We just passed 1.5C, we will almost certainly pass 2C by about 2035 and its going to be catastrophic. Far from decreasing CO2 emissions we are not only continuing to increase but doing so at an increasing rate. We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more and we run the real risk of collapsing civilisation if we don't change urgently.
But we sure did make a great profit on those datacentres so worth it to destroy the planets habitats.
I would bet a very large amount of money that we will not have climate change induced civilizational collapse by 2050. Or 2100, if I'm around to see it.
I too will bet a large amount of anything that will only be valuable if civilization does not collapse that civilization will not collapse, even though my pessimistic nature inclines me to expect civilization's collapse.
Offering to make a bet and put some skin in the game is sometimes a very sincere and persuasive expression of confidence in one’s position. In this case, what you’re offering will be valueless if you lose the bet.
I think you're probably right, but there's an enormous gap between "things start to go really bad for everyone around us" and civilization collapse.
Remember, WW2 didn't bring civilizational collapse. In fact one could argue it even accelerated industrial development. Doesn't mean much to those who perished.
There are a bunch of confident predictions like yours that I feel ignore higher-order effects. Climate change won't make the earth uninhabitable, but it will cause more frequent droughts and other disasters, driving up food prices and causing a lot more climate migration from poor countries, which is already causing fatal societal autoimmune reactions in much of the first world. Additionally, for a while I thought the stories about people deciding not to have children because of climate change were an exaggeration, but it's now widespread enough that it's clearly a real trend which will probably accelerate as climate change drives CoL up further, which in turn is a huge headwind on civilization.
I think I would take the opposite side of your bet, maybe not at even odds but not at terrible ones either.
Personally I think we could end up like the old SF series Incorporated. 95% of the worlds population living in hellish conditions, 5% living a great life.
Civilization collapse for the temperate zones of the Globe, probably not, but civilization collapse for parts of Africa and Central Asia, most likely. Temperatures are getting out of hand right now, with 50+ Celsius happening more and more. The world is not ready to handle hundreds of millions of climate refugees, if these people need to leave their countries in order to be able to survive.
I think at some point everyone must face the fact that they're not on this planet by themselves.
Depends on how you classify the collapse of civilisation.
It seems highly plausible that there will be a large exodus of humans from previously habitable zones as the temperatures increase and access to food and water become highly variable. Some areas will likely still have access to decent agricultural conditions (e.g. greenhouses can help to control the local climate in order to grow food), but there will undoubtedly be increased conflict over dwindling resources.
This is an incredibly short sighted and ignorant view. If you live close to the equator, the climate is visibly changing and is becoming borderline deadly.
> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more
99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Every species eventually goes extinct, species going extinct isn't much of a motivator to go around making humans suffer. We can't stop species going extinct but we can make people comfortable.
And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
This is an absolutely unhinged take. We're facing civilizational collapse because we couldn't be arsed to stop burning fossil fuels, not because we didn't have other options. We've known how to do solar, wind, and nuclear for decades, we've known about anthropogenic climate change for decades, we've known the risks, and we've done absolutely nothing about it. This is a problem of will, not capacity.
Edit, because I'm guessing the "civilizational collapse" line's going to catch the response, instead of the "will, not capacity" part:
Pick any one of:
* Sea levels rise by 2-3ft
* The jet stream breaks down
* The north atlantic current breaks down
* Large swaths of the globe between, say, +/-33deg off the equator experience heat waves sufficient to make being outside more than ~30 or so minutes unprotected a life threatening event for normally healthy individuals multiple times per year (note these areas of the planet contain several billion people, and not the rich ones).
* Climates change sufficient to move productive agricultural zones substantially outside of where they've been for roughly the entire industrial area, causing regular crop failures and unpredictable food prices
* Large scale droughts and flooding become a regular event
* Category 5 becomes the low side of what we'd expect a hurricane to hit
And walk through the political, economic, and social ramifications of it, and then realize we're looking at all of them - and we're already seeing the beginnings of them _today_.
