> The next generations of humans won't have it as easy as those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world today.
Do you really think so? We continue to make great strides in improving availability of food and clean water and reducing disease and war across the world. Yes, perhaps in ten generations, and for whatever reasons, humanity will be living in a climate 1 degree warmer than what we have adapted to today, but they will be capable of their own adaptation. They will look back at the quality of our lives the same way we look back at the quality of life ten generations before us.
I do. I recommend "The Limits to growths"[1]. As much as I'd like to, I find it hard not to be convinced by their simulations. Pollution is increasing globally, non-renewable resources are getting depleted, renewable resources are consumed faster than they renew. All of this happens at an exponential pace, it can't last forever. Climate change is just a symptom. The whole system is bound to collapse somehow. It just can be otherwise for very fundamental reasons. We live in a unique time of fast growth, it seems natural to think that things will go on just like they've be doing in our lifetime, but they can't.
> They will look back at the quality of our lives the same way we look back at the quality of life ten generations before us.
"In 2016, a report published by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth concluded that "there is unsettling evidence that society is still following the 'standard run' of the original study – in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards".[45] The report also points out that some issues not fully addressed in the original 1972 report, such as climate change, present additional challenges for human development."
Also Al Bartlett: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
Do you really think so? We continue to make great strides in improving availability of food and clean water and reducing disease and war across the world. Yes, perhaps in ten generations, and for whatever reasons, humanity will be living in a climate 1 degree warmer than what we have adapted to today, but they will be capable of their own adaptation. They will look back at the quality of our lives the same way we look back at the quality of life ten generations before us.