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I feel like this post is going to be interpreted very differently depending on what the audience is.

For left-of-centrists, this seems like a decent wake-up call. Stop being depressed about there being no solutions in your narrow overton window, and embrace the necessity that society adapts to reality.

For conservatives, "pessimism" is an odd phrase, but they'll be glad to hear you're warming up to signing up for lifeboat defense duty - maybe if you work hard you can get to be in it.

For realists, "abandon" is an worrisome phrase. It has always obviously been about both. Is this another excuse to keep consumption high?

Adaptation at a national level is impossible. Individuals or small groups of individuals can, as best they can.

We won't be adapting, there will be lots of kicking the can down the road though, which can be confused for adaptation... I guess.

whether the focus should shift from prevention to adaptation.

Why the arbitrary binary? You do both, all the time. We can't stop preventing. What, are we just going to be like, oh well, we tried for a bit but didn't get the results we hoped for, let's burn all the coal and gas from now on? No, that's idiotic.

We've got some good results already, I've been seeing headlines that we're preventing the worst climate outcomes. That will likely continue to slowly improve. Every problem that comes with every solution is being addressed. Sometimes a step is taken backwards, but two steps are eventually taken in the right direction. It's happening in one of the dumbest ways possible, but it's happening.

If we do not stop emitting, we will continue to change the climate. Therefore adaption to new climate reality would have to continue forever unless we stop emitting.

That is not to say we do not also have to adapt. The rise in temperature is already at a level, where continuing as normal is no longer feasible. Those adaptions are a huge part of the cost of polluting our planet with fossil fuel emissions. Hence we have to make the polluters pay for it.

Stop looking at the numbers? No.

Yes. Long past time in fact.

People have been focused on political solutions far too much - "too much" not least because in so many cases, the final arbiters of which, if any, political solutions get adopted are a relative handful of fabulously wealthy psychopaths who are going to oppose anything that undermines their privilege, entirely regardless of the long-term consequences.

So understand - because of their control, political solutions for the most part are not going to happen. It doesn't matter how important they might be, because the systems are not rational - they're warped to the service of the privileged few.

So it's going to come down to individual action primarily.

Note though that that doesn't necessarily mean entirely self-serving action. Quite the opposite in fact - individuals will need to focus on what they can do, as individuals, to at least ease the hardship not only for themselves but for their fellow humans.

And at some point, quite likely, we'll even be able to rely on governments to fulfill their responsibilities. For the immediate future though, that's too often not the case, and we as a species need to come to terms with that and act accordingly.