Even during the worst collapses, massive species extinctions took centuries or milleniums. Doing it in a couple of decades instead is unprecedented.
Species extinctions are insignificant if evolution and migration can allow other species to fill niches left behind. This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution. And while migration is significantly disrupted by infrastructure.
As to your second comment, solar is the cheapest energy.
Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.
Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.
Anchoring against the cumulative number of species that have ever existed is a strange baseline, that's a metric that will emphasise "hey, life on earth is old" but makes it very hard to say if there's anything unusual or not about the current period.
The more common baseline I've come across is comparing the estimated rate of species extinction from the last century or so versus the baseline historical extinction rate.
To pick an arbitrary article about extinction rates with citations to published research:
> But this estimated [background extinction] rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past.
> In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.
> If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.
> civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels
I don't understand the reasoning behind that. Obtaining fossil fuels, refining and delivering them to where they are needed all requires a substantial number of systems working together. Disruption to e.g. refineries will stop people from being able to use fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, alternate sources such as solar and wind are cheaper and require far less civilisation to make workable (e.g. setup your own solar cell and plug it into your isolated supply).
The record shows that civilizations collapse when they deplete their resources or otherwise live out of balance with their environment. Which civilizations collapsed because they did not use enough resources?
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels.
There's a limited amount of fossil fuels on Earth. We definitely are going to stop using them as a major energy source at some point because of that, the question is if we get to get a choice as to how we reduce and stop using them or let the production curve peak and the economy collapse once that happens if nothing was anticipated. With additional climate change to deal with by that point.
> 99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do.
Ehhhhh this argument is hopeful at best. The problem is we're changing the temp faster than base keystone species' evolution can adapt.
Without them it's super super unpredictable what'll actually happen.
The worry being mass extinction because we lost plankton or similar. Huge amounts of oxygen production and co2 capacity disappears rapidly with that.
> Far from decreasing CO2 emissions we are not only continuing to increase but doing so at an increasing rate.
Objectively untrue. Globally, though the rise over the last couple of decades is disturbing, emissions are most likely leveling off again; they may have broken past the mid 2010s levels and appear to be rapidly rising in the last few years, but this is just a slight "over-recovery" from the impressive ~5.7% drop in 2020 (mainly from COVID restrictions of course). US emissions peaked in 2005 and were ~18.6% lower in 2023 (the last year of Our World in Data figures). And, you know, China is pivoting.
Reminder that we have enough nuclear fuel to power all of humanity with zero emissions for hundreds of years. Anyone who’s talking about this issue and not pushing nuclear is likely trying to use it as a political tool instead of actually trying to solve the problem.
Most people pushing nuclear are trying to sell fossil fuels for another 50 or so years and delay implementation of cheaper solutions. If we committed to building out nuclear today, we'd get our first one online in about 20 years. We need about 1000 of them in the US, which would take a lot longer than 20 years.
I'm all for nuclear, specifically nuclear fusion, specifically the great big fusion reactor in the sky that bathes the Earth in more free energy in a day than we as a planet use in a year.
Eh. Not really anymore. Except at extreme latitudes, solar + battery now beats Nuclear on year round cost and especially on time to installation. It's only going to get more stark as time passes.
Doubt this will happen. Coal production in the US has plummeted, coal mines and infrastructure is not coming back. At best they would import cheap coal (but maybe not with tarrifs?) but even that would require sizable capex in ports… its just not gonna happen.
A developer in the Bay Area just spent 10 years litigating for the right to build a coal terminal at the Port of Oakland, and having won the suit now intends to go ahead and build it, aiming to go into operation by 2028. So clearly some people with sizable capex at their disposal disagree with you.
When all the carbon frozen in the permafrost of Siberia is released back into the ecosystem, the Earth with once again look like a tropical paradise it once was, being able to sustain giant cold-blooded reptiles.
(Well, not sure they actually were reptiles, but most likely cold-blooded.)
