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A Personal Blog
by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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I am no climate change denier. I generally accept (without religious fervor) the consensus opinion of leading experts as the being the most likely conclusions based on the information we have at hand. That consensus opinion, as far as a I can tell, says that man-made climate change is real and will have enormous impacts on our lives and economies. But I am unaware of any consensus opinion of leading experts (or even a considerable minority opinion) that suggests that man-made climate change, as we understand it today, will (or even may) lead to the extinction of humans. See https://www.livescience.com/climate-change-humans-extinct.html (“Scientists predict a range of devastating scenarios if climate change is not kept under control, but if we just consider the direct impacts, then there’s some good news; it’s unlikely to cause our extinction. ‘There is no evidence of climate change scenarios that would render human beings extinct,'”); and https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/13/18660548/climate-change-human-civilization-existential-risk (“The fact is that even the most pessimistic reports, evaluated responsibly, don’t suggest climate change will end human civilization,”).
Overstatements, and cheesy ones like this video in particular, do harm to the movement for responsible action on man-made climate change. They preach only to the choir, alienate good faith participants in the process who are focused on trying to understand the issues and facts, and give ammunition to climate deniers as evidence that climate change advocates are lying.
Yes, you are right, current projections don’t suggest the earth will become uninhabitable for humans, only a chunk of it.
And seas rising will submerge many of the major cities on the planet (and almost all of Florida), but we’ll have beachfront property somewhere inland. Ice caps will cover much of the UK, but Brits can move to other parts of the EU (er, whoops).
Crop growing zones, like the wheat zone, will shift; but so what if we can’t grow wheat here, they’ll do it in Canada and Russia.
Entire species will go extinct, the ocean fisheries will collapse, but we can eat stuff from vats, so that’s OK too.
Plus we’re in the throes of demonstrating how well we deal with the coming pandemics, so that’s nothing to worry about either.
So, yes, there is an allegorical element here. But the real situation is almost as dire. And dire tends to bread violence. And we have an awful lot of very dangerous weapons…
Don’t be a dinosaur.
It’s a cute video, but the dinosaur is wrong — climate change won’t make humans extinct. It’ll merely make billions of humans miserable, a lot of us dead, and it’ll make “hell” a routine part of the weather forecast almost everywhere. Extinction is an exaggeration, though. People with enough money will do just fine.
I’m absolutely rooting for anyone working against climate change, but also extremely pessimistic. The time to take action was twenty years ago, but damned near nothing’s been done, and the rich and powerful don’t give a damn, so nothing’s going to be done except a lot of ‘conferences’ with caviar on the snack trays setting goals that won’t be met.
You can’t even imagine the shitscape world unlucky survivors will inherit in fifty years, but it’ll be the Garden of Eden compared to fifty years after that.