Is going to? It's already happening. We've seen increased heat stroke deaths. We've seen animal populations get displaced.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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Climate scientist here: what is there to reconcile? Slowing and eventually stopping warming is definitely possible, even inevitable, the question is just when and how fast we can do it, and what the repercussions are. Every fraction of a degree warmer is worse, so we should be taking as much mitigation action as fast as we can. Mitigating earlier is better than adapting later.
Sorry if you think Im throwing shade. I just dont see how mitigation is possible.
Use less fossil fuels. We have the technology to have electrified public transport, for instance. We just don't have the political will or the financial backing. This is not really a problem that scientists are well equipt to solve.
Mitigation is always possible. If we don’t do it intentionally, eventually the climate will force our hand. This will result in billions of human deaths, extinction of many organisms, and massive destruction of the current global ecology, but it will happen.
Remember, the Sahara wasn’t always a desert, and North America was more than once covered in ice.
We’re likely to die off due to poisoning the environment long before the climate makes a significant dent in our 8bn population.
We’re not going to escape sea level rise or some places becoming uninhabitable, nor a redistribution of water and total destruction of all weather models. But we can slow the changes to the point where we can adapt faster than the climate changes… and the more we mitigate, the more lives we save along the way.
I had to reckon with this as a civic-minded class of 2000, we got the early digital everything and they had such fanfare for bringing us up, and into the future, a gateway to a new generation - and as kids, we had media for 20 years telling us something had to change - they told us Millennials were going to solve the looming problems of the past. But then we found out the world didn't really want those changes, and we burned out like Great Value Incandescents. Then it was several years of "how do I plan a retirement against the coming climate wars..." and then the Great Despair where I just did drugs for several years and gave up,
Yes, constantly.
Most people, imo, don't have a good idea who the scientific community is and what their discussions look like. The scientific community is made up primarily of working class nerds who work at universities and suppliers and contract companies, and they communicate through blog and magazine articles in publications by and for other academics.
If you go to a scientific conference, you'll see talks and panels on this subject and it's a routine topic at coffee breaks and drinks in the evenings.
The scientific community has been discussing this topic literally longer than anyone else.
As others said, it's generally a routine thing. I did once see a Mastodon post from a climate scientist, where they expressed that they're losing hope.
If that's the kind of reconciling you're talking about, I imagine every climate scientist has gone through that, but it's something they tend to deal with individually rather than stating it publicly.
The problem is that you don't want to give the public the impression that it's hopeless. Fossil fuel corporations will use that against you. And it just does not make rational sense.
Any amount of greenhouse gas that we don't put into the atmosphere makes our lives easier. Even if you give up hope for some particular goal, you would still want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible, so that it doesn't become worse sooner.
Climate change already affects our lives. We really don't want it to become worse sooner.
Yes they have already reconciled that it is already happening now. They are figuring out how to stop it so that all life on Earth doesn’t go extinct…
But then Nestle says "Life? Or profits today?.....PROFITS!!! FUCK YO' WATER SUPPLY!!! I DO WHAT I WANT!!!"
There are virtually no scientists that think all life on earth will go extinct.
That ALL life will go extinct is hard to imagine, but many scientists do see a high chance that humanity is going extinct (due to climate collapse) or, at the very least a population collapse of >95% is certain to happen within 200 years.
Civilization collapse in 200 years is pretty plausible, which would go along with 95% of the population dying. For humans to go extinct would take better than 99.9% dying. 5,000 individuals would be a comfortable minimum viable population for humans to survive.
Yeah, if they were in one place. Not 5000 remaining survivors scattered all sround the world. Also, keep in mind that this would be an ongoing catastrophe, not something the world will just bounce back from once the humans are gone.
Well, the scientists are talking about 95%, which is 400 million people, and if people started dying out due to climate, you would see regions where people have a better time living. These would most likely be in the temperate bands, which are a narrow strip across South America and Africa, and a larger strip across North America and Eurasia. Those northern bands are thousands of kilometers long, and people have traveled those distances on foot before. Moreover, those 5000 people don't have to be in one place, they need to join up in a few generations at worst. Also, climate collapse isn't instant, as we are experiencing it right now, so those 5000 can start congregating before the collapse is complete. For reference, 0.1% of 8 billion is 1.6 million people. 5000 people is a third of a percent of that.
Killing every human is pretty hard.
Yes, essentially zero chance of human extinction also
You never know. 3-4C of temperature increase may offer some surprises.
Dude we made it through that already
What? When?
It's been settled for 20 years that the world is warming. The efforts at this point are entirely focused on containing and limiting the damage. The fight to stop it is long over, and there's absolutely nothing that can stop some level of catastrophic damage.