How does self hosting change the power consumption? Don't you still need to power those devices? If you're running fully on renewable, sure you have a point. But if everyone self hosts, the power companies still have to fill the energy gap, right?
We started seeing the "smoke" when Reagan became President after Carter put Solar Panels on the White House. Each President (& Congress) since then kowtowed to the Fossil Fuel industry to varying degrees.
The GOP was the leader but the Democrats added to it but pretended they cared. At least the GOP told the truth that they were out to destroy the Climate.
We had almost 50 years to work on it, but people who could lead decided they wanted to keep their jobs and bribes instead of doing good for the US and the World.
These were initiated by Nixon, removed late in the Reagan era when the roof was replaced, then new panels installed by Bush 2, followed by more under Obama.
being realistic given the current administration, the best avenue for those that care about climate change would be to lobby their representatives for nuclear and specially coal to nuclear transitions (https://www.energy.gov/ne/coal-nuclear-transitions) and lobby for more government funding directed to accelerate this. This would be palatable to the current administration while also supporting the goal of less c02 and other emissions.
Heck this also takes away any incentive to restart the coal plants by private companies if they are being financially supported and already in the process of converting them to nuclear, and it takes away an incentive to build more long-term because each nuclear plant provides a lot more power on average. Another thing to lobby for would be for more SMRs funding and less regulation overall in nuclear (it's insane how overly regulated nuclear is based on one soviet fuck up of a crappy underfunded/flawed powerplant (chernobyl). Fukushima plants (commissioned in 1971!) were hit with a once in a lifetime 9.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on top despite being less than 100 miles from the epicenter even with regulatory lapses and no direct deaths.
What do you suppose this administration dislikes about solar that wouldn't be equally unpalatable about nuclear? Keeping fossil fuels propped up is the only reason I can see solar not being an easy sell to Trump. Domestic solar panel production could be the space race of our time, and fit right into the tariff narrative, with the right prompting.
Eh. This is less of a US political party problem. We aren't the only consumers and emitters. Even if we were, I don't think this _really_ is democrat vs republican. Silicon Valley types vote left. Also pushed gaming, cryptocurrency, AI, internet marketing, and everything else that helps us consume more dumbshit.
Readit News
But we sure did make a great profit on those datacentres so worth it to destroy the planets habitats.
Remember, WW2 didn't bring civilizational collapse. In fact one could argue it even accelerated industrial development. Doesn't mean much to those who perished.
I think I would take the opposite side of your bet, maybe not at even odds but not at terrible ones either.
Back to serfdom that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series)
I think at some point everyone must face the fact that they're not on this planet by themselves.
It seems highly plausible that there will be a large exodus of humans from previously habitable zones as the temperatures increase and access to food and water become highly variable. Some areas will likely still have access to decent agricultural conditions (e.g. greenhouses can help to control the local climate in order to grow food), but there will undoubtedly be increased conflict over dwindling resources.
Sure, we won't collapse to Mad Max levels, not in the West at least, but our quality of life will decline steeply.
[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20231218-why-olive-oil-...
This is an incredibly short sighted and ignorant view. If you live close to the equator, the climate is visibly changing and is becoming borderline deadly.
the scale of impact goes beyond extinction, to encompass wiping out entire system types.
99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Every species eventually goes extinct, species going extinct isn't much of a motivator to go around making humans suffer. We can't stop species going extinct but we can make people comfortable.
And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.
Edit, because I'm guessing the "civilizational collapse" line's going to catch the response, instead of the "will, not capacity" part:
Pick any one of:
* Sea levels rise by 2-3ft
* The jet stream breaks down
* The north atlantic current breaks down
* Large swaths of the globe between, say, +/-33deg off the equator experience heat waves sufficient to make being outside more than ~30 or so minutes unprotected a life threatening event for normally healthy individuals multiple times per year (note these areas of the planet contain several billion people, and not the rich ones).
