Future of the human climate niche
pnas.org
pnas.org
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/04/28/191011411...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilbara
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_(Western_Australia)
Who cares if a bunch of Indian coastal cities get flooded if you have a breadbasket and tons of oil?
Bringing infrastructure to these newly suitable lands will be a massive engineering challenge.
Great article here: https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/frozenground/people.html
So just because Canada is getting warmer that doesn't mean we can necessarily move all our food production further north and keep going as normal.
We're screwed.
Since the climate has always been changing, and 100 years ago we were coming out of the "little Ice Age"... why was that so perfect?
There must be some changes from global warming that are beneficial, surely?
Not trying to be snarky, but I see claims like this all the time (and not just about climate change), and nobody seems to provide a reputable source for said claims. Cite your source, just like you were in school.
That's an interesting scenario to explore from a demographics point of view under the assumption that nothing changes. But it's not necessarily what is going to happen given the current technical progress on clean energy, farming practices, tackling desertification, etc. IMHO taking coal plants and most ICE vehicles out of the equation in the next decades is going to help reduce smog and co2 emissions. Concrete and cement are currently actually a bigger problem and there too there are alternative technologies emerging.
It won't stop global warming but it will enable us to engineer our way out of (or at least around) some of its consequences. Clearly anything over 50-60 degrees C is not sustainable. The Saudi's are currently dealing with those kind of temperatures already on a regular basis. However, replanting forests in e.g. Africa or India or large scale ecosystem engineering in China seems to result in drastically different micro climate in those places where that happens. We've barely scratched the surface of what is possible there in a relatively short amount of time at relatively modest expense. Lower temperature, better water retention, higher farming yields, etc. Three decades is a long time for absolutely nothing to happen on that front.
As for northern regions. What's bad for the world is not necessarily unpleasant there. I live in Berlin at 52 degrees latitude and used to live in Finland at 60 degrees latitude. Most of the world at similar southern latitudes are ocean. But longer nicer summers are not necessarily a punishment for people living there. And actually it's quite enjoyable. It's not all universally bad. And also it's not historically unprecedented for things to be a bit warmer up north given fossil records.
> The Paris Agreement's long-term temperature goal is to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels; and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 °C, recognizing that this would substantially reduce the risks and impacts of climate change. This should be done by reducing emissions as soon as possible, in order to "achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases" in the second half of the 21st century. It also aims to increase the ability of parties to adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change, and make "finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development."
> Under the Paris Agreement, each country must determine, plan, and regularly report on the contribution that it undertakes to mitigate global warming. [6] No mechanism forces [7] a country to set a specific emissions target by a specific date, [8] but each target should go beyond previously set targets.
And then this is what was decided:
> In June 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the agreement. Under the agreement, the earliest effective date of withdrawal for the U.S. is November 2020, shortly before the end of President Trump's 2016 term. In practice, changes in United States policy that are contrary to the Paris Agreement have already been put in place.[9]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012387...
When is humanity going to get a grip on this? We know what the outcomes are and we know what the fixes are yet we’re doing ~nothing. I have a huge feeling of constant background dread for the future.
A lot of people are doing something.
Some do a lot by actively working on solutions, many do a little by preserving energy and reducing their personal consumption (especially meat and transportation/travel).
If you feel dread you should do more.
Extinction is a goal we have unconsciously targeted and we are going to achieve it.
People will not change their habits to fix global issues because global issues are not in human-time scale. So we do not see them coming.
I think it's easy to feel like you feel, and I do (sometimes), but right now I'm trying hard to feel as hopeful as I can without ignoring the problem.
Why we should care may not be apparent to a large demographic on this forum, but for those of us with small children, the reasons to care are loved ones whose futures we think about a lot every single day.
So some of us are in fact paying close attention to these warnings, and the better ones are the ones issuing them.
[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/07/glacier-national-park...
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco-pocalyp...
To start with accurate predictions as a base, then present the models and predictions that failed would put things into perspective.
By the way, you've accurately described what the mainstream media does with climate change (and many other topics). Also, those are the same sources a vast majority of the population uses to get their news.
So, poor or not, it's unfortunately the norm, and as such it erodes the confidence in articles that place a timeline on our doom.
How's his own predictions of a new Little Ice Age in 2016 looking? You know, when the Solar Cycle hits its minimum? Watts not only gets the year wrong, he gets the entire direction wrong. You'd think he'd manage to be a bit less sneering about others predictions when his own are so utterly crap.
