as well as killing the indigenous communities, the caretakers of the environment for thousands of years
Can we please stop dehumanizing indigenous peoples by pretending they have a mystical bond to the environment? Western culture is not a prerequisite for anthropological environmental devastation. Indigenous North Americans wiped out native woolly mammoths, horses, cave bears, lions, and cheetahs. Easter Islanders chopped down almost every single tree on the island, driving every native tree species extinct along with the animals who depended on them, ruining the soil quality, and devastating the ecosystem. The Mayans wiped themselves out by using slash and burn farming to bloat their population, which led to a huge drought that killed a huge fraction of biological diversity in the region. The Nazca systematically deforested large pieces of Peru and collapsed when those trees no longer held back the desert. Their land is still incredibly arid a thousand years later.
Aboriginal Australians, the Anasazi, countless other indigenous peoples have utterly devastated their environment. It is humans who are dangerous. We have to learn to be better than anyone who came before.
The global climate/fossil CO2 situation is returning the planet to conditions last seen about 3-5 million years ago, at present. There was no ice age cycle at that time, and sea levels were perhaps 16-17 meters higher than today (of course, during ice age maximums, sea levels fell several hundred meters relative to present). CO2 levels in this period (the Pliocene) were comparable to current period, somewhat above 400 ppm. The Arctic was largely ice-free, and the tropical warm pool in the oceans expanded northwards:
However, we've already pulled the trigger, as CO2 levels are already above 400 ppm and thus, adaptation to the new conditions is absolutely required. This will require a huge redirection of civilizational resources over the next century. It would also make sense to eliminate the source of the problem, fossil fuel use, from the energy mix. Coal use has increased and is now pretty steady around 7.5 billion tons a year globally at present, and every oil & gas operator's long-term plans include maintaining current production levels for the next 30 years. This translates into a growth rate of atmospheric CO2 of about 2.5 ppm per year over the next 30 years, so about 490 ppm in 30 years can be expected.
Today's climate won't equilibrate temperature-wise with today's atmospheric CO2 forcing for at least 100 years, and sea level rise will likely continue for many centuries after that. Now, would it be possible globally to phase out fossil fuels and replace with renewables at a reasonable rate, say 1-3% per year (complete replacement in ~30-100 years)? Yes. Is there any interest in doing this in any major fossil-fuel producing country? No.
Humans, we must conclude, are rather stupid monkeys that are socially incapable of long-term planning, and would rather fight wars over control of diminishing resources than coordinate their activities to preserve those resources.
We squandered it all, and in exchange we got strip malls, plastic baubles, and disposable food containers. If I weren't a human myself, I'd be watching its extinction from the sidelines while saying, "Good riddance."
Can we please stop dehumanizing indigenous peoples by pretending they have a mystical bond to the environment? Western culture is not a prerequisite for anthropological environmental devastation. Indigenous North Americans wiped out native woolly mammoths, horses, cave bears, lions, and cheetahs. Easter Islanders chopped down almost every single tree on the island, driving every native tree species extinct along with the animals who depended on them, ruining the soil quality, and devastating the ecosystem. The Mayans wiped themselves out by using slash and burn farming to bloat their population, which led to a huge drought that killed a huge fraction of biological diversity in the region. The Nazca systematically deforested large pieces of Peru and collapsed when those trees no longer held back the desert. Their land is still incredibly arid a thousand years later.
Aboriginal Australians, the Anasazi, countless other indigenous peoples have utterly devastated their environment. It is humans who are dangerous. We have to learn to be better than anyone who came before.