You could just go watch the 15-year-old movie An Inconvenient Truth. It's not perfect, but it gives a pretty good overall view of the consequences of climate change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth

We won't "all" have to do anything -- much of humanity will merely find it awkward. It's the poorest people who will suffer most: they can't afford to relocate, or rebuild infrastructure, or switch to cheaper foods when crops fail because they're already buying the cheapest things.

Western nations will likely buy their way out of it, outside of the occasional hundred-year-flood becoming decadal. The real pain will just be hundreds of millions of deaths and many hundreds of millions more people displaced. It's not an apocalypse. It's merely intense misery on a vast scale.

Nobody is expecting us to cut off fossil fuels entirely, or immediately. Any decent plan will require decades. We could have been well on our way, if we'd started decades ago when this became obvious. The basic physics of climate change are really very, very straightforward: carbon dioxide is opaque to infrared, and if you double the concentration you will increase the temperature. The economics of it are less straightforward, but it's clear that it's a vast amount of energy being pumped into a system, which will cause damage somewhere.

Congratulations! That dissonance you are experiencing is your psyche's natural response to propaganda. Don't supress it!

Remember that fear is the most powerful emotion, it hits the hardest and stays with us even when the source is gone or proved to be a lie.

Just like COVID, when all the news papers and experts agree, and you cannot even question the facts without being attacked, you can be pretty sure you are being lied too.

In the long term, people will just migrate away from the badly-affected areas, towards areas that are positively affected by global warming, i.e. more northern parts that are currently too cold to farm/live/...

It's not something that will happen overnight, but neither is global warming. At the end of the day (or century rather), it'll just be a couple million people migrating, same as what happened in the last ice ages, just on a massively larger scale.

Presumably this is the video:

https://youtu.be/-8CQ0QHbUG4

Yes.

Someone did figure it out, 4 decades ago. The answer was to stop burning fossil fuels.

The people who got rich and powerful from fossil fuels didn't like this answer.

We could have just phased them out over 4 decades, but instead we spent 4 decades undermining politics, society, capitalism, expertise and starting a few wars to maintain the status quo.

Luckily, they didn't stop all progress and we now have great, cheap alternatives for basically all use cases that previously required burning fossil fuels.

Now we just have to roll them out.

We're still being delayed by people who benefit from that delay, but it's at least possible they've not doomed us all. Which is nice.

If the climate changes too quickly before nature can adapt, we can kiss a lot of the animals and plants we like goodbye as well. And then we can kiss a lot of ourselves goodbye as well. Some people handwave and say things will adapt, but then they also reflexively underestimate the complexity of vast systems, and generally, are not to be trusted.

Climate aside, the ocean is also full of plastic. There's microplastics in every sacred, hidden place on this planet now. That was also a gargantuan own-goal and we should definitely eliminate the vast majority of disposable plastics from consumer and industrial applications.

I actually think that Putin's war in Ukraine is just a scapegoat. Price increases started mid year 2021. War certainly didn't help though.

Have to admit that I am even more confused now after your answer. It's another one of those that I consider too broad and philosophical for me to understand. I absolutely agree that we need to find a solution and optimise for more efficient use of finite resources. We had warm water from solar cells in 1980's and I am pro nuclear energy and optimistic about the future.

I think I grasp the fundamentals but I still can't visualise what will actually happen if we continue as is. That's the path I am searching. Some missing piece of information that will make my brain 'click'. Maybe I already know but just can't accept it yet.

> I think I grasp the fundamentals but I still can't visualise what will actually happen if we continue as is.

I wish I knew where to start. It was frustrating for me to know that we could have fixed it, but we didn't. It might be more upsetting to learn about it now that it's too late. In any case, I'm sorry to hear what you are about to learn, if you are willing to seek the truth. Even if you aren't, the future is coming, sooner than expected.

> I actually think that Putin's war in Ukraine is just a scapegoat. Price increases started mid year 2021. War certainly didn't help though.

I actually agree with this. The only reason I brought it up as an example is that I had no idea Russia and Ukraine were such significant exporters of wheat, so that had a direct connection to the cost of breakfast in my country.

Truth is, the twin pressures of COVID-19 and this war is causing a lot of inconvenience. That, and other factors I'm not aware of.

> It's another one of those that I consider too broad and philosophical for me to understand.

I guess the simplest way I could put it is this: a disruption in the supply of wheat from two countries has caused the cost of breakfast to almost double in mine.

Relating it to climate change: if a small rise in temperature causes crops to fail (because they cannot survive in such temperatures), food will become expensive everywhere. What happens when many people cannot afford to buy food? They riot.

If you're American, you might remember the chaos of the George Floyd protests. That kind of instability is not good. No one wants it.

What I feel I need to add is the obvious: burning fossil fuels is not the only way climate can change. It also happens naturally, and other natural forces like volcanic eruptions or comet strikes can destabilize a region's climate.

So we burning fossil fuels is not the only thing we should care about. Sustainability thinking must go beyond that.

The only other thing I can say is this: too much change too quickly has a lot of negatives we want to avoid. Uncertainty is expensive. Climate change causes a lot of things to change too quickly for comfort, and no one wants that.

Most conversations around climate change come down to that fact.