What is Reddit's opinion of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Always stoked when folks see this and notice it. The shot of the Earth is based on a worse case scenario for climate change and we hoped to convey in a single image what that reality might look like - based on real climate science.

Here's my original post on this two years ago, that has some links in it!

Stoked to see everyone notice this!

The artist that did this (@BrennanPierre on Twitter) based it off of a series of maps that National Geographic did based on the premise of what the Earth would look like when/if we lose the polar ice caps to climate change. If you want to see more, it's paid content, but it's absolutely worth checking out - <em>link here</em> Much like you see in the NatGeo article, he preserved a thin blue line that shows where the original coastline was circa 2020.

Business Insider did a <em>video</em> showing that data in motion. Seems accurate to the original, but there might be some discrepancies.

There's lots more on the Earth of the future in the logs you find on ships as well - which we tried to ground in science as much as our game developer brains allow.

Some folks have commented on the lack of storms or rain. This shot was meant to be high summer and again using a worst case scenario we presumed a 5C rise in temperature. (The Paris Agreements are 2C and we are close to 1.5C for reference.)

At this temperature much of the continental US, central America, and the top of South America becomes a death zone during the summer where those that are outside in humid conditions are unable to cool themselves through perspiration and die of heat exhaustion quickly. (Google "Wet bulb temperature death") This phenomenon is already being seen in places like India, and we will see the rise of it in Asia and the Middle East during our lifetimes. The Economist has a great breakdown here The clouds you see over the Amazon and off of California aren't clouds - they're smokestacks blowing out to sea.

There's also some things in our logs, too, about climate change. Sea level rise and storms are common knowledge now, but one potential bi-product of greenhouse gases is the acidification of the ocean - which will lead to most of the life dead, but oceans full of jellyfish. There's a log somewhere in the game about folks being tired of eating jellyfish based on that. Article here And I'm sure I'm missing many other references, too.

If you're at all interested in post-climate change futurism I recommend this book - which goes far beyond sea level rise and storms - even beyond the changes themselves and instead imagining what society might look like and how we might adapt.

If you're wondering what you can do - talking about it and making it a focus is the beginning. We got through the pandemic, we can beat climate change or at least mitigate and co-live with it!