* Climates change sufficient to move productive agricultural zones substantially outside of where they've been for roughly the entire industrial area, causing regular crop failures and unpredictable food prices
* Large scale droughts and flooding become a regular event
* Category 5 becomes the low side of what we'd expect a hurricane to hit
And walk through the political, economic, and social ramifications of it, and then realize we're looking at all of them - and we're already seeing the beginnings of them _today_.
Species extinctions are insignificant if evolution and migration can allow other species to fill niches left behind. This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution. And while migration is significantly disrupted by infrastructure.
As to your second comment, solar is the cheapest energy.
Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.
The more common baseline I've come across is comparing the estimated rate of species extinction from the last century or so versus the baseline historical extinction rate.
To pick an arbitrary article about extinction rates with citations to published research:
> But this estimated [background extinction] rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past.
> In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.
> If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.
https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-ar...
Solar is cheaper now. Has been for awhile.
I don't understand the reasoning behind that. Obtaining fossil fuels, refining and delivering them to where they are needed all requires a substantial number of systems working together. Disruption to e.g. refineries will stop people from being able to use fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, alternate sources such as solar and wind are cheaper and require far less civilisation to make workable (e.g. setup your own solar cell and plug it into your isolated supply).
There's a limited amount of fossil fuels on Earth. We definitely are going to stop using them as a major energy source at some point because of that, the question is if we get to get a choice as to how we reduce and stop using them or let the production curve peak and the economy collapse once that happens if nothing was anticipated. With additional climate change to deal with by that point.
Ehhhhh this argument is hopeful at best. The problem is we're changing the temp faster than base keystone species' evolution can adapt.
Without them it's super super unpredictable what'll actually happen.
The worry being mass extinction because we lost plankton or similar. Huge amounts of oxygen production and co2 capacity disappears rapidly with that.
https://berkeleyearth.org/august-2025-temperature-update/
Objectively untrue. Globally, though the rise over the last couple of decades is disturbing, emissions are most likely leveling off again; they may have broken past the mid 2010s levels and appear to be rapidly rising in the last few years, but this is just a slight "over-recovery" from the impressive ~5.7% drop in 2020 (mainly from COVID restrictions of course). US emissions peaked in 2005 and were ~18.6% lower in 2023 (the last year of Our World in Data figures). And, you know, China is pivoting.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
> and its going to be catastrophic.... But we sure did...
This attitude tends to inspire unproductive doomerism rather than urgent change.
No, that is true already. Look at the "rate" tab of the Mauna Kea data, it shows growth on average. Of the rate of CO 2 growth.
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/gr.html
France's nuclear electricity isn't even that cheap and they were all built decades ago.
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https://oaklandside.org/2025/09/22/oakland-coal-terminal-leg...
When all the carbon frozen in the permafrost of Siberia is released back into the ecosystem, the Earth with once again look like a tropical paradise it once was, being able to sustain giant cold-blooded reptiles.
(Well, not sure they actually were reptiles, but most likely cold-blooded.)
I wonder if the vast chunk of humanity that shares this trait will be able to survive the scenario. I doubt it somehow.
The GOP was the leader but the Democrats added to it but pretended they cared. At least the GOP told the truth that they were out to destroy the Climate.
We had almost 50 years to work on it, but people who could lead decided they wanted to keep their jobs and bribes instead of doing good for the US and the World.
For this, I fully blame Reagan and his enablers.
Heck this also takes away any incentive to restart the coal plants by private companies if they are being financially supported and already in the process of converting them to nuclear, and it takes away an incentive to build more long-term because each nuclear plant provides a lot more power on average. Another thing to lobby for would be for more SMRs funding and less regulation overall in nuclear (it's insane how overly regulated nuclear is based on one soviet fuck up of a crappy underfunded/flawed powerplant (chernobyl). Fukushima plants (commissioned in 1971!) were hit with a once in a lifetime 9.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on top despite being less than 100 miles from the epicenter even with regulatory lapses and no direct deaths.
(And where did you get 9.5 from?)
I wish I was kidding.
Citation needed. The famous SV names are all dumping money into right wing authoritarian political causes.