Can’t help but feel the coronavirus lockdowns are a good trial run for a low carbon world: limited travel, local food and entertainment, less consumption of non-essentials.
Minimal. At best, we might be pushing the timeline out by a few months.
Remote work isn't even necessarily carbon positive. In hot or cold weather, transit emissions savings may be more than offset by increased HVAC usage at home.
[Though avoiding business flying is probably a clear positive]
At least to a thumbnail sketch, back-of-the-napkin calculation, I'd guess not. Most American homes don't have smart thermostats and people just leave their system set to "comfortable" all day long, whether or not the home is occupied.
> In hot or cold weather, transit emissions savings may be more than offset by increased HVAC usage at home.
Most people keep on heating/cooling their home while they are at their office; sometimes to a lesser power, sometimes the same all the time. Office which is also heated/cooled (and had to be built one day, often terribly). So with a regular job, your home emits, your office emits at the same time, and the transportation between those emits too (and had to be built).
In the very short term, probably, but things are going to back to normal (or even worse) soon. Major companies have already said that the virus is going to cause them to miss their targets for carbon reduction.
For it to be a valid trial run, emissions have to be reduced while the world is running as normal.
The list of similarities is long. Coronavirus is also a global threat facing all of humanity. Similar to climate change deniers, there is tons of misinformation on the question in the internet. The poorest will suffer most in both instances.
I think civil unrest, like what happened when the French government raised fuel taxes, is the most likely outcome of a low carbon world.
People are willing to suffer short-term privations, especially when they are afraid of getting the coronavirus. People are not willing to suffer for years to reduce their carbon footprints.
It's also notable that the burdens of reducing carbon emissions fall disproportionately on the poor. The fuel taxes in France are a perfect example.
I hate to be the bearer of bad hot takes, but the burdens falling disproportionately on the poor is not a reason to avoid catastrophic global collapse.
Even though it's unfair, if the choice is "the burdens fall on the poor" and "the burdens fall on everyone (including the poor, who will be hit harder because they have fewer resources in reserve to survive unplanned catastrophe)", the first option is better.
(... it's also a false forced choice; there are other options. But the question of poverty runs somewhat separate to the question of saving humanity from climate change).
> I hate to be the bearer of bad hot takes, but the burdens falling disproportionately on the poor is not a reason to avoid catastrophic global collapse.
It is if there will be civil unrest, leading to the election of reactionary populist governments which roll back emission cuts.
Approaches to the problem that enrage a large portion of the citizenry are counterproductive. They won't work in a democracy, and most of the large polluters are democracies.
The French people are generally considered to be pretty left-wing (at least by outsiders) but they took to the streets as soon as the government raised fuel prices. Imagine how well that kind of policy would go down in Texas.
Poverty is therefore directly related to the question of solving climate change.
Marketing will solve this aspect of the challenge. Poverty is a relative state, not an absolute one: We want more because our betters have more. The negative associated personal outcomes of poverty are not a corrollary of insufficient carbon emission.
Therefore, market to the people climate-friendly lifestyles. Show celebrities doing their part. Make it easy to pick the right option by default with purchases. Encourage more local events and travel. It has been demonstrated that people respond to good storytelling and I don't think that is going to change.
One of my lecturers once gave an anecdotal reductio ad absurdum argument of why it is difficult to reduce our carbon footprint: people are not willing to walk from
the UK to France for a piece of cheese when they can just drive a few minutes to the store.
Transportation makes up 10% of the carbon impact of food at most if I remember correctly. The choice of what one eats is a lot more important. Here are articles you might be interested in?
> People are willing to suffer short-term privations, especially when they are afraid of getting the coronavirus. People are not willing to suffer for years to reduce their carbon footprints.
The French suffered higher overhead energy costs to make their electricity production >70% nuclear. The difference is that this long term suffering is much less severe than short-term suffering.
It's also a great demonstration that it's really hard to get people to believe that something they can't see is real.
Coronavirus cases have been growing stably and predictably for weeks. Epidemiologists (and not only they) saw it coming. No panic would have been necessary if calm, decisive action had been taken early on. But somehow the panic seems to be necessary. Normalcy bias is real.
These past weeks have been really instructive about collective human behavior, and have me really worried about our ability as a species to address climate change.