It's actually been settled science for over 40 years at this point. Here's Carl Sagan laying it out to Congress in 1985 https://youtu.be/Wp-WiNXH6hI
Yes, scientists have reconciled with this. In fact, climate change is now an outdated term; it is called climate collapse, and scientists (across many disciplines), most (rational, non-populist) politicians and citizens acknowledge that the dramatic effects are omnipresent.
We definitely still use the term climate change.
There are different fields of science. In my field (water resources), any scientist that is reasonable knows the climate change is happening, you can see it in any data that spans for last 50 years. We're focused on how to deal with it, given it'll get worse. All the future scenarios (from simulations) are worse than history, there's less worse and more worse depending on how people will act. But I think even the worst case did not have "world war" into consideration. So we might have wayy worse than our predictions. But again, predicting future is hard, there could be effects that we're not expecting. Specially the current geopolitical scenario when climate change (and greed) is making life hard leading into authoritative regimes which is making it worse on top of previous policies. Which exceeds the linear growth pattern used in the simulations.
Like, I don't think a lot of simulation took into account "what if we get rid of all the environmental protection policies?", maybe a little because they are looking at a lot of different scenarios, but not to this degree, because we didn't expect this to happen 10 years ago.
But I think even the worst case did not have "world war" into consideration.
Specifically "blowing up regional methane storage" was probably unexpected.
Uhhhh.... they've been warning us for many decades, now? (and sounding alarms)
There's also the fact that Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (and others) discovered key mechanisms of the Greenhouse Effect, and CO2's key role in such, back in the 1800's. So you know, want to know about a science issue? Maybe ask literal scientists?
It's not the body of relevant scientists that are letting us down, Dafty...
They can either give up, or keep trying. Which would you do?
The seeming lack of stopping it is a problem or economics or psychology or maybe even simple biology. I only rate one of those as 'science' though, two of them are grift/jargon. Physics and engineering meanwhile has done vastly more to accelerate it than to slow it down - and those dudes are way better at getting funding.
I think half the physicists sniff their own farts and convince themselves of their moral duty to deplete the earth's resources, so that they can tell themselves they're working on the building the USS enterprise to save mankind, whilst actually they're pumping rocket fuel into doodlebugs.
"Scientific Community" is kind of a broad term. It is composed of a lot of smarty-pants types who are unlikely to take "no" for an answer, and will keep trying to fix the problem.
In the end, you may be right, and there's no way to stop the runaway train, and all these folks will accomplish is getting our hopes raised while they earn their PhD's and present papers in worldwide conferences they all burned jet fuel to get to.
But, what if you turn out to be wrong, and one of those poindexters actually figures out how to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere in an economical fashion, and they manage to stop the train? That person will be instantly famous, and the Nobel Prize might be the least of their accolades. They will be remembered as one of humanity's greatest minds. If they happen to be British, they will be buried in that cathedral next to Newton and Darwin and Hawking, that's how important it will be.
So, they will keep trying, because it's as close as you can get in this life to immortality.
It's an energy problem, not a smarts problem.
Imagine the Hiroshima bomb.
How much energy that contains.
Now understand that, just from excess emissions alone, we are adding at least four of those nuclear explosions worth of energy into the atmosphere.
Per second.
That's right, per second.
There is no solving this without technology that would be indistinguishable from magic, so not happening. We had our chance, capitalism won, and those at the top are hoarding and preparing for what's coming next.
Remember that we have technology that 100 years ago would have been indistinguishable from magic.
That's an assumption that math and physics doesn't support.
There is no infinite well of technology and efficiency for us to draw from.
That's not to say we can't find things that will help a lot, we should, but they won't save us.
I made a statement about the past. No assumptions we made.
You weren't implying by saying that, that we could possibly have the magic technology to save ourselves 100 years from now? Sorry if I misunderstood.
They said your statement was incorrect; either there’s a way to salvage the planet in a habitable form, or there isn’t — but “indistinguishable from magic” doesn’t come into it.
Personally, I think energy is only a portion of the problem space; we need to slow climate change enough that humanity can continue to adapt with it.
After all, we survived multiple ice ages; will the climate destroy our technological advances, or will those advances enable us to adapt to a changing world?
The world is likely highly overpopulated at the present, but we can lose a significant chunk of humanity and still preserve the body of knowledge and many of the technologies that we currently enjoy.
Collapses are inevitable, but total collapse is still avoidable.
And lose my funding?
Well for example, I read they’re harvesting coral samples so we can try to regrow the coral reefs in the future.
They are trying, but... I was at a talk by a leading coral reef scientist last year, he said it would if it worked well, doing enough of it to maintain the Great Barrier Reef would cost on the order of ten trillion dollars a year...
No, scientists can definitely do something about it.
I think if you replace scientists with a body that is paralyzed with inaction because of regulatory capture like the US it would make more sense.
Has the US government ever reconciled with the fact global warming is happening and there is no way they can work together to stop it?
The answer is then a clean yes.