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Comment by chasd00 | Hacker News Reader

All the climate change i hear about is a change for the worse. Are there any places on earth where the change will be for the better? We've had pretty mild summers in TX for the past 5 or so years. If that's due to climate change then great, i'll just live here.

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Putting more energy into a meta-stable chaotic system will greatly increase the number of extremes across the board. Models and forecasts are currently mostly focused on how the various averages are trending, which is fine and useful.

It's most correct to plan around every location getting more wet, more dry, more hot, more cold, more storms and more droughts.

>Putting more energy into a meta-stable chaotic system will greatly increase the number of extremes across the board

This doesn't really track. We're talking about adding less than 1% increase in energy.

> chaotic system

What exactly is your point?

A chaotic system is generally defined to mean one in which small changes to the inputs lead to large variations in the outputs. So your reply noting that it’s only a 1% change doesn’t contradict the previous statements.

>A chaotic system is generally defined to mean on in which small changes to the inputs lead to large variations in the outputs.

A large variation, yes. A direct relationship between a small increase in input and a corresponding large increase in a specific output, no.

It depends on the system, I’m not familiar enough with climate science to state anything about the particular case at hand, but chaotic systems can be deterministic.

>It depends on the system

Sure, which makes the blanket statement the GP made incorrect:

>Putting more energy into a meta-stable chaotic system will greatly increase the number of extremes across the board

I think you’re being a bit pedantic, in context GP was clearly referring to the climate, not making blanket statements about all chaotic systems.

In either case, a 1% change in energy input is always going to be a big deal with regards to an energy dependent chaotic system.

You're being pedantic.

Chaotic systems, in essence, are known for its unpredictability. Watch this to get an idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEjZd-AvPco

You body temperature is 309 degrees Kelvin. 1% less, and you die of hypothermia. 1% more, and you get braindamage and can die in convultions.

So the best climate is an ice age then?

It's not only about the climate but also the rate of change of climate. When the climate changes very quickly, ecosystems cannot adapt and they die.

Remember that humans are actually very adaptable, our range of habitats extends from the arctic to the tropics, desert to rainforest. Most life is not so tolerant.

Our range of habitat has been artificially extended by cheap plentiful energy. Watch this space.

Indigenous peoples have been living in all corners of the globe for thousands of years. The range of our habitat has stayed roughly the same since antiquity, but the population that any given land can support has been vastly boosted by technology.

Not really. Given pelts and basic hand tools human populations can survive damn near anywhere.

Both of these things are true, depending on what is meant by our range of habitat. A small number of people can survive just about anywhere just as you describe, but current population densities are not sustainable in many places without cheap abundant energy.

(I’m not actually concerned with us running out of cheap abundant energy; PV is already fantastic in this regard, and in a hypothetical collapse of all dispatchable power sources that included never being able to make more batteries, we would be severely inconvenienced rather than utterly finished).

The issue is the warming planet isn't only causing a change in weather for various areas. Yeah for example the Arctic is getting a bit warmer. Which sounds like a good thing.

But the warming up of the sea and atmosphere is giving more energy potential to our weather systems. So every hurricane season, tornado season, fire season, monsoonal season, etc is getting worse and worse. And there's no such thing as isolated climate. That extra energy in the system is world wide, which is really bad for most of us.

There may be places that have slight benefits, sure. But the worldwide negative effects cancel those out IMO.

Lets not forget that the thawing of the permafrost in the arctic has significant environmental impact on greenhouse gases such as methane.

Do you have data showing that every hurricane, tornado, fire and monsoon season is “getting worse and worse”?

This is something which you can easily check yourself. We shouldn't expect people to make citations for statements which can be verified by typing the exact question into a search engine.

That’s not how this works at all. You don’t get to make claims and then tell people they should go find supporting evidence themselves.

>But the warming up of the sea and atmosphere is giving more energy potential to our weather systems. So every hurricane season, tornado season, fire season, monsoonal season, etc is getting worse and worse.

Global warming is adding somewhere between 0.3 and 0.5% more energy to the system. It's a neglible amount of energy for the overall system.

What it does is change the equilibrium of a complex system. Things are going to be different. Not necessarily more intense across the board.

I think the assumption that there ever was a long term climate equillibrium is false. Climate has always been changing. The radiative input from the sun is always changing. The composition of the atmosphere is always changing. The albedo of the earth is always changing.

I believe humans may be contributing significantly to current change by increasing greenhouse gases.

It is unknown whether this is a significant problem or a problem humans can or should solve.

I’m not sure any informed person disagrees. People are concerned about the comfortable temperature range for people and large scale agriculture.

We’ll probably adapt, but it might be really bumpy for a decade or so in the 2050s.

