Uninhabitable places in 2100 (interactive map)
interaktiv.morgenpost.de
interaktiv.morgenpost.de
If some of you would leave behind your climate change disaster porn fetishism for a bit (despite using plenty of the latest smartphone technologies in your comfortable middle to upper middle class lives while you lambast the world for "never changing"), you might consider these climate predictions rationally enough to realize that doom scenarios like these have been ongoing for decades, if not centuries and have literally no basis in fact. They are no more than speculation based on guesses derived from a snapshot of the present. Remember the air quality predictions of the 70's? How have those gone in many of the places where it was predicted that millions would suffocate? Just one example.
For one thing, the 2.7 degree increase they mention is desperately severe and seems to assume that nothing in our human world will improve in any way in so far as contamination of the world is concerned, or present and near future technologies to mitigate it. Secondly, the entire graphic hinges on afar too many unknown unknowns and a total lack of imagination for potential positive outcomes from warmer temperatures or human innovation under steady duress.
I don't deny the dangers of climate change or the effect that humans have on the world already, or if they're not careful about modulating their behavior down the road. It's also undeniable that even now, irresponsible climate actions have caused suffering for certain populations, but none of this justifies treating doom porn as a hard or realistic assessment of the future, when nothing so far has even concretely borne out older predictions of man-made climate catastrophe in even the present time.
You don't need a full year with the average day past the uninhabitable mark to be in trouble, you just need one day with conditions that you can't survive.
Climate change is hard to fix, but it most definitely won't be made easier if the focus is just on blaming Americans for X and Y.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/greenhous...
I mean, the whole continent of Antarctica is covered in ice. Sure Mexico and North Africa become unbearably hot, but I imagine lots of places actually become more hospitable with global warming. Not that you’ll ever hear the doomsdayers talk about it.
Go look at a world map. How much land mass is at the equator compared to 60 degrees north? Any person that’s serious about examining the effects of climate change will take all effects into account, not just the ones that conjure Mad Max movie scenes.
What happened in Canada last year (and partly to those of us who live in PNW: it hit 108F at our house last year in the woods next to the Puget Sound) wasn't about average temperatures, it was about more energy in a quasi-stable chaotic system causing more frequent extremes on both/all sides.
The old saying goes: a human dies after three minutes without O2, three days without water, three weeks without food. More to this point, a human dies after being exposed to 95F wet bulb temperatures for three hours.
What's this have to do with living near the poles as the average warms up? There might be some use there, but wild weather is a truly global thing, and the poles are, on average, accumulating even more energy than the equator.
You might have to buy an air conditioner if you keep living in Washington state over the next few decades. Folks in Canada might save money on their winter heating bill. Folks that live in Tennessee might not notice any difference.
There are lots of places on planet earth where being outside for 3 hours in the weather can kill you. I worked in lawn and garden at Wal-Mart 15 years ago watering plants in the parking lot in the July heat in Oklahoma. It was easily 115°F for several hours in the afternoon. You go inside each hour for 15 minutes and drink lots of water.
Humanity has been living in deserts and jungles for a long time, in conditions far less comfortable than a few hours of 108°F heat in an otherwise very temperate climate. Millions of people live in Phoenix, AZ in the summertime. Modern technology makes it even easier. I'm not buying that a daily temperature outlier here and there means we're headed for a climate catastrophe.
First, if you click on "present", it shows significant populations living in "uninhabitable" areas, making their definition of "uninhabitable" quite questionable, covering e.g. 56% of the population of India and 84% of the population of the Netherlands. Last time I checked, Rotterdam and Amsterdam were pretty habitable.
Second, for their 2100 display, they're assuming an increase of 2.7°C compared to pre-industrial levels, which is what their source (ClimateActionTracker) considers the outcome of currently implemented policies, ignoring any and all planned improvements/goals. That's not a realistic scenario.
There are plenty of realistic scenarios where far right climate denialists come to power in major nations and actively roll back targets and progress. Counting on future action is exactly the wrong thing to do right now - and including future un-comitted-to actions in a model would be "highly misleading".
For the people who don't keep putting money building and maintaining giant walls to keep the sea out, yes those places will become unlivable.
