My LJ post from 2019; unfortunately it’s aging well.
I keep running into people who call themselves naturalists but are still profoundly ignorant about the ongoing climate meltdown. Let me summarize the current situation so that in the future I can simply send them to this post.
1. The fact that human activity is causing an unnaturally rapid climate change has been known for decades; even oil companies accepted it (as their internal documents show). It is one of the best-proven facts in recent history of science. All subsequent “controversy” has nothing to do with science (or freedom of speech) – it’s a propaganda war waged by oil, gas and coal companies, politicians they have bought, and a few idiots who serve them for free.
2. Constant attacks by paid trolls have made climate scientists overly cautious in their predictions. Also, many secondary causes of accelerated warming and feedback loops making it worse are outside the realm of climate science. What it means is that all predictions are too optimistic. Even the most extreme “climate alarmists” actually have no idea how bad it really is.
3. The climate meltdown is not just unnaturally rapid, it also happens at a time when all of our planet’s ecosystems are already falling apart. The pressure on them has been steadily growing since people killed virtually all large animals on one continent after another during the last seventy thousand years, but in the last 300 years it has been worsening exponentially. Many parts of the world are now basically wastelands, and the oceans are also dying fast. We just don’t realize how screwed up our planet is because no human living today has ever seen a fully functional, intact natural ecosystem.
4. My prediction is that by the end of this century the planet will be 7-10C warmer, 70-90% of all plant and animals species will be extinct, the climate will be too unstable for agriculture, all ice caps will be gone, the air will not be breathable for humans above 1000 m a.s.l., most if not all tropical and subtropical lowlands will be lifeless due to extreme heat waves, and human population will be below 10% of the present level and still falling.
5. It is too late to avert the disaster, but we can still try to avoid the worst. The most effective ways to do it are to (1) get rid of anti-environment politicians by whatever means necessary (all of them without exception are crooks anyway), (2) impose steep carbon taxes, (3) strip fossil fuel, timber, fishing and other extraction industries of all subsidies, (4) heavily subsidize renewable energy instead, and (5) subsidize and promote all methods of family planning, including abortion. It is all very simple and will make our lives better in so many ways.
Naturalist on Earth 
“all ice caps will be gone”, “the air will not be breathable for humans above 1000 m a.s.l.” – Can you explain your reasoning behind these predictions? I understand that you say even “climate alarmists” have no idea how bad it really is, but these predictions are not even remotely backed by science.
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Easy. It is already obvious that we’ll lose almost all forests by the end of the century (5% of Canadian forests burned last summer, the rates are even worse in Australia, and tropical forests are on the verge of being replaced by savanna). Warming oceans mean catastrophic decline in plankton. Moreover, warming means that plants use up more oxygen for breathing while photosynthesis doesn’t go up at the same rate. We are going to start losing atmospheric oxygen, while production of CO2 by burning fossil fuels will be dwarfed by what burning and dying vegetation will generate. That will make breathing at high altitudes progressively difficult. As for polar caps, Antarctic warming is already way ahead of all predictions. That means that in addition to Greenland and Western Antarctic, which are already predicted to melt, Eastern Antarctic will also melt; all those processes involve numerous positive loops and can only accelerate.
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Do you have any scientific evidence that backs up these predictions? I couldn’t find a single paper suggesting that climate change will affect atmospheric oxygen levels to the point where breathing becomes significantly more difficult. Even assuming that the most dire predictions are grossly underestimating the melt rate, nothing comes close to projecting that the entire East Antarctic Ice Sheet will be lost by 2100.
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You are missing my point. No scientific paper predicted what happened to global temperature, South Ocean sea ice, and Canadian forests in 2023. Climate change is moving faster than science predicts. This discrepancy will grow rapidly as more positive loops become activated, because our science is too compartmentalized to successfully take them all into account.
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Okay, so you don’t have any evidence.
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You are still not getting it. Our world is not entirely reflected in published papers. Sometimes you just have to look around.
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I would say that for a complicated problem such as climate change, predictions require actual evidence, rather than just “looking around”.
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Actual evidence is what you observe, not what has been predicted. There is plenty of scientific reports showing that 2023 was outside the range of past predictions. Just what I predicted in this 2019 post.
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Underestimated climate change projections does not translate to “all ice caps will be gone” and “the air will not be breathable for humans above 1000 m a.s.l.” by the end of this century.
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Of course not. But global ocean temperatures being 0.5C above the 40-year average in 2022 and close to a full 1C in 2023 certainly do.
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“But global ocean temperatures being 0.5C above the 40-year average in 2022 and close to a full 1C in 2023 certainly do.” – Surely you understand that such a bold claim requires actual evidence to support it.
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Rising ocean temperatures are all the evidence you need. What other evidence would you expect? We are talking about long-term forecasts; there is no such thing as evidence of the future, and models are now useless because the world no longer works like it did during the period of time on which those models are based.
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Again, none of that translates to “all ice caps will be gone” and “the air will not be breathable for humans above 1000 m a.s.l.” by the end of this century.
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Of course it does. Sea temperature of 40C was recorded this year for the first time. In addition to being lethal to pretty much all ocean life, such temperatures prevent mixing of surface and deep waters, creating yet another positive feedback loop not accounted for by any models. So we are going to lose pretty much all plankton (40% of oxygen production), plus have global temperatures many degrees above anything seen on the planet for millions of years. There will be no ice in a world like that, and hardly any forests.
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