So yes, there is no "correct"\"natural" temperature for the Earth. But there very much exists a correct temperature for human (and many others) organized life, and that is basically the temperature of ~200 years ago. As it will get hotter, hundreds of millions will die of heat stroke and water and food shortages, wars will erupt probably killing billions, civilization as it exists today will dramatically change. Many plants and animals will die as well. Other people, societies, plants and animals will take their place of course - the Earth will sustain life for a wide range of temperatures - but that does not mean that we shouldn't fear these possibilities.

Edit: George Carlin, not "Steve" Carlin...

We used to die in droves from heatwaves and water and food shortages, but we don't anymore, because of technology. Is increased CO2 going to harm crop yields? No, it's the opposite. Was increased CO2 bad for life on ancient earth? No, it was the opposite -- earth used to be an endless jungle teeming with life.

It seems to me like some people want to mess around with the climate because they imagine some neo-Malthusian horror story about the future, like we won't use technology to adapt. But they don't want to call themselves nature obstructionists, like I suggested elsewhere, because they insist that the warming is the fault of humans, despite the fact that the climate seemed due to warm up anyway, even if all humans had been wiped out by a plague in the year 1000 or whatever, since it had been in the Scotese "ice box" stage.

Increased CO2 is creating higher temperatures, which in turn is disrupting temperature-regulation mechanisms everywhere on earth - leading not only to higher temperatures, but to more temperature variability throughout the year, more than has been seen in 10,000 years. It's also leading to more water remaining trapped as vapor, creating longer and more devastating droughts.

> Was increased CO2 bad for life on ancient earth? No, it was the opposite -- earth used to be an endless jungle teeming with life.

This only happens if forests and jungles are allowed to grow to use up the extra CO2. The opposite is happening today: everywhere in the world, jungles and forests are being actively cut down and the land cleared for agricultural use - capturing significantly less CO2 than an entire forest ecosystem.

> because they insist that the warming is the fault of humans, despite the fact that the climate seemed due to warm up anyway

They insist on this because we can actually quantify almost precisely how this is the fault of human activity. The rate of global warming is almost perfectly matched to greenhouse gas emissions. Historical ice age / warm age models entirely fail to account for this miraculous coincidence, and are in fact propaganda held up by massive industrial and financial interests that have an institutional lack of care for the long-term viability of current societies.

The solution to the risk of societal decline is to force society to decline? No. The solution is to make clean energy (solar, nuclear, etc.) abundant to the point that everyone has more energy available than they know what to do with.

We have the scale to change the climate of the entire planet, and the technology to understand that we are doing so. We undoubtedly have the ability to overcome this hurdle, just like the many hurdles faced by humanity before. And yet people's first thought is, "My life is too good, let's (let everyone else but me) go back to subsistence farming and dying of cholera."

Nature is indifferent to us. It will not provide for us if we just let it do its thing, with or without CO2 emissions. Its fragility is a problem to be engineered through, not a call to abandon all progress.

The solution is to double down on the technological sophistication that allowed for all modern life, not to give up at the first hint of a real challenge.

Not to mention, global transportation is currently impossible without fossil fuels, in the current volumes - there is no way to have cargo ships and cargo planes and cargo trucks that deliver anywhere near as much as today without burning fossil fuels, and even futuristic batteries are not going to change that.

So, the only possible solution is to reduce our economies in the developed world. We are anyways consuming far, far in excess of needs, to the benefit of no one except the Apples and Amazons and Huaweis of the world. I'm not talking about food necessarily, but much more about goods - changing phones every year, changing cars every 3-5, new computers, new plastic crap, new clothes, new appliances etc.

All of this contraction will happen. We can taper off slowly over the next 50 years (?), or keep going at full throttle and have a massive crash. Unless we believe in some magical technology that will somehow create clean energy out of nothing without putting carbon in the air for mining and production, there is no changing this simple reality.

Perhaps if we had started seriously investing in renewables 50 years ago when the problem was first discovered, we could have actually built enough to avoid this. Alas, companies who knew chose to bury it, and scientists who knew chose to keep quiet.

The only thing really that can overcome this massive temptation that fossil fuels pose right now (until renewables become abundant enough), is strict worldwide regulation to limit and ultimately prohibit their use.

