It won’t be long before climate change starts causing mass migrations and the associated conflicts. With the current unstable world order we could really do without another massive problem.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/17/nx-s1-5500318/iranian-officia...
https://e360.yale.edu/features/iran-water-drought-dams-qanat...
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
So it's not really delusion, but irresponsibility and selfishness.
They trained it on historical data up to the 90s or so, and had it predict the "future" up to the time of the article. And as I recall it did very well. They even included some actual near-future predictions as well which also turned out pretty accurately as I recall.
Which I suppose isn't a huge surprise after all. People don't like to starve.
The closest natural resource–society interaction to predict conflict risk according to our models was food production within its economic and demographic context, e.g., with GDP per capita, unemployment, infant mortality and youth bulge.
[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6574 Revisiting the Contested Role of Natural Resources in Violent Conflict Risk through Machine Learning (Open Access)
So, you are right, but in Iran's case, the current regime pretty much did the opposite of anything you should have done, while also chopping of their hands to do anything more.
But the problems are on different time scales and spheres of influence.
Iran can’t do anything on their own against climate change. But they can decide to fund water projects instead of bombs.
It’s a bit like saying: I went to the beach for a day and got sunburned. It’s climate change!
Yes the sun got more intense because of climate change (maybe) but why didn’t you buy an umbrella or sun screen?
And become again a client state of the West, you forgot that part.
* Highly educated population.
* Remnant of an ancient non-Arab Islamic empire.
* Almost precisely the same population count.
And people don't starve in Turkey. Why would they starve in a Western-aligned Iran? The main problem in the richer half of the world is already obesity.
Just pick a random African country where the West helps.
And some African countries are, in fact, developing as well. I don't think that an average Kenyan starves either.
It's actually the US making the Iranian people starve on account of their (US's) economic war against Iran, and the same goes for Cuba and the Cubans living in Cuba. Saying that the Iranians should embrace with full arms the same Westerners that are making them starve right at this moment has to be a bit.
That matters if you live in a functioning democracy.
If you are being exploited and oppressed by your own ruling class rather than a foreign one it makes little difference. You might even be better off.
They pump over 4 Million barrels per day (https://ycharts.com/indicators/iran_crude_oil_production).
This equals about 1.7 Million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per day, which is an increase of 120% since year 2000 and corresponds to about 2% of the global CO2 emissions.
No nation on earth like Iran, save perhaps for China and Norway, is in such a unique position of power, both economically, socially, and with the engineering knowhow) and political ability to actually do something to prevent climate damage. Instead they are making the situation more difficult.
One will help in the mid-term and the other in the long-term.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/warming-...
In many cases governments are cutting back on spending on dealing with these sorts of problems because they can avoid blame by saying it is a result of climate change and few people ask why they did not act to mitigate the effects.
Second mismanagement is a super broad term showing failure on all levels of the state.
It’s definitely not monocausal but the effect many years of utter betrayal of their own people.
As climate change gets worse in the future, the margin for error will keep shrinking. More countries will start to experience similar problems. Only the most competent will survive, but eventually regional instability will attack the foundations of that state capacity as a contagion byproduct, making it harder to be the competent outlier.
This all becomes a push driver for migration towards the colder north, as the equator becomes progressively destabilized and uninhabitable. Not only water shortages in dry climates but wet-bulb temperatures in temperate climates that make existing outdoors dangerous for periods of the year.
This is what will happen in the future btw - climate change will apply pressure via famine and droughts, but the fallout will always be attributed to the failure of local governments to correctly "manage the change".
We'll go from "climate change is a hoax" to "climate change is just a given and it's your duty to manage it".
The case here is very simple: invest in infrastructure for your people or invest in bombs to attack foreign states.
And you’re saying it’s climate change? I’d like to live in your world.
I don't believe a single thing they say.
"Since there are murderers out there, it is fine for me to murder/there is no point in trying to reduce murder rates."
But when the AMOC stops and western Europe's winters get longer there will be huge changes too. If I recall correctly, the AMOC stopping is a trigger for an ice age, that is, ice sheets / the north pole going down way south. This would make anything above France uninhabitable, if not wiped off the map entirely.
But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters, so likely in our lifetime it'd mainly mean we change how we build houses and buildings. But long term, people would move.
I was in Switzerland last summer, in Glarus Alps, and walking around I found a sign that basically said that the reason why all the mountains around it were "smooth" in appearance is because during last ice age all of it was covered in ice, and the rock got smooth as the ice started to shift and slide over the course of hundreds of years. It said that only the highest peaks would be free of ice, and even then just barely - and all of those were above 2000m above(current) sea level. It's crazy to think that an ice age doesn't just mean "it's very cold" - it means there is enough ice to bury europe under 2 kilometers of ice. That's not survivable in any way, we would just have to move south somewhere - but like you said, even if it happens again it will take thousands of years to get to that point.
Not all ‘ice ages’ are the same.
A true ice age as you discuss is due to the distance we are from the sun. Unfortunately, we are in the opposite and the compounding effects of human induced greenhouse effect will doom us. It’s a bit like nature/nuture.
There is stuff we can control. How we handle our species and our home, the earth.
Temperatures are generally above 0°C in summer, -50 approximately in winter.
Will an Ice Age actually be worse than that?
I would expect somewhat better, although maybe not much. I might expect Denmark and Southern Parts of Sweden and England to reach 10 degrees in Summer, and -20 in Winter. But that is of course just a guess on my part so I am certainly willing to hear that I have guessed wrong.
Of course I'm thinking survivable with the magic of "technology" and maybe I'm adding wishful thinking into this science fiction scenario here, but I'm not sure if the result of the new Ice Age will be the same as the last one.
An AMOC slowdown or even collapse does not trigger an ice age. Full glacial periods are driven by orbital forcing, not ocean circulation alone.
The evidence points to regional cooling of a few degrees in parts of Western and Northern Europe, not rendering everything north of France uninhabitable.
Past ice sheets advanced over millennia under much colder global conditions than today, not on human timescales.
Even severe AMOC scenarios would be major and costly disruptions, not close to Europe being wiped off the map.
https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...
https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...
> even the repeated blatant lies
It is difficult to have a reasonable discourse when starting with such overkill positions. The topic is way too nuanced. The civil war in Syria had many reasons, political, economic, religious, but also environmental.
Climate change massively increases the risk on water supply and harvesting yields, and if that risk manifests in a situation where people are already unhappy due to other reasons, it can be the trigger for large-scale reactions.
With all that having many factors, you'll rarely be able to point to one thing as "the" cause. That does not make it less relevant, though.
*centuries, it was first predicted in the 19th century when Britain was burning increasingly massive amounts of coal.
This kind of reasoning: "California wildfires and tornadoes have always been part of the US weather patterns"
Whilst ignoring the increasing frequency and magnitude / intensity.
Gumtree forests tend to need more frequent low intensity burns to clear fuel build up, which Australian Aboriginals used to manage.