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Comment by fweespeech | Hacker News Reader

Well, if "by fine", they mean mass migrations away from the equatorial band, fragile areas near deserts, and increased conflict as immigration controls block that migration.

We are looking at pretty much everything from Florida to Brazil being rendered unfit for humans.

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I think this is the most effective way to get people's attention at this point in history. The current waves of migration from Syria, North Africa, and from Central/South America are just a tiny foretaste of what's to come if climate change goes the way we fear.

I think you are right.

However many people will mindlessly argue that "secure borders" will magically prevent the mass migration of 100+ million people.

Well, if states were to embrace a lot more violence than they do now "security" probably could do that (not an endorsement).

> We are looking at pretty much everything from Florida to Brazil being rendered unfit for humans.

That is not even remotely politically tenable though, and lots of stupid things will be attempted long before it gets to that point. Mt. Tambora deposited 50 megatons of SO2 into the upper atmosphere in 1815, and in so doing dropped the global climate by .5℃ for over a year. Such an action is well within our technological and industrial capacity. It's a terrible idea but it will definitely be attempted long before global warming depopulates 2/3rds of our inhabited range.

I don't know about that specifically, but is there a reason why geoengineering in general is a bad idea?

We lack even a basic understanding of many aspects of the global climate. Imagine trying to engineer a computer with a nineteenth-century knowledge of electromagnetism. The only thing we know for certain is what worked in the past.

So you're saying Yellowstone is an option... ;)

I think the bigger risk will be associated with extreme weather, all over the globe, not just in the middle. We're already seeing that ramp up big time.

I fear that long before the oceans rise substantively, crop killing heat, crop killing cold, crop killing floods, crop killing drought and crop killing storms will strike so widely, frequently and randomly that it will be difficult to reliably produce food anywhere.

I haven't seen much science on this specific topic yet. I'm just intuitively extrapolating how quickly these food-destroying '500 year' storms are ramping up. We've had something like 6 '500 year' storms in the US so far in 2016.

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