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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

I think at this point, the question is not whether there will be serious disruption, but how badly it will hit and where the prime spots will be to live. Anywhere North with access to fresh water is looking pretty good right about now. I'd imagine anywhere currently hot and arid will be more so, but it's hard to predict.

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It's probably more complex than that, with more geopolitical factors involved. Right now, for example, Russia's political economy is limited by access to year-round deep water ports. China's relationship to Tibet is shaped by the fact that Tibet is basically China's watershed. The bread basket of the United States is just a bunch of fertile soil, blown off the Rockies, that happens to have landed underneath fantastic weather for corn, or wheat, or what have you. When any of those change, we're all going to become much more intimately familiar with the phrase "balance of power."

It's not going to be a case of moving near fresh water. It's going to be a case of getting tolerable living conditions subject to the political apparatuses and distribution networks that develop in response to the power structures that develop as the planet changes underneath the map and the map changes underneath our feet.

Good luck!

The future is almost certainly going to be indoor farming, climate controlled systems and mass produced lab grown foods (eg: algae, insects), so access to fresh water is going to be a bigger bottleneck than say, nice weather or soil types. Soil can be trucked in from arid or inhospitable regions. Food can be grown in vats.

Tolerable power structures are directly related to the resources on hand and pressure on those resources.

Fresh water is what future wars will be fought over. Perhaps coastal cities will up their desalination game, who knows.

>Fresh water is what future wars will be fought over.

Yes, even more so than today. Being American, I never realized how scarce water actually was until college. I studied inter-regional conflict and learned all about water wars.

https://pacinst.org/news/pacific-institute-releases-updates-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_conflict_in_the_Middle...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_conflict

> It's going to be a case of getting tolerable living conditions subject to the political apparatuses and distribution networks that develop in response to the power structures that develop as the planet changes underneath the map and the map changes underneath our feet.

I've never seen anyone describe Mad Max so aptly!

Arguably Syria was/is Mad Max. It's a lot uglier than the movie, but the movie had standards of decency to fulfill...

The problem is predicting which places will suffer from drought as weather patterns shift. You could be surrounded by fresh water and safe from rising sea levels but crops will still fail if it doesn't rain enough.

There was this terrifying idea I heard recently that at about 6 degrees increase we’d be looking at almost no cloud formation which in turn would contribute another 6, we don’t really have any idea what would happen then, but I’d guess you can be sure not much more pollution from us humans.

I don't support CO2 pollution, but yes, the period of the Younger Dryas experienced global shift of 2.5 degrees celsius within hundreds, or perhaps possible singles of years, of presumed natural causes.

> http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/revisi...

I feel that will lead to more FUD about scientists crying the sky is falling if any predictions are incorrect. I feel it'll also hinder efforts with a "welp, guess we already lost so we can stop trying" attitude.

As with everything, there will be winners and losers. If predictions hold, the northern hemisphere is going to be the big winner as the northern hemisphere ( primarily siberia, alaska and much of canada ) hold significant amount of inaccessible land that will become available. But just as importantly ( or even more importantly ), if the arctic passage along siberia and the northwest passage opens up, it will be an immense boon to the world economy and trade as it will shorten shipping by 30% or even more. And of course the resources ( oil, minerals, etc ) locked in the arctic will become accessible.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-09-04/who-controls-northwes...

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/10/21/russia-builds...

Don't believe the propaganda or hype online about the world ending. There will be disruption but there will also be opportunity. The media loves to hype "end of world" nonsense for clicks. In my relatively short period of time, I've lived through so many "end of world" media hypes that it is hard to take them seriously anymore.

Countries, banks, businesses, etc aren't planning for the end, they are fighting over new opportunities in the coming decades.

I find this line of thinking offensively short-sighted. Suppose for a moment there might be less economic activity--much, much less--due to famine from cratering populations of insects, fish, etc., etc. Or even something stupid like microplastics may have already put into motion an unavoidable catastrophe.

Why are you using the internet or living in the first world then? Instead of talking a good game, why not do something yourself? If you really believed the nonsense you are saying.

Ah, the "unavoidable collapse". I used to think like you because I consumed so bullshit from the news/media. I can't remember how many times "the world was ending". Super bacteria, acidic ocean, peak oil ( remember that one ), supervolcanoes, bees gone, butterflies gone, etc.

Listen, if things were truly getting as bad the propaganda claims, all the rich people's assets would be seized, nobody would be allowed to fly, own yachts and all global shipping would be stopped. If the fearmongering were true, but obviously it is not since the same people fearmongering about climate change are also pushing for more global trade, more consumption and more pollution/environmental destruction.

