Almost nobody is talking about the momentum of change. The goal is to stop raising atmospheric carbon and methane, but the current levels will keep melting the glaciers. The problem is not just sea level rise, but the moderation provided by mountain glaciers. They keep the rivers running all summer, and moderate the storms, and direct the weather to where farmers have learned to expect it. What we need is to get to -.5C for a few centuries to re-build the ice. When we see icicles melting, we know spring is coming, and when we see the ice in our drinks vanish, we know that the drink will warm up quickly, but we don't make the connection with big chunks of ice that have been there thousands of years.
I've tried to get my head around all this, looking at individual related climate studies, such as glaciation, and sea changes (temperatures, currents, sea level, changing bio-diversity, etc etc etc ...) and more, and I came to the conclusion that we know far too little about how everything interacts (hardly surprising considering the complexity and lack of knowledge) never mind fully understanding the individual systems, and attacking particular targets won't help (or not enough) and will very likely have unintended negative effects elsewhere.
It seems to me the real problem is the current human population, being artificially and unsustainably far too large, and the current global commercial and cultural system of expansion being the fuel that our societies run on, regardless of their political bias.
The only way I could see a 'fix' would be a fundamental change in how humans live, requiring a complete change of how we view our place in the biosphere that created and sustains us. Global government of some sort would be needed with the collective power to control even the most powerful nation states and to try and force that would just result in world war. It's clear we lack the motivation to make this change voluntarily, so nature will do it for us.
But that shouldn't be a reason to be downhearted. Without the last mass extinction we wouldn't have evolved. It can be viewed that we are just an indivisible part of the whole of whatever is considered living matter on the planet. Just as birth requires death, so the creation of new species comes from the diminution and extinction of others. We sometimes speak of our own evolution, but don't think of all the possible ways this could happen and what would come from us.
We are all subject to being cursed to "live in interesting times".
Still, it's a bit of a bummer really!
They can't stop it.
