Increased drought in some areas, increased flooding in others. Deadly heatwaves. Ocean acidification. Stronger hurricanes. More earthquakes, disappearing of glaciers that supply fresh water, mass biodiversity die-off, massive wildfires. Those are just the most obvious effects. All these increase in severity, frequency, and size as warming increases.

And that doesn’t even get into the non-direct effects on humans; droughts or flooding lead to famine, mass displacement, rise in climate refugees, geopolitical conflict, more volatile supply of fresh water...I could go on and on.

We’ve only warmed by an average of ~1.1C so far and the amount of weather disasters has increased five-fold in that same time period. We’re reaching the point many people are still dealing with a past weather disaster when they get hit by another. Think about that - in a growing number of places, weather disasters are happening so frequently that there is no time to rebuild from the previous disasters, let alone prepare for future ones. And this is only at 1.1C of warming. Under conservative estimates we’ll reach 2.5C within a human lifetime.

Alright I’ll entertain this one final time.

Do you accept or deny the fact that greenhouse gasses cause an increase in temperature?

Assuming you accept that fact...it should be a pretty straightforward realization that putting more greenhouse gasses at an increasing rate is going to lead to more warming at an increasing rate.

I mean the concept of acceleration/rate of change is taught in high school, this shouldn’t be that hard to understand.

😹 is that how you’re interpreting things? I’ll give you a 3/10 on the trolling. Needs some work

Ah I see what’s going on now. Nice trolling job 👍

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of anthropogenic climate change if you think you’re being smart to compare it to previous times on Earth when high amounts of CO2 was in the atmosphere.

Like sure, CO2 has been high before...but 1. That was before humans. And 2. The rate at which we are emitting CO2 far exceeds anything in the past. The rate of change is the issue.

I mean it’s fairly easy to see, just look at this graph:

https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-relentless-rise-of-carbon-dioxide/

In the past, CO2 rose/fell on geologic timescales. This meant plants and animals could adapt. But CO2 is now, because of us, rising rapidly on human timescales. Leaving no time for adaptation. We’re quite literally in an extinction event, and climate change is a massive factor in that.

It matters because more carbon in air = more trapped heat on Earth

We’re not in r/science though, excluding the slight chance that a climate scientist may be in this thread, studies are going to go over pretty much everyone’s heads.

A well sourced documentary will do much better to communicate the science for the average layperson.

Even if there were no feedback loops, 2.5C is more than catastrophic all on its own.

Awww so sad 🥺