Finished the book. His focus is on painting the picture of what the future will be like, in various ranges of "worseness" and how we might respond to it, and how civilization will likely get greatly reconfigured. I don't really think the guy is being overly alarmist or hyperbolic. Stuff is real.
A main takeaway is that the model of progress we've had since perhaps the Enlightenment (post Dark Ages) needs to likely change. The upward exponential modulated by sine waves of various crests and troughs may well be permanently modulated down to sea level (literally and figuratively) by a negative exponential driven by climate. Progress will likely level or decline until we adapt to the radically different conditions,and it could take millennia, since we'd pretty much have to re-do everything we did over the last 12,000 years in a much more sustainable light. The technology might be there, but the geopolitical upheavals may take centuries to quell.
Of course the degree of this can be mitigated by acting as early as possible to completely decarbonize in an orderly way, but the will just doesn't seem to be there. Too much inertia. And, no, onesy-twosy neoliberals driving EV's won't cut it. It's dramatic change needed across civilization. Hopefully 2020 will be the turning point, and the youth marching in the streets will gain momentum toward action, lest their children live amongst the ruins of a once relatively prosperous civilization in a new, much extended, Dark Age, dwarfing any that hit humanity before...
My next book is The Growth Delusion...after a detour to a big history one called Origin Story, which, in the early reading, posits the idea of the universal law of an entropy tax on creating order, which climate change is precisely that!
-Greg
