How El Niño Made the Atlantic Hurricane Season Disappear | Hacker News Reader

How El Niño Made the Atlantic Hurricane Season Disappear

wsj.com

11 pointsatestu10 comments

I have a question for people who understand this better than I do. I'm not a climate change denier or indifferent to it.

Q: is it possible that climate change could be a net positive for a significant number of people, even if a global net negative?

My concern is that some people could be encouraged to promote CO2 warming because of positive local effects.

While there might be some short-term positive effects for certain areas of the globe, in the long-term it will be negative for everyone. Having watched two very good interviews with climate scientists recently, both were warning about the collapse of current global systems by mid-century. As things get warmer and climate shifts, many places currently important for producing food will get too hot and too dry for consistent agriculture, and we'll start to see food shortages. Drought and heat will also begin to make some parts of the world unlivable, and people will migrate out of necessity, which given the current political climate, you know how that will go. One of the scientists said that, at current warming trends, the world will reach that level of heat in the 2040s, and we'll start to see the breakdown of current social, political and trade systems. Everyone will be negatively affected at that point.

> Drought and heat will also begin to make some parts of the world unlivable, and people will migrate out of necessity, which given the current political climate, you know how that will go.

It's worth noting that this is already happening. Outmigration from the Central American "Dry Corridor" is on the rise, and a growing number of migrants apprehended at the US-Mexico border over the past decade have been from countries that overlap the dry corridor (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). Major droughts in the late 20-teens required millions of people to turn to food aid. The thing is, it's hard to see the connection to climate change because it's surrounded by other factors. The region has millions of rural residents who rely on farming for their income or food, so are they leaving for climate-related reasons, crime-related reasons, or reasons of economic opportunity? The answer of course is that many of these factors are intertwined. I think we imagine that one day we'll wake up in Mad Max world and until then, climate change isn't yet a disaster. And while there probably will be a day when some disaster creates an immediate, horrible refugee crisis, the day-to-day reality is probably more like today: a trickle of people moving from areas that are slowly getting less and less habitable as time goes on, gradually putting stress on the system.

That dry corridor has suffered from lots of deforestation. Their pop grew by leaps and bounds since the green revolution and that led to lots of clearing of forest for farmlands which when managed poorly lead to soil erosion combined with fewer trees means more land cleared leading to "dry corridors." So, pop growth was/is a major input.

I’m not an expert but believe “desertification” is the name of this process.

Yes, but that explains the resultant state, not how things got that way.

I'm just a layman on this subject, but it would seem that with how interconnected our world is, it'd be very hard for global warming to be a net positive for most countries. The topic of refugees alone has shown that destabilization in some parts of the world can have reverberations in completely others (e.g. Western Europe).

That said, the very rich who are insulated from practically any externality of climate change, many who are actively building doomsday bunkers, may look very keenly at the opportunities a societal upheaval may bring their way.

I don’t know about you, but for me, little could be worse than being stuck in a doomsday bunker.

I saw a mention that the lack of hurricanes is going to itself be a big problem. Hurricanes are an important way to remove energy from the oceans. Without them, the Atlantic will get significantly warmer, and when storms do form, they are going to be massive beasts.

We are definitely in the "unknown, but it probably won't be good" territory.

People I know who used to be climate change deniers are now saying that even if it's true more CO2 is good for plants so everybody's a winner.

I am pretty sure they will say everything's for the better until it specifically and undeniably affects them negatively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com