With CO2 Levels Rising, Drylands Are Turning Green – Yale E360
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That's the problem with a simplistic climate story. Climate change is chaotic. The deserts may go green while the oceans die. Increased storms threaten your house. That's not to say that some things about climate change aren't beneficial, it's that, on balance, most of climate change is bad, at least from a peaceful human civilization perspective.
We take a lot of stuff for granted, like regular rainfall patterns in certain areas, that would be impossibly expensive to replace with technological solutions.
I think it’s hard to know what ‘bad’ means here. I think that the truth is climate change presents a great uncertainty and it could be quite bad or it could not be so bad as we think. We have no real idea, we just have projections and estimates of physical phenomena that are based on our understanding of science and the world. These projections will likely come true to a degree and they’ll also likely be wrong to a degree, and we have no idea how that will change humanity in the process.
That’s really scary and it’s the first time that humanity has ever faced such a large and unavoidable uncertainty. All that said, I don’t think we have the computational models to predict what happens when you increase the temperature on earth for a century. We have no idea if other reactions will trigger and cause unforeseen effects. Each rung of uncertainty presents potential for mass death, but not certainty of it. Only uncertainty.
Even with a few silver linings here and there we should be doing what we can to reduce and even reverse climate change.
I think with how slow evolution happens, bad is anything that isn't the status quo. Yes, some species that are more adaptable will survive and could even thrive as competitors die off, but many more species will go extinct. It's hard to imagine any path here (at least on a short to medium term timescale) where biodiversity increases. And given that biodiversity is what got us to where we are, I think it's easy to agree that it's a good thing, so anything that threatens it is bad.
> All that said, I don’t think we have the computational models to predict what happens when you increase the temperature on earth for a century.
This definitely seems true. As a layman it seems like this is a classic case where chaos theory comes into play. Even tiny errors in our projections will lead to wildly different outcomes, so the only thing that we can say for sure is that we don't know. That's scary.
Mass extinctions also is what got us to where we are. If dinosaurs were still around when humans started to evolve, it might have been a Bad Thing.
Many species are supposed to go extinct, all the time. That's is how nature and evolution works. If we become extinct, then it paves the way for human++. This is neither good nor bad, it's just how life has evolved for billions of years. I think if we try to stop this and maintain status quo, that is ethically and morally wrong.
True, but what are called "mass extinction events" actually took place over tens of thousands of years, which is "quick" when talking about geological time. We're potentially talking about a mass extinction event taking place over hundreds of years. The problem is that's a long time compared to a human lifespan, but an extremely short time from a geological standpoint. We have nothing from the past to analyze what the effects of this exceedingly fast extinction event will be - including whether it will lead to such ecological collapse that complex land animals such as humans can continue to exist. We simply don't know. One would think we should proceed with caution, but instead we're hitting the accelerator.
Strong disagree. I really dislike this "well, we just don't know what's going to happen!" take just because there is some uncertainty around the edges.
Just take one dead simple example that we know with a quite high degree of certainty - sea level rise. Coastal communities just happen to be where most of humanity lives (here is a nice map from the Map Porn subreddit, showing areas of equal population in the US, where the areas along the coast basically contain the same population as everything else: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fs...).
It's not hard to game out how much devastation there will be with 2, 4, 8 meters of sea level rise, and if anything we've been finding recently that our calculations of ice melt have been too conservative.
I'm not a climate scientist so take this in the curious vein that it is intended, but do we know that the uncertainty is only around the "edges"? From what I know about weather forecasting, relatively small changes in initial conditions can lead to rather dramatic differences in outcomes. It's my understanding this is how they get to the probabilistic estimates like "40% chance of rain"...they run a bunch of different models with slightly different initial conditions and 40% show rain.
Genuine question: if there is relatively large uncertainty at the small geographic and temporal scales, why wouldn't that also propagate to even larger amounts of uncertainty at larger scale models? (FWIW, I'm not trying to wordsmith around the word "bad" but rather pin down the uncertainty aspect of the claim.)
Neil deGrasse Tyson in his Cosmos show described it like a person walking a dog. We don't know where the dog will be exactly, but we can see the person with the leash is moving in one direction, and the dog isn't going to ever get too far from him (because of the leash).
With climate change you're talking about having seen the human walk half way down a block already. You can see they're continuing to walk the same direction, and everyone agrees they'll continue walking to the end of the block if nothing changes. Do we know exactly where the dog is during that whole walk? No, but we do know it will cross a line two thirds of the way down the block sometime before the human reaches the end of the block. And the likelihood of the dog crossing is greater and greater the further along the block the human is.