If your comment is intended as a general dismissal of climate predictions, my replies would be:
* What would you recommend instead?
* Would you recommend that no one make model-based predictions at all?
* Would you recommend that model-based predictions be dismissed entirely?
All models are wrong, but some are useful. [1] In other words, models are all simplifications in different kinds of ways, but a critical, skeptical mind can find value in them.
Science is largely based on models. Some may think current scientific theories are the complete truth, but history has shown this is not a reliable prediction. Still, you work with the best models you have, since the alternative is worse. Still, the only way forward we know is starting from where we are.
Exponential growth on a long timescale is something people are bad at.
> reducing handshakes is recommended generally to prevent the spread of colds and flu, but not specifically for coronavirus.
> Ulevitch also announced that he won’t be taking in-person meetings with anyone who’s recently traveled to China. It’s unclear if Ulevitch was kidding.
> so far, the flu has impacted far more people. [...] Yet unlike the flu, the coronavirus is new and not well understood, which makes it especially scary to the public, including Silicon Valley’s elite.
...Wow.
If we had started in earnest to reduce emissions in the early nineties when the science was crystal clear, we could be mostly done by now. The current climate is measurably different from thirty years ago, but obviously not so bad. Unfortunately we barely did anything in the last thirty years, so we can only hope to finish decarbonization in another thirty years. By then we'll have locked in another two degrees of warming and, if we're unlucky, hit some trigger points that cause runaway warming (e.g. Greenland losing most of its ice, large parts of the permafrost thawing...) which we're powerless to stop.
Unless something changes, 10 years from now we're all going to be having this same discussion.
But more to your point: Regional warming can be larger, and the tails of the temperature distribution move more than the small increase in average temperature suggest. Precipitation patterns are also affected.
Secondly, as for measurably different: there are a million articles on the internet detailing how weather patterns have changed across the world in the last few decades.
For some personal perspective: I live in Zurich, where winter temperatures once hovered around freezing and there were 20 days of snow per year [1]. Winter gets milder and milder and this year it almost didn't happen. Autumn just became spring at some point. It snowed for 10 minutes. I look around at all the buildings here with snow protection fences on their roofs and wonder when people will remove them through lack of use. Nearby ski resorts were brown and grassy, not white. And as winters have gotten warmer, so have summers. There was a huge number of days over 30 last year -- something that used to be quite extreme.
Also, although global temperatures have "only" risen ~1C this increase is not uniformly distributed. In particular the Arctic is heating much faster, accelerating melting ice caps and sea level rise [2].
[0] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich#Climate [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/climate/climate-change-ar...
I encourage you to read up on what's going on, get scared, and vow to do something (vote, lobby, educate, etc).
(Edit: added NASA source)
As i understand it, it all depends on the shape of the polar vortex pattern which in turn shapes/modulates the jet stream.
- Groundwater will be gone.
- Fish will be gone.
- Arctic methane will be a problem.
- Topsoil will die.
Please consider this a friendly suggestion to help improve the persuasiveness of your comment.
The above claims are non-obvious, to say the least. Many appear to be exaggerations.
Here on HN, it is my experience that people seek out useful discussion. It may be based on personal experiences and/or credible sources. If you have sources, share them.
Guardian review of said book:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/27/the-uninhabita...
I like the last paragraph:
"You could call [the book] alarmist, and you would not be wrong. (In the closing pages, Wallace-Wells himself accepts the charge as “fair enough, because I am alarmed”.) But to read The Uninhabitable Earth – or to consider in any serious way the scale of the crisis we face – is to understand the collapse of the distinction between alarmism and plain realism. To fail to be alarmed is to fail to think about the problem, and to fail to think about the problem is to relinquish all hope of its solution."
The evidence is overwhelming, worldwide. Pick any source you want at this point.
Out of curiosity, what's the second and third best things people could do?
If you live in a state where a Republican is quite a bit more likely than a Democrat to win the general election, it would probably be more effective to register as a Republican so you can participate in the primaries or caucuses that select the Republican candidate for the general election.
There you can support candidates more like Republicans of a few years ago who would acknowledge and address the problem.
[1] https://www.clcouncil.org/media/2017/03/The-Conservative-Cas...
But if there are other things you care about even a little, then blindly voting for one party or the other is stupid.
Whenever voting for anything you need to first weigh the items of greatest importance to you, in order from most to least important. Then find the candidates that put them in the same or similar order.
That's whom you vote for, regardless of party, or what the news says about them, or what your family or friends vote.