I am sorry if at this point is kind of an interruption of your conversation, but I believe I disagree only with a little detail my fellow human said, and I think it is important. There is a way to be a "doomer" or whatever name we get nowadays without believing in a trajectory. I do not believe we have a fixed path. I believe there are a lot of options, but all within a range of possibilities (we won't develop wings tomorrow and sparkle and be angels all of a sudden). And the thing is I believe that realm of possibilities is mostly negative from our point of view. That many possible paths are okay, even some kind of good, but many many others are bad or frankly terrible. So, in that way, I believe I am a "doomer" without thinking that it will all go downhill. No, sometimes history gets a good chapter, a good period of time, here and there; still, overall, I'd argue existence is mostly or predominantly negative/ugly/sad/not-likable.

And I agree with my fellow lemming that the only thing left when you view things like this is to try to make things better, thus, "doomerism" shouldn't be apathy or defeat or whatever, it is a very urgent call to reduce the suffering we 'diagnose' and to make the world a better place.

I wouldn't call it "doomerism", I'd call it philosophical pessimism (because it's more technical and Wikipediable, lol).

Yes, our trajectory is already decided in the sense that we're locked into catastrophe. It's about degrees of catastrophe now. "But if we work hard" you say?

Here's an imperfect but approachable analogy: If you're trapped in a bathtub and it's pleasantly warm, and you pour boiling water in until it's concerningly hot, you can't just stop pouring the water to resolve your problem. You're now in mortal danger since you can't get out, even though no more hot water is being added to the system. It'll take too long for the water to naturally cool to save you. The water is the climate system. The boiling water is the extra energy trapped by greenhouse gases. You are human civilization as we know it.

It's concerningly hot now. You don't currently have any access to cold water (carbon sequestration and/or mitigation). Nothing more than a few drops a minute anyway. That's not going to help. Even the very most optimistic of scenarios says that we might be able to bring that up to a very slow stream of cold water. Certainly won't work fast enough.

Now here's reality: the hot water is not stopping, it's speeding up. Your body might be able to manage the hot water for a little bit, but pretty soon things are going to stop working properly as you overheat. You might get lucky if the hot water stops RIGHT NOW, but that's if you're lucky. Even if you somehow make it, you're going to be severely fucked.

But. The. Water. Is. Still. Speeding. Up.

Edit: Ah yes, the downvote. Hero, would you care to critique anything? I really could use some hope, I'm serious. I would love reason for optimism, and I'm totally open minded to it. All you need to do is speak up?

I hope the silent downvotes make y'all feel better.... anything except confront the issue I guess.