I'm sorry if this is bleak, but I'm very scared about climate change. Is there any sort of hope at this point or are we all just waiting to starve to death? :(
There is always hope. There is always possibility.
Life has clung on to this little spherical rock for 4.6 billion years and has survived unimaginable things. Life will survive this, too.
We have to work together. We have to realize we are all one biosphere, one planet, one people. And work together.
And that kind of change starts with each one of us, in extending more empathy and compassion to each other and to nature, and fighting for what's right.
tldr do the work you can do. it'll help.
I'm a PhD student studying ice sheets, sea level and their interactions with climate and I want to share my thoughts. To start with, human-caused climate change is a Very Real, Very Big issue, but it is *not* an existential threat to humanity or life on Earth. Earth's climate has changed dramatically in the past, and there are pre-historical analogs for the eventual climate we will reach even in the (unrealistically) bad Representative Concentraction Pathway 8.5 emission scenario the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses as its worst case future--which, for reference sees atmospheric CO2 concentrations reach 1200 parts per million by 2100. Life has survived and even thrived in these climates.
The issue is not the magnitude alone of climate change, but rather the speed at which climate is changing. It took hundreded of millions of years for Earth's climate to change from the hothouse Devonian and Triassic periods with over 1500 parts per million (ppm) CO2 in the atmosphere to the geologically cool pre-industrial Quaternary with 280 ppm CO2, and life had time to evolve in response to those changes. Human-caused climate change, on the other hand, acts on scales of centuries, faster than most species can adapt. Some will change on their own to survive, others with the aid of humanity, but this is going to be the 6th mass extinction event (if it isn't already). That is certainly cause for sadness, but not despair. The biosphere will survive and rebound like it did after the 5 previous mass extinctions.
And, of course, humanity is smart enough and capable enough that we will be able to adapt in time. To speak to your concern about famine, there are people working on producing heat-resistant crops, and that work, combined with changes in land use and consumption patterns, will lead to stable food supplies in the future.
The worst problems introduced by climate change are solvable or, at this stage, still preventable. Prompt action now will slow both the rate at which climate will change, as well as the eventual endpoint of that change. Prompt action will give us and the biosphere more time to adapt to the changes that are already in store. Prompt action is emminently doable.
The ultimate scale of climate change is a political problem, and like all political problems it has a straightforward solution: collective organization. Talk to your friends, neighbors and co-workers about what you can each do individually. Your city, town, county or other local subdivision has a climate activism group, join them. If they don't yet have one, you can change that. Begin fighting for local changes to decarbonize the economy since on the small scale they are the most achievable. As the wins start to snowball there, reach out to other neaby groups to fight together for regional (and eventually larger) concerns. Each of us has the power to change the world in small positive ways, so together we can do great things.
The future climate of our planet is in our hands today, and that is a source of hope. Together we have the power to do almost anything.
