I’m old, I’ve seen how we’ve ignored the warnings for the past 30 years. Worse yet, if you ask people on when sollutuons can be ready, they say 10-20 years, and we only have one decade left to stop our own destruction.
New England has lost over 600 ski areas. There are fewer and fewer places with good enough conditions to grow coffee (a shame as I feel like the culture around fine coffee is just now coming into existence in the US). Enjoy oysters, clams, and scallops while you can as ocean acidification is killing them in droves. As soil heats due to global warming, it releases carbon dioxide, accelerating these effects.
I don't think the world is the same for anyone working in these industries or in tourism. Folks on HN are also generally isolated from the effects of the kinds of droughts that caused the Arab Spring, or from having to home refugees of climate change whose islands are disappearing to the rising sea levels.
It has been argued that Yemen is the first resource exhaustion war - the country has extremely limited water supplies.
The West is going to have to look at the possibility of a lot of refugees in the future, with the option of taking them in or watching them die.
Being near the cost isn’t necessarily worse than being inland as the sea can help regulate the extreme temperatures. I live in a costal city which basically sits around 100meters above sea level, on a good foundation, so the higher amount of rainfall and increasing sea levels aren’t really a worry. I work in another city 40km in land. In the winter my work place can be absolutely frozen while my hometown sits around 0 degrees, and vice versa in the summer. We had a really bad heatwave this summer, but it was 5 degrees worse at my work place than my home.
But basically you’re only going to be fine if you live as far north as Canada or northern Germany.
You’re spot on about climate refugees though. Syria was/is a war about water control, and now Yemen is in the same boat.
The real worry isn’t that though. It’s all the methane gas locked in the permafrost. It might make the air unbreatheable to humans, and then the rest really won’t matter.
That doesn't mean you get to mess it up for the rest of us.
Also, I firmly believe that we can figure out how to make things like methane and oil from biological processes; it's just that extracting it from the ground is cheaper.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I think we're quickly getting to a point where this is a political problem instead of a technology problem.
We have to either bio-engineer organisms to make them better producers (as we do for producing medicines, etc), or use any of the non-biologic processes for fuel synthesis, like Fischer-Tropsch.
Scrubbing would only become possible if we either:
- develop unlimited free energy (fusion, or incredibly cheap solar)
- let plants do the work for us, harvesting the Earth's tremendous isolation.
Either of these solutions almost implies that the climate battle is already won. In the first case, if clean energy is cheap enough to scrub carbon, then it is cheap enough to displace all other power sources. In the latter case, the slow pace of photosynthesis means we'd have to stop burning carbon (and stop burning forests) for a long time until CO2 concentrations stabilize, which is exactly what the Kyoto protocol was all about.
With our technology, it's still considered a nation-scale accomplishment to build a bridge spanning 55 km, or a dam spanning 2 km. Those kinds of engineering accomplishments are currently the likes of which most nations can only dream.
All we can currently do on the planetary scale is resource extraction -- fishing, strip mining, and deforestation. And accidentally altering the atmospheric composition of course.
I guess we can try to cover the entire ocean in floating white plastic pellets, to increase its albedo? That would probably work.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02082017/heatwaves-deadly...
As for migrating to cooler climates , what is the time scale? A century? 50 years? 20 years? What about technological solutions that come into existence during that time frame? Are we going to discount them?
Doomsday implies the human race can't adapt.
This seems weird. A lot of tropical places are both hotter and more humid than this limit, and people seem to have adapted.
Where? As far as I can tell, the highest wet-bulb temperatures are around the Persian Gulf, and although they sometimes come close to the human survival limit, they do not yet exceed it.
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2017/12/22/humidity-may-prove-...
The last generation plants were a military money hack. The plants that got funded interestingly were good at producing materials used for bombs. Not good designs that are financially viable without military money. Or even designs that are safe.
They are too expensive to close down properly. That's why not one has been closed down in the USA. That's not a safe design.
If the military jerks didn't hijack things so the power plants were designed wrong we would probably have had better designs made and more research going into the right directions. Instead we have a sea of toxic waste and bullshit plants to clean up.
Blaming environmentalists is fucking stupid.
What's your counter argument? Something like...
War is peace, hate is love, ignorance is strength?
Bullshit.
Do you mean Tschernobyl? It depends how you define 'huge areas in Europe', there is a good overview on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_an...
According to this table, 10 % of Austria is contamined with 37–185 kBq/m2 (lowest contamination of this table). You can eat food grown anywhere in Austria, I do not know where 'food not edible' starts.
But just the fact that you now have to discuss such things is wrong enough.