Maybe. But again I think it would be a bumpy road regardless. Humans have undergone an inflection point in the past couple hundred years. We are probably vastly surpassing the long term carrying capacity of the Earth. This may be an unpopular opinion but I think the best thing that could happen to the human species in the long run would be to drop the population perhaps below 500 million in coming decades as the Georgia Guide Stones recommend.

The assumption has been that climate does change over time. The problem with the current climate change is the rate of change is much higher that most changes not driven by human actions. Most plants/animals (and civilizations) will struggle to adapt to this rate of change.

Texas is predicted to go from 60 dangerous heat days per year to 115 heat days per year by 2050. I doubt that's a good thing. And 5 years isn't enough to establish what the trend is, a countercyclical trend for 5 year can happen by random or via any of the multidecadal climate cycles.

There is no way to predict that. We can't even predict how many there will be this year or the next 5 years, let alone decades from now.

This is the difference between climate and weather. You can very easily predict that there will be on average x amount of days over, say, 100 deg. Predicting which days, however, is not really possible.

Where’s your source for this?

Russia is supposed to be nicer. Some people believe it’ll become the bread basket of the world if climate change continues unabated.

And it will likely open the Arctic ocean for much shorter shipping lanes from Russia to Canada.

Hopefully by sail boat...

Cruise ship.

I think that’s a simplistic view of it. As far as I’ve followed along, Russia has been having droughts and mega fires which tend to be incompatible with high crop yields.

Well I believe the droughts and wildfires are not really occurring in Siberia, which is the area I think some are speculating will become a breadbasket.

Edit: I was wrong.

Living around Seattle, I disagree, lately there have been articles just about every year about wildfires or drought in Siberia, and many about those fires causing smoky skies in Seattle.

This summer: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/07/05/siberia-forest-fir...

2019: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/unprecedented-numbe...

2018: https://crosscut.com/2018/07/first-smoky-skies-season-arrive...

There are unprecedented wild fires in siberia. What are you talking about!

Perhaps they argue for this case over in https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/16/magazine/russ.... I haven't read the article, I just keep the bookmark around.

Siberia has awful soil that doesn't have nearly the nutrients necessary to support large scale agriculture even if the temperature shifts. You could fix that, but it would take the same amount of time as trying to fix climate change (at least on a big enough scale).

Talking about megafires, Chernobyl’s surroundings are sitting under dry leaves, because bacteria and insects have defects and don’t decompose them properly.

You have a source on this?

Google. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around...

Sure but give it a few thousand years

Yeah, "some people" being Russian. Fooling themselves like the rest of the world.

Do you think thawed permafrost is usable as arable land with the snap of a finger? Furthermore one could wonder what else will thaw and give us some nasty surprises.

Im thinking of the scene in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum says: 'Life finds a way.'

Our society is highly optimized to the current climate. Any change is for the worse.

This what people fail to grasp - if you move where deserts, forests and rivers are, even if you loose nothing 'net', now your city is in in the desert, has no fresh water, the suer system doesnt work because the ocean level is higher, and all you infrastructure needs to be rebuilt

Doesn't even have to change a great deal. Been watching real estate in regional towns where I live in Australia and places that are somewhat dry now but at risk of getting drier/hotter are full of cheap houses struggling to sell. Everyone's thinking the same thing about the prospects of that town in 10-20 years, and it's on top of the usual plight of small country towns.

I doubt you’ll be able to comfortably watch the rest of the world burn from there.

The Canadian Prairies are getting warmer and forecasted to have a longer/more productive growing seasons although a bad drought this year isn't encouraging.

Climate resiliency was a primary factor in our decision to move last year to western New York. Farmland, fresh water, and not too hot. Check out Figure 10 in the linked report...

http://uploads.oneregionforward.org/content/uploads/2015/01/...

Looks like you'll be growing peaches, pecans and Vidalia onions in a few decades, yikes!

Actually, Niagara County is surprisingly temperate--warmer and much less snowy than Buffalo and the south towns. It's been famous for apples, pears, and stone fruit since the 19th century; we even have some vineyards. But yeah, maybe we'll add figs and bananas.

WNY isn't completely immune. A drought five years ago killed the corn crop. Long term stats are only updated every ten years and we only just switched over to data including 2010-2020.

> But yeah, maybe we'll add figs and bananas.

Give it a few years. I live in Bucharest (Romania), located at ~45 Northern latitude, and I’ve first started seeing fig trees around here about 10 years ago. In the last few years I’ve started seeing more and more of them, so much so that I’ve started taking photos of almost all of them and I’m thinking of putting those photos on a map and exporting the geo-locations somewhere on GitHub in a .kml or geo-json file for other people to look at.

They grow like weeds in most places I've seen!

