The Precipitation Problem

When the temperature rises the air can hold more water. That leads to two issues: (1) rain is less likely to occur because the air is retaining more moisture and (2) when it does occur there is more rain. So you get less frequent rain that is more intense.

Humans have been putting a lot conscious effort into modifying our world for our own benefit. We've converted a huge amount of our land area into farmland and cities for our own use, which has had a lot of upsides for our current lifestyle. But rampant dumping of pollutants into the atmosphere hasn't usually had a lot of upsides, whether it be lead, or CFCs, or CO2. Climate change is not a directed endeavor with a goal, and so it's not surprising that it causes a lot of havoc.

More energy in the system increases the unpredictability.

You can see this on the tiny scale, where heat (energy) first turns a solid (atoms are bound to a rigid structure) to a liquid (atoms slide past each other) to a gas (atoms bounce around unpredictably).

While weather doesn't have this clean sort of phase transition, more heat in the atmosphere drives both predictable heat as well as unpredictable cold, storms, droughts, floods, etc.

Every bit of infrastructure built with rainfall in mind will be operating outside parameters. And the new rainfall pattern won't ease smoothly into place, it'll thrash from year to year for who knows how long (decades?). Farming isn't designed for that.

Wake me up when CO2 has been stable for 500 years.

It's because of the asymmetry of the stakeholders. If you consider "nature" or "Gaia" or even "planet Earth" as stakeholders, climate change is a net nothing for them. Nature will be fine, as will the planet.

Humans OTOH are pretty much f*cked unless we change our ways. Doomish reports of climate change mostly reflect the potential outcomes for humans, because wombats and ferns don't click on ads.

Because we’ve optimized our locations for older weather patterns. We live where the weather allows us to grow our crops and stock. There are some who live on the edge of these zones, and their life is usually harder.

Climate change makes our current locations less well suited, so nearly every change is a negative one.

It's the unpredictability.

If you're farming, you're trying to time things like when you can actually get out on your field and plant. Too much rain at the wrong time throws everything off — suddenly your window of time shrinks. Same with harvesting.

Hard question. Probably because we were in a sweet spot without realizing it. And that lands are also pretty damaged. Swamp are a key part of regulating water flow, but humanity have been destroying those for hundreds of years. Also grounds are probably over-plowed, which make them less permeable. See "dust bowl".

Human beings have poured billions of tons of concrete into infrastructure that is designed for the climate to be the way it was in the twentieth century (or earlier). Sure, there may be more rainfall in some places, but we would have to build new dams and aqueducts, or expand the existing ones, to take advantage of that. Meanwhile, the stuff we already built may underperform its design goals. The aggregate cost of redesigning the infrastructure would be huge.

To make matters worse, we know that at least one thing — direct heat hazards to humans, crops and livestock — is very bad about global warming. Rising wet-bulb temperatures are no joke. Meanwhile, existing construction processes emit lots of greenhouse gases. That compounds the first problem, since reducing emissions conflicts (today) with building infrastructure.

Any hydrological or climatic "benefits" of global warming are very likely to be outweighed by infrastructure inertia that inhibits our ability to enjoy them, plus the heat thing.

I have the same question. I'm not an erath scientist, so maybe I'm completely wrong. But it's my understanding that GHG emissions are artificially lengthening the current interglacial period, and (what I've read about) the effects of climate change seem to be preferable to the effects of an ice age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#:~:text=By%20this%20de....

It's the Monkey's Paw. You wish for extreme rain to end the California drought. Turns out you mainly get that rain in the winter/spring and then experience 5 months of no rain at all and all of that growth turns into an extreme amount of fuel to burn by end of Summer. Still technically not in a drought but wildfires could be worse.

Because plants and animals have adapted to certain conditions and cannot change as fast as the conditions are changing. Insects start disappearing, then the birds that depend on them, and so on.

Any change to the normal brings with it the need for adaptation, it does not matter whether that change brings lower temperatures (e.g. past and coming glaciations, the 'little ice age', etc.) or higher temperatures (the interglacial temperature rise up to the climatic optimum some ~8500 years ago, the Roman and Viking warm periods, the current warm period). When it gets colder crop yield goes down, crops fail, tree lines go down (as in 'trees fail to thrive on high places') and the productive potential of a given area of land goes down. People will have to move or starve. Many of them will move to lower ground, displacing those who were there already. The displaced will move elsewhere, displacing others. When it gets warmer again the opposite happens, the productive capacity of marginal land will rise while the capacity of land which was already optimal can go down due to drought and subsequent erosion. People will move to this newly productive land, displacing those who were already there. The displaced will move to higher ground or to less productive regions.

Another important - and in this case probably the most important - factor is that bad news sells much better than good news. A warmer climate has the potential to make currently suboptimal regions in places like Russia and Canada suitable for productive agriculture. This has happened before - e.g. grapes were grown and wine was probably produced in Denmark during the Viking age [1], the Sahara desert used to be 'covered in vegetation and lakes' [2] - and will happen again. You probably will not hear much in the news about the greening of deserts just like the fact that the planet is a lot 'greener' than it has been in recent history is not published or if it is is put in a bad light like the New York Times 'Global Greening’ Sounds Good. In the Long Run, It’s Terrible. [3] put it.

[1] https://videnskab.dk/kultur-samfund/foerste-bevis-vikinger-k...

[2] https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/green-saha...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/science/climate-change-pl...