> I think it's pretty reasonable to think that an extreme climate would cause extreme mortality.
No, it's not reasonable. They're using the same label, but there's no evidence showing that.
No, it's not reasonable. They're using the same label, but there's no evidence showing that.
Make a people's land unliveable, and make it so they cannot grow crops any more, and those people will come for your land. Imagine if 1B people decide to move to where another 1B people live, but are still struggling with climate change? Barely making it by?
So I agree with your point, 100%. You are right in the direct mortality. But also felt a tangential point of "secondary effects" was important, and this seems a good place to put it.
Global warming isn't going to actually kill many people. Instead humans fighting over resources will, I think.
An example. Canada has a population of 40 to 50million. Now imagine if for whatever reasons, much of the Souther US becomes unliveable, and at the same time, Northern Canada becomes viable as a place to live.
Now you have 100M people wanting to cross a border in a period of a few years. How can a country of 50M absorb 100M in that period of time? Chaos.
That won't end well.
You may wonder where that city is going to get their food if it can't be grown nearby, but food can be traded across long distances and often already is. So a more likely scenario is that Canada massively expands agriculture with a relatively small number of agricultural workers, many of whom might certainly be immigrants, and then trades the surplus.
The one case where long-distance migrations will be unavailable are island countries that can't handle rising sea levels, but fortunately even put together they don't have very large populations, and in some cases resettlement agreements are already in place.
(22 hour long summer days for a one month period doesn't equate to six months of sunlight half the day. It just doesn't work that way.)
I think there are three issues here. Climate, farm size, and reporting.
Some of the farms in the prairies are massive. I was hitch-hiking across Canada 20 years ago, and got a ride from a farmer in Saskatchewan. He told me he had some crazy number of acres of land, in the 50 thousand acre range, and that he was both the "youngest farmer" and "smallest landowner" in his coop. In the Prairies, they farm big.
And a lot of this seems to be voluntary.
So when I see the entire top half of some of these provinces simply cut off, I wonder if they even bother to report. The territories and managed differently, are directly federally controlled, and likely simply don't report. I find it hard to believe that farms stop right at the top of the Alberta border, and that's it.
That said, I don't think I said you cannot grow crops in the north, just that you're heavily limited in what you can grow. Some grain crops, in the south, you can get several crops a year. Hay, and some wheats, you can get 2 or 3 in a year.
But not corn. And not potatoes. And not a lot of other staples. Corn and potatoes are big, in terms of overall calories. Here, in Quebec near Ottawa, there are two types of human corn grown. In french they call it 'yellow' and 'bi-colour', in english Canada 'yellow' and 'peaches and cream' corn. The bicolour type has yellow and almost white kernels, and you can grow two crops of them here in this region, if lucky. For traditional yellow corn? On some cloudy years, the local farmer I buy from? They might lost their entire 'yellow corn' crop. It needs a lot of sun.
I suspect the faster growing crop is less nutritious, although I could be wrong. One problem is that due to cross-pollination, it's kinda hard to get the original yellow corn.
Anyhow. Not sure if you'll see any of this. But thought I'd respond regardless.
The type of light is important. Days of sunlight mean little, if the sun barely gets more than a few degrees above the horizon. And our human bred crops? Well, we'd need to take time to even hope to adapt them.
They are very coddled, and need loadd of sun.
The extreme global average temperatures haven't happened in the entire history of human civilization, so the kind of evidence you might be expecting is tough to come by. But there are dozens of papers suggesting what might happen using trend projection and knowledge of agricultural and sociopolitical constraints, if you care to look. There is also the fact that heat related deaths are already in the hundreds of thousands per year and the trend is upward.
The fact that someone finds it unreasonable to think that an extreme climate would cause extreme mortality is ... interesting.