The challenge before many of us is to channel our fear and grief about the climate crisis into choices that safeguard the future: how we provide aid to the most vulnerable, and how we heat and cool our homes, travel, eat and, above all, vote. We commit a grave error when we indulge the fantasy of universal vulnerability — that the world is becoming generally inhospitable to human life. For while we all live on one planet, there are many worlds separating the real victims of climate change from the bystanders.
Distant, what a great word. In this context does it mean “not in my lifetime”, or perhaps “not in this geological epoch” The growing amount of evidence places “human extinction” much closer to one of these options. While we’re on the subject of semantics, perhaps we should examine what is meant by “human extinction” in your comment. Is that the death of the last human, or the death of the way of life we, our parents, and our parents parents have known?
The geological epoch question gets a bit weird in this context because the current one is defined largely by the scale of human impact so it seems like the next one would include a shift away from that in which case there might not be enough of an academic apparatus to name the next one depending on how things shake out.
When I say human extinction via climate is distant I mean that the point where the climate cannot support/sustain any humans at all is probably at least a billion years out.
Obviously there is a lot of wiggle room there for life to look drastically different than it does now. Already species are going extinct at rates the earth has never seen before, people are being displaced by weather events causing immigration tensions and increasing xenophobia, plant and animal habitable zones are migrating with no place for the plants and animals to migrate to due to the scarcity of wild reserves and lack of connection between them to enable movement. Each of these have downstream effects that we don’t fully understand but could reasonably leave existence looking pretty grim for those who adapt and survive over the next several generations.
Obviously this is assuming we don’t deploy nuclear weapons on a mass scale or something which would create a whole different kind of climate crisis
Don’t plan on the world ending. You’ll be in a tough spot when it doesn’t.