To someone who can understand abstract concepts like "the future," the behavior of world leaders can seem terrifyingly callous, irresponsible, incompetent and maybe even malicious. However when the nasty package shows up on their doorsteps, they can function normally, at least if they're part of a functioning society.
We're still only demonstrating ability to react to a sudden media-worthy crisis that is putting people (including decision makers) at a very minor risk of death in the very short term.
For climate change, we need to demonstrate the ability to proactively avoid a creeping catastrophe that will occur in the medium-long term, where the harm may not happen to current decision makers, but will instead happen to other people who don't get a vote in the decision today, and isn't media worthy since nothing is really changing ("outlook remains bleak").
> No panic would have been necessary if calm, decisive action had been taken early on.
I disagree. Shutting down major portions of the economy, and the resultant economic damage, would have been quite severe regardless of when it was implemented. Not saying there wouldn't have been less panic, but broad quarantines would have caused a lot of panic in any case.
What's more insidious: if we had acted drastically to prevent pandemic, no one would have felt any sting, and it might reduce the motivation to take drastic action the next time.
I listened to Richard Mueller's "Physics for Future Presidents" podcast course, and he presents an interesting conundrum: say you're the mayor of a small town, and a seismologist approaches you with a report of a 15% chance of a devastating earthquake next Tuesday, recommending a citywide evacuation. Being a responsible mayor, you do so, despite the cost and displeasure of your constituents. On Tuesday, no earthquake occurs, and the town repopulates. This happens ten more times over several years, and still no earthquakes (after all, each occurrence is only a 15% chance). Sure enough, another Tuesday, another 15% prediction, and citizens are getting frustrated. As the mayor: do you order another evacuation, especially if it's costing you significant resources and political capital? How can you tell the difference between getting lucky on the numbers, and a bad seismologist? Even if the data is accurate, how do you not succumb to the temptation to play the odds?
If there's any silver lining to our failure to prevent the pandemic, it's that maybe we'll take the problem more seriously on the next pandemic, perhaps one with a much higher fatality rate.
I don't disagree, but to play devil's advocate: the problem with "trust the experts, despite contradiction of everyday experience", is that it opens a massive attack vector for moral hazard / perverse incentives, for those who seek to profit or gain power from leveraging expertise (whether real or perceived). History is replete with data points where the experts were wrong (bloodletting) or dishonest (Iraq invasion). Laypeople are stuck with a "trust your mechanic" problem, of not having the knowledge to assess which experts are trustworthy.
It's easy to mock anti-vaxxers, climate denialists, et al; while an honest inquiry leaves room for nuance, those issues seem to have definitive answers, where reality correlates closely with the so-called consensus. But at the same time, the knee-jerk anti-science reactions should be viewed through a lens of general declining social trust in institutions. Even though those particular issues may be the wrong fields of combat, there's a subconscious sense in which everyday people feel lied to for decades by "experts". Now we're stuck in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation, where the actual experts who are honest brokers and have their shit together aren't being taken seriously. Trust is hard-won and easily lost, and there are massive downstream effects to corruption in truth-finding/sense-making institutions.
To your 15% chance of disaster example from your other comment: I think what you need is a population where a large fraction of people understand where those 15% come from.
Edit: I also want to point out that I didn't find your examples that convincing. Bloodletting was a seriously long time ago, and is unlikely to affect anyone today. Iraq was a purely political issue, and didn't have a scientific angle.
Don't confuse disagreement on the severity of its consequences with disbelief in the phenomenon itself. For the coronavirus, it's an infection with a mortality rate ~20x higher[1] than the flu concentrated among people older than working age. If we want to reduce as much loss of life as possible then yeah we should shut down the country. But it doesn't present a threat to the long term success of society (heck, a cynic might even point out that retirees dying in greater numbers will make social security more affordable), and so many do conclude that decisive action is unwarranted.
The view you are suggesting works, in the sense that it is logically consistent.
However, I very much doubt that this is the calculation that went through very many people's heads, say, 3 weeks ago.
I think proof of this is that in all places that have substantial outbreaks, containment measures are getting heavier and heavier with increasing numbers of cases. If that's what you were going to do anyway, then the sum cost (in money, time, human effort) would have been lower if you had started earlier. This is because exponential growth with a factor of 1.33 is still manageable if you have 10 cases, but turns into an overwhelming tsunami if you have 10000.