I'm trying to be careful here because I don't want to come across as if I'm against investing efforts to mitigate climate change. But in the real world, it ultimately comes down to trade-offs. So I agree with the premise that eventually, if unabated, climate change will likely cause "bad" outcomes. Apropos to this thread, though, is the definition of "bad". And from what other commenters have shared, there is large uncertainty of both the "low" and "high" temperature change models out to about 2070 or so.
In other words, even if the circumstances meet the definition for a "high" temperature change it may result in the same outcome as if it were a "low" temperature change, but the mitigation efforts would likely be drastically different. In a world where the solution is trade-offs, mitigating for one scenario over the other comes with real consequences. The point I'm trying to get at here is that I think uncertainty has to be a larger part of the conversation when we're talking about competing risks, especially when that uncertainty is relatively high. While uncertainty is a central part of a scientific discussion, my hesitancy about even bringing this up is that I also recognize that highlighting uncertainty is also a tactic of bad-faith actors to undermine any reasonable conclusions.
A) necessary simplifications (we can only resolve the earth to a scale of a few kilometers or so and need to use subgrid models to approximate processes that happen on smaller scales such as cloud formation) and
B) unknown or not well enough known parameters and model behavior and
C) Unknown input quantities (most prominent: future man-made CO2 emissions)
There is thus quite some disagreement between different climate models[1] and uncertainty is sometimes reported based on the amount of disagreement between these models.
[1] See https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6..., page 17, in the high emissions scenario the uncertainty range lies between 3 and 5 °C.
We have an entire civilization completely optimized for the climate of the late 20th century.
It's hard to know exactly how it will be bad, but it's an incredibly safe bet that global warming is bad.
* Rising sea levels
* Rising water temperatures decimating marine life
* increased temperature swings, including higher highs. The ways things are going, there are going to be vast areas which become uninhabitable by humans as they are today in places with tens of millions of inhabitants like Iraq, Pakistan, India.
Those are prety obvious, already in progress, and universally bad.
You might "create jobs" that way in the general sense of stimulating an economy by borrowing against future monies, and that may be helpful in smoothing out a business cycle or avoiding a negative feedback loop, but "creating jobs" is only useful when the economy is understimulated (which it isn't at this particular moment, though I'm sure it will be again at various times between now and say 2100).
You increase the size of the economy, rather than just smooth out the business cycle, by increasing the net productivity of the population.
Change is always scary. Trying to preserve something when change is inevitable is the mistake.
> Factors contributing to social disenchanment in Syria include socio-economic stress caused by the Iraqi conflict, as well as the most intense drought ever recorded in the region.[
This has led to half a million deaths, and the migration of 6 million refugees has caused political fractures in several developed nations.
The world is not set up for mass migration on the scale that will be needed if regional agricultural productivity changes unpredictably, even on the scale of decades. I could easily believe that a larger number of these events could compound into millions of famine deaths and a conflagration of military conflicts. 1+ billion deaths is well within range if global food logistics break down or a general military conflict is triggered.
On a more positive note, maybe we can stave off the long-term effects if we're able to develop and deploy a world-wide carbon capture technology. We are living in the Anthropocene after all!
It's not like deserts become green with calm weather...
If death of the species lies anywhere, it's in stagnation. As soon as we stagnate, we will start to die. That's the fundamental lesson of nature.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100830131344.h...
I do want good sources of change, like the GHG-decoupled economic growth we've been seeing, and technology and science breakthroughs.
Nothing is indicating to me that we are actually progressing. What I'm seeing is stagnation (we keep doing the same stupid things).
Progress to me would mean fewer problems, not more.
Nordic countries like Russia, Canada and Scandinavian countries will benefit a lot from a warmer climate while equatorial countries will suffer the most.
It seems like on the net the changes are beneficial to a more productive biosphere - if they were happening on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years. Instead things are changing on the scale of decades and life won't have time to adapt. Delicate ecosystems are having a hard time.
The science never said that. It was popsci, magazines and attention brokers that pushed that narrative. A warming world looks like Jurassic park, not Mad Max, but that doesn't sell, so they had to make it scary to sell it, hence the desertification narrative.
These effects can already be seen with many insurance companies abandoning low lying states like Florida and Louisiana. There are few instances of people more willing to put their money where their mouth is than insurance company actuaries.
If it wasn't for more water in the atmosphere, just CO2 warming, there would be no Global Warming crisis, it would be just a blip. And still, somehow people widely believe we'll overall be in desert-like conditions?
Sure some plains may be burning more green, but those plains were once rainforests.
The place I grew up - South Devon - was once a temperate rainforest. Yet the landscape I know (and thought was beautiful) is fields of grass and shrubs. The Moors. It would almost certainly return to being a rainforest if not for the active management (grazing and controlled burns). It's funny that that landscape looks very similar to the picture in the article despite being in a very different part of the world.