> 56% agreed with the viewpoint that humanity is doomed, according to the study.
Climate change is a serious issue, and one that stands poised to do a substantial amount of harm, but if the majority of young people think that humanity is doomed then I seriously suspect that there's misinformation about the impact of climate change at play here. Even the more pessimistic outlooks of climate change still leave substantial areas of habitable climate. Many societies would be harmed, and disproportionately among lower income equatorial countries, but I think it's a massive stretch to say that humanity is doomed based on our climate projections.
I think it's irresponsible to act as though the climate crisis is just a matter of weather, and not how also we will respond to it. Resource shortages caused by the climate crisis could cause resource wars, and if weapons of mass destruction are deployed during those wars, that could easily finish off homo sapiens.
The mere collapse of civilization and mass death should be bad enough that we take drastic action to prevent it, but I do also think it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of human extinction.
What shortages? The world overproduces food by no small margin. Starvation is a regional supply issue. In developed countries 30-40% of food often goes to waste. Alternative water supplies like desalination exist, and countries like Israel with constrained natural water supplies use it extensively. I think it's irresponsible to proclaim that humanity is doomed without a coherent argument as to why it won't be able to survive.
Overproduction of food is irrelevant if regional supply issues exist. So why do they exist, why are they sticky and so apparently unsolvable?
Desalination is prohibitively energy-intensive. More so in a world of shrinking resources.
You're arguing for precisely why these shortages are a problem but you think you're arguing against their existence. A "shortage" is not simply a hard supply number -- it's also defined by how well the supply is utilized. And the problem is precisely that humans are, and will presumably continue to be, selfish and horrible at using even sufficient or even surplus supplies. So why in the world would anyone think that we'll adequately deal with actually shortages?
> So why do they exist, why are they sticky and so apparently unsolvable?
Warfare and inept or corrupt government are the primary reasons. E.g. deliberate starvation as seen in the Ethiopia-Tigray conflict, and isolationism as seen in North Korea.
> Desalination is prohibitively energy-intensive. More so in a world of shrinking resources.
Israel produces the majority of its domestic water through desalination [1]. This is but one of several ways of improving water supply, others include wastewater reclamation or building new aqueducts.
> You're arguing for precisely why these shortages are a problem but you think you're arguing against their existence. A "shortage" is not simply a hard supply number -- it's also defined by how well the supply is utilized. And the problem is precisely that humans are, and will presumably continue to be, selfish and horrible at using even sufficient or even surplus supplies. So why in the world would anyone think that we'll adequately deal with actually shortages?
However bad you believe our utilization to be, the end result is still cutting world hunger by a third over the last 20 years. And more than halved since 1970. In developed countries, the percentage of land used for agriculture is often declining [2]. I think you're missing the forest for the trees: the reduction in arable land caused by climate change is more than offset by the greater yields delivered by industrialized agriculture, and the assumption that there will be a shortage in staple goods will not hold true.
A lot of people still haven't realised that cultural extinction is likely to happen before personal or human extinction does.
Ironically we're a completely natural phenomenon - a species that outcompetes the others, but gets stuck at individual and herd intelligence without evolving collective intelligence.
We're basically a brushfire species - which is probably something that happens fairly regularly on planets.
Could you please link to the source for your claim?
In 2018, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported that climate change is one of the leading drivers of global hunger [1].
"Overall, the number of hungry people grew for the third year in row in 2017, reaching a total of 821 million worldwide. The paper warns that this number will continue to rise if countries fail to tackle climate change and to build resilience to its unavoidable impacts."
And just this summer, Madagascar made the news for suffering the world's first climate-induced famine [2].
This is true - hunger rates are rising since about 2015, but the link to climate change isn't singular. War is very influential, and the leading spots where you see hunger - Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan, Nigeria, Syria are known for their situations separate from climate change.
It's also unclear if this is a noise figure rather than a trend. Overall hunger has been declining for decades. Less people die from hunger and weather than ever before if you move the running average out a bit (10 years for example)
I wouldn't discount climate change here. It's obviously part of it. Syria is a prime example, where drought has contributed to the civil war. But like all climate change - it's nuanced.
Some specific sourcing would really help me accept these claims.
What I'm taking away here is that climate change is both directly driving hunger, and compounding other drivers like war. You call it "nuanced," which of course is true, in the same way that the proximate cause of death "from old age" is nuanced: each thing that goes bad compounds all the other things. I feel that misses the point, which is that climate change is only just beginning to exacerbate global hunger.
That omits the second half of the trend analysis by Our World In Data. The decades-long drop in global hunger has in fact reversed in recent years, and it's misleading just to cite the preceding decades of progress without any mention of its recent reversal:
However, over the last few years, the total number increased to around 663 million in 2017. This increase in hunger levels are largely a result of increases in Sub-Saharan Africa (where rates have risen by several percentage points in recent years) and small increases in the Middle East & North Africa. The UN FAO have linked this increase in undernourishment in particular to the rising extent of conflict-affected countries (which is often a leading cause of famine), and compounded by climate-related factors such as the El Niño phenomenon (which can inflict both drought and flood conditions).
Total numbers may have increased, but proportional numbers are still down. In 1990, 25% of the world lived in hunger, today it's under 10%. The overall decline is unambiguous.
