Personally, I think we should plan for hot world and try to reduce emissions. I have very little faith in decarbonization efforts.

I have connections to inner energy company circles that work in renewables. When they get drunk, they openly admit to green washing. Unless governments seriously address this with sanctions and legal actions, it will never happen.

It's like clogging your toilet. Unclogging it sucks, but it's your fault. I don't see this being fixed without serious uncomfortable painful corrective action. Governments don't seem interested in that.

I don't know if it's defeatist. We should really start coming to terms with the fact that things are most likely going to get extremely bad regardless of what we do, and instead of putting most of our effort into trying to stop things, we should increase focus on how we're going to deal with what's coming.

Not that trying to eg. get global CO^2^ production down or whatever wouldn't be worth it, but unless this economic system is more or less torn down completely or someone comes up with an actually viable fusion reactor, we can't pin too much of our hopes on the people in power suddenly starting to act selflessly.

Realism isn't defeatist. We are, in fact, losing badly. That's just the objective reality. The issue now is much more than people want to think their current ways of life can continue; that is the real risk now. It's also true that everyone can take meaningful actions today and tomorrow to improve the situation in the future. To your point, the "well will just live even more lavish now bc there is no hope" mindset is very dangerous. But so is thinking we do not have to change. Anyone in anything like the industrialized world will have to shift how they live in the very near term.

If a defeatist attitude means people just won't procreate but still continue eating loads of animal products, not recycling (lmao) and regularly buying new things and driving everywhere- it would actually be a good thing for the hypothetical future where it's possible to reverse the damage we've caused.

Sea levels won't rise all that fast.

Developed countries can rebuild their coastal cities every 50 years just a bit further from the shore every time, most already rebuild every 50 years or little more. Except for the ones that are already or almost underwater, but those are goners anyway.

Infrastructures like ports and associated transport, can also be rebuilt every fever than 100 years, they often aren't even built with that long of a lifespan in mind, but can take much larger sea level increases.

As for developing countries... Bangladesh is toast, others will vary.

Overall, a 20m sea level increase is easily sustainable at a rate of 2m per 100 years or so.

I mean we had a tangible e experiment. We just need a few plagues