Quote:Don't mean just keep burning the shit out of coal and oil until the planet cooks. It'll all run out, eventually.Ugh well we have hundreds of years worth of coal reserves. There's really a lot of it. We basically have the ability to make the planet mostly uninhabitable if we keep burning that stuff. There's also more esoteric concerns like "don't use all of the easy fuels, because what if we need to bootstrap a civilization again?" or "what if we need coal-powered giant robots to fight magical monsters?"
It's not really clear where the tipping points are, which is part of the problem of modeling. It's a planet-sized nonlinear system after all. Some things are obviously thermodynamically irreversible, like phase changes -- in this case things like ice melt, methane clathrate evaporation, permafrost thawing causing gas release, etc. But we are are already committed to a warmer world. At least 1°C rise will happen by 2100, if we stopped burning all fossil fuels today. So yes, we need to deal with the fallout. And lots of people already have been doing this, starting with the engineers and insurance industry.
But at the same time it's probably worth it to prevent the world from turning into a Dark Sun campaign. (Although I have to say things are looking more and more Shadowrun every day.) Preventing consequences gets much harder if you keep causing more of them; both sides of the problem have to be dealt with.
Your post sounds like you're in the bargaining stage of grief, which I believe comes before the "Brooklyn rage" from sea level rise.
-- ∇×V