Assuming the most optimistic scenario, how serious a problem is global warming going to be?

There is not but many will wrongly claim that there is. As far as how serious it will be is a complete unknown. Um…. Bad, probably. I’m not even touching the cause here because it’s pointless to argue over it. We all know pollution is bad, few have the actual motivation or even basic knowledge of how to cut it down. Even if we get a handle on our emissions nothing will change the fact that climate is going to change without our help. Those who attribute all of it to human causes need to read up on historical climate/geology those who think we are incapable of influencing our climate don’t understand basic science and those who think we have a perfect understanding of our climate probably think they understand science but really don’t. In the end we simply must adapt and do the best we can to keep this place clean and functioning properly. At least change will happen slowly enough to give us time to adapt. What else is there to say?

Hopefully Miami won’t be underwater in 50 years…. Is that optimistic?

There used to be a consensus back in the 1980’s that we’d never let it get this bad, but we did. That was before the industrial effort to deny and resist reality. Now there is no consensus about how bad simply because no one knows. There’s no way to say what the most optimistic non-denier projection is. Some non-deniers say even the most optimistic cases are extremely, extremely bad.

Well, global warming is just a side argument, really. We ARE going to run out of fossil fuels. If we don’t have a renewable option, that will pretty much be the end of civilization as we know it.

The most optimistic scenario?? Mankind will have snuffed itself out long before it becomes a MAJOR problem!

If it got really bad, Miami will be buildings sticking up out of the water 100 miles from shore. New Orleans? A walled city 50 miles from shore. Or so I’ve heard…

It is certainly not completely unknown. Sea level rise will be a significant problem. Miami is six feet above sea level. Major cities such as London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York and dozens of others are almost as threatened. Most ofthenation of Bangladesh could be under water within a century. Their current population is 155,000.000 (According to the CIA factbook).and they’re Muslims. Where are they supposed to go? India? China? I don’t think so. In a century or less, there could be a billion refugees from flooded areas, and a hell of a lot of prime fam land will be under water. How are people supposed to feed themselves. There’s a real nightmare looming.

@Dutchess_III I’d say running out of fossil fuels is far less problematic than catastrophic climate change.

@Setanta Of course, it’s not just rising sea levels, but densely-inhabited regions becoming uninhabitable (e.g. India, Southeast Asia) – where are those people going to go?

@Zaku How do you figure? I mean, assuming we don’t have a replacement.

A tipping point is coming soon. Maybe all ready too late.

@Dutchess_III Why do you assume we won’t have a replacement? Even if we don’t, the problems would involve us not being able to sustain our industrial and agricultural and transportation practices, and cut back on consumption, and depending on how quickly that occurs and how many alternatives we develop, there will be more or less issues, possibly including lots of human death and suffering.

By comparison, the planet becoming uninhabitable in many highly populated areas, and possibly nearly all of them, is far more deadly.

But assuming that we don’t have a replacement to energy, the loss of electricity, energy as we know it, would be far more devastating then slow-rising sea levels.

My point is, our focus needs to be on finding a renewable replacement for the limited amount of fossil fuels we use now. The impact of the relatively small percent of coastal region flooding would be nothing compared to entire continents becoming unsustainable with their current populations. Mass starvation, disease, everything. Yeah, some would survive and we’d be back to the populations of 20,000 years ago.

And when we find replacements, man-made climate change will fix itself.