Yes, Climate Change Is Probably Going to Kill You
predicament.substack.com
predicament.substack.com
The current IPCC estimate for say crop yields change is quite low, less than 10% for <2.4C warming [1]. What they miss out are the actual higher-order effects. Food shortages are already leading to export bans, for example by India with corresponding global effects [2]. And as the situation worsens, the dark political forces that will emerge will cause the real problems. Tit-for-tat export bans of food can cause 10% food shortage to famine in certain areas, to war and other sorts of conflicts. Self-imposed breakdown of global supply chains can be catastrophic
IPCC and climate scientists cannot do a game theoretic analysis of how countries will behave. The real danger lies, where as expected, everyone defects.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... Page 16
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/8/16/how-indias-ban-o...
The poles of our planet currently retain a massive amount of frozen water that imposes significant force on each opposing end of our planet. That ice has accumulated over a long period of time which has slowly shaped our planet into a spheroid. As that ice melts and that mass is redistributed around the planet into all connected bodies of oceanic waters the pressure on the poles is fundamentally going to change. As that pressure subsides the ground at the poles will rebound thus impacting the shape of our planet physically returning it to a sphere. We have a term for when the ground moves but even more alarming will be the knock on effects of the entire planet changing shape for what lies under the ground that is red hot and often appears violently. Since we monitor the ground shaking and we also monitor volcanic activity we should have a fairly good awareness of such events occurring however what will be the explanation for the increases in such events? The effect may be red hot but the cause will likely be ice cold.
Interesting times reside ahead as we learn more and more about the only place every single person calls home.
What you cannot see matters most!
1. We have passed 1.5C last year, that's something we have measured. And because of this "lag effect" (inertia), this is the result of the emissions from decades ago. Which means that even if we stop emitting entirely tomorrow, it will keep on warming for decades.
2. We all know that the dinosaurs disappeared. What we don't always realise, though, is that the climate change that drove their extinction happened orders of magnitude slower than what we are measuring now. Some like to refer to something catastrophic as "what happened to the dinosaurs"... well what we are measuring now is a lot worse.
Not trying to debate or anything, just curious
> The Triassic–Jurassic (Tr-J) extinction event (TJME), often called the end-Triassic extinction, marks the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods, 201.4 million years ago. It is one of five major extinction events, profoundly affecting life on land and in the oceans.[...]
> The cause of the Tr-J extinction event may have been extensive volcanic eruptions in the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP),[8] which released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the Earth's atmosphere,[9][10] causing profound global warming[11] along with ocean acidification.
Food shortages will not kill you.[1] Nor will mass migration per se.
But the author omits global thermonuclear war--the biggest, most dangerous risk, as it always has been--being made more likely by climate change induced stresses.
Water and/or electricity shortages and/or heat stress or wildfires or conflict may well kill millions who live in countries or states with incapable governments (those that are corrupt, or nepotistic, or otherwise have key personnel not selected for competence alone).
The author seems to think "reserves" is a meaningful figure for metals and other minerals. Reserves is a figure for the amount that companies have found and that they are are prepared to go through the process of developing within (approximately) the next 20 years (the standard permitting, financing and construction timetable). When they get to 20 years' worth, companies stop looking.
1. I have lived through at least two food price supercycles, with peaks in the 1970s and the 2005-2008 period. Food price cycles are self-correcting. There is a lot of slack in the food production and distribution system - think of all the corn grown for e-85 gasoline, for instance.
It is too bad, but that article does detail potential problems of Climate Change. The next 4 years we all know what little Climate Cbhange support the US Gov had will probably be cancelled.
People don't understand food economics. We use approximately all the arable land in the world to grow food because that's the cheapest way to grow enough food. If we had less usable farm land we won't grow less food, we'll use more intensive methods to grow the same amount of food at higher prices.
Climate change is going to be horrible enough without this nonsense. If we lose 90% of species, that's going to be terrible. The human species will be part of the 10% that survives.
The original post is BS. It's a distraction and so wrong it helps climate deniers more than it helps the cause.