I would like to add a point that is rarely spelled out:
A shock-therapy style stop to fossil fuel extraction will kill millions of people through starvation, economic collapse and insufficient heating in winter. Depending how shocking the shock therapy is it could be billions.
Wait until you see what climate change does with continued carbon emissions!
But this has always been the problem with stopping climate change.
We are choosing between lesser, but certain immediate pain vs larger but less certain future pain.
In the 1880s we could have easily stopped climate changed, but been forced to slow growth. The pain would have been minimal for those living, but the probability of extreme catastrophe seemed remote so nothing was done.
As we move forward the probability of extreme catastrophe becomes more certain, but so too does the immediately pain.
Without modern fertilizers which heavily rely on fossil fuels to produce, roughly half of the world population cannot be fed. Further, agriculture becomes much more labor intensive and we pretty much revert to the past where the majority of the population on earth were farmers. If you don't know how to farm effectively using past methods, you probably also get added to the "cannot be fed" list. That is a substantial immediate pain. I would much rather work to gradually reduce carbon emissions while mitigating the damage done.
I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.
> I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.
Oh, much worse.
First off we, fertilizer or no, we're already facing crop failures in the US [0] and will continue to face even more extreme crop failures [1]. Even if we had unlimited fertilizer we've already signed up for massive famine.
But if you really want to talk about the unmitigated climate change path, which is what happens if we choose not to keep hydrocarbons in the ground, I really recommend reading Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky [2].
He's a respected geologist that makes a compelling case that the vast majority of mass extinction events were caused by rapid rises in CO2.
One of the realistic scenarios we're facing, he argues, is the break down of the AMOC ultimately leading to the oceans becoming anoxic and releasing hydrogen sulfide rather than oxygen. The entire marine ecosystem is essentially wiped out except for some cyanobacteria. The oceans are the foundation of all of our food systems. It would make the planet uninhabitable my most complex life of today. This has happened before in Earth's climate history.
All of the "bad-awful" but not-extinction event scenarios assume that we do not burn all of the fossil fuel reserves currently leased. We are already looking at a grim future, but given that we're rapidly pumping millions of years of stored CO2 into the atmosphere, upper bounds for the damage we can do are tremendous.
Sounds like the classic trolley problem where your choice is to pull a lever and immediately kill half the world's population because 100 million kilometres away, the entirety of life on earth is comfortably resting on the train tracks. You're saying, let's pull that lever. I'm saying, let's organize a project to move the trolley tracks since we have ample time to do so. Sure some people will get hit by the trolley as it races by while the track is still being moved, but it sure beats killing 4 billion people in one fell swoop.
First off, I'm not saying "starting tomorrow now fossil fuels!", I'm saying you must keep fossil fuels in the ground to avoid worst case. And the start of that means you have to identify some fossil fuels that will never be extracted.
> since we have ample time to do so.
I seriously have no idea where you got that impression, but with climate change once you start feeling the effects you're already in the danger zone. We've already signed up for famine and potentially billions dead even if we had zero emissions today.
I do suggest you read up a bit more on the topic. No serious research around climate change would claim we have "ample time".
The bigger question is: how close are we to climate "tipping points". We do know that geologically it seems there are points where positive feedbacks start accelerating climate change rapidly. We just don't know where the line is for those tipping points.
If we seriously want to avoid extinction of the species we should already be starting to strategize a schedule of what fossil fuels reserves we promise to keep in the ground, and what we're going to do about future discoveries.
To be honest, I don't really think we will do this, but if we wanted to survive at all we should start talking about it very seriously.
A shock-therapy style stop to fossil fuel extraction will kill millions of people through starvation, economic collapse and insufficient heating in winter. Depending how shocking the shock therapy is it could be billions.