Fair enough, I was oversimplifying.

It’s only a small portion of the climatology academic consensus that considers a massive population correction and civilization collapse. Specifically, if the average global temperature reaches pre-industrial mean M +4℃, (NASA page) our infrastructure will not be able to sustain support of a global population of one billion people (some scientists predict significantly fewer humans can survive.)

Granted, that’s a big contingency. We’re headed towards M+4℃ rapidly and we’re watching as contingencies accelerate the rate the global temperature climbs, whether from massive methane releases from the Siberian tundra or the ocean heat absorption declining as it acidifies. (I’m not fully aware of the correlative relationship in that one)

And yes, a lot of factors might mitigate or reverse the process. Many nations are accelerating their response to global warming concerns, ramping up sustainable energy resources over those that produce greenhouse gasses. We may engage in one or more geoengineering projects which mitigate the global temperature rise.

But right now, the projected trajectories don’t look great. Without some major push by the world’s nations and companies (that is, our oligarchical elite) we’re still going to see M+4℃ before the 22nd century.

But who cares? If it’s just a handful of Cassandras wailing about the world turning into a Roland Emmerich movie setting, then the rest of the community isn’t so bothered, right?

Well, here’s the thing: The rest of the academic consensus just doesn’t consider projections like that at all. They don’t deny that this is the expected outcome, or suggest scenarios in which we can endure M+4℃ and be fine. They’re not even imagining we’ll imminently solve the CME problem with settling on the moon or Mars. They’re just assuming that something amazing will happen between now and then and will postpone M+4℃ indefinitely, or at least to some future century.

They’re also not looking to deeply into what that something amazing might be. We don’t have think-tanks designing large geoengineering schemes. We are working on small steps that bring fusion energy closer, make solar energy and wind energy a little more sustainable. We are collectively doing a lot of not-big things that are definitely not going to slow down the speeding runaway train that is M+4℃

Furthermore it’s not like everything will be peachy at M+3.99℃ and we have nuclear holocaust as the needle hits the +4℃ tick. We’ve long known M+1.5℃ is going to be a shit show, as the coasts get hammered by hurricanes, more of the equatorial belt becomes unlivable and nonarable, more of our vert and forests burn (or are stripped by industry – that’s still a thing), and these factors are going to make it harder to organize the large scale projects we need to offset the infrastructure we depend on. (Mom, in Flagstaff AZ just sent a picture of her porch last week showing Montana levels of snow.)

Then there’s the sociology, which few people at all are thinking about, that it’s much more profitable to exploit disasters than it is to prevent them, that our billionaires are more inclined to build shelters in which they can pretend to be safe or create secret missions to Mars (that are likely to fail Stockton Rush style) than they are, create huge projects that serve the whole of society. So we can expect charitable contributions towards climate crisis mitigation to spring up like charitable contributions towards saving Haiti. As I said, the human animal has a tragedy-of-the-commons problem that we have yet to solve.

As for sources, Wikipedia teems with discussion of these matters, and there are some insightful pop-science climatology series on YouTube that dives deep into specific issues, either how we’re fucking ourselves, neat technology that might help, or how a specific situation can be unfucked. There are also ones on how shit is getting bad, is going to get worse and we really don’t want it to get worse. The internet has a lot of resources even while our search engines deteriorate.

And yes, in most climate science, the ongoing consensus is we really don’t want it to get worse and we’re doing way, way, way not enough to prevent things from getting worse. They like to leave it up to the rest of us how much of Titanic has to be underwater before be decide it’s actually going to sink.

I’d love, love, love, to be wrong. I’d like to imagine that humanity’s finest hour is yet to come. But my experience of human nature is we tend to not solve problems and let them become no-longer problems anymore. And we really are waiting for Greta Thunberg to try harder.

The outcome of least-resistance of the climate crisis is projected to heat the world to M+4℃ by 2100, possibly as early as 2040 or 2034 in very-worst-possible-timeline scenarios (clathrate guns, and biodiversity extinction acceleration and stuff like that). Famine and resource wars and no small amount of cannibalism is likely to be the order of the day. At that point we’re not going to be thinking about preserving Chopin and Shakespeare, but enough food to last the migration.