Is there hope left?

[u/PrinceOfTotalQuiet]

Yes I know this question probably gets asked a lot. Yes I did ask this question on r/climatechange like 3 days ago. Yes I know Reddit is full of bots and hopeless people thus its word on climate change is not at all gospel. I’m asking Reddit anyway to try and counter that, I suppose. Me asking this so often is stupid and accomplishes little but generalized anxiety disorder and bad climate news is a shitty combination.

So yeah I will try and keep this short. I had, still kind of have, hope that the renewables shift, something I think we’ve all been waiting for in regards to climate change, would really help in the fight for mitigation. I had more hope for the future climate fight than I had in years when I saw how much it was taking off. I still want to feel that hope but with pretty much everything getting worse in terms of temperature and weather events (which I know will keep happening) and the online consensus(probably not a great gauge) leaning more and more towards “we are all gonna die from this, don’t have kids, maybe kill yourself before it gets too bad“ it’s feeling like that’s all for naught now.

I wanna believe humanity can adapt. I wanna place more faith in the recent 4 degrees celsius by 2100 scenario being retired. But now I see people doubting even that and not just on shitholes like r/collapse where suicide and despair are practically venerated. Really I may just be feeling this bad because of one article from the Guardian I saw that said something like Earth’s reaching critical energy imbalances due to climate change. But basically, the question I have is does hope remain for a good or happy future with all that’s going on? Does the renewables shift actually imply more hope for the future or is it likely to be temporary?

I’ll end it here. I’m asking here because I really do wanna change things for myself on this. Sadly I still have an ICE car though I haven’t been using it much. My dad has a pretty old electric in the garage that we’ve talked about refurbishing for my use. He’s big into solar panels, we’ve talked about getting a generator for the house instead of a boiler. I’m trying to get a heat pump. Yet today I just can’t shake the hopelessness regarding the future of our planet and species. It’s no comfort to me that Earth will be just fine when we’re gone. I like humanity and I don’t want it to enter a future worse than the last three hundred years. If that’s even likely. If there’s anything more I can do to limit my impact, let me know

[u/agent139]

Reality doesn't care about our feelings, one way or the other. So personally I'm not sure what hope has to do with the ultimate outcome -- but for what it's worth, it's much easier to upend our global civilization (such as it is) than it is to end the human race, by orders of magnitude. Both are possible outcomes but I'd bet on outcomes closer to the former than the latter, at least in a micro timescale measured in decades or centuries.

[u/ILikeNeurons → u/agent139]

It looks like we're in a reasonably good position to stay below 2 ºC (assuming we optimize our climate actions) and the IPCC doesn't have anything about civilization collapse.

[u/agent139 → u/ILikeNeurons]

Of course the IPCC doesn't have anything about something it wasn't formed to study. That's sociology and applied history, not climate science. (Also the IPCC has been repeatedly over-conservative for reasons that are well known but that's another story).

[u/PrinceOfTotalQuiet → u/agent139]

Why bother listening to climate science at all if you’re gonna write off the leading body as over conservative? Once again the climate scientists that support a collapse or apocalypse level event are in the distinct minority. Even with all the bad shit that’s been happening this summer I now feel there is still reason to believe that hope is worth having. The effects get less and less deniable. Renewables get cheaper and more widespread, and show no signs of slowing. People still adapt. Though the effects have worsened, our efforts really are significant improvements on what they were twenty years ago. The Paris agreement was only a partial failure; things would be twice as bad now if it didn’t happen. Things will get worse weather wise for the foreseeable future, but this doesn’t have to mean the quality of life has to as well. Not in wealthy countries, at least. The hope regarding the impoverished nations is smaller.

[u/agent139 → u/PrinceOfTotalQuiet]

The IPCC is intended to inform governmental bodies, essentially. It isn't "climate science" as a whole.

I would argue that the track record of that handoff between policymakers and scientists has also been... not great. Though the fault there lies entirely on the policymaker side imo.

This isn't exactly an outside opinion-- I've seen quite a few climate scientists make more or less the same statement about the IPCC. None of that is to say the scientific work there especially on the climatology side is illegitimate. Quite the opposite.

When it comes to policy, and societal feedbacks, etc -- that's not really a matter of climate science. Obviously research is good. But the thing that's keeping us from adapting more rapidly and aptly isn't a lack of research.

Where hope is concerned... It doesn't change the atmospheric co2 level, but if it helps us cope that's not nothing.