This post will be grim- feel free to skip over it if you are not in the mood to be depressed...

I remember a specific moment where I realized humanity had missed a significant opportunity to turn things around. I was a Graduate student in physics working on my PhD research at Brookhaven National Lab, on Long Island. It was winter in 2000. I was standing in the parking lot outside the Chemistry department building at BNL having a cigarette, mulling over the fact that Bush, not Gore would be the next president. I thought about what it meant for the coming years. Getting the world to do anything about Global Warming would now be impossible for many years to come- if the USA refused to act there was no way the rest of the world would take any meaningful action. I was depressed, and worried about the future of human civilization... doomed by fools like TB, SDAI, FrankC, and GBaikie (whom I repeatedly fought with on the MSNBC and early zone to slapdown their inexcusable lies on the topic).

I clearly saw that global warming would lead to immense amounts of death, and ultimately would likely lead to fascism and collapse of civilization... but at the time I thought the true impact would only be realized after my lifetime...

Now, 23 years later, it seems all but certain that we will see much of it in the coming two decades.

The scale of death and turmoil the world will experience in the coming years will be painful to witness. In coming years entire regions will start to become uninhabitable. We will see cities in India, Central America and the Middle East have worsening heatwaves that kill 10's of thousands... then hundreds of thousands. The waves of refugees we have already seen empower the rise of fascism in 1st world will soon become a tsunami many of orders of magnitude larger. There will be famines of continental scale, and with all that will come wars- which will exacerbate the starvation and the flood of refugees. We are already seeing extreme weather events skyrocket and take a toll on quality of life and economies even in the 1st world- the rate at which these events happen will accelerate wildly. Monumental climate disasters, war, famine, and disease will claim vastly more lives each year than the year before. In the very near term we will see death and suffering on a scale humanity has never experienced... and THEN it will start to get REALLY bad

At some point the threads that hold together our civilization will start to break- and the first world will be so focused on survival that aid and assistance to the 3rd world will end- and then the people that did the least to create this climate disaster will start to die on a scale that will dwarf the holocaust by several orders of magnitude. They won't die off quietly, of course... there will be wars and terrorism as the understandably lash out.

I suspect that the population by 2200 will, even in the best case, be billions less than today's population... however the drop in population will do nothing to change the accelerating warming... that will be baked in, so to speak... the momentum of the changes will be impossible to stop and it will be well over a century of worsening conditions before it stops getting worse, and it will be millennia before it can start to reverse...again that's a best case estimate.

Well before 2200 we will witness famine in the 1st world - Europe, North America... by then fascism will have finally succeeded in replacing nearly all the world's democracies, so those famines will be even worse than they have to be, as oligarchs and autocrats rush to secure their power wealth and comfort at the expense of the masses.

This is the best case.... the worst case is we end up just wiping ourselves out even faster with a paroxysm of war.

Well, at least those like TB who knowingly lied about the science of global warming were able to help maximize corporate profits for a few decades... I guess that was worth slitting their grandchildren's throats...