There’s this line that keeps popping up in my head lately:
The world is coming to an end, Mal…
It’s spoken by Woody Harrelson’s character, Mickey, to Mallory (Mal), played by Juliette Lewis, in Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers (wikipedia entry) 
), just as the amazing Sweet Jane, a Velvet Underground cover done by Cowboy Junkies, starts playing. You can see the clip on youtube .
(The movie, by the way, is great, and I highly recommend it. It was a formative film for me and my buddies back in our early 20’s)
The world is and is not coming to an end, actually. Planet Earth itself will carry on existing and probably having life in it, until the Sun dies out in about 5 billion years (wikipedia) .
For us humans, though, things are not looking good. Human-made climate change is a very real, very big problem and as things stand today (mid-November 2022) it is extremely unlikely that the changes in the planet’s atmosphere will be reversed. More than likely they will be even worse. The question therefore is not will we suffer due to climate change? but rather how much will life (human and non-human) suffer because of climate change?.
Theoretically it is still possible to “undo” it. If somehow a huge majority of fossil fuel emissions were to be stopped immediately and not restarted, ever, and only non-fossil sources of energy were to be used from now on then yeah, it would be possible to go back to Earth’s average temperature at pre-Industrial Age levels. That’s not going to happen, though (and in a way thankfully, as it would bring a lot of pain and despair to people in poor nations. On the other hand it would also bring fossil-fuel companies, especially coal, gas and oil, to their knees - that would be great to see.)
In real life, though, that’s not going to happen. Like most human activity, there will be breakthroughs and setbacks, and because power always corrupts, crushing forces work and will continue to work against the change that has to occur, planet-wide.
Fossil fuel industries will not go down easily - they’ll use all their resources (as they have done for several decades now ) to avoid it.
In the meantime, alternatives like renewables are nice but not powerful enough to cover humankind’s demands for energy (and it’s a fantasy - if not outright an insult - to ask developing or poor countries to stay like that while rich countries continue to gorge). Nuclear energy is essential in the fight against climate change. Without it, that fight is lost. Here’s an old but great article ) by Mark Lynas about it. (his wikipedia entry ).
Coming back to Mickey’s line that’s been on my mind lately, and thinking about my obsession with pre/post apocalyptic movies (my favourite sub-genre), it would be easy to fall back to the comforting (?) idea that this is all going to hell, and fast, so screw it.
Reality, though, is not like that. I mean, it was like that for people in Pakistan this year (wikipedia article ). It was as well for those in Bangladesh and northeastern India (wikipedia article ). It will be like that for many other similar situations that will continue to occur.
But the world, as a whole, won’t come to an end like that. (snaps fingers). It will gradually become more and more inhospitable for humans, first in some parts of the world, then in many and finally everywhere in the world. It’s not going to be spectacular like it usually is on pre/post apocalyptical media, one day things are in turmoil and the next it’s gone; it’s gonna be painful and slow.
How painful? Well, that’s the cause that makes sense to fight for - to try to slow as much as possible the seemingly unstoppable climate change. Or drown in despair, if that’s your thing.
In any case, the question is “how bad will it become?” and not “will it be bad?”, because it already is.
Resources
-
Mark Lynas’ Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (wikipedia
, libgen ) is a great primer on the subject. It’s both terrifying (content) and pleasant (form). There was a TV movie made about it and you can watch it on youtube as well. -
Mark updated that book in April 2020. He called the new version Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (libgen
). I haven’t read it yet but will soon. -
Not wanting to come out as a fanboi, but failing at that, let me also recommend Mark’s Nuclear 2.0: Why A Green Future Needs Nuclear Power book (libgen
). It’s from 2013 but it still stands in its defence of the need to use nuclear power as a main energy source for the world. In it he covers the usual criticisms that are levelled at the technology.
Update: the line is actually
Whole world's coming to an end, Mal.