Many of the posts in this thread show one of the (many) reasons that there is no hope. Selfish and short sighted.
Here’s a summary of what lies ahead - often within this century:
‘Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The 5 warmest summers since 1500 have occurred since 2002 and even we meet the 2°C from the Paris agreement cities like Karachi (Pakistan) and Calcutta (India) will become close to uninhabitable. At 4°C, we would have “normal” summers like the 2003 European heatwave causing 2000 deaths per day! At 6°C New York would exceed temperatures of present-day Bahrain, currently the hottest place on the planet.’
‘The basic rule for staple cereal crops, like grains, corn and rice, is that the yield will drop anywhere between 10% and 17% per degree temperature increase which means that in the worst-case scenario with a 5°C warming, we may have to feed up to 50% more mouths with 50% less yield.
......If nothing changes dramatically, by 2080, lots of places that today are our main food suppliers like Southern Europe, South America and Africa will be in a permanent extreme drought and will not be reliable as such to provide us with any stable level of food supply.’
‘The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing in the air: It just crossed 400 parts per million (ppm), and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21%. On top of that small increases in pollution are capable of shortening life spans by 10 years. The warmer it gets, the more ozone forms in the air and research show that unborn children expose to higher levels of ozone are more likely to have autism’
‘Without a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least a 1,2m of sea-level rise and possibly 3m by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas and rice-paddy empires, and even those above 3m will flood much more easily, and much more regularly if the water gets that high. At least 600 million people live within 10m of sea level today.’
And that’s a fraction of the bad news. I haven’t included the mass extinction events occurring. The massive loss of insects (and no, it’s not good news that there are fewer wasps and bees hovering around your barbecue parties); the effects of climate change on disease and so much else.
It is your children and mine who will live through what is predicted and some of it can’t be avoided even if we reached zero carbon emissions tomorrow. A minimum of 2 degrees increase in global temperature is literally baked in already. And that does not just mean that summer will be 2 degrees warmer. It causes increases in global sea levels, decreases in food production, increases in human diseases and death rates, further habitat loss and extinctions of species.
The media don’t report the horrible truth because if people knew what was coming they may rebel against the governments and multinationals that are destroying the planet for short term economic gain.