For India it mostly shows up for the water stress index, and yeah, it seems to be having issues with water today[3]:
"India placed thirteenth among the world's 17 ‘extremely water-stressed’ countries, according to the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas released by the World Resources Institute (WRI). The country, followed by neighbouring Pakistan, was under ‘extremely high’ levels of baseline water stress."
"A region is said to be under ‘water stress’ when the demand for water there exceeds the available volume or when poor quality restricts use."
"The World Bank too had warned about the region’s water stress last year. Countries there were “withdrawing water from underground reservoirs faster than it could be replenished and were essentially living beyond their means,” it said."
So they're getting away with it right now because they haven't totally drained all the groundwater, but they're steadily depleting that. Eventually that won't be the case (especially by 2100), and that region will most likely become unlivable.
[1]: https://www.theb1m.com/video/the-sea-wall-that-saved-a-natio...
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/new-york-119-billion-se...
[3]: https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/water/india-world-s-13th...
By that definition, most of the world is unlivable because you'll die (within hours!) if you sit naked outside at night in winter. And clothing and an insulated, heated house costs a lot more than $35 every few decades.
Likewise, desalination will become cheaper and cheaper. That's not "future maybe technology" like fusion or carbon capture, that's something that's already in use today, at a cost that will become feasible as the cost goes down and India develops more.
So what I'm hearing is that we could future proof the Netherlands fairly substantially for a fraction of this particular religion's profits (let alone all religions).
What...are we going to do about this? This seems like it could shape up to be a humanitarian crisis of completely incomparable proportions. Could a million people die from one heatwave at some point this century?
There are a lot of empty places on earth. Without looking far, just look at the midwest, Canada, Russia... There's even a whole continent that's currently frozen - Antarctica.
If temperatures rise to the point of say making Antarctica livable, it would just be fair compensation to open it for settlement to every ecological migrant.
Water sourcing, soil generation, mining and extraction, energy generation, food production, and favorable trade conditions are bog standard needs.
You can't just dump a million people somewhere after collecting them from off the street and hope for the best.
Indeed. But look at the time it takes to create new infrastructure (large building, hospitals...) in China when it's needed right now.
I believe we have the technology to make large metropolis in a matter of a few semesters. Even assuming a total lack of improvements, a few years is all it should take to tackle the emergency even if we are barely prepared and organized.
And if there's only one thing to trust, when push come to shove, humanity always accomplish miracles. Crisis unites: people forget about old feuds to care about each other.
I'm not intentionally Malthusian, typically Ricardian. However, I feel there are two things being ignored
1. The pandemic response shows that individual humans don't seem to care much for humanity
2. It's within our capacity to start acting now, rather than waiting for a threshold to be crossed where most, if not all, of humanity dies off due to +6C average temps with wild swings and the wild weather, infrastructure destruction, and more that brings.
> Indeed. But look at the time it takes to create new infrastructure (large building, hospitals...) in China when it's needed right now.
These large projects definitely seems astounding if you think they started the day the first brick was laid. In reality there is a huge supply chain supporting those accomplishments, pre-determined architecture, and more. So, establishing a base on Ceres for mining? We got that in the bag. Coordinating even more than the pandemic would have required to stem the tide of accelerating temperature increases? I admit pessimism.
I think the core disagreement is on the empathy levels, and the need to act sooner rather than later.
At <1% mortality, I think the pandemic response showed we care quite a lot, enough to do many things, but not to the point of sacrificing everything we need normal just for such little lives to save. If it had been 10% or 30%, I think the conclusion would have been very different.
As for the need to start acting now, things take time! The pandemic got us a wonderful vaccine manufacturing and distribution infrastructure, based on brand new technology that drastically cut the time to production. We're lucky we got such a low mortality disease first!
I don't see why global warming would happen as a +6C overnight. If Antartica melt, change the gulf stream, it'll be bad - but not "most, if not all, of humanity dies off". Maybe 1%. Maybe 5%? In any case, enough to create a big fright and get us to prepare an adequate response for the next time!
For starters we can raise awareness about the potential ecological calamity, education and awareness goes a long way. Influencing key policymakers and stakeholders is the only sustainable way to ensure change...
In the US, it is very expensive and sometimes impossible to procure insurance for areas at extreme risk of wildfire or flooding. This is essentially the private market's assessment of risk based on location. Most people will leave if they are unable to reasonably insure their homes and property. Cities at very high risk will build seawalls and flood defenses in order to protect their taxpaying base. These are acute solutions to acute impacts.