I think what people mean by 'humanity is doomed' isn't about whether the homo sapiens species will continue - it will.
The fear is more that society collapses. Our way of life may be doomed. With our extreme focus on career specialisation over the past century, very few, if any of us have the generalist skills to thrive in a world equivalent to pre-industrial times. It's not something to shrug at. What country can actually live as a self contained unit without global supply lines and dependencies? What families or individuals could?
It's also true that there will be substantial areas of habitable climate. The problem is that people who weren't lucky enough to be born and live in one, won't simply accept their fates and die. Eight billion people will surge into a relatively small habitable band - in the process this will destroy the arable land and severely strain systems like water, power, waste and healthcare.
Why do you think climate change is going to make industrialized society and global trade disappear? Are warming oceans going to melt container ships? Not to be snide, but this comment is just postulating the collapse of industry and trade as fact without a cohesive picture as to why climate change will cause this.
The overwhelming majority of the earth will still be habitable with even the most pessimistic predictions of 4-5 degrees of warming. Those areas that stand to become uninhabitable, like the Sahara Desert, are very sparsely populated. Only 2.5 million people in an area the size of the continental USA. A big swath on a map, but not a very big impact on global demographics. As far as resources go, the world already has a substantial overproduction of food. Water can be secured from alternative sources, like desalination (Israel already obtains ~40% of its water from desalination) and reclamation of waste water.
To reiterate, I see a massive gap in how the effects of climate change lead to the collapse of global civilization.
> To reiterate, I see a massive gap in how the effects of climate change lead to the collapse of global civilization.
some parts of the world/economy are stronger and more resilient than others
if, for example supply chains of manufactured goods from a few countries petered out, the effects would cascade up the chain to many other industries
just look at the effect of a covid, and microchip shortages, we can barely get capacity to build cars and even gpus now and its only getting worse
add some mass migrations here and there, political disruptions, markets pulling back investments (aka 2008) and more, and it becomes much easier to imagine our way of life being disrupted so such a degree that we "cannot carry on as before"
You're talking of billions of deaths from famine and conflict from displacement. Should young people not be alarmed about the idea of a few hundred of millions of humans relegated to the poles of the Earth because the species was too stupid to stop destroying their own planet?
If we can't prevent - or based on comments here, completely reject the reality of - the massive and preventable degradation of the only habitat in known universe where we can survive then we are in fact quite doomed.
The Kyoto Protocol, first international treaty designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions, was signed in 1997. Since then greenhouse emissions have grown by 50% and global population has grown by 25%. What prevention measures are you proposing, and why did they utterly fail to reverse the catastrophic growth trend in the past 25 years?
Even amongst people who are presumably, on the whole, intelligent, and by definition (due to the nature of the work that attracts people to HN) good at understanding complex systems, the amount of down-playing and hardheadedness and frankly closed-minded thinking -- all in the service of a kind of soft denial -- displayed throughout the comments here is astounding. And it seems to stem from either unwillingness or inability to truly see the magnitude of the problem, the system affected as a whole.
Climate change is not happening in a vacuum. You are completely underestimating the monumental effects of what you're conceding will happen (disproportionate harming of lower income equatorial countries), and overstating the consolation of there still being substantial areas of habitable climate.
We are poised to see the largest refugee crisis in history. The global supply chain will lose its most foundational workers, the destruction of its most foundational resources. Wealthier nations will not welcome those refugees with open arms, and we can all but expect their arrival to even further foment the rise of right-wing extremism, which will continue to contribute to instability in their own native countries.
Furthermore, those shrinking but still existent areas of habitable climate will encourage violence simply by way of everyone on the planet becoming more and more aware of how rare they are. And even that ignores the fact that "habitable" does not mean "untouched." Those places will have their own purely-climate-related problems, politics and violence aside.
And that is but one of dozens or even hundreds of equally massive, intertwined, complex issues resulting from climate change.
The very literal existence of humanity may not be doomed (though it very well may be), but any semblance of global order and a functioning society very much is.
I presume we should destroy oil/gas/coal. That would wipe out ~85% of world's energy production. Might I ask how are we going to power the gigantic engineering project envisioned, on top of somehow keeping people from freezing and/or starving?
Swap it out for electric. I like how the “other” category of renewables is an exponential. The question is does that exponential get us to where we need to be in 10 years. If the answer is no, then we need to think about what minimizes overall damage the most.
I wonder what nation will be in last place for who is the cleanest. If theyre stubborn about burning gas I dont care about their sovereignty. I dont think I will be alone on that.
Climate change is the underlying problem, but most of the "doomed" feeling I've heard from others comes from the inevitable strife that will follow widespread climate displacement, famine, drought, and other increasingly severe weather. Not to mention feuding governments.
My feeling is that we could survive climate change easily, but it's the other people that will do us in.
We've lost ~4.5 million people globally to covid and things have been a little weird (this is certainly an understatement for some). What happens when that's 50 million? 100?
Climate change is a serious issue, and one that stands poised to do a substantial amount of harm, but if the majority of young people think that humanity is doomed then I seriously suspect that there's misinformation about the impact of climate change at play here. Even the more pessimistic outlooks of climate change still leave substantial areas of habitable climate. Many societies would be harmed, and disproportionately among lower income equatorial countries, but I think it's a massive stretch to say that humanity is doomed based on our climate projections.