The challenge before many of us is to channel our fear and grief about the climate crisis into choices that safeguard the future: how we provide aid to the most vulnerable, and how we heat and cool our homes, travel, eat and, above all, vote. We commit a grave error when we indulge the fantasy of universal vulnerability — that the world is becoming generally inhospitable to human life. For while we all live on one planet, there are many worlds separating the real victims of climate change from the bystanders.
I think most people who care about climate change already understand that human extinction is distant. Gates doesn’t mention national borders but creating immigration corridors between nations so people can migrate and creating wild passages so animals can migrate are a key part of any dignified treatment of the problem.
I think most people are aware that humans could collectively mitigate the impact and severity of the effects of climate change on humans, plants, and animals if enough people worked together to plan and execute contingencies. It’s the political problem that feels the most intractable. If we can’t reorient our governance towards organizing or ruling in ways that that value life and dignity over profit, displaced populations will lead to continuous war and fuel increased xenophobia just like climate migrations have many times in history. It’s not human extinction on the horizon but it is not human flourishing.
Distant, what a great word. In this context does it mean “not in my lifetime”, or perhaps “not in this geological epoch” The growing amount of evidence places “human extinction” much closer to one of these options. While we’re on the subject of semantics, perhaps we should examine what is meant by “human extinction” in your comment. Is that the death of the last human, or the death of the way of life we, our parents, and our parents parents have known?
Don’t plan on the world ending. You’ll be in a tough spot when it doesn’t.
The geological epoch question gets a bit weird in this context because the current one is defined largely by the scale of human impact so it seems like the next one would include a shift away from that in which case there might not be enough of an academic apparatus to name the next one depending on how things shake out.
When I say human extinction via climate is distant I mean that the point where the climate cannot support/sustain any humans at all is probably at least a billion years out.
Obviously there is a lot of wiggle room there for life to look drastically different than it does now. Already species are going extinct at rates the earth has never seen before, people are being displaced by weather events causing immigration tensions and increasing xenophobia, plant and animal habitable zones are migrating with no place for the plants and animals to migrate to due to the scarcity of wild reserves and lack of connection between them to enable movement. Each of these have downstream effects that we don’t fully understand but could reasonably leave existence looking pretty grim for those who adapt and survive over the next several generations.
Obviously this is assuming we don’t deploy nuclear weapons on a mass scale or something which would create a whole different kind of climate crisis
NYT has zero credibility.
Bill Gates has less than no credibility on climate change or anything really.
Jamaica is still recovering from hurricane Melissa that all the people worth listening to say was unusual and far more intense than it would be without climate change.
Stop treating wealthy people like they’re worth listening to.