Massive crop failure, higher sea levels, hotter summer temperatures leading to greater risk of forest fires etc.
Bravo, you produced the classic list but none of these assumptions hold under critical thinking, there's very little scientific proof to support any of them.
Your mistake is this: you have seen how the climate models fit within the predictions of 1.5degC average temperature rise as happened so far, and extrapolate that the 3degC increase predicted by the same models is true. Fair enough, this is likely close. Then you go on and read that this causes massive crop failures. Yet in reality, you are not seeing any proof for
this claim. While the climate models are relatively well tested, the
crop models are not, and unlike climate where the 1-1.5degC rise can be verified from old data, there is no such a thing for crop failures. If there is, it assumes non-adoption of farming land, while in reality the drought is a bigger problem in areas that are poor for farming already, while increasing temperatures enable farming in new areas.
If significant crop failures were to occur after what, 2degC? 3degC?, we should be seeing clear signs of this already. I checked:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/the-dark-side-of-cobalt/msg4962169/#msg4962169 . Now wheat crops continuing to increase is not proof of the opposite, there are other crops than wheat and so on, and maybe there is some sudden steep decline after 2.5degC average rise or something, but this data sure is a red flag and reminds us about the
burden of proof.
Higher sea levels is nearly irrelevant, it does not matter, the change is meaninglessly small and slow. All examples I have seen used to show sea level rise being relevant have been not about sea level rise, but local land sinking.
Hotter summer temperatures indeed increase the risk and seriousness of wildfires, but the key question is not what are the contributing factors, but what are the
root causes for these fires. Again using common sense, I question why 41degC summer temperature does not "cause" forest fires but 43degC suddenly does? You don't have to dig very deep and not even into "alternative media" to find out these forest fires are almost exclusively started by human action and in alarmingly large number of cases, on purpose i.e. arson. While pyromania is well documented over the whole human history*, only in 2020's people who think pyromaniacs exists and are dangerous are called
conspiracy theorists, even when they can point out credible sources describing these incidents.
*) specifically, pyromaniacs have recorded tendency to stay close to the fires they start, assist in putting them out, so seeing arsonists among firefighter should not surprise anyone
While mitigating the
contributing factors is generally a great idea, I think much better results against forest fires could be had by attacking the root causes and direct factors, through education ("throwing out cigarettes is dangerous") and sanctions / fear of sanctions. This is how we deal with most other types of crime, too.
While at it, I have nothing against reducing CO2 as much as we can, through effective measures.
You can already see some of that happening to the Greek islands now. And it will get worse in Australia.
Yep, ecoterrorism. In Australia specifically, see e.g.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51125898 . Note that police has been able to
prove over 10% as arsons, and that is obviously only the tip of the iceberg because police has to state their reports based on undeniable facts. And this is a really serious issue: even if we could stop fossil fuel use completely, the climate stays roughly what it is now. The same temperatures and summer drought continues. If we do nothing to the actual root cause of the fires, they are not magically going to stop, because we are only attacking the secondary, contributing factors, significance of which is probably overestimated by orders of magnitude.
If this steep relationship from 1.5degC temperature shift into significant increase of wildfires were true, then it surely should mean there were very little to no wildfires in the past. Again, I checked:
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-wildfires . Just some random statistic from the US of A but it's something. Number of wildfires has stayed relatively constant, even decreased a bit.
I would guess even in 1980's, arson was a thing. Then they would have not been called ecoterrorists, though. We always have anti-society forces and will always have them, and it is important for a human being to be on the "right side of history". Road to hell is paved with good intentions and thus, if you want to destroy societies from the inside, you need some excuses for those
useful idiots to drive your destructive agenda. Fighting against bad capitalists was cool at some point, now it's fighting against those who "destroy the nature".
Feeding this from mainstream media as a colossally bad idea. We can already see how Greta's "climate movement" basically formed around boycotting school and education. Climate activism is pretty much all about war against science. In real world, science and engineering, and people in STEM is exactly what we need to solve the CO2 problem. And I won't call it a "climate crisis" because I don't want to. It's an important problem to solve nevertheless as excessive use of fossil fuels mostly do harm, not only to climate but to political stability as well (it's enough to say, look at which parts of Ukraine the gas and oil fields happen to be.)