It’s mass extinction level bad, but humans probably won’t go extinct. The humans who may live 200 years from now will have a much less beautiful world than we do.
This is the coldest year you will experience for the rest of your life, and this is the hottest year you’ve ever experienced.
There will be fewer humans, perhaps 5% of what we have now - that’s what I glimpse from all the literature. That is not good news: as life will be much less “developed” as a result.
Yes I agree on the likely outcome that the world will be "less developed". But this always makes me think that we should choose this outcome rather than wait for it. That way we'll have more control and we may limit some damage.
If we have to go "back", whatever that means, I'd rather do it voluntarily as the urge to always go "forward", whatever that means, seems to be an underlying cause of our problems.
Basically you are arguing for a soft landing of the climate collapse. Most scientists agree to that.
Whew! Good thing the scientists are in charge
https://unsdg.un.org/latest/stories/climate-summit-2025-scaling-10-solutions-can-still-deliver
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165897
Highly recommend keeping up with climate.us, they're good folks.
Have you had much of a background in the sciences? Interested in learning more about disinformation?
Thanks a bunch!
Interested in learning more about disinformation?
Sure, do you have something that'll help me identify disinformation better?
Mostly it boils down to taking it slow and, depending on the medium, learning how to tell key signs.
Easiest is keeping to trusted scientific journals and news sources. Longer form media requires more study to determine genuine vs AI authorship and of course bias.
Short form media is often harder, but having a good idea about major regional goals, like certain countries for example that may be using botting to create movement towards a certain topic or belief, can help you to see potential biases.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-combat-fake-news-and-disinformation/
If short form media is twitter takes and 60 second shorts, I have learned to almost immediately dismiss them until supported by more evidence.
And there's also commercial social media algorithms that take advantage of their extensive data hoarding to stagnate and dogmatize opinions.
Mostly it boils down to taking it slow and, depending on the medium, learning how to tell key signs.
Then I guess it's mostly just experience and intuition, like learning how to pirate stuff safely online.
To a good point yea, it's experience based, it's why the top schools are already exposing the topic of disinformation and media literacy to younger generations. Trust but verify is an excellent mantra, take time to properly think through and challenge new information you encounter, keep a change of pace to stay mentally fresh, destressing yourself when possible all work together to keep a healthy learning mindset.
It's essentially a holistic approach to learning and processing.
Unfortunately, geopolitical interests, personal ideology, and everything in-between will make true online objectivity nearly impossible, so learning to best navigate it is pretty much the only approach for now. Besides keeping offline as much as possible.
However bad you think it is, it's worse.
So much worse. Remember–climate scientists are scientists. They only say what they know. They regularly get caught with their pants down by new ways things can collapse.
It's going bad, and worse than we thought.
Seven of nine planetary boundaries now breached:
A major new scientific review, “Planetary Health Check 2025”, shows that seven of nine planetary boundaries have now been exceeded. For the first time, this also includes the boundary for ocean acidification. This means that several of Earth’s life-supporting systems risk crossing critical thresholds, with severe consequences for both ecosystems and societies.
The only good news is we're a lot closer to mass rejection and lynching of the fuckers who did this.
As the other commenters have already shared, things are going poorly. An issue with climate change is that concrete consequences are delayed behind our actions, there is already more warming baked in. But I worry about the focus on the binary good or bad outcome on climate change and the people who say things like "it's too late." (fossil fuel astroturfing pushes this phrase btw). Climate change is not binary and it's never too late for us to try prevent worse things happening.
Despite unfavorable political winds in some developed countries, there's progress in developing nations and, most importantly, India and China. China is spending nearly $1 trillion/year on green energy and infrastructure. They clearly want to dominate the global green energy economy. India is adding big solar capacity too. And solar is also taking off across Africa, where off-grid diesel generators are being directly replaced with small-scale solar systems. Since electricity for solar is now the cheapest form in many areas of the world, it often pays for itself and keeps increasing as an attractive investment.
We thankfully already have the most of the technology needed to address climate change (carbon-free energy, energy storage, better power grids, more forests and less cattle). And green tech keeps getting better, I like the channel Undecided with Matt Ferrell to keep up with tech advancements. But no technological progress will be enough if fossil fuel companies keep drilling. As things worsen, the political appetites will also certainly change.
Mostly bad but with u certainty and some hope.
However carbon emissions have plateaued in quite a few countries. We do have technologies like solar, wind, grid storage, EVs that will have significant impact and are rolling out. It’s not enough and way too delayed but it’s a good start
If we don’t pass any climate tipping points or all the extinction boundaries, we can recover over a century or two
Mandatory part so people don't come at me as a denialist:
We've done a bad job, close to as bad as we could have. Government policies have been a drop in the bucket, and there's already a lot of backlash to them. Coral reefs are going to go extinct, or close - I just can't imagine any other scenario. Coffee and chocolate might get hard to come by.
We've lucked out and technology change looks like it will stop us from digging deeper and deeper. I think we would have otherwise.
But, there is hype in this thread.
Is it a smart decision to start moving to higher/colder regions yet? What can we do?
Waterfront property might be sketchy. Ditto for agricultural property where it's supposed to really dry out. Just for living, as opposed to making a living, people already manage in Arizona and Kuwait. Climate change will be expensive and uncomfortable, and I'm already really tired of wildfires, but unless your reaching us from the cyber cafe in your Bangladesh village you'll likely personally survive.
The main thing I can think of that you can personally do to adapt is be prepared for weather emergencies. You probably know some of the tips to avoid contributing.
We've reached a point of no return on many aspects of climate change. Over the decades the climate rhetoric of climatologists has changed from preventing climate change, to damage control.
It's not going well on the latter either...
Nuclear war would be so much worse.
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