Do you know what is the biggest source of environmental carnage and climate change? Globalism. Do you know what the fearmongers want more of? Globalism. So maybe the world isn't going to end as they'd like you to believe. Maybe the fearmongering is about something else?

Maybe not "the end of the world", but "the end of a world".

"When" is also a big question. Or what else is occurring "when" the when occurs. Or even how accurate the models are this time around. Yes, there are big questions.

Folks seem to talk as if doom is imminent, where to buy property inland to survive. Mad Max talk. That's ridiculous.

I remember going home from a college class in 1990 and breathlessly informing my folks that yes, global warming was occurring, it was imminent. 30 years later its obvious that what was predicted hasn't happened. Not even close.

Not denying the science, don't make any mistake. But I'm not a huge believer in imminent catastrophe anymore. If what they say is going to happen happens it's generations, not decades we are likely talking about. Not that this makes it any better, not that we shouldn't do something, not that what scientists overwhelmingly believe won't come to pass.

But the hysteria has been overblown, I've seen it. Maybe it isn't this time but cherrypicked appearing video with scary music doesn't really convince me at this point.

I had my own experience of hearing and reacting to this same information at roughly the same time. As i recall the story then was that we would start to see extreme weather events becoming more common within 20 years, political instability due to changes in climate (ie. Droughts etc) the next 30 years, and potentially runaway climate change in the 50-100 year period.

Prey much spot on so far.

Edit: the thing that actually scares me more than any of this is the preliminary evidence of slowing wind and ocean currents.

What I was told was considerably more extreme and on a much shorter timeline.

As for political instability due to drought, not sure that's not always happened. Is weather actually more extreme now than it was 30 years ago? I don't think so.

Anyway, not a denialist. But neither am I that much of an eminent worrier anymore, nor do I really believe the models are necessarily that accurate. But, fossil fuels aren't a great idea anyway, they are dirty all around.

I guess we will see in another 20 years if runaway climate change happens. Maybe I'll climb back on the worried train.

The weather is more extreme than it was 30 years ago. I don’t feel the need to cite ever-increasing broken records and such like; there are too many to report. We’re already suffering very badly.

I don't see the weather as more extreme than it was 30 (or 100) years ago. I realize this is said in the media and on certain sites, but I don't see it actually being the case.

There have always been droughts, hurricanes, floods, even more extreme events in the past than we have witnessed over the last few decades.

It would be interesting to objectively determine a baseline for "extreme" events and plot the frequency over last two or three centuries though, that I'd like to see and it might convenience me.

CNN breathlessly stating "Hurricane caused by global warming!" doesn't though.

Are you familiar with the weather this spring in the midwestern US? It is extreme and unprecedented. There are quite a few scientists who have been studying the extreme nature of the changes occurring over the past few decades. Here are some sources to help get you up to speed.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/midwest-flooding-perfect-storm-... : Perfect storm of extreme weather and climate change drove deadly Midwest flooding

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321130859.h...: New data show that extreme weather events have become more frequent over the past 36 years, with a significant uptick in floods and other hydrological events compared even with five years ago, according to a new publication, "Extreme weather events in Europe: Preparing for climate change adaptation: an update on EASAC's 2013 study" by the European Academies' Science Advisory Council (EASAC), a body made up of 27 national science academies in the European Union, Norway, and Switzerland. Given the increase in the frequency of extreme weather events, EASAC calls for stronger attention to climate change adaptation across the European Union: leaders and policy-makers must improve the adaptability of Europe's infrastructure and social systems to a changing climate.

https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/... : The US government maintains a website warning of these threats: As the world has warmed, that warming has triggered many other changes to the Earth’s climate. Changes in extreme weather and climate events, such as heat waves and droughts, are the primary way that most people experience climate change. Human-induced climate change has already increased the number and strength of some of these extreme events. Over the last 50 years, much of the U.S. has seen increases in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, heavy downpours, and in some regions, severe floods and droughts.

https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/bulletin-... : The U.S. Northern Plains and East Africa droughts of 2017, floods in South America, China and Bangladesh, and heatwaves in China and the Mediterranean were all made more likely by human-caused climate change, according to new research published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).

The seventh edition of the report, Explaining Extreme Events in 2017 from a Climate Perspective, also included analyses of ocean heat events, including intense marine heatwaves in the Tasman Sea off of Australia in 2017 and 2018 that were “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. Also included are analyses of Australian fires and Uruguay flooding.

"The weather this spring in the midwest" is exactly the type of logical fallacy I'm talking about. Floods have always occurred, are they occurring more frequently?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods

Here is Mississippi. This isn't "unprecedented" at all in spite of headlines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_River_floods

What I'd like to see is a plot of frequency of extreme events. Not sensational news articles. That really might convince me. Because I might be wrong, but what I see now looks like hype.

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