The problem is a political one. As long as there's no worldwide regulation and as long as renewable technology isn't competitive in comparison to fossil fuels every single person is incentivized to use fossil fuels, because deep down modern life is based upon manipulation stuff at will through the use of energy. The more energy is available to the individual, the more options they've got. Let's not fools ourselves by pretending, renewables are already able to replace fossil fuels so that every single person on the planet can just switch and continue enjoying the convenience of using massive amounts of energy in their daily life and only use renewable energy instead. Renewables are not competitive yet.

But the technology exists. The infrastructure just hasn't been built yet.

As most people probably know by now, a rather small proportion of the world's desert land could suffice to generate enough electricity to supply the whole world with energy. If this energy were stored in the form of let's say Methanol, it could be transported relatively easily by ship all over the world (I don't see a worldwide electrical power grid ever being powerful and fail safe enough to transfer all the energy where it's needed).

The technology is all there but it's a political challenge to make the transition.

> plastic crap

Yep, agree ... there's sooo much plastic crap.

But I guess buildings are a bigger issue compared to that. Concrete. There needs to be a cultural/architectural shift towards either concrete buildings that last much longer or don't get torn down and rebuilt because the aesthetics aren't favoured anymore or buildings made from wood.

Buildings shouldn't be built to last and enable comfortable living for like 40 but rather 250 years.

To enable people to make the decision to actually build in this way would require to politics to set the incentives right. To require architectural designs to be assesed from a long term sustainability perspective with the long term cost being included in the price. If wood is too costly in comparison to concrete, people will simply continue building with concrete.

[1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...

> Who will be responsible for the consequences? Also, we can keep adapting, as we always did if the climate is changing.

> I do not see the point in taking every piece of news from climate change like the end of thw world: we will have to keep adapting.

This is only because you don't understand the problem, or don't listen/trust the entirety of the scientific community. Like all organisms on Earth, humans and human society can adapt to a limited set of circumstances. We can create thriving societies in Finland and at the Equator, but we can't create thriving societies in Antarctica or the Sahara desert.

What (the certainly man-made and certainly happening) climate change is doing is going to make a lot more of the Earth unlivable for humans. Even the livable parts will become much more variable in their livability. Humans will migrate in massive numbers from the now-unlivable places (such as Bangladesh, currently housing ~160 million people) to places where society can still thrive - but as can be seen from the massive reaction to the minuscule trickle of refugees from Syria to Europe, this is met with utter hostility. Further, scarcer resources (especially water in many places, such as the US south or India and Pakistan) will likely lead to wars, further creating refugee crises and disrupting supply chains.

The timeline is indeed unclear, and there have been cycles of too-pessimistic predictions and too-optimistic predictions. The current discussions seem to imagine massive changes in the 50-100 year range, but recent weather patterns seem to suggest we may be on the optimistic side at the moment.

But regardless of timeline, the general trend is clear and undeniable, as are the conclusions. In some sense, you are right that "we will adapt", as humanity as a species or even human civilization are unlikely to simply end. But they are also not going to remain the change, and there is no plausible path from current society to a +2-4C average temp society that does not involve the deaths of billions.

There is no sane and honest denying that man-made global warming is happening. It's just like thinking the earth is flat, at this point.

Read carefully bc I kbow where you are going to put the ball on: we do know about the gases that produce heat. But there are PLENTY of variables that we cannot predict most likely.

And as the other reply says, it is a topic that is more politics than anything else. Now go vote me down and do not discuss. Religions are like that, I know. Even if you dare to call it strict science.

Plenty of predictions have failed before. Predicting is difficult. And if we dnt know what is going on with enough accuracy what it is going to come for sure is a lot of people living in worse conditions (I mean developing countries mainly) because a set of bureaucrats decided that we need to do it. What if that is not the main cause? What about the damage to those people? If it is for health and proved I can understand it. If it is for hypothesis we should be VERY careful and do the right things. You could set restrictions and the temperature still go up. And what? The people who take the wrong decisions what?

This is like the pandemic in my country: u dnt vaccinate everyone on time even for ur own self-set goals, you forbid private clinics to buy vaccines creating a monopoly (but that is ok even if they are slow as f*ck!). When things come bad, what? Easy: we blame it on here and there WITHOUT data, close businesses and put restrictions. Later we make those people we locked down pay the bill even if we did not do our homework with our goals and problem solved.

This does not conflict with trying to slow it.

It can, though, so we need to be super careful. It's basic human social dynamics: once someone starts making money from mitigating a problem, they become invested in perpetuating (or even worsening) the problem.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But when your lemonade stand starts raking in serious cash, you suddenly want to make sure everyone is being given lemons, so you can buy them up and sell even more lemonade.