We dont need to be heroes, but our kids could go on to be a small positive effect on the world, like (ideally) we try to be. Maybe you dont give a shit about the future. Maybe you simply dont want to have kids, maybe you dont want to put in the effort, or dont think you can. Maybe you simply cant afford it. That's fine. At least it's honest.

Adopting kids who already exist and need a good home, and bringing them up to care about Climate Change is also an option.

This might be the singular most disgusting thing I've ever read in my entire life.

So I'll be 56 years old or so when I die, nice...

Hi, alien here. Each and everyone is going to die as if they were never here anyway, why the idea of humanity dying is so much more terrifying for people?

Because not everyone is a merry nihilist. Some of us actually care about the state of the human race even after we die. We actually care about the lives of our children and the world they're going to be brought up in. We'd prefer having a positive future to look forward to in our old age rather than a future where extreme weather is common, clean water is scarce and air is barely breathable. Why even bother studying or working, forming relationships, when we know that ultimately we'll all be dead at some point? Because not every single one of us is a nihilist and has a different outlook on life.

I'm a year behind you. (If we had the same safety net and pension options as the Boomers did) we wouldn't even be at retiring age by that point!

So, from what i read from the article: The earth will start warming up till a point where the warming progress will be self sustaining. This will lead to large areas becomming uninhabitable, vegitation dying as it didn't have enough time to adept to the new climate, and as a result will lead to mass migration? I've been reading articles like this almost my whole life now and they've become progressively more agressive and terrifying, yet noone actually in a position to do something about it seems to care. I'm honestly doubtfull they ever will untill it's to late so we're basicually doomed. Great.

You need work and relationships if you want to feel good about your social status? Not for the brighter future ahead 30 years down the line, let alone 100 or 1000, I'd argue. Same with children, having children who live well is a sign of good social status for elderly people. People who can't find status (a place in the society) often do kill themselves. Oh, I think I found my answer. Well, that was quick.

I think it has something to do about staying in power long enough to make a change. If your political party actually acknowledges the dangers of climate change and builds it agenda around lessening the impact of it in your country, you'll probably want to enact regulations on ICE vehicles, industry, etc. and the majority of people will see it as a violation of their rights and an attempt to remove any sort of luxury they might enjoy and they'll rather vote for a party that claims the exact opposite of you, a party that claims that there isn't any climate change and that instead of regulations, there'll be deregulations - bigger ICE vehicles, more industry, more jobs, more money! Sadly, demagogues are the ones who tend to win elections, and they rarely ever have people's best interests in mind.

Sorry folks, but I don't personally believe in this. Now shout at me for being optimistic, or just being positive and not downright delusional like the majority of the people in here, but I find this almost on the same wave of the Millennium Bug or 2012, only backed out on a realistic threat. I do believe that Climate Change is happening and it's a real threat, but I don't believe these fear-mongering reports. According to: https://nypost.com/2019/06/03/climate-change-could-end-human-civilization-by-2050-report/ Assuming we stay on our current trajectory, emissions will lock in a 3 degree Celsius (37 degrees Fahrenheit) global warming, setting off a disastrous chain off events which the report’s authors claim will lead to “a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end.” We still have 31 years for changing into something, I definitely think that our climate politics is going to grow in the next years. So the "deadline" of 2050 isn't going to be met.

People don't want more deregulated pollution, people have concerns about China. You deregulate stuff here, the capital simply goes over to China or India and these countries are super corrupt so damn right people don't want to go trough hardships and lose jobs for nothing.

The only way to avoid the risks of this scenario is what the report describes as “akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization” And what we've got is the polar opposite: apathetic, sluggish and skeptical

In my experience, people I know are never primarily concerned about China or India. They simply see any sort of regulation or drastic change as an oppressive move by the government whose politicians are only puppets of big corporations. As an example, many people I know oppose replacing ICE cars by electric cars because they believe that it's only being planned to appease the electric car manufacturers who lobbied for it so much. Regulations on coal plants, fossil fuels? It's all a scam to make us pay more money to the government and the European Union only wants to weaken us, because then they can order us around as much as they want. The state of things in China is fortunately getting better for its people. The people and the government began to realize how shitty pollution actually is and since smog was so commonplace, many cities have forced taxi and bus companies to convert to natural gas and electric. When I was in Guangzhou 4 years ago, most of them were still petrol powered, and this year, pretty much every taxi I took was either electric or gas powered. Unfortunately, that's in the cities, where the government has the most power and where such problems are very visible to the public. The Chinese countryside is unfortunately a lot worse, since the majority of people living out there are old, uneducated and they're just trying to get by without thinking about any long-term effects on the land. I have no personal experience with India, so I can't comment on that, but you are right that corruption (in any country) is a massive problem and it certainly makes any sort of change in regards to combatting climate change needlessly more difficult. And you are entirely correct that "waiting it out till better and cleaner technologies are developed" is something that people would do rather than drastically changing their way of life. The problem with this is that we're running out of time and the longer we'll take to develop better technologies and change nothing, the worse everything will be for us. And even if we manage to develop them in time, it's not very likely that they'll completely reverse the effects of climate change on a global scale and we can go back to what things were before.