The reality is, we just don’t know. I feel confident in saying it will get bad enough to kill food crops on a massive scale and a bunch of people will starve to death. How many is “a bunch”? I don’t know. Maybe billions. Maybe less.
But how bad it really could get, on the bad side, with as many tipping points as could exist, I think it’s impossible to say until it happens. Big changes in the earth’s climate have historically been big. The whole thing was a snowball for like 100 million years. Sometimes the ice caps melt and everything dies. Actually as I understand it, the pretty consistent answer for what happens when a big climate change happens is “almost everything dies” and then the survivors slowly adapt to the new reality. But it definitely wouldn’t be survivable for any kind of civilization (even just on pure food availability grounds) in a lot of the realistic scenarios.
The reality is, we just don’t know. I feel confident in saying it will get bad enough to kill food crops on a massive scale and a bunch of people will starve to death. How many is “a bunch”? I don’t know. Maybe billions. Maybe less.
But how bad it really could get, on the bad side, with as many tipping points as could exist, I think it’s impossible to say until it happens. Big changes in the earth’s climate have historically been big. The whole thing was a snowball for like 100 million years. Sometimes the ice caps melt and everything dies. Actually as I understand it, the pretty consistent answer for what happens when a big climate change happens is “almost everything dies” and then the survivors slowly adapt to the new reality. But it definitely wouldn’t be survivable for any kind of civilization (even just on pure food availability grounds) in a lot of the realistic scenarios.