This is a fun romp through the worst-case scenarios of global climate change--a decidedly apocalyptic vision of what the next few decades on earth could look like if the most dire predictions of climate science come to pass.
The most interesting part of the "climate change debate" to me has always been the extent to which the debate is almost certainly entirely irrelevant. We do not have an infinite supply of natural resources to exploit, no matter the short or long term impact of converting those resources into carbon dioxide. The earth has had mass extinction events in the past, long before industrialization and the subsequent population and consumption explosion of the last couple hundred years. If we somehow created the technology to become a "carbon-neutral" species--to whatever extent that's possible--the earth would nevertheless produce another mass extinction event. As George Carlin used to say, the planet is fine, and will someday shake us off like a bad case of fleas, a surface nuisance--it's the *humans* that are fucked, not the planet.
But whether your religion is a traditional Abrahamic one, or a newfangled Technocratic Humanistic one, most of us seem to believe that we'll actually be fine, too--whether through divine intervention of some god's master plan, or thanks to some great, miraculous technological leap. These scenarios are decidedly unlikely! And who knows! Maybe we will be fine. But arguing about whether or not we should be desperately searching for alternative ways to power human progress seems besides the point. If we are going to burn our resources, it only makes sense to marshal a good chunk of those resources in search of an alternative.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html
