Will climate change significantly affect our species?
I'm wondering what other DUers think.
Regardless of other species (I don't want to neglect them or suggests our fates are not linked, but for the sake of the question), do you think that climate change will extinguish the human race or radically re-adjust is dispensations, eliminating modern life as we have come to know it, for instance?
I'm not asking if we can yet avoid its major effects, but will we?
Is the petroleum industry so powerful that it will take us (and sadly thousands of other species) over the cliff?
What do you think?
= new reply since forum marked as read
from the trees LOL
Humans will survive unless something really bad happens like a meteor the size of the Manhattan hits us 
Of course he still pees on the carpet so I can't do everything right 
We're already seeing effects from the current planetary heat loading.
We - the aggregate global "we" - have no way of voluntarily slowing carbon emissions significantly and rapidly, where "significant and rapid" means something like an 80% reduction within 20 years. Effective international agreements cannot be achieved even for slow and insignificant reductions.
Carbon emissions are tightly linked to economic activity. Around 70% of all economic growth is attributable to the growth of energy consumption. (See Gail Tverberg's article from a couple of days ago: How our energy problem leads to a debt collapse problem.)
1. If the world economy keeps humming, CO2 will keep rising. Eventually the world's heat loading will be enough to cause widespread crop failures with all that implies. We may be within 20 years of that point.
2. The only thing we know of that would reduce human CO2 emissions significantly and rapidly is a global economic collapse. That of course carries its own set of existential risks: it would trigger the Four Horsemen, with results virtually indistinguishable from the first case. The probability, timeline and severity of such a crash is unpredictable, but the state of the world's economy and finances at the moment makes me very pessimistic.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is a partial collapse of the world economy. A partial collapse that cut economic output and CO2 emissions by 50% or so within a couple of years, and 75% within a couple of decades might put us in a sustainable situation for the longer term, so long as we didn't have access to the resources or energy required to rebuild the economy to its current level. If we were able to rebuild from a 50% economic collapse we could see an oscillating, stair-step decline that could look like this:
We will go extinct, but not any time soon. There will be time for a lot of heartache and misery between now and then. Let us pray...
