Charts show how little progress has been made in limiting greenhouse emissions
I&#x27;ve thought a lot about climate change and it&#x27;s consequences. If we trigger runaway warming through feedback loops involved permafrost and ocean (hydrates) methane - things are going to get really, really bad. This happened when ~5C degree warming from millions of years of the Siberian traps eruptions caused methane hydrates to be released into the atmosphere, triggering another ~5C warming and the greatest mass extinction on Earth, the End-Permian Extinction, also known as &quot;the Great Dying&quot; where 96% of marine species went extinct, and 70% of terrestrial species. Clearly if that happens, we&#x27;re really in trouble. I don&#x27;t know how likely that is, or what the trigger point would be. The climate today is not the same as it was 250M years ago.<p>On the other side of the coin, the Earth is uncomfortably cool these last few million years. We have these repeated periods of glaciation. Having Europe, Russia, Canada, and the northern US ground to dust beneath kilometers of ice would be a bit of tragedy too on a similar scale. That it&#x27;s further away in the future doesn&#x27;t make it less of a problem - if we&#x27;re too aggressive solving climate change we could imagine a future where we have to deliberately pump methane into the atmosphere to stave off an ice age. For better or worse we seem to be at no risk of this through our ineptitude in responding to climate change.<p>For people worried about coral reefs dying, it happened less than 10K year ago at the end of the last ice age. Sea level rose 400ft and drowned the world&#x27;s coral reefs. They bounced back, as you can see today. They will also bounce back from climate change - it will just suck in the meanwhile. There are undoubtedly things we can and will do to make it suck less, like developing heat resistant corals, planting reefs further north&#x2F;south, etc.<p>For people worried about coastal cities being submerged, relax, you&#x27;ll be dead by then. Long term, we should be moving our investment to more sustainable areas. But infrastructure doesn&#x27;t last forever anyway, so I think a lot of that may occur naturally as people just stop developing new infrastructure in low-lying areas. There&#x27;s no question it will cost us though.<p>If you&#x27;re really worried about climate change for your descendants, get Canadian citizenship. That&#x27;s one of the few countries likely to benefit from climate change.<p>So to sum up, climate change is not all bad, just mostly bad, until or unless it runs away on us, and then the doomsayers may be right for a change.