I need help, i have lost all faith and am falling into a rather severe depression.

Two things that might help give you a bit of perspective:

  1. Climate change has become a politicized issue, so like any political issue 99% of what you hear and read is sensationalist bullshit. And that's on both sides - it's equally wrong and ignorant for Bill Nye to talk about tornados and Barack Obama to tweet about wildfires as it is for Donald Trump make sarcastic comments during snow storms.

  2. The idea of shifting baselines - what you perceive as the natural world, isn't even close. The world has already been massively affected by anthropogenic activity, in nearly every way.

This is an excellent paper talking about this in the context of the marine realm.

I study coral reefs, a globally important and intrinsically amazing ecosystem that's being threatened not only by climate change but also by ocean acidification. And the two things I know for sure is that bleaching (and mortality) will increase across the world and that coral reefs as a functional ecosystem will not go extinct. That's the magic of corals, they're environmentally fragile but persist throughout geologic time through conditions way 'worse' than we can ever re-create.

But the more we research the more we're finding incredible ability of corals for acclimatization that people weren't thinking about just 5 years ago.

So personally I have great hope that science and restoration can outpace anthropogenic climate changes even in the most difficult scenarios - but even in a WORST case scenario, it's important to keep in mind how many mass extinctions humans are already responsible for and how severely altered what we think of as 'natural systems' already are.

If you aren't 'depressed' by the most pristine 'nature' you can imagine, there's no particular reason to be depressed about continued loss of biodiversity.

And there's especially no reason to be concerned that 'we won't make it'. 'We' are the most adaptable and resourceful species that has ever existed on this planet.

/r/environment Thread