To preempt some replies, I am not denying the extreme scale of the challenge ahead and the broad impact, especially in less developed and highly dense nations. I believe it is an inevitable adjustment that societies will need to make.
Kim Stanley Robinson explodes the possibility in “Ministry for the Future” the most terrifying and troubling opening of any book I’ve ever read.
Your personal impact is relevant - i.e. find a way to drive less or not at all (move closer to work, buy an e-bike), divest any investments you have in fossil fuel companies (index funds are a particularly hard one), switch your banking to a credit union (major banks fund many fossil fuel ventures).
But more important than you personal impact, is the group-impact you can have. Anything that impacts your communities choices, or economies of scale. I.e. don't just move closer to work and buy an e-bike - tell your friends about it, convince them to do it to. Then go to city council meetings and demand better cycling infrastructure. Vote and donate to political candidates who are committed to climate action - ignore the presidential race and do this at a local level where you can have a much bigger impact. Switch your home off fracked methane and onto electric, every customer the gas company loses, the worse the economies of scale are.
If you have influence or power over stuff at work, look for opportunities there - a good and simple one is pushing back against efforts to return to the office.
For everybody the actions are going to be different, maybe none of the things I listed are things you can do, that's ok as long as you figure out what the things you can do are and do them. Some people will be able to shoulder more than others. The only wrong move here is to do nothing because of despair or because it's someone else's problem to work out.
It's not clear to me that say an expansion of the Sahara or the desertic part of Australia won't be more than mitigated by the large amount of land currently covered by permafrost in Eurasia.
A proper accounting of the phenomenon would show both, if only to refute my naive take.
It's not about optimism, but being factual.
> national borders are unlikely to go away in the next hundred years
That's a strange take, because an argument often raised is that ecological migrants must be accommodated if entire countries become uninhabitable.
As borders are just imaginary lines in the ground, if there is indeed a climate emergency, I do not see why say people from the Indian subcontinent (shown preeminently in the interactive map) would have no rights to settle in the empty eurasian steppes.
Human lives matter more than imaginary lines caused by historical circumstances.
Yes. That is the argument. It is a just and reasonable argument. It does not mean that they will be accomodated.
> if there is indeed a climate emergency, I do not see why say people from the Indian subcontinent, I do not see why say people from the Indian subcontinent (shown preeminently in the interactive map) would have no rights to settle in the empty eurasian steppes
You don't see why? OK. Tell me: who is going to roll tanks into Russia on their behalf when Russia says no?
An ecologically perilous future is one of harder borders and angrier international affairs and is yet another reason to avert it instead of leaping for the quick dopamine pings of "well, actually".
A big gap will be soil quality, I reckon, as native microorganisms, fungi, and plants don't traverse north/south axes well
But yeah, there might be water and amenable temperature in areas.
"We're all going to die" may be as old as "the young are such slackers."
“Whither are the manly vigour and athletic appearance of our forefathers flown? Can these be their legitimate heirs? Surely, no; a race of effeminate, self-admiring, emaciated fribbles can never have descended in a direct line from the heroes of Potiers and Agincourt...” Letter in Town and Country magazine republished in Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, 1771
“They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.” Rhetoric, Aristotle, 4th Century BC
BTW, the animation was fine on an iPad Pro.
There was an article a while back talking about this, usually these water insecurity issues in the southwest are attributable to the unsustainable farming practices that go on here (because the year round sun and temperatures make farming convenient-despite lack of rainfall).
Example (not endorsement): https://www.hydraloop.com
But with enough will industrial nations can largely spend their way out of all of these problems. Water can be brought from far away or desalinated from the ocean (both happen in California), heat can be fought off by being indoors with AC, sea level rise can be resisted with dikes, levees and pumps. But a lot of places in Africa and Asia won't have the money to do that.
I'm happy you can shrug it off as an "I'll be gone by the time this is an issue" problem, but I hope none of your descendants ever see this comment.
You can only hold people accountable for the things that they could have done. For someone in their early 70s that's about 26 times voting for federal representatives. For someone in their early 20s that's about 2 times.
To say those two groups bear any kind of equal responsibility is just wrong.