Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "UK heatwave: Cobra meeting held as national emergency declared over soaring temperatures" video.

  1. 15
  2. 6
  3. 6
  4. 4
  5. 4
  6. 3
  7. 3
  8. 2
  9. 2
  10. 2
  11. 2
  12. 2
  13. 2
  14. 1
  15. 1
  16. 1
  17. 1
  18.  @Mystic_Void  I find such complacency very scary. There are nearly 8 billion people on the planet right now. If we don't stop climate change getting worse, the systems of food production and distribution will start collapsing and that number will fall very significantly. That means billions of people dying. Let me say that again. BILLIONS of people will die from food shortages and war over resources. This century. We are already seeing it in parts of Africa, the middle east and Asia. India is one of the largest exporters of grain. It has stop exporting this year because of extreme heat slashing yields. That is why everyone is so desperate to get the grain out of Ukraine right now. There are already shortages and they will kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people in parts of the world like Africa. Humans survived ice ages, with very large falls in population, because they could move and their populations were tiny. That isn't how human society works any more. You can't just move half the population of India because where they live becomes to hot to live any more. As for extinctions in nature, it's already happening. The rate of extinctions now is running at 1000x the normal rate. We are on course to lose about a million species this century. That is because of both climate change and the wholesale destruction of natural habitat to make way for animal agriculture. Not stopping climate and ecological collapse will be the single worse event and moral failure in human history on a scale I don't think you can conceive of. It will mean watching our entire society gradually fall apart over coming decades. It will mean living in a state of ongoing hopelessness because once we pass natural tipping points like ice free winter in the Arctic or permafrost melt in Siberia or the death of the Amazon, there will be absolutely nothing we can do to stop the process. The climate was in a stable niche that supported human life. Like pushing a ball at the top of a hill, once it is dislodged from that stable niche, it will roll down the hill out of our control until it finds a new stable point. That might be at 3C, it might be at 5C. All we know is that it will be an uninhabitable planet for organised human life. We will have ended the human experiment.
    1
  19. 1
  20. 1
  21. 1
  22. 1
  23. 1