Nuclear power

[The Grand Nudger]

 I saw recently Bill Nye said that the solution to carbon pollution will be electric airplanes and carbon capture. And that is very naive. But who has the answer? Frighteningly, no one seems to have.

There probably isn't any single answer to be had.  Fossil fuel and fossil petroleum products have provided us with a multitude of solutions to a wide range of disparate problems.  The Answer™ is going to reflect that.  

Electric airplanes and carbon capture - great ideas if we can manage it well.  Carbon capture is universal - electric planes hit one of the big three (eat,move,build).

[Anomalocaris]

We should be clear that no realistic scenario of climate change would lead to direct threat to “long-term survival of the species”. Any scenario in which climate change act as an ultimate cause that leads to threats to survival of species requires a chain of proximal contingent causes.

So investing on thwarting these more proximal contingent causes is likely a more effective approach to avoid the unlikely threat to long-term survival of the species than investing all resources on reversing the climate change.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

On the other hand, if you address the ultimate cause, the proximate causes go away. If never address the ultimate cause, the proximate causes never stop coming at you.

For example, global warming is the ultimate cause of more intense cyclonic storms, but it’s the storm itself that’s the proximate cause of your house being flattened. I suppose you could continue to perpetually invest in ever-stronger houses, but that’s not really addressing the problem.

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

On the other hand, if you address the ultimate cause, the proximate causes go away. If never address the ultimate cause, the proximate causes never stop coming at you.

For example, global warming is the ultimate cause of more intense cyclonic storms, but it’s the storm itself that’s the proximate cause of your house to be flattened. I suppose you could continue to invest in ever-stronger houses, but that’s not really addressing the problem.

Boru

It is not possible to fully address the ultimate cause,   Ultimately “everyone loses if you don’t pull your weight” is usually not a adequate incentive for calculating economic classes, states and organizations to pull their weight. 

Proximal causes are not random.   They don’t just keep coming randomly.    A large body of them stem form the mismatch between the social, economic, political and geopolitical structure we inherited and conditions expected to pervail as climate change proceeds.   Address the mismatch, and you drain the pool of potential proximal causes considerably.

Because the targeted nature, and greater immediacy of their direct consequence, proximal causes offer more  room for better match between who pays the price and who gets the benefit.    So effort to address these proximal causes would be more likely be successful than efforts to reverse the ultimate cause,  so adapting that strategy would likely make a greater difference to probability of species survival than the strategy of revering the ultimate cause.

[Jehanne]

The issue here is death & annihilation of the human species, and, perhaps, all mammalian life.

That is a vast exaggeration of the potential consequences.

So much so it discredits the entire topic

The IPCC Sixth Assessment is available for all to read:

According to the WGI report, it is only possible to avoid warming of 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) or 2.0 °C (3.6 °F) if massive and immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are made.In a front-page story, The Guardian described the report as "its starkest warning yet" of "major inevitable and irreversible climate changes", a theme echoed by many newspapers as well as political leaders and activists around the world.

Wikipedia -- IPCC Sixth Assessment Report

If you think that Humanity can survive a 2.0 C increase in World temperature, you and I will simply have to agree to disagree.

[Mister Agenda]

Humanity can survive, but not in its current numbers...each degree of global temperature increase result in about a 5% loss in crop yields. Add in sea level rise, more acidic oceans, increase in tropical diseases, extreme heat waves, more wildfires, more storms with more precipitations, fresh water shortages, and damage to ecosystems from extinctions; we're looking at severe economic and political instability. It's going to be rough and I don't see how we still have 8 billion people at the end of this century. The potential human die-off is in the hundreds of millions. Maintaining a global technological civilization under those circumstances is going to be challenging.

[Anomalocaris]

We can have 8 billion people at the end of this century despite an 1.5 degree global temperature rise because:

1. We are considerably more than 5% below the global carrying capacity even accounting for the fact that utilization of available carrying capacity will decline as a large percentage of the global become more developed and its population grow wealthier.

2. A increase in utilization efficiency of greater than 5% is expected over the next few decades

The threat doesn’t come from exceeding diminished total carrying capacity of the globe. It comes from conflict and population movements arising out of uneven distribution of the loss of carrying capacity.

We could see a billion people dying from killing each other because some people resent the fact that they suffer loses due to what they perceive to be other people’s behavior, or because those with surplus carrying capacity will kill to w preserve the ability to capitalize on the bonus regardless of consequences to others. But we won’t see a billion people dying merely because climate change really makes it impossible to support them.

[Jehanne]

Some biologists see the Earth's carrying capacity as being at 2 billion human beings, and so, experts disagree on this one.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sounds like a social goal. It's not really possible to understand any given persons cc estimates without understanding their specific metrics...but 2bil is pretty low...what with there being 8bil of us right now. We've not run out of food, water, or space yet.

[Angrboda]

Sounds like a social goal.  It's not really possible to understand any given persons cc estimates without understanding their specific metrics...but 2bil is pretty low...what with there being 8bil of us right now.  We've not run out of food, water, or space yet.

I see you've fallen for the holograms!