What should humanity do about climate change?

We will have take measures to deal with it. Either migrate inland away from the current shorelines or build sea walls.

Better building standards for high winds. More of the country might adopt the Miami-Dade standards for shutters and roof straps.

More creative residential and commercial buildings that have more thought regarding orientation to the sun, green energy, able to function off the grid, and things like grass on rooftops.

Our bodies won’t adapt any time soon.

Trouble is that for most of the world’s peoples there will be no mitigating the coming 140 degree summer afternoons or the submergence of coastal cities. Where’s Florida’s population going when the state disappears?

I’m in the Florida “highlands.” I’m probably safe for a while. I keep thinking what’s going to happen to the real estate market here if coastline truly starts disappearing. I lived in Pinellas County for a while and the construction there was terrible regarding housing elevation. It was so easy to flood. House after house. I can look at the land and tell. Whole communities are a flood problem in some places.

The 140° heat will cause some migration. The Middle East will probably be the first place and the most impacted initially that we will see the movement of people. I was in a presentation five years ago and the person doing the lecture on immigration was saying exactly that, and at the time I hadn’t thought about that before, but I think he’s probably right.

Accept it. Deal with it. If it can. Enough will never get done to stop it.

Even if we never let one molecule of CO2 out in all of human history climate change is going to happen. Aside from man made contributions there is normal climate change that we should be adapting to. NYC once had two miles of ice over it, and geologically recently, humans were around during this. Marine trans-regressions happen so regularly that you can see shale/limestone bands in the rock layers all over the world from it. We need to be building our cities to account for these changes.

@Blackwater_Park Yeah, but it matters how fast it happens and when if you care about human kind.

It’s just like covid, I said since the very beginning it matters when you catch. Just like HIV, and so many things in history.

@Blackwater_Park I agree with you… Don’t trees and plants need CO2 to live?
Are trying to kill trees? What will my poor puppy do.
The gravitational pull of Jupiter does more to affect climate than John Kerry ever will.

Well, my point is not to negate what humans have done which is a lot. It is to say that we need to look long-term, like building structures and settlements meant to survive thousands of years. We build settlements in some of the worst possible places.

Humans need to do whatever they can to stop contributing to climate change (and ocean acidification, and extinctions of non-human species, and habitat destruction, and water pollution, etc).

Humans are part of the Earth’s ecosystems, and won’t survive if those fail. Humans need to stop destroying ecosystems. It may already be too late. Adaptations that involve only thinking about ourselves cannot solve this problem.

The OP suggests doing nothing. What a stupid idea!

I follow what the scientific community says. If the overwhelming majority of structural engineers said that x bridge isn’t safe to walk across, I’m not going to walk across it. If the overwhelming majority of mycologists agree that the mushroom is poisonous, I’m not going to eat it. If the overwhelming majority of shipwrights tell me a boat isn’t seaworthy, I’m not going to sail on it.

There’s a profound arrogance to climate change denialists. As for what can be done? I think we need to make radical changes to pursue 0 net carbon emissions as quickly as possible. That means heavy investment in domestic green energy production, storage distribution and transportation. Building codes should require new construction to include things like geothermal and insulation. There should be government programs to subsidize the retrofitting of existing buildings for better energy efficiency, producing lots of good jobs and reducing inefficiencies in the way we heat/cool our homes and other buildings. We could also eliminate all subsidies for fossil fuels.

Above all, push for sustainable, renewable energy.

Sustainable energy is fine provided we use micro grids. Without good storage it won’t really work with our current grid. We don’t have it yet though. We had better learn to be ok with the N word, as in nuclear. It’s the only viable carbon free-ish option right now. I’m sorry, but we just can’t do it with wind and solar. Right now a good portion of the power grid in the US is in trouble. With record temps and base load generation way down we are looking at blackouts in areas that have not previously faced them. As we shut down coal fired plants with out replacing capacity, this very summer parts of the midwest are in high risk territory. Like Texas during that recent blizzard. Analysts got it wrong, they almost universally predicted a demand reduction over previous years. Well, the opposite happened. The real problem lies in your own home, power demand is high. If you want renewables you really should also be demanding efficiency regulations.

@Blackwater_Park….one molecule of CO2 would not affect a single thing.
CO2 is edited from various sources naturally.
Yes, the earth has gone through natural cycle changes, but it happens over thousands of years. Man-made emissions threw us into crisis in just one hundred years.

Yeah, I more than realize this. My point is we need to prepare for the long-term changes also.

Or find a way to reverse it.

Well we did, we are supposed to be moving into a colder timeline but we pretty well stopped that right in it’s tracks.

We should wait until the large corporations are done polluting and exploiting every last cent they can extract from the earth, and the working slob.
Then and maybe then we might do so but until then there is profit to be made, and who cares about future generations as long as we made our profit now is all that matters.
Who needs clean air and water?

My multi-step plan. The first three are what wealthy governments should do, the last three are my suggestions for how the technologies should be used, but let me be clear, I want to do the first three and then let the market decide on the right portfolio of energy technologies to use. We just need to buy the market time and correct for the externality of emissions.

We should stop trying to beggar-thy-neighbor with these treaties that do nothing but act as PR events. Developing nations are NOT going to buy in. The wealthy countries need to act to take care of their own issues, and doing so will bring the price point down to where developing economies might then adopt them.

1) Throw out everything we’re doing right now. It’s all wrong. Start from a clean slate.

2) The wealthy nations of the world should adopt a simple revenue-neutral carbon tax/tariff that starts small, but rises steadily and predictably. This will allow the economy time to react while still signalling that there is now a ticking clock before the cost of emissions is no longer and externality.

3) Solar engineering to extend the time-frame over which we have to react. This is critical. The 2050 date was always just a scare-mongering tactic, but the longer we wait, the more we’re shifting our climate. We can mitigate the temperature portions of the problem immediately through solar engineering (emitting solar reflecting compounds from aircraft is the cheapest). This doesn’t solve the acidification of the oceans, nor is it a long term answer, but it can spread the economic pain out.

4) Encourage fracking for LNG in the short term. Yes, natural gas is not 100% clean, but it’s SO MUCH cleaner and cheaper that it’s the easiest/shortest path to reducing emissions. And that step is WORTH TAKING. There’s huge amounts of LNG out there that could be accessed and it would have the side benefit of reducing Putin’s influence over Europe.

5) Micro-Nuclear Fission & Geo-Thermal for the medium term. Wind and Solar are, I believe, not going to get it done. I hope I’m wrong, because the politicians are pushing them to the exclusion of all other options, and that’s a mistake. Nuclear fission is safe and efficient despite the fact that we’re still using designs from the 1950s. Updated designs would be even safer, produce 1% by volume of the amount of waste, and the half-life of that waste would be far shorter (because we used it more completely). It and geothermal are the two ready-to-go technologies that can produce reliable base-load power at a price point that will be more reliable and predictable. We need to let them be a part of the plan.

6) Fusion in the long term. Nuclear fusion is at a Q ration (output / input) of about 0.7 last I heard. We’re still a ways away from breakeven. But we’ve been making progress and there are multiple innovations that would seem to raise optimism for the future. We must continue to invest in fusion, but we can’t expect it to be ready in time. Maybe it will be….but we can’t depend on it.

After watching South Park… I mean extensive research… I blame climate change on…
ManBearPig!

@WhyNow Not that extensive then, The creators of south park officially apologized for denying it.

^^Oops… so busted!

Rich countries have a Consumption problem and poor countries have an Overpopulation problem. Both those problems need to be solved, or else climate change will never be stabilized.