Hmm, let me know if you have any thoughts on my responses to your request for my takes, David.

Ramiro, I'm curious about resources that you want to share about climate change, it is the only GCR that EA's regularly deny is a GCR, for some reason. I don't think David's question is entirely fair, but paper topics that could illustrate some expectations include:

• multi-breadbasket failure due to extreme weather and drought
• tipping elements posed to fall this century (including the Amazon),
• the signed climate emergency paper,
• recent papers about methane hydrate melting in the past,
• (informal) analyses of the recent summit rain on Greenland
• recent analyses of pressures on rate of melting of the Antarctic
• notes from climate scientists that IPCC models leave out positive feedbacks from physical forcings on tipping elements like:
  • warming ocean currents running against our ice sheets
  • moraines, drainage holes, ice darkening, and bottom lubrication of Greenland ice sheets
  • change of snow to rain on Greenland as Greenland receives warmer weather and Greenland's altitude drops
  • changes in wind patterns carrying moisture to different places globally
  • slowing of the AMOC as freshening occurs in the North Atlantic
  • burning and cutting of the Amazon rainforest
  • increased or continual fires in permafrost regions
• or feedbacks from declining carbon sinks, like:
  • respiration increase past photosynthesis thresholds in plants
  • Brazil rainforest change to a carbon source and savannah
  • decline of plankton due to acidification, ocean heat waves, and declines in certain ocean species (for example, whales)
  • forest fires in the permafrost
  • desertification during long-term drought
• the feasibility and timeliness of BECCS or DACCS at scale
• the general trend of decline in predicted GAST increases required to tip large Earth system tipping elements.
• an expected increase in human pressures on natural systems as weather and climate worsens (for example, increased pressure on fisheries as they decline)

These topics are what Halstead didn't really draw together or foresee had implications this century.

Below is a prediction that I posted to gjopen a few months ago, at the start of their series of questions on climate change. It was not written for an EA audience, but it does show my thinking on the matter. Maybe I'm just mistaken that global society will totally flub our response to the GCR that is climate destruction. Maybe that is just what is happening so far but we will radically change for the better. Meanwhile, I reject the EA claim that climate change is not a neglected cause area, but I speculate that EA's think climate change is intractable. It is not intractable. There are multiple pathways to solutions, but only the muddling ones appeal to me. The extreme technology pathway (nanotech) is actually more frightening than climate change. Nanotechnology is a GCR of its own.

...

Our civilization is on a pathway to make Earth uninhabitable for any large group of humans by 2100, all other things equal. I suppose there might be a few humans in some underwater city, underground camp, or space station. 
 
We have had muddling solutions available for 50 years. A muddling solution is a sensible but reactive solution to a predicted problem, that is implemented quickly, that is not terribly innovative, and is followed for as long as necessary, meaning decades or even centuries.  
 
Here's a list of muddling solutions that could have prevented our problems if resorted to them beginning in the 1970's: 
 
*  providing family planning services globally 
*  encouraging access to education and financial opportunities for women worldwide 
*  voluntarily reducing the birth rate across the world to 1.5 (1-2 children) 
*  relying on vegetarian (soy or amino-supplemented staple grains) protein 
*  subsidizing conservation and micro-grid technologies, not oil and gas industries 
*  removing all personhood rights from corporations 
*  raising fuel economy of cars over 50mpg and preferring trains, taxis, or human-powered vehicles 
*  emphasizing water conservation in agriculture 
*  forcing costs of industrial and construction waste onto companies, suppliers, or consumers 
*  maintaining regulations on the finance and credit industries (preventing their obvious excesses) 
*  protecting most land areas from development and only allowing narrow human corridors through them 
*  disallowing advertising of vice goods (alcohol, cigarettes, pornography, restaurant foods, candy, soda) 
*  avoiding all medical and pharmaceutical advertising 
*  disallowing commercial fishing and farm-animal operations 
*  providing sewage handling and clean water globally 
*  preventing run-off from industrial agriculture 
*  requiring pesticides to meet certain criteria 
*  encouraging wider use of alternative agriculture methods 
*  avoiding low-value (most) use of plastic 
*  recycling all container materials in use (wood, metal, glass, plastic, etc) 
*  capturing all minerals and metals contained in agricultural, industrial, consumer and other waste streams 
*  and the list goes on... 
  
Some people believe that contraception violates their religion. Some believe that humans should be able to live everywhere regardless of ecological impacts. Vices are the spice of life for most people. There were incentives to avoid all the past solutions on my list, I admit. However, those solutions, implemented and accepted globally, would have prevented catastrophe. This list is true to the thought experiment, "What could we have done to avoid our climate change problem over the last 50 years that we knew to do but didn't do". In my view, those solutions are obviously necessary and not overly burdensome. A small percentage of people would have made a lot less money. A lot of illness and suffering in our society would be absent. But just like all solutions that require action, these solutions could only succeed if they were implemented and accepted. Our civilization did not take those actions over the last 50 years. 
 
Now we need other solutions (involving welcoming migration and choosing extreme curbs on birth rate and consumption in developed countries) as well as those on my list, but much faster (for example, to save our ocean life from acidification, overfishing, and pollution effects over the next few decades). People in the developed world won't do it. Instead, the developed world will follow conventional wisdom.  
 
