A bit of smoke in the air

The skies are orange in California, but it's 'just a bit of smoke in the air', right? CV19 is a much worse problem.

It's not. CV19 might kill 1 person in 100 as a plausible worst case, so 70 million people. And it will go away: there will be a vaccine almost certainly (and there will be other pandemics of course, and they will kill people too). Climate change as a plausible worst case might kill 9 people in 10 – more than 6 billion people – and that 'bit of smoke in the air' is an early symptom of it. And it will, in human terms, never go away: the lifetime of CO₂ in the atmosphere is hundreds to thousands of years (the lifetime of individual CO₂ molecules is much smaller as they cycle through the oceans, and global warming denialist fuckwits make hay out of this, but the equilibrium concentration takes a huge time to decline). The future is going to be some crap version of blade runner: orange skies and the ruins of cities, except no flying cars, no off-world colonies (work out what lifting significant numbers (millions to hundreds of millions) of people into LEO does to the climate sometime), no android slaves (did the current AI bubble burst yet? Winter is coming), everyone is starving, and we'll be ruled by clown fascists.

Of course climate change will probably only kill your children and their children, together with people living in far-away countries with dark skins, and no-one cares about their children and they certainly don't care about people with dark skins even if they don't live far away. CV19 might kill you, and we all care about us.

(This is not meant to imply I don't think CV19 is serious: I think it is very serious. It's just not the most serious.)