How's the groundwater contamination? I was looking at Minnesota but the PFAS/... contamination is rampant, just terrible.

It's a concern, unfortunately. We read quite a bit about specific local issues before buying our house; our water is pretty good though I also installed a filter. Love Canal, where the Superfund program was born, is in Niagara Falls. In Tonawanda the army intentionally poured Manhattan Project leftovers into dispersed wells to hide the source... [1] And WNY was generally a center of late 19C/early 20C industry which generally left messes behind.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/02/01/nyregion/big-atom-waste-s...

Extreem changes in a system deeply adapted to a current situation is always a problem, that's why you hear mostly about the down and not the up.

Slow or local changes are ok because life adapts nicely.

Brutal or global changes will also see adaptation, but will cause much pain and damages.

Moving a cristal glass on a few yards or meters at the average speed of 4 miles or km an hour may be fine for the glass or not, depending if your speed is mostly constant, or not.

If you move the glass excrucingly slowly first, of throw it brutally at the last inch/cm, it will be bad for the glass. You won't hear about the good stories about this, because there are not aligned with the nature if the situation.

Texas is most likely fucked long-term. You can probably get away with living there another 10-15 years (total guess, some things could happen which could kick off some positive feedback loops sooner than that), but I wouldn't buy any housing there and maybe start looking further north before everyone else does and housing prices skyrocket.

Makes perfect sense when Arizona is 20F warmer on average than TX during the summer and yet people seem to live there fine.

AZ has been allowing for their climate (with regard to water) since 1974. Texans will have to move fast.

Fortunately (?) people are dumb and the rush will happen at the last minute.

I think the northern migration will start at a trickle, slowly start increasing but still slow enough people don't really notice, and then suddenly and without much warning become a flood.

Just need to make sure you sneak in before that flood, but if you try to time it just right you'll probably wait too long and be in the same situation as everyone else.

Shill me your housing bag, whereabouts?

I own a home in the Chicago region right now (not the city itself). It'll probably fare better than Texas but if the Earth warms up 2-3 degrees Celsius it's probably not going to be a good idea to stay here either. Much more than that and it probably doesn't matter where I go.

I would like to sell it and move further north in the next 5-7 years myself, hopefully, probably either Wisconsin or Michigan, near the Great Lakes. The decision isn't 100% up to me, though, as I'm married. We have been talking about it, though.

>It'll probably fare better than Texas but if the Earth warms up 2-3 degrees Celsius it's probably not going to be a good idea to stay here either. Much more than that and it probably doesn't matter where I go.

Why is that? Chicago flooding risk?

Various things, one of which being Illinois is expected to turn into the equivalent of what Texas weather and temperatures were about 5-10 years ago, by end-of-century according to this link[1], but there are articles that keep saying we're reaching these tipping points much faster than forecasted[2], so I'm guessing by around mid-century is more likely. And I don't particularly enjoy Texas weather, what I've experienced of it.

Also I'm asthmatic, and the air quality where I live already has several days a year where it's unwise for me to go outside for too long (and so my dogs don't get their walks :/), and the number of those days are expected to triple by 2050. I can't find that link offhand, but here's one that says that Chicago now has worse air quality than Los Angeles, having stretches of 2 weeks of bad air quality, and that's last year, not in the future[3].

I'm not super concerned about flooding where I live specifically, since I'm in the far suburbs. I do live near enough to a river that it floods some streets in my city that I drive on, but it's already doing that now anyway. Downtown Chicago could see some flooding from the Lake, but it won't be anywhere near as bad as the coasts. I'm actually considering moving to a place that's much closer to Lake Michigan, just up in Wisconsin or Michigan.

But also if we blow past our estimates of warming and get to 4 degrees Celsius or higher, then a good chunk of the US is expected to start turning into a desert, and where I live is approximately where the edge of that is expected to be[4].

I imagine the process will take long enough that I'll be dead before it fully happens, but I also would like to secure a decent home further North before the eventual rush so I can still get a place at a cheap-to-decent price.

[1]: https://climatechange.chicago.gov/climate-impacts/climate-im...

[2]: https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/world-to-hit-t...

[3]: https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-air-quality-weather-unhealth...

[4]: https://youtu.be/ZfFvLJyPf3o

> pretty mild summers in TX for the past 5 or so years. If that's due to climate change then great, i'll just live here.

There have been two weather related massive grid failures in Texas this year so far. I would not want to live there as climate change intensifies. The winters are going to suck.

Let's say the weather gets better in one place due to climate change. Isn't that nice. You have that on the one hand.