Conventional wisdom is to: 
 * wall ourselves off (for example, ignore others well-being, hoard resources, and wait for technology breakthroughs). 
* innovate our way out (for example, through intensive development of breakthrough technologies) 
 
I don't think walling off will work, because the natural systems that are sometimes called tipping points are now changing. The effects of those tipping points will cut off supply chains over the next few decades, leading to multi-breadbasket failure, destroyed critical infrastructure, and destroyed political systems. Every country is vulnerable to those consequences. 
  
Theoretically, we can innovate our way out. However, the innovations need to address more than energy production. They have to let us: 
* control local weather. 
* remove GHG's from the atmosphere.  
* replace modern agriculture at scale.
* quickly reverse ocean acidification.  
* reverse ecosystem destruction or replace ecosystems (for example, replace extinct pollinators).  
* remove pollution quickly (within months or years) from land and ocean pollution sinks. 
* replace modern manufacturing at scale.
 
No futuristic technology can meet the required timeline except for large-scale manufacturing with nanotechnology (assembling materials and self-assembling devices, from micro- to macro-scale, at extreme speed). The timeline becomes shorter with each decade that passes. We won't recognize the extreme impact of the current processes for another 10-20 years. I think the latest we could introduce nanotechnology to do all those things and still have a livable Earth for the entire global population is 2040, before ecosystem damage becomes so great that it destroys civilization on its own. But it won't happen in time.
 
Instead, after 2060, we'll be left with: 
* very little good topsoil or clean water anywhere  
* poor air quality in most places (dust storms, toxic algae gassing off, air pollution from local manufacturing) 
* no guarantee of mild weather anywhere in any season (so any farming has to be in artificially protected environments),  
* most land species extinct (including pollinators),  
* mostly dead oceans (no pteropods or zooplankton and declining phytoplankton). 
 
Today: 
* the Arctic ice is retreating fast  
* the Amazon is becoming a carbon source 
* the permafrost is melting faster (with local feedback from fires and the warming Arctic ocean)  
* Greenland is having unexpectedly large melting events 
* the jet stream is becoming wavy instead of hanging in a tight circle 
* surprising levels of GHGs other than CO2 are already in the atmosphere 
 
Climate modelers in general are playing catch up to all these changes, IPCC scenarios don't really account for tipping points processes happening as quickly as they are. Countries have no plan to stop producing CO2 or releasing other GHG's, so the IPCC's business-as-usual scenario will go as long as it can. None of the anticipated CCS solutions are feasible and timely at scale (including planting trees).

By the end of the century: 
* The Greenland ice sheet and some or all of the West Antarctic will have melted.  
* The methane hydrates of the [ESIS] in the Arctic will have dumped their gas load 
* the permafrost across the high latitudes will be either melted or refreezing in a mini-ice age  
* the Amazon will have long-since disappeared in drought and lightning fires 
* Several large heat waves will have hit the tropical latitudes, killing every mammal outdoors (not wearing a cooling jacket) after several hours.  
* there won't be significant land or ocean sinks for CO2.
* tropical temperatures will be unlivable without cooling technologies.
* the 6th great extinction will be over. 
* at least one human famine will have hit all countries around the world simultaneously. 
 
I personally believe that climate change is now self-amplifying. We can slow the rate by removing anthropogenic forcings of global atmospheric heating, but if we are late to doing that, then we have already lost control of the heating rate to intrinsic feedbacks. I don't know how far along that self-amplification is now. I do know that between release of frozen GHG's and destruction of CO2 sinks and loss of stratocumulus cloud cover, the Earth can take us past 6C of warming. [GAST increase] 
 
Today's problem lies with the situation and human psychology. Obvious solutions are unpalatable.

First, you can't point at plenty, predict it will all be gone in a few decades, and then ask people to deprive themselves of that plenty. We don't choose voluntary deprivation for the greater good based on theories or science.

Second, the problem of nonlinear changes in climate conditions and Earth inhabitability is that we cannot conceive of them as real. But they are real. People would rather die than give up hamburgers? Maybe not, but if we wait until that seems like a real decision to make, it will be too late. When the signal from climate change is so strong that everyone is terrified, and willing to do something like give up hamburgers, it will be too late to give up hamburgers. Instead, the consequences of raising all those cows will be knocking.

Finally, the consequences of climate change are not our instant extinction. Instead, humanity will go through a drawn-out, painful, lengthy whithering of life quality against increasing harms from climate events, social upheavals and decreasing resources. That situation will erode heroic efforts and noble causes, extinguishing hope as frustrating obstacles mount for any organized effort to stop climate change. 
 
I think human society in the developed world just hasn't felt the climate change signal yet, and isn't really ready to face the problem until it does. And then it will be too late to do much of anything about climate change. I used to think "too late" meant 2060, about when we realized that CCS solutions were always hypotheticals. Now I think it means 2030, the earliest that we might lock in the death of ocean life from multiple anthropogenic forcings, suffer a giant methane bubble from the Arctic, or see massive melt on Greenland. That's why I think my prediction is correct, we really only have less than a decade to push our climate (and biosphere) onto another pathway. All those solutions I listed are how to do it. Anyone think they look worthwhile?

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Thank you for reading, if you got this far. This is just a scenario and analysis with a few proposed plausible alternatives. If your counterargument is that we have more electric cars or that solar is cheaper than ever, then you need to explore the problem more carefully.

Thanks Noah! Please do share.