I recall reading something about how stopping emissions outright would have a pretty dramatic adverse effect on global temperatures, because while the greenhouse effect is of course real, the emissions also act as reflection for incoming solar energy. This makes me wonder if we can fix this problem without real innovation, not just global production collapse (which is bad for other reasons, obviously).
If anyone can remind me about what I'm thinking of here, that would be awesome... or prove me wrong.
I'm by no means saying we shouldn't be planning and building more sustainable solutions (both policy and products), since that's EXACTLY what we need to be doing. I'm just also saying that to make this all work, I think we need to do more.
I'd be interested in reading more. It seems counter-intuitive -- the emissions that are already in the atmosphere would still be doing any reflection that they are currently doing.
And whatever shielding they're doing, the net effect of every ton of CO2 is in the direction of more warming.
My understanding is that, while you are correct that these emissions are already in the air, they filter themselves out over time, so it's about rates of production vs rates of dismission (for lack of a better word). If we stop all emissions today, the sky will quite literally start clearing up, and thus warming the Earth even more.
Not trying to be too sensationalist, but I believe this is the truth.
The IPCC working group 1 summary talks about the physical effects, that's a pretty good primary source if you want a lot of detail and tons of references to trace down.
I hope it has long term effects. Tons of companies are trying remote work for the first time, hopefully some of it will stick. Commute emissions are like 8% of total
That's an inane take. Even in the absolute worst case scenario of 3% global mortality, how would that possibly result in a 50% global decrease in economic output?
I think the main assumption is the remaining 97% of people are working with reduced output if they are working at all. Just because you didn't die doesn't mean you went to work and put in 100% of normal effort.
People don't have to die, they just have to stop traveling so frivolously. Some people on this post seem to think that people will realize how much they were traveling, and that on the lockdown they didn't travel and didn't need to.
My feeling is that people will feel caged and as soon as they think it's safe, they'll start traveling again and there'll be a giant surge of travel for a couple months, and then it'll basically return to the way it was.
I am always amused by headlines like this. I do not understand why the people expect earth to react to keep humans alive. Earth does what it does. We do what we do and should be willing to face the consequences.
Now here's a crisis we can deal with. I hope COVID's rapid and haphazard response will teach us drastic changes are not so terrible and not so scarey when implemented slowly.
Honestly, I feel like the world leaders' confused, belated, contradictory, and deceitful response to COVID is still miles better than their response to climate change.
Just imagine if climate change today were being met by the kinds of panicked direct interventions, quick decisions, and money being released the way is (fortunately) happening for COVID.
The problem is that climate change is still more like the proverbial frog in hot water, while COVID is more like a frying pan.
I don't believe we'll ever succeed in dealing with climate change. It's going to kill us all and the people in power will refuse to accept responsibility the whole while.
Agreed, and also I hope to be proven wrong. People don't want to change, by nature. Humans are terribly flawed. The last two people alive on earth will be pointing fingers at each other moments before they perish.
I agree, but I'm interested to see will we see the fall during our generation or the next one will experience it. Bringing children to this world seems selfish.
I actually believe we're in one of the best times to bring children into this world. Child mortality has dramatically fallen.
We just live in an age where we're hyper-aware of our actions. I believe if we get out of an emergency, "we're all going to die" mindset, we may actually have a chance.
Child mortality is the least of it, however. You have to consider what the world is going to be like in 20,30 and 40 years from now and factor that into your decision. You have to consider what you'd be asking them to live through.
Bringing children into this world isn't doing them any favors; at all.
Children use to be born with a high chance of killing their moms during birth. Then half of them wouldn't make it to 18. Then could probably expect to live and work as a farmer under the control of someone else at the threat of violence for their whole life. Famine, disease, and many other unimaginable problems plagued their lives.
Things are literally the best they've ever been. They could get much worse but any reasonable prediction still puts us ahead of the expected life of someone in the 19th century.
If you don't want to have children, that's your choice. You don't have to justify it by putting your morality on other people.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
It's not going to decimate us or kill half of us or most of us, it's going to kill us all? What scenarios get us from here to there, such that nobody can adapt to the changes? Is this hyperbole or do you really think that human extinction is the probable result of AGW?
