Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

abdullahkhalids

> What are some second and third-order impacts? ... food shortages, lack of fresh water, disease, heat stress, mass migration and conflicts.

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...

How about fourth, fifth, or greater order impacts that science cannot "see" in this moment because the change cannot be historically recreated visually in any data? Ponder this citizen scientists' unexpert thoughts for a moment in which I have spent many hours doing from my many evenings of star gazing as thinking sessions.

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!

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