By 2050, many world cities will have weather like they’ve never seen | Hacker News Reader

By 2050, many world cities will have weather like they’ve never seen

nationalgeographic.com

53 pointsAnon8443 comments

Scary article. Also scientists believe the maximum capacity for earth is about 10b.

When people start running out of resources in hotter zones we're in real trouble.

Population control, not only climate change!

I believe that the data from developed nations has indicated that population growth follows a sigmoid and not an exponential. If that indication holds true for all nations as all nations become "developed", then population control is a naturally occurring phenomenon and the world will not have to resort to anything like a 1 child policy.

If that holds true, then I believe the problem is far more constrained to climate engineering rather than social/societal engineering which may actually be possible.

Hopefully it gets done in time!

Population might come down but the current trajectory says it will cross 10billion in the next 20years . It will come down long after problems of over population start hitting us.

> Population control, not only climate change!

Unfortunately, I think it will happen through climate change. It's not only about the weather in cities, but food production will be affected as well.

Is that the nice way to say let's wage war or what did you have in mind to get rid of all those living people?

Strap in, everyone, the climate ride only gets worse from here.

The headlines certainly will. Let's wait and see if it ever manages to impact my life. Seeing scary headlines like these for multiple decades without ever having my life impacted sure has done nothing to lend credibility to those headlines.

How old are you? You'll probably live long enough to have hundreds of millions of climate refugees beating down the door to your country when their cities become literally unlivable: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/climate/india-heat-wave-s...

The oldest headlines I remember are from the 1960s and 70s. Also, there's already so many "refugees" in my country, I won't notice a couple of million more. The way I see it things will tip politically towards the far, far right and then I won't have to worry about people dying outside of my country.

Well, I guess that's a refreshingly sociopathic outlook.

If you were alive in the 60s and 70s, you probably won't live to see the worst of what's coming, but any children and grandchildren you have will.

And we're not talking about a few million: some estimates suggest up to a billion people will relocate in response to pressure from changing climate. Rich nations are kidding themselves if they think they can close borders against numbers like that.

With a military complex big enough and autonomous weapons, I don't see the problem, to be honest. Just using some of the currently banned chemical weapons can eradicate those numbers with minimal effort. It's all a matter of politics. Once it tips, those numbers won't matter, other than being a statistic for the annals of history. "X people were massacred...". If it doesn't tip, it's going to be game over, though.

This is really sad to hear. We are spending million of dollars on space research for finding possibility of human survival on other planets by dumping our own planet with plastic, co2 etc and making it hell.

Instead of that we can spend the same amount to revamp and protect our own ecosystem. But this will not come true until nation leaders understand this.

Nation leaders don't have as much power as you seem to think. It's all a problem with incentives and starts with every individual. You could stop buying anything that contains plastic, you could stop using your car, never travel with a plane etc. etc. The problem isn't with nation leaders, it's with the incentives we have leading us to do the things we do.

We are spending billions on military, fossil fuels, buying useless crap... If we could make a list of what we can cut, space research shouldn't be in the top 100.

This has nothing to do with aerospace. We are spending billions, trillions if you count the wars in the middle east, on oil subsidies.

Commenting so I can check back in 30 years.

When I look at the big cities mentioned in the article on Google Maps, about 50% of what I see are roofs.

I wouldn't be surprised if we also put roofs on the gaps over the next 30 years. So whole cities become indoor areas.

Living in an outdoor city might become as unusual as it is to live outdoors today.

Additional guess: Most of the roofs will be made of solar panels.

People need sunlight, though. Going extended periods of time without sunlight will lead to feeling tired all the time, from where it's easy to fall into depression. Would be really bad if that's the direction cities are going..

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

There are technical solutions, but I don't expect them to be applied, since they ain't applied now in conditions where they should.

Good luck maintaining all that roof and climate controlling what’s under it.

It already works for the other 50%.

The other 50% is divvied up into rooms with much smaller volume and exposed surface area.

Unless we're going to recreate and replicate the dystopian Kowloon Walled City this seems pretty wasteful and will only exacerbate warming with all the increased energy requirements.

RemindMe! 30 years

Wait, wrong web site.

Let's jsonfy the data https://gist.github.com/spookyahell/1c688efc3bc0096517542350...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48780685

Already happening: "Europe's five hottest summers since 1500 have all been in the 21st Century."

How can it be since the 1500s if we can accurately measure this for only a little over a hundred years? There was this sceptics question about a newspaper from 18XX about the hottest summer and all the answers pointed out that we couldn't measure accurately back then.

> How

Science!

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

There's an emphasis on the word "likely" in that article, so it's speculation at best.

It's not words: science has much more exact way to estimate the confidence in any scientific result -- numerically! The estimates are valid and good. It's certainly not "speculation" like you now "speculate" with your doubt, but it's a scientific estimate, guided by the scientific processes. To dispute them, you'd have to raise to that level, be educated enough and able to understand the work already done, not speak empty words of doubt.

Your appeal to authority isn't convincing.

I'm definitely not appealing to authority. I'm claimng that nobody should take you seriously when you don't understand the topic and moreover even show that you don't want to learn.

If you weren't appealing to authority you could make your point without referring to an authority. But what you told me was that there is an authority who said something that I am not allowed to dispute without also becoming part of said authority. Hence my reaction: your appeal to authority isn't convincing. Feel free to use exactly the same arguments your authority would use, but just saying "because they said so" won't convince me.

The average temperature for cities in middle America will raise 10F in 30yrs? That sounds really a very big swing and they claim it’s their “most conservative” prediction.

> with Minneapolis’s warmest month shooting up from around 80 degrees Fahrenheit on average to more than 90F in 2050.

They're saying it's the warmest month, not the whole year. I guess that makes sense, the mean might increase just a little but the variance is what is going to increase a lot.

I wonder if fertility rates will have some sort of environmentally driven drop. Will seemingly healthy females no longer be able to conceive?

Already happened to Cape Town

how come Asian cities are less prone to change? Look at Seoul, Hong Kong for example.

Name one city you believe is seeing weather they haven't seen in the last 200 years and I bet we can go back and find data that shows otherwise

Sure we could, but that wouldn't support the current narrative crafted to garner support for a CO2 tax. People should always pay attention when the solution to any given problem is supposedly more taxation.

You're implying that a shadowy conspiracy of politicians and climate scientists has, over the course of decades, spun the entire concept of climate change out of whole cloth purely to justify an otherwise-pointless tax? And, for good measure, that all tax is illegitimate?

Taxation is theft on gunpoint. You can't opt out and get nothing of value in return. I see no evidence that trusting politicians is a thing people should do. Neither would I put much value onto what studies say that were paid for by people with an interest in discovering climate change, which we used to call global warming, but then stopped, because it never actually got much warmer over the course of decades.

If you want people to believe you start with being believable. For example, make a prediction that actually comes true. Never seen something like that in relation to "climate change".

This thread went straight from denying changes to conspiracy theories about tax, all without a single shred of proof.

Since when was proof required when talking about climate change? If there was actual proof that human activity makes a difference, there wouldn't be any denial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com