It's an interesting thought. Mass displacement will be a huge issue though. While we do have plenty of landmass in theory, migration of major cities is just.. I cannot possibly fathom how that could ever be organized. We'd panic, loot grocery stores, rob pharmacies, etc. I mean look at what this pandemic has done. You can't even buy cans of beans or toilet paper! My local store is out of bags of dry rice. Of _rice_.
I don't recall where I heard it but before I knew it was a quote, I used to say this all the time: humanity is three square meals away from total annihilation. One day without food and humans will revert right back to our caveman "attack other human, take food" lizard brains.
I definitely went a little off topic from your original post but, "adapt to the changes" isn't honestly something I can fathom happening. I don't know where you live - be it a city or suburbs or otherwise - but think about 30 million people showing up and tell me that doesn't end in a massive disaster.
Massive disaster can be a huge distance from human extinction. A 1% die off is a massive disaster but even a 99% megadeath is 75 million people short of killing us all. I haven't seen any likely AGW scenarios that get us close to that. Maybe someone could point me that way.
I was using the Planet Venus as a historical precedent of what happens to a planet in our solar system in the conditions of a runaway greenhouse gas effect when I wrote that.
I'm a cryptography-focused security engineer, not a climate scientist.
The end of human industrialized civilization is only a reasonable outcome as a secondary effect (e.g nuclear war destroying most of society). And even then I'm dubious if we'd reach human extinction rather than just the end of industrial society.
Even with 5 or 7 degrees celsius warming there's still a lot of habitable land. The main concern is that agricultural capacity will be lower overall. This will disproportionately impact poorer countries that have less resources to do things like improve irrigation infrastructure, or set up large thermonuclear desalination plants to cope with lower water supply.
People in power do and believe what they are told to do and believe. For evidence see the iraq war, the war on terror, etc.
It's on the people in power. If they wanted, they could use the resources at their disposal (media, etc) to change people's opinions almost over-night.
Poor timing for the publication of this report, to be honest. People have finite emotional capacity for dealing with stress/threats. Most people right now, with the coronavirus going, probably don't have the energy to spend on caring about this, so instead they'll just detach from it (I know that's what I find myself doing). Waiting a month or two would've likely meant a stronger impact.
People have been ignoring it for decades now, and it's not going to change due to another UN report regardless of timing. Everyone wants the upper middle class US lifestyle, and the future will have to pay for it.
If they did the report, it's because they hoped to make an impact. All I'm suggesting is that whatever impact they were hoping to make, it could've been larger with better timing. Your defeatism has no relevance to that question one way or the other.
Don't worry, we'll still be "way off track" in two months, and we can bang the drum again then.
It is a drum that needs a lot of banging.
The slowing of economic activity from Covid-19 is going to make it possible to test many climate and environmental models in ways climate-modelers couldn't have dreamed up six months ago. It is possible that Covid-19 will teach our present generations a lot about collective global action. The novel coronavirus is small potatoes in magnitude relative to the impact of climate change, but the timescale makes Covid-19 far more acute.
I don't want to be pessimistic, but I'm working on the assumption that we won't (collectively) enact any plan that (requires coordinated sacrifice of multiple countries) but (allows some country to gain economic / military advantage by gaming the system at others' expense).
So I'm assuming that it's smartest to assume climate change will happen without significant mitigation, and try to minimize the suffering that results.
Now that I think about it, this reminds me a lot of our response to covid-19: I always assumed people lacked the political will for real containment, and we should focus our efforts on "flatting the curve" instead.
89 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadI'm hoping if we can learn any lessons from this, it is better pandemic planning and larger companies finally seeing the benefit of remote work.
Remote work isn't even necessarily carbon positive. In hot or cold weather, transit emissions savings may be more than offset by increased HVAC usage at home.
[Though avoiding business flying is probably a clear positive]
Interesting point regarding HVAC usage, I am curious to see the density required for it to become a net positive.
At least to a thumbnail sketch, back-of-the-napkin calculation, I'd guess not. Most American homes don't have smart thermostats and people just leave their system set to "comfortable" all day long, whether or not the home is occupied.
Most people keep on heating/cooling their home while they are at their office; sometimes to a lesser power, sometimes the same all the time. Office which is also heated/cooled (and had to be built one day, often terribly). So with a regular job, your home emits, your office emits at the same time, and the transportation between those emits too (and had to be built).
The aggregate reduction in economic activity is significant though. Oil prices are halved from their pre-outbreak levels.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90476154/airlines-will-stop-coro...
