Decline, part 1: Imminent climate catastrophe

Industrial civilization faces multiple levels of problems, from the specific to the general. Our single most urgent specific problem is climate change, which we have caused, and which is already troublesome and getting worse. We’ve been warned for decades that climate change would have harmful effects around the world. While many wallowed in denial, most of the rest of us comforted ourselves that the bad things would happen much later, decades or centuries from now, or somewhere else, in poorer nations. After the last two years, with extreme-weather records being smashed regularly and hundreds of people dying as a result, anyone who is paying attention knows that climate disruption is real, it is happening now, and it’s happening around the world, including right here. Let's explore some of the sober scientific predictions of our future.

 

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