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Comment by decremental | Hacker News Reader

Is there an estimated timeframe for when people will start to experience the impact of the climate crisis instead of only hearing about it?

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Dozens dead and more than one million people displaced by flooding in China

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/21/china-floods...

That depends on your definition of "impact". Everybody currently alive has experienced some effect of climate change already. Where I live for example the number of days with >30°C per year has roughly doubled since I was born.

Heatwaves, forest fires, and dying coral have all been experienced in the past few years by some people.

Attributing any specific extreme weather event to global warning is problematic.

Did you forget this happened only a few weeks ago?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_hea...

Haven't a _lot_ of people already experienced it?

Pretty sure an increase in average temperatures can be seen pretty much everywhere at this point.

Though its effect on weather patterns is harder to estimate.

The impact is happening right now. There will be increasingly more extreme weather events over time, heat waves, cold waves, flooding, hurricanes, etc. The frequency of events and extremeness of events are increasing.

obxkcd about days below 0F in St. Louis https://xkcd.com/1321/

I think ca 2150 would be a reasonable non-cranky estimate, assuming current trends hold.

At that time, if things don't improve by a huge margin (like in : never before in human history; except maybe at WW2 levels), hundreds of millions of people will have moved away from their birthplace (taking the place of other who may or may not be happy with it, which may lead to "tension" between populations; see what happens today when a few refugees (yes, a few) reach the borders of Europe...)

My understanding is there will be many more losers than winners.

Then I would kindly suggest governments stop encouraging people to continue reproducing at an unsustainable rate. Reversing overpopulation would make both mitigation and adaptation much more feasible.

Not requiring ones next generation to be precisely from local genetic stock is a good start. Being able to absorb refugees into ones culture vs crying on and on about low domestic birth rates, that’s a pet peeve of mine

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