What I think:
Climate change is happening. It’s consequences for us (personally as a state country and world) will be massive.
I doubt there’ll be many people left to tell the story by the second half of this century. While global population is going through extreme growth and not slowing there is no way it won’t plunge suddenly and dramatically as some critical limits to sustainability are reached. This sort of population crash is easily observable in nature.
Most species will go extinct. Species extinction is now rapid.
The seas are dying fast.
Climate change will hit food supply hard and also global finances (right down to all our personal finances). Yes we may not be able to afford to buy food if Australia’s food supply is not already all committed in overseas sales contracts.
Will we turn Earth into a boiling hell like the planet Venus? We deserve to be damned in the court of cosmic judgement if we do. I think it will go very hot but can’t imagine it will go that hot. More like 200 degrees maximum whereas Venus is over 800 degrees.
I think we have started something that we do not have the capacity to stop (like pushing a canoe over Niagara Falls). It is not a case of trying to engineer a reduction to CO2-equivalent emissions of a former time because the CO2 already up there will work its effects for a millenium with all its feedback loops being triggered unstoppably. We’re in a system which is sensitive to initial conditionsand those initial conditions are well and truly set and the whole show is running towards its inevitable conclusion. Like a thundercloud building in the afternoon sky.
How long have we got left? Haven’t got a clue but I think we’ll get very uncomfortably hot in our own lifetimes. After living through a very peaceful era in this country in my lifetime I don’t feel any certainty that it will stay that way for my final shortish stretch of years. Might get very harsh and violent very suddenly but obviously I’m hanging out for it not to. Just desperately want it to stay stable not change just keep going along from day to day ok. I deeply want to be able to go down to the local greengrocers and buy fresh fruit and veges and be able to feel safe and pay our bills and just be be healthy be happy find ways to be useful do what we can. That’s all precious and that’s what climate change threatens – everything basically.
In QLD drought is a HUGE threat. The rainfall has dropped dramatically for Brisbane. We’ve had our first warning and escaped by the merest whisker but we haven’t learned the lessons. SE QLD has so many people and growing with our water supply unreliable in the extreme. And our food-growing depends on water too.
Then there is our income source: mainly coal. Top greenhouse gas producer. Doesn’t really matter what we think or do about it the rest of the world has woken up to coal being something to wean off fast. They are getting their act together rapidly. We are seeing a revolution in energy technology and with it will come a revolution in our income. As in dwindling.
If not coal tourism! Totally dependent on air travel and ocean cruises! Now there is an income source we wouldn’t want to look closely at from a future perspective!
But in the meantime our farmlands will be devastated by mainly foreign interests grabbing everything they can – with almost no benefit at all to Australians. Nearly all the profits will flow overseas. In fact I entirely predict we will not only be left with little benefit but also with a whole heap of big debts and costs.
We’ll likely see wars certainly including Australia quite likely also in Australia. For resources such as minerals food-growing land and water. The only thing that will stop some of these wars starting is selling our assets off so cheaply to foreign interests that it will be cheaper and less trouble for them to just buy them than to fight us for them. Except there’ll be competition from foreign vultures – it won’t just be us they’ll be wanting to move aside. We’re seeing competition already inside Australia as our sense of unity and common welfare is eroding fast we are fragmenting into clans of self-interest more than willing to grab resources and cut out others.
There will also be a tidal wave of environmental refugees from countries around the world severely overpopulated far above their carrying capacity often as a direct consequence of extremely poor policies around family planning coming under extreme stress of degraded soils water sources drying up completely (aquafers rivers fed by glacial meltwaters failing rains encroaching deserts) resources running out. We show pathetic inability to either defend our shores or to determine where we sit in defending our own chances of surviving just a bit longer in a world of people slipping into the inevitable doom of climate destruction that will hit here at some stage too.
There is a big question of how we face this stuff. I know that I’ve personally gone through some very deep grief and depression as I read and understood and realised just what we are facing. There is the grief of losing so much: literally our whole world our whole species future. The only way I’ve found through this is acknowledging how precious it all is.
I don’t see any reason to blame anyone for what is happening except maybe some of the big corporates especially big media when they lie and distort the truth of what is happening and confuse people. I cannot see any justification for that. Every CEO and political leader is in the same boat (Earth) after all. None of us can escape. I don’t feel any more at risk here as an ‘ordinary citizen’ than if I was wealthy or powerful.
But can we be gentle on each other and comfort each other. Or will there be trigger points when people turn on each other en masse in wars and massacres in thuggery and power-grabbing of remnant resources? Will the police crack down brutally to maintain an increasingly harsh state?
My “hope” image is one I read about people in a plane crash into the ocean holding each other in the water chest to chest. Not so much about surviving the unsurvivable but about going into the night gently comforting those you are among at the time.
Right now I’m going through a stage of: “It won’t make any difference what anybody does – we can’t ‘save’ the world and there really is not much that anybody can do to destroy it any faster than we are collectively doing through CO2 emissions.” A form of grief and giving up. I’m ready to focus on the time left and just being.