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Comment by nn3 | Hacker News Reader

While they will may have temporary problems in places I suspect Siberia will be a long term winner from climate change.

All the people displaced from flooded coastal settlements have to move somewhere after all.

There aren’t going to be long term winners from climate change. They might be less affected but it’s not going to be good. New illnesses, food scarcity and other things will only make some places “winnings” a relative thing.

Would you consider a tornado that levels your house a long term winner for your basement?

No, there are places that are borderline unhabitable now that will become more livable as the climate warms. Here's one study:

http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/jmp2265/?page_id=48

As a tangible example, Greenland is now starting to be warm enough to grow potatoes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6993612.stm

Isn't the methane release going to accelerate the warming exponentially to the point of mass-extintion? The so-called feedback effect. Permafrost is thawing 70 years before the simplistic models predicted:

- https://www.livescience.com/65709-arctic-permafrost-melts-de...

- https://envisionation.co.uk/index.php/nick-breeze/203-subsea...

Also, there is Nitrous Oxide too, which will deplete the Ozone layer:

- https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/06/harvard-chemi...

I'm not qualified to comment on whether Earth will eventually end up looking like Venus, I'm just pointing out that in the short term there will be places that gain from climate change as well.

I think it's pretty safe to say that Earth will not end up looking like Venus from a simple fact that there were times in its history when greenhouse gas concentrations were much higher than even the wildest projections you'd see today, and yet here we are. Now granted, there weren't any people back then, but the planet did not turn into Venus.

They're not going to be so nice when they're at the other end of a four-billion-person refugee crisis in a few decades.

If we continue our current path it seems likely that the ecosystem collapses hard enough that even places where the climate becomes nicer for humans will be hard to inhabit, for example because phytoplankton in the oceans dies off and we run out of oxygen.

There will be winners and losers from climate change.

Likely a lot more losers than winners.

But denying that there will be winners too is as misguided as denying climate change in the first place.

In this case winners are tied to places, so yes moving will be often the only sensible option.

Is Siberia the perfect place to move to? We'll find out (or rather our descendants will) But they're unlikely to be the losers at least

Unless that article about those 2 scientists from the 50's is correct, and the rising oceans will allow free circulation between the atlantic, arctic, and pacific leading to massive snowfall on arctic land masses creating 2 mile high glaciers and causing the next ice age.

> All the people displaced from flooded coastal settlements have to move somewhere after all.

Land is not really the issue at hand. Even disregarding the entire infrastructural issue, Siberia has no fertile soil. When the temperate breadbaskets and rice bowls start failing, the subarctic regions won't be able to take up the slack.

They could be a "long term winner" 50 weeks out of the year, and have a more mild climate than before, but have hurricanes or flash floods much worse than anything before the other two weeks and not really be better off.

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