Convincing the world seem the hard part. 43% of the forcing greenhouse grasses are currently coming from non amicable regimes. 53% if you include USA, but there's a chance administration is going to change. Beyond declaring what are the small countries options?
climate change isn't an one/off effect but gradual
every bit of improvement is a higher chance to avoid some of the most catastrophic outcomes (where the unlikely but possible worst outcome being a mass extinction chain reaction which humanity will find very very hard to survive in a functioning manner/without losing their future)
so still worth fighting for any improvement even if we can't avoid a catastrophe anymore, as there is a huge margin between what we still can archive, and what we might end up with if we stop fighting and are quite unlucky
But it's also clear, it won't be enough. Emissions are not only still increasing, they likely won't stop increasing in my lifetime (in the next 50 years.)
We must adapt. The earth is going to get a lot warmer, and wetter in some parts, and drier in others, and sea levels will likely keep slowly rising for many centuries to come, if not millennia.
Even though we, collectively, are driving said train. As a believer in the great filter theory[1] it's a shame given how far we've apparently come, only to be brought low by our desires, our inability to believe we could screw ourselves this royally, and our collective lack of give-a-shit to fix it.
I believe in climate change but in terms of a great filter candidate it doesn't seem significant - even in a worst case scenario with a lot of warming there will be large parts of the planet that are perfectly habitable.
On the other hand: nuclear war, genetic engineering, or just plain bad luck (carrington event, asteroid impact) seem much more likely to actually wipe out modern society
Aside from just plain bad luck, the things you list don't happen in isolation. Humans have fought bloody wars over land for as long as we've stood upright. Do you think we'll all neatly organize into the remaining habitable land?
I agree climate change could cause wars but I don't agree with the narrative that it will somehow cause 'worse' wars because... worse than what? We've managed to have terrible wars than wipe out whole peoples, and great power competition that almost destroyed civilisation in the 1960s without any climate change required. It's hard to see how things can really get much worse on that front
I think it's most likely a symptom, not an end result of our stupidity. It's the short-sightedness that lets us keep doing this, that is the same idiocy that will lead us to nuclear or chemical warfare which reduces us back to a pre-industrialized society. Only this time we won't have readily available hydrocarbons we can use to dig ourselves out of it again. We'll be stuck burning wood to make coal.
Interestingly in the UK the industrial revolution actually started with water power, not steam engines. It just so happens that the UK, especially England is actually fairly bad for hydropower potential (too flat).
We'll never know the counterfactual, but I think if coal didn't exist what you would have seen is an increased focus on hydropower instead. That would have meant industrialisation would have been slower and distributed completely differently geographically, but would still have happened in my opinion
Oh cool! Sometimes taking away the easy toys enables us to innovate in completely different directions. Maybe there's hope yet (saying this as a guy who lives at the base of some pretty tall mountains too).
The great filter isn't about extinction necessarily, but about not being able to transcend to a space-faring species. I don't think our ignorance of climate change will extinct us, but I do think the way we handle climate change is a symptom of the short-sightedness and willful ignorance that ensures we won't make it past Type I on the Kardashev scale.
I see your point, but to qualify for the great filter it has to prevent not only us, but most civilizations from continuing as technological civilizations.
I don't see it. Maybe at worst it's a temporary setback, not a permanent one.
it's both true and misleading in what conclusions people might take from it
e.g. if you want the true climate damage done by a country you would have to look at all the damage done by producing all the goods consumed there. This isn't very practical doable. But if you e.g. mass import Chinese goods you can't only blame China for the climate damage done in context of producing those goods (but neither can you take away all the fault from them, they still decide how to produce the goods in the end and we (west) motivate them to do so badly).
This also applies to Oil producing countries etc.
And some non amicable countries are so because they see no way to handle their economical situation if they tried to change it. But if countries where to work better together they might find a way forward. And sometimes innovation can fix that by itself. E.g. solar cells have gotten absurdly good to a point where sometimes they just out compete non-renewables on purely economical benefits. That is, if your government doesn't do regulations to actively prevent this (weather it's by hindering solar or by hugely subventionieren oil/coal/gas).
So the situation is both better and worse then the statistics above make it look. Better as you could move production away from non amicable countries and boycott their products and "convince" some of them by giving them a economical feasible means to improve. Worse because we know this won't happen and it means its not just "their fault" but quite often indirectly partially our fault, too.
Also lets be realistic thanks to corruption, short term thinking(e.g. next election) and sometimes plain stupidity many countries which try to get away from oil/coal/gas have done such horrible bad decisions that they not only completely fucked avoiding climate change but also have put their economy in a thought spot. When then is taken out of context and used by people like Trump as an example why fighting climate change is supposedly a scam.