On the other hand, there are big risks inherent to change. You don't get to pick just the good parts of climate change. Spitballing here: risks to food stability from droughts, fires, etc. Some areas no longer economically support farming. Other areas open up but aren't as productive, so food is a bigger part of your budget and might be subject to disruption. Political risks: displaced people start eyeing the habitable places and find ways to make life miserabile unless they're let in. Costs of the disruption while everyone tries to adapt weigh on the economy and make the products/services you take for granted today more expensive or unavailable. Your children (or others that you care about) will have to deal with even worse. And things don't stop getting worse until greenhouse gas emissions are dealt with.

The mentality of looking at the silver lining while ignoring the rest is wrong on so many obvious levels.

Nature general adapts though evolution... So any large scale changes to our eco-system will likely have negative effects short term.

Notice that "short term" in nature is probably a very long time for a human :)

Long even for a humanity

You're taking about destabilising a global-spanning system with tremendous energies. No, there's no "change for the better"

I mean, the cold y'all had this winter was possibly climate change, so you have that to look forward to. Likely worse wildfires, too. East Texas will get higher humidity.

So... probably not too nice.

Yes. Nordic countries like Russia and Canada will benefit the most, especially considering the opening of maritime routes and the easier exploitation of natural sources that were usually locked up under ice or permafrost.

Would mosquitoes become a major hassle in those areas? I understand they're already bad for part of the year.

Great Lakes area (Toronto etc.) supposed to benefit.

Yeah it's not as if Texas was frozen over helpless and without power not too long ago

The freeze would've been pleasant if it weren't for the power failure

No, it wasn't. I had power the entire time and I had to help neighbors whose vehicles would not start and deal with dangerous roads. No one in Texas has the correct winter tires and cities lack the infrastructure to clear the roads quickly. It was dangerous, not pleasant, even with electricity.

Winter tires can't really help on ice. Source: live in michigan.

wot!? regular tires are terrifying on ice.

source: canadian

As a Minnesotan I concur, but most people don’t put winter tires on. It’s infuriating.

For those not in the know, the rubber is formulated to be softer at cold temperatures. Summer/performance tires get ridiculously hard and all-season tires are “meh” at best.

And winter tires are just as terrifying on ice.

Oh please, I was driving the whole time. It was fun if anything.

Texas Power Grid

Texas Power Grid laughs.

Is this the new anti climate change meme? I saw nearly this exact post on the last climate change article about fires or something.

Not exactly new. It's the old misunderstanding/deliberately dense denier point of "global warming would mean everything will be just as it is now, just a degree or two warmer."

Yeah, nah. It doesn't work like that.

I used to have a personal list of stages but can't find it at the moment. Denying it's a problem/claiming it's a good thing is not the last one though.

But:

    1. Deny the Problem Exists
    2. Deny We're the Cause
    3. Deny It's a Problem
    4. Deny We can Solve It
    5. It's too Late
    5b. And it's the fault of doom prophets who scared us into denying it (it's a mechanism to resist stress) and should have communicated better.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

==We've had pretty mild summers in TX for the past 5 or so years.==

The same Texas where hundreds of people froze to death in February? Seems like there has been some extreme weather.

People will complain if you put any change in positive terms. But of course there are upsides and silver linings.

I won't get into some contentious discussion, but let's just say it's more and more viable to grow and produce wine in Denmark, which is on its own a positive thing. So that's just one example of a positive change.

But at the same time it’s becoming impossible to grow wine in California due to smoke taint and increasing fire insurance premiums. When folks are loosing what was once a nice climate, it’s not of comfort that some foreign land with strict immigration rules is getting a better climate.

My comment was not provided for comfort - not much to find in this topic - just for conversation and exchanging ideas :)

Yeah, commenters here aren't taking the spirit of the question into account. Overall, climate change has substantial negative impacts, yes. But not literally everything will be worse because of it. The GP was just curious about what might end up being better - and not trying to justify climate change using those examples.

Yes, many more people die of cold than of heat. Global warming will likely save a couple hundred thousand lives per year in this regard. [1]

1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-natural-disaster...

edit: added "in this regard". Did not mean to suggest that we know how all of the implications of global warming pan out.

At the cost of horrific hurricanes in the tropical and subtropical regions. Locally there may be effects seen as beneficial, but globally it's looking to be a downhill slide.

A lot of people who also think about it politically forgetting that it will also increase migrant crisises. As things get unhabitable people will be migrating. This will apply to the southern border of US.

GP acknowledged that there are many bad things but asked if there were also good thing. I was only answering that question. I was not claiming that it is good on balance.

hasn't there actually been less horrific hurricanes instead of more? There's been one cat 5 that's hit the US since 2005.

Wet Bulb temperature above 35C is deadly no matter how much water or shade you have. If the global average increases over 1.5C, most of the tropics will experience prolonged deadly heat.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/08/global-heati...

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