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Comment by jensen123 | Hacker News Reader

Well, you can at least move to some other place that will be less affected by it. For example, if you currently live in Florida, you could move to Michigan. So, I think it's useful to hear about it.

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It's interesting that people consider flooding the biggest problem, I would have though wide spread crop failures would be the main problem.

And the wars and mass refugee movements that would rapidly follow.

This. We're in for a rough ride.

Yes, there is that. Famines and population crashes are likely. But growing conditions will improve further north, or south. Maybe move to Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, Argentina or Chile :) There's a lot of Siberia.

There's no soil in Siberia

Sure there is. It's just frozen.

It is there and Siberia totally turns green in summer. It's just that permafrost only permits grass and dwarf trees, and even where there is no permafrost agriculture is not feasible. Greenhouses work just fine, tho.

> I would have though wide spread crop failures would be the main problem.

It's like you are assuming harvests would go bad everywhere. Actually there are places where you can't grow food right now where you would be able to grow food next once the temperature increases.

Yes, but I don't believe that impoverished populations who can't feed themselves anymore will be relocated graciously in say for example, Siberia and won't necessarily have the relevant skills.

Change is not that an issue, the rate of change though...

the rate of change is not unprecedented. The climate changed faster coming out of the last ice age, for example. Clearly nature can adapt to rapid change.

Correct me if I am wrong but at the end of the last Ice Age we did not had 7 billions people.

I find the terms "Nature", "Earth", etc really ambiguous in these kind of discussions. Sure "Earth" will be fine, will still orbit the Sun, even if it gets as hot as Venus. Cockroaches or water bears will inherit the Earth.

But people worried are not really worried about "Nature" (at least I am not) but rather about the very people that are sharing the same and only habitable, in our reach at least, planet.

Europe is considered in a major crisis for 3-4 millions Syrian refugees, now imagine if tomorrow there are 100 or 200 millions refugees moving all around the world.

In the end, it is only a "people" issue.

We only had a few million people during the Ice Age.

I live in Australia. An island inhabited by a few hundred thousand people using stone-age technology until colonisation. Now there are 25 million of us here.

Yes Europe is having a problem with a few million refugees, but it's less of a problem than it had from 1939-45. And it recovered from that pretty quickly. We're used to a level of peace and comfort unparalleled in human history, and perturbations of that feel like TOTAL DISASTERS to us. We can cope and adapt to much greater events than we would ever believe watching the news.

And yes, Nature will cope. So will we.

> the rate of change is not unprecedented. The climate changed faster coming out of the last ice age, for example

Do you have a source for that?

There have been a couple of articles talking about the rapid change coming out of the ice age recently. I didn't bookmark them because who has time for that? But I'm not making this up randomly ;)

Feel free to ignore the point and my comment if you feel it insufficiently supported by peer-reviewed articles.

I'm sorry I'm unable to assist your learning by giving you a solid reference.

Well, as far as I know,. all the articles I have read say exactly the contrary, that the rate now is a lot faster than the one coming out from the ice age. Is because of that I ask your sources.

From [0]: > As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming. [0] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page...

well, 20 seconds googling turned this up: http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-clim... Quote from the abstract: "One of the most surprising findings was that the shifts from cold stadials to the warm interstadial intervals occurred in a matter of decades, with air temperatures over Greenland rapidly warming 8 to 15°C"

DO cycles didn't changed the Earth global mean temperature, they are regional changes.

The "global mean temperature" is a statistical construct. It doesn't actually exist as a thing that can kill animals and plants. They only get to experience actual temperatures, and are clearly able to adapt to rapid changes in actual temperatures.

> Change is not that an issue, the rate of change though...

Rate is change is actually pretty slow in this case.

> Rate is change is actually pretty slow in this case.

Really? All the articles and papers say the contrary. Do you have anything to back your claim?

Flooding is a much less immediate problem than the economic effects of anticipated flooding. Basically, Miami will become Detroit long before sea level rises above street level.

Good point. I'm not an expert on global warming, but I guess crop failures are much more likely in southern areas? Recently, I read the science fiction book The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. This book takes place in a future US, on a planet where there has been lots of global warming. In this future US, there are border controls between the states, to stop people fleeing from the drought. Not sure how likely this is to happen, but it's great book anyway.

Or you get used to it early by moving to a place like Adelaide, Australia, where you 3 or so have 42C plus days in a row in summer and they already have built a desalination plant during the last proper drought.

How would you predict local effects? A change in climate is a change in overall dynamics. Precise local effects is not at all predictable, I think.

There are regional climate models. But at least sea level is relatively straightforward. Even the gravitational and geostatic effects of large chunks of ice. And getting further from the equator will also be generally good.

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