For it to be a valid trial run, emissions have to be reduced while the world is running as normal.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/coronavirus-china-...
People are willing to suffer short-term privations, especially when they are afraid of getting the coronavirus. People are not willing to suffer for years to reduce their carbon footprints.
It's also notable that the burdens of reducing carbon emissions fall disproportionately on the poor. The fuel taxes in France are a perfect example.
Even though it's unfair, if the choice is "the burdens fall on the poor" and "the burdens fall on everyone (including the poor, who will be hit harder because they have fewer resources in reserve to survive unplanned catastrophe)", the first option is better.
(... it's also a false forced choice; there are other options. But the question of poverty runs somewhat separate to the question of saving humanity from climate change).
It is if there will be civil unrest, leading to the election of reactionary populist governments which roll back emission cuts.
Approaches to the problem that enrage a large portion of the citizenry are counterproductive. They won't work in a democracy, and most of the large polluters are democracies.
The French people are generally considered to be pretty left-wing (at least by outsiders) but they took to the streets as soon as the government raised fuel prices. Imagine how well that kind of policy would go down in Texas.
Poverty is therefore directly related to the question of solving climate change.
Therefore, market to the people climate-friendly lifestyles. Show celebrities doing their part. Make it easy to pick the right option by default with purchases. Encourage more local events and travel. It has been demonstrated that people respond to good storytelling and I don't think that is going to change.
It is a difficult problem to solve for a reason.
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
The French suffered higher overhead energy costs to make their electricity production >70% nuclear. The difference is that this long term suffering is much less severe than short-term suffering.
Coronavirus cases have been growing stably and predictably for weeks. Epidemiologists (and not only they) saw it coming. No panic would have been necessary if calm, decisive action had been taken early on. But somehow the panic seems to be necessary. Normalcy bias is real.
These past weeks have been really instructive about collective human behavior, and have me really worried about our ability as a species to address climate change.
For climate change, we need to demonstrate the ability to proactively avoid a creeping catastrophe that will occur in the medium-long term, where the harm may not happen to current decision makers, but will instead happen to other people who don't get a vote in the decision today, and isn't media worthy since nothing is really changing ("outlook remains bleak").
I disagree. Shutting down major portions of the economy, and the resultant economic damage, would have been quite severe regardless of when it was implemented. Not saying there wouldn't have been less panic, but broad quarantines would have caused a lot of panic in any case.
I listened to Richard Mueller's "Physics for Future Presidents" podcast course, and he presents an interesting conundrum: say you're the mayor of a small town, and a seismologist approaches you with a report of a 15% chance of a devastating earthquake next Tuesday, recommending a citywide evacuation. Being a responsible mayor, you do so, despite the cost and displeasure of your constituents. On Tuesday, no earthquake occurs, and the town repopulates. This happens ten more times over several years, and still no earthquakes (after all, each occurrence is only a 15% chance). Sure enough, another Tuesday, another 15% prediction, and citizens are getting frustrated. As the mayor: do you order another evacuation, especially if it's costing you significant resources and political capital? How can you tell the difference between getting lucky on the numbers, and a bad seismologist? Even if the data is accurate, how do you not succumb to the temptation to play the odds?
If there's any silver lining to our failure to prevent the pandemic, it's that maybe we'll take the problem more seriously on the next pandemic, perhaps one with a much higher fatality rate.
It's easy to mock anti-vaxxers, climate denialists, et al; while an honest inquiry leaves room for nuance, those issues seem to have definitive answers, where reality correlates closely with the so-called consensus. But at the same time, the knee-jerk anti-science reactions should be viewed through a lens of general declining social trust in institutions. Even though those particular issues may be the wrong fields of combat, there's a subconscious sense in which everyday people feel lied to for decades by "experts". Now we're stuck in a boy-who-cried-wolf situation, where the actual experts who are honest brokers and have their shit together aren't being taken seriously. Trust is hard-won and easily lost, and there are massive downstream effects to corruption in truth-finding/sense-making institutions.
To your 15% chance of disaster example from your other comment: I think what you need is a population where a large fraction of people understand where those 15% come from.
Edit: I also want to point out that I didn't find your examples that convincing. Bloodletting was a seriously long time ago, and is unlikely to affect anyone today. Iraq was a purely political issue, and didn't have a scientific angle.
