We're toast

 Okay, so. It's time to talk about the weather.

Well, no. And that's part of the problem.

We hear the words "climate" or "global warming" and we think about the difference between a winter night and a summer day. That's how we're sort of hardwired; humans are a more-evolved sort of ape, but we're still an ape, and we tend to look first for shelter, food, and sex (okay, we're a sort of bonobo kind of ape, but, still...) and only then do we bother to spend time scratching our heads over more abstract ideas.

But we have a tough time wrapping our monkeybrains around those ideas. "Climate" is weather, right? And we still have cold weather, it still snows, so how can it be "warm"?

So you get people like this nitwit and his snowball "disproving" the notion that humans are somehow forcing change in climate patterns.

It's commonsensically obvious that the notion is not "disproved" but is, instead, more likely than not...

...when you consider the single biggest change in the Earth's atmospheric cycles that humans have effected; the Industrial Revolution.

We - in the sense of "we" as a species different from our closest anthropoid relatives - have been around for probably about four to five million years or so. Our ancestors (since they weren't our species of homo sapiens) figured out tool-using some two million and change years back, and very late after that - probably no more than about 100,000 years ago - figured out the beginnings of "farming".

Real honest-to-John-Deere big-league farming doesn't come along until Sumer and Egypt, though, about 10,000 years ago. Small-scale "industry" in the form of stuff like working metals comes along seven or eight thousand years ago.

The big leap comes in the 19th Century - well, it begins about 250 years ago, but doesn't seriously take off until the mid-1800s - and the big kicker comes in the last three-quarters of the 20th Century with the internal combustion engine.

Suddenly - in geological terms, in a fraction of a picosecond - humans are burning all kinds of things that release gases into the air, the sort of gas-emissions that before this needed immense natural processes like million-year-long flood basalt eruptions to produce.

Now here's the thing: we've been here before. The last time we had this much CO2 in the air was in the Miocene, the geological epoch than ran from about 5 million to 20 million years ago. The Miocene are was pretty toasty, too.

And note how this compares to today:

It's not so much that we humans are dumping carbon into the sky; Nature does that just fine. It's that we're dumping 400ppm carbon into the sky in the middle of a glacial period where the average CO2 is running something closer to 250ppm.

Now.

Here's one rendition of what we think the Miocene looked like:

Y'know what evolved in the Miocene?

Grass.

Seriously.

Your lawn started as the first species of the family Poaceae some time near the end of the Mesozoic, about 70-80 million years ago (we've found bits in dinosaur shit, so we've got a timeline) but the real explosion came as the climate warmed and dried, about 10-20 million years before present. Grass went from being a fairly minor part of the Cenozoic flora to dominating huge land areas.

And with the grass came the animals. Horses, right? "Horse" at the beginning of the Eocene 50-odd million years ago was a dinky thing the size of a Labrador retriever. By the end of the Miocene 45 million years later we're looking at Black Beauty. Well, okay, no. But the thing was recognizably a "horse".

My point here is that the sort of things that happen when you change the climate this much are big things. Species evolve. Species become extinct. Entire ecosystems change, even appear, like "grasslands", where nothing like them was before.

And we're driving ourselves headlong into just such a climate change right now.

So. Does this mean that we're looking at "extinction"?

I doubt it.

Modern human industrial capability enables us to modify our surroundings too much for even a Miocene-like climate to destroy us. We'll adapt to the changing conditions, find ways to grow food and make shelter in different places on the land surface, in ways that many other species can't.

(Which, I should note, is also part of this whole "climate change" macguffin; we're looking at a "sixth extinction", a loss of species that we haven't seen since meteor strike at the end of the Mesozoic and the final curtain for the dinosaurs)

But this sort of adaptation will, inevitably, produce human dislocation and suffering on a scale we've never seen. Coastal submergence will endanger many of the cities we've built. More severe weather like droughts, wildfires, monsoons, tropical cyclones will disrupt our ways of living.

People living in places that lack the high-end industrial capability of the First World, in particular, will get hammered. People getting hammered won't just lie down and die in place. They'll try and go to where they can live, which means mass migrations. Human history has examples of this, like the mfecane of southern Africa, and they are seldom pretty or pleasant.

So, to recap:

1) We're pretty much 99.9% certain to be driving ourselves into a warmer Earth, and

2) That's very likely to produce some truly appalling horrors for many, many people.

You'd think that anyone looking at this would conclude that we could at least try and do something to prevent, or mitigate, the former so as to avoid, or mitigate, the latter.

But when you look around, we're not doing anything of the sort, really.

Why not?

Here's my short answer; because in a lot of ways we're still fucking monkeys.

If it's not directly related to food, shelter, or sex, we have a hard time both visualizing the importance of something and giving a shit about it. The old monkey-brain just wants that tasty snack and a piece of that sweet bonobo ass over there and to hell with tomorrow's problems.

In other words, both as individuals and as groups, we're damn poorly designed to deal with massive, slow-rolling, long-term, complex problems. We have enough fucking trouble setting up a Zoom meeting.

Another problem is that in order to mitigate the long-term climate problems we'd have to make short-term decisions that are likely to cost us, both in real money and in changes to the way we live now, that may not be drastic but will be, at least, 1) irking, and 2) force us to admit that there are problematic things about the "way we live now".

That's really difficult to get people to do.

I mean, we know - know as in "damn fucking certain" - that we're going to have an immense earthquake along the Pacific northwest coast of the United States. Immense. Huge, like Day of Judgement huge. In order to prevent massive loss of life we'd need to spend millions - probably billions - to harden things like bridges and pipelines, retrofit old buildings, pay to move people out of vulnerable places. And, every so often, one of our newspapers or television stations does a little piece about that and reminds us that if we don't tens of thousands of us are going to be totally fucked (as in "dead" or "the living will envy the dead" sort-of totally fucked).

Then we look at the immediate cost, emit a little squeak, and go back to ignoring the whole thing.

Thus with "climate change".

The GQP is, obviously, worse. Being in the pocket of extraction industries that would be defenestrated by the changes we'd need to make doesn't help, of course. Being all-in on "conservative" things like fast food burgers, big lawns, and coal-rolling pickups means that they're going to reflexively oppose your solar panels and soy burgers; your typical Chevy-owning Republican is the human truck nutz of climate change denialism.

But that means that the "mainstream" Left in the US is going to have a hard time selling the idea that it's not an issue of individuals recycling pop cans and driving a Leaf, but a Marshall Plan-level of social and economic redirection.

Good luck getting those corporate donations when you're going to wrench Pepsico and Amazon in ways that will reduce their immediate profit and force them to radically restructure their way of doing business...assuming they CAN; the extraction industries are going to pitch an obvious bitch to prevent the derailing of their gravy train.

Industrial capitalism is simply a grossly poor candidate for recognizing complex, non-immediate threats, analyzing and selecting corrective measures, and taking appropriate actions to effect them. The particular brand of short-term-profit-taking return-to-the-Gilded-Age vulture capitalism that we've been willing to let return to power since the 1980s is even worse.

So.

Nope.

We're pretty much just in for a horrific century or two as the human race feels the impact of the Holocene Thermal Maximum.

I wish I didn't believe that, but I just don't see a way around it.