Environmental Question #41 [How bad is it?]

How fucked are we actually?

Courtesy of Reddit user u/mathisfakenews

Q: How fucked are we actually?

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A: I get this question all the time in real life, but this is the first time I've been asked online. The simplest answer is that if you live in a place where you have the electricity and internet access to be asking this question online, you will probably be fine. A decent amount of progress has been made toward mitigating the overlapping environmental crises that we are living through, which has changed the outlook from being the extinction of all of humanity, to instead widespread death and hardship among the poorest people in the world only.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s when the first reliable climate change models became available, the expected degree of global warming was about 5 degrees Celsius. If this amount of warming were to happen, it would be a worldwide extinction level event on the same scale as an ice age, although of course involving different kinds of extreme weather compared to an ice age. In that scenario, not many humans if any could manage to survive. However, in the subsequent decades lots of changes were made to energy policy, along with technological improvements in renewable energy that have massively reduced emissions.

Today the expected global warming is a little more than 2 degrees Celsius. This will still have huge consequences: cities and countries near the sea level will be swallowed up by the ocean, droughts and famines will grip large swaths of the world, and extreme weather like hurricanes beyond anything we've seen in history will become common. People and countries with enough money and resources will be able to build defenses to weather some of the most serious effects of climate change, and while every day life will become very different for many people, most people in rich countries will survive. However, the people who lack the resources to adapt will become climate refugees or die. This is happening already in some areas near the equator, where formerly tropical climates are transforming into deserts, forcing the people there to move to find work and food.

The same is true for chemical toxicity in the environment. Huge progress has been made over the past several decades to identify and regulate toxic materials, so rather than widespread human extinction, instead the trajectory we are currently on will mean people in rich areas will be able to keep themselves away from chemical pollutants by sending all of their pollution to poor places.

As I'm sure you can tell, some people dying is certainly a big step up from everyone dying, but there is still a long way to go until a truly GOOD future is in sight. That is why conversation in environmental activist spaces has moved from talking about survival, to instead talking about environmental justice. Humanity's survival has been secured already, but today not everyone gets to have a seat on the ark, and that's not remotely fair.