1. The most in-depth writeup I've found reports a fatality rate of ~5x higher after more widespread testing: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/03/12/how-dead...
However, I very much doubt that this is the calculation that went through very many people's heads, say, 3 weeks ago.
I think proof of this is that in all places that have substantial outbreaks, containment measures are getting heavier and heavier with increasing numbers of cases. If that's what you were going to do anyway, then the sum cost (in money, time, human effort) would have been lower if you had started earlier. This is because exponential growth with a factor of 1.33 is still manageable if you have 10 cases, but turns into an overwhelming tsunami if you have 10000.
If anyone can remind me about what I'm thinking of here, that would be awesome... or prove me wrong.
I'm by no means saying we shouldn't be planning and building more sustainable solutions (both policy and products), since that's EXACTLY what we need to be doing. I'm just also saying that to make this all work, I think we need to do more.
And whatever shielding they're doing, the net effect of every ton of CO2 is in the direction of more warming.
Not trying to be too sensationalist, but I believe this is the truth.
- relocalization of industries
- more budget for health
Coronavirus might not get it down by 90% but 50% is certainly possible.
My feeling is that people will feel caged and as soon as they think it's safe, they'll start traveling again and there'll be a giant surge of travel for a couple months, and then it'll basically return to the way it was.
> We are currently way off track to meeting either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets that the Paris Agreement calls for
The article doesn't use the words "planet" or "Earth".
We're not. The Earth, and nature, will be just fine. The question is whether or not the planet will remain conducive to human life.
Just imagine if climate change today were being met by the kinds of panicked direct interventions, quick decisions, and money being released the way is (fortunately) happening for COVID.
The problem is that climate change is still more like the proverbial frog in hot water, while COVID is more like a frying pan.
Happy to be proven wrong!
Doesn't really work with the fact that there's about 7.7 billion people.
We just live in an age where we're hyper-aware of our actions. I believe if we get out of an emergency, "we're all going to die" mindset, we may actually have a chance.
Bringing children into this world isn't doing them any favors; at all.
Things are literally the best they've ever been. They could get much worse but any reasonable prediction still puts us ahead of the expected life of someone in the 19th century.
If you don't want to have children, that's your choice. You don't have to justify it by putting your morality on other people.
---
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
---
(EDIT: HN formatting doesn't like poems)
I don't recall where I heard it but before I knew it was a quote, I used to say this all the time: humanity is three square meals away from total annihilation. One day without food and humans will revert right back to our caveman "attack other human, take food" lizard brains.
I definitely went a little off topic from your original post but, "adapt to the changes" isn't honestly something I can fathom happening. I don't know where you live - be it a city or suburbs or otherwise - but think about 30 million people showing up and tell me that doesn't end in a massive disaster.
I'm a cryptography-focused security engineer, not a climate scientist.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16000870.2019.1...
I'd have to know a lot more before deciding that either a runaway greenhouse or net cooling is plausible, let alone likely.
Even with 5 or 7 degrees celsius warming there's still a lot of habitable land. The main concern is that agricultural capacity will be lower overall. This will disproportionately impact poorer countries that have less resources to do things like improve irrigation infrastructure, or set up large thermonuclear desalination plants to cope with lower water supply.
It's on the people in power. If they wanted, they could use the resources at their disposal (media, etc) to change people's opinions almost over-night.
The way they did after 9/11.
It is absolutely on them; and on no one else.
It's very unlikely that Biden will take significantly more steps to deal with climate change than Trump will.
The political will to deal with climate change simply isn't there; it would piss off too many lobbyists.
It is a drum that needs a lot of banging.
The slowing of economic activity from Covid-19 is going to make it possible to test many climate and environmental models in ways climate-modelers couldn't have dreamed up six months ago. It is possible that Covid-19 will teach our present generations a lot about collective global action. The novel coronavirus is small potatoes in magnitude relative to the impact of climate change, but the timescale makes Covid-19 far more acute.
So I'm assuming that it's smartest to assume climate change will happen without significant mitigation, and try to minimize the suffering that results.
Now that I think about it, this reminds me a lot of our response to covid-19: I always assumed people lacked the political will for real containment, and we should focus our efforts on "flatting the curve" instead.
With a few billion people gone the climate changes will quickly revert itself.