alt Hacker NewsThe initial pain will be diffuse and not obviously caused by global warming.
For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.
Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.
Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.
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I am not sure how not directly linked to global warming. I am currently on the phone but I remember a study that mentioned that Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh would see a deadly heat (wet bulb temperatures) from basically 0 as it is right now to 30 days/year by 2050 or 2060. I can't remember right now.
If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
"Migration to the colder north..."
Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?
Wasn't a drought originally part of the cause of Syria's collapse into civil war? Climate change is already causing unrest in equitorial countries, mass migration and a corresponding rise in authoritarianism / right wing populism in Europe.
That's the sum of climate change. "GDP growth of 3% instead of 5%."
Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount of otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.
And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.
That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.
By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and is cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives.
Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.