Our consumption is the deadly weapon killing the planet. I have been living and preaching low Carbon for decades, and so far nobody - not one friend, family member, has followed my examples in minimizing energy and goods consumption.
I have lived most of my life without a car, without flying, with no consideration for fashion, without packaged or imported foods, reducing, repairing, re-purposing and recycling. When I lived in Boulder I got my clothes, parts, and some gear from dumpsters around student housing, and electronic parts, tools and instruments from the fabulous surplus store(s). Walking, bicycles, and buses sufficed for transport, and I was living in a tourist/recreation destination so I could walk or bicycle to vacation spots. In 50 years of reading, observing, and thinking about all the aspects of climate change including both causes and effects, these are my conclusions:
Every consecutive IPCC report shows that the acceleration of warming is beyond the worst case of the prior report, because 97% of climate scientists are trying to stick to collated, peer reviewed meta-studies that run years behind, and unwilling to accept there are multiple contributing positive feedback loops not considered in mainstream science because the implications are too dire.
A few scientists have been sounding the alarm on melting clathrates, even though there was ample evidence of the present danger and rate of change going back to 2014. The vast bulk of excess CO2 and heat has been absorbed by the oceans, and it is affecting the deeps, the 70% of the Earth's surface that is more than a kilometer under salt water. There have been sparse observations of Methane bubbling at depth, but it is consumed by Methanotrophic bacteria living below the hypoxic layer, and so is being turned into CO2, accelerating the pH decline and not being counted because atmospheric Methane concentrations are not reflecting this pathway.
This means we may be past the tipping point, but unable to observe it. Methane evolution from Arctic regions is being observed as rapidly accelerating, but the Carbon trapped as Methane Hydrates under the big oceans dwarves all other fossil fuel deposits, and it is a degree or two from melting and par-boiling life on the surface. We will probably not observe this feedback loop until the deep ocean depletes of Oxygen, and it suddenly bubbles out of the ocean all over the world. It will absolutely be too late then, because it also means the bottom ecosystem is dead - because it was aerobic!
All life is cycles, the paradigm of progress is FALSE. Even what we think is "Renewable" is usually NOT under the human regime of progress.
You have probably heard the phrase "rich volcanic soil". Fresh lava has a mix of all five dozen bio-essential mineral elements, which get released into volcanic watersheds by seepage and lichens. These elements accumulate in soil stored in clay particles, organic complexes, and thousands of species of soil organisms, and then recycle as plants grow and die, returning the minerals to the soil around their roots.
Humans broke this cycle by CIVILIZATION. The two pillars of city building are importation of food, fuel, and fiber; and exportation of sewage and other wastes. This creates a one way journey, with our crops and ‘managed’ forests extracting bio-essential minerals from the soil, transportation to towns and cities, and from there the ‘end of cycle life’ destination is mixing with water and flowing to the ocean in ‘modern’ sanitation systems. Sure, minerals were always lost through hydro-geological flows of groundwater and river systems, but agri-business accelerated it orders of magnitude so Nature’s recycling became inadequate. Ancient civilizations going back to earliest known in the Hindu Kush have desertified previously verdant land in this manner. In fact, humans have annihilated half of all forests, some 3 trillion trees!
We have also killed or blocked all of Nature’s workers who used to transport the bio-essential elements uphill. These include anadromous fish that grew in the ocean but spawned upstream, mainly salmon, herring, and eels; flocks of wild birds; and migrating wild herds of grazing fauna, now all extinct, endangered or corralled. Our soils have depleted so much from mechanized agriculture, dams and irrigation, urbanization, and flush toilets that the nutrient density of food in supermarkets is down 75% to 99% relative to the 19th Century.
OH! But it gets worse. Mineral elements on the oceans’ surface move up the food chain to the apex predators which sink to the bottom when they die, providing Carbon fuel and mineral building blocks for the bottom ecosystem. These elements, freed from volcanic rock, thus return to the mantle as the ocean floor is subducted - except for those few species that have evolved to feed in the deeps and return to the surface with a load of mineral rich feces! Yes, the entire global ecology was fertilized by whale poop!
So stupid humans ‘harvested’ 95% of the whales in the 20th Century, some 3 million whale carcasses which each used to haul three to five TONS a day of mineral rich organic material up from 3,000ft underwater, feeding the ocean which then fed the land. But no more! We have lost 300 billion tons of mineral rich organic matter to the cold depths of the ocean, spread over 140 million square miles. There is no technological breakthrough that can get those minerals back!
As evidence of the affect, a survey of oceanic plankton concentrations repeating the physical methods of the first global survey (aerial and satellite don’t work) showed that the base of the surface food chain is down 70% over the last 100 years. Humans have killed roughly 70% of all life on Earth, and we are in the top ten extinction events already.
We are not the next species to extinct, but soon.
It may not be too late if we go Carbon negative now; stop eating flesh, fowl and fish; stop mining and burning; stop driving cars, flying planes and sailing ships; and reduce the human population to a sustainable number, which I estimate is around 2 billion. I think most people will die from being unable or unwilling to make these changes.