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Comment by myth_drannon | Hacker News Reader

Northern passage is opening up, trade with Chinese goods will be much cheaper. There is a lot of profit to be made on top of dead bodies of millions of future victims of the climate catastrophe.

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Cheaper for who? The Panama Canal is a pretty direct route.

Not to mention the northern passage isn’t anywhere close to passable by any serious cargo, even in a decade it will be questionable.

Shanghai to Rotterdam: Panama canal 26000km, Northern passage 16000km....

It saves about 4000 km and 4 days off of Vancouver -> Finland, which for one early transit was worth about $200K:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/breakthro...

There're still a lot of practical problems with the Northwest Passage - notably, the most direct routes are too shallow, there remain lots of icebergs and ice sheets, it's not well-mapped, and there are few resupply ports along the way. I'm not sure I'd agree with all the criticisms in the article (notably, they assume the Northwest Passage will always have ice in winter, but in many "greenhouse earth" scenarios the arctic is ice-free year-round), but it's decades out, not years.

very poetic. I like it because it made me look at the positive side first (woah.... never thought of that)... and then made me decide I don't want that.

Well, history is going to be written by those who profited rather than those who died, so in the eyes of our descendants (if we have any), it'll be a positive thing. Not sure if that's a comforting thought or a disturbing one.

There is also 15% more green vegetation on the planet right now than a few decades ago, due to recent warming, much in formerly marginal areas. Some millions of people potentially dead from famine are likely still alive thinks to the extra food resources. (Along with quite a number of assorted non-human critters supported by it all.)

Do you have any references to back up these claims, especially the assertion concerning famine?

Just because there is more vegetation over all does not mean that food crops produce higher yields. Climate change decreases yields by creating more extreme patterns in precipitation and temperature fluctuation.

If "extreme patterns in precipitation and temperature fluctuation" are doing that, you should see decreased greening in the satellite data. But we haven't.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004

According to the above (2016) Nature article, 25% to 50% of the globe shows greening, with only 4% showing browning.

Lower yielding crops are still green, color has nothing to do with the weight produced per plant. Yield is related to physiological stress on the crop: over water a plant it stays green while the roots rot, put it in drought conditions or heat it up for slightly longer and it gets stressed; either way you're reducing the harvest yield.

Additionally if the greening is occurring in previously permafrost soils that are not very useful for farming then there is not an increase in the food produced by that green area.

World crop yields are up year on year, according to the USDA. See Table 01 World Crop Production Summary here:

https://apps.fas.usda.gov/psdonline/circulars/production.pdf

Interesting, although year to year is a bit of a small scale to compare. Also the first sentence mentions a drought that dropped 5% of Russian wheat from the previous month, but that left the yield 4% higher than the previous year. It's possible that the increases from higher temps offset the longer droughts in some cases. If variance in rain and temperature continue to increase there will eventually be a tipping point where yields are severely reduced.

Well sure, there must be a tipping point somewhere, but the earth has been a lot hotter in the past than it is now, and biomass was in much greater quantity at such times.

It's glacial maximums that are really concerning to me personally. It's very unlikely that we could feed so many billions of people as we do now if we ever enter another ice age.

An uptick in crop failures due to irregular growing seasons has lead to things like the Syrian civil war, which is a fairly direct cause of the immigrant crisis in Europe which is a fairly direct cause of the rise of ethno nationalism in Europe.

This paper disputes your claims about the effects of climate change on Syria’s current state: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096262981...

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