6 ms·

At this point it feels like Global Warming will be really bad, but also really uneven. Some people will have a really bad time, losing their homes, way of life

• xenocratus 6y ago
  And some areas will actually become more habitable - closer to the poles.
  • scarmig 6y ago
    It turns out that beachfront property in Siberia was a great deal!
    • londons_explore 6y ago
      Lots of siberia is permafrost... When that melts it usually becomes boggy marshland. Not great for your holiday resort.
  • daxfohl 6y ago
    Those siberian methane craters make me second guess whether any of that land would be habitable either.
  • scythe 6y ago
    Unfortunately, the geometry of a sphere is such that half of the total area of Earth is between +/- 30 degrees latitude. The areas that will be improved are much smaller than the areas that will get worse.
  • masklinn 6y ago
    > And some areas will actually become more habitable - closer to the poles. These areas have no soil worth speaking of so agriculture is not an option, the ecosystem will not be stable so no foraging or hunting, and the grounds will be extremely unstable as they'll be thawing continuously, and the surface will just be soggy bog. As all extreme locales the long winter night also tends to trigger depression in many.
  • graeme 6y ago
    We in Canada already inhabited pretty much all the habitable land up here. The bits that aren’t widely settled aren’t suited for agriculture even in summer. People say this northern land thing with no actual experience of what unsettled lands look like. Google Muskeg if you want to see your promised land. https://www.google.com/search?q=muskeg&hl=en&prmd=imvn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjLo_LTwdrsAhWNMd8KHftMB9cQ_AUoAXoECAoQAQ&biw=375&bih=553 https://www.google.com/search?q=muskeg&hl=en&prmd=imvn&sourc... There’s also the boreal forest, but the consensus is that’s at a tipping point and will eventually perish in wildfires. Might be useful savannah eventually but will not be pleasant during the transition. There have already been massive wildfires in northern canada and siberia. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.3198892#click=https://t.co/3NEaJz0R7I https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.3198892#click=https://t.co/3NEaJz0R...
    • PeterisP 6y ago
      Our ancestors practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. A boreal forest that burns down in a wildfire should result in reasonably fertile land.
      • graeme 6y ago
        They slashed and burned forests in fertile regions. Boreal forests are nothing like that. “ Soils in the boreal forest are typically podzols (from the Russian word for “ash”), gray soils that are thin, acidic, and poor in nutrients. These soils lie beneath a mat of coniferous tree needles and other organic material that accumulates due to the slow decomposition rates and limited soil microorganism activity that occurs in the cold climate. Tannins and other acidic compounds from this layer cause the upper layers of soil to become acidic (Lakehead University 2007). Podzols are formed when precipitation exceeds evaporation, and nutrients, minerals, and organic matter are leached by downward-moving acidic water from the upper soil layers. These soils are unsuitable for agriculture, but can support numerous species of trees, shrubs, and other plants that have adapted to these soil conditions.” http://www.ramp-alberta.org/river/boreal/canada/physical+environment.aspx http://www.ramp-alberta.org/river/boreal/canada/physical+env...
        • 6y ago
• mrtksn 6y ago
  Everyone will notice but it may take time to recognise the root cause. We can expect desperate people do desperate things meaning that those with the lucky tickets may not get a break to enjoy it. Ask Europeans how much fun it is to have civil wars in the neighbourhood.
  • demosito666 6y ago
    > Ask Europeans how much fun it is to have civil wars in the neighbourhood. It's absolutely no trouble until it spills over the border into your country.
    • mrtksn 6y ago
      And how do you achieve that? Build a wall? Shoot the intruders? deploy WMDs? The moment you choose to close your eyes what's going on in your neighbourhood the fabric of your society tears apart because the morality in the society crumbles. You will have people who know people and love people beyond the border, you will have people who believe in a philosophy that teaches to help those in need,you have people who are not happy about how your society works but were keeping it to themselves because killing other human beings was not an option but now it is an option obviously. Not only that, there will be people competing for power in your lucky society and the people in need and all the issues in your society will be tools to gain power. Things wont also happen in one day, those in need will have things to offer to people in your society - anything prohibited, anything that those in power deny to those who want power. It will spill over, there's no way around it. Unless maybe you have some kind of monarchy where everyone knows it's place and follows the orders, doesn't question authority and doesn't aspire to move between classes. How do you turn democracies into this thing? To decide who is the king who is the servant you will need civil wars, so it will definitely spill over.
      • PeterisP 6y ago
        Well, barbed wire on borders and militarised border guards who are authorised to shoot tresspassers outside of the official crossing points are a thing on quite a few borders, and used to be even more common just a few decades ago, e.g. the Warsaw pact and USSR borders. It's not a pleasant option, but it is an option that countries can choose to take if the circumstances suggest that it's in their best interest. The last 25 years have seen a trend of more open borders in and around Europe, but if the circumstances change, that trend can reverse itself. And while such closed borders are more common in various dictatorships, given the political trends we're seeing in many elections worldwide, it's not particularly implausible that such policies could get majority support also in democratic countries if the economic conditions deteriorate, for example, because of climate change.
• AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Look at Europe and the Syrian refugee crisis. Global warming will make that look like a small band of visiting tourists. Global warming will impact the poor far more than the rich, and there will be BILLIONS of refugees running towards borders. One would hope it would be gradual and not as catastrophic as a bloody civil war, but a series of warming-fueled storms or a pronounced month-long heat wave could have similar effects. At some point, nations will close borders. Resource/Environmental wars are never apparent as such. Since they involve movements of entire ethnicities, they become ethnic wars that are actually resource wars where the haves vs have-nots to deal with the environmental or resource disaster are delineated along ethnic divides. The Sudan crisis was explained to me as being fundamentally a water war in this way.
  • core-questions 6y ago
    > At some point, nations will close borders. Why would it not be logical to start gearing up for this inevitability now, then? Why wait?
    • dboreham 6y ago
      Because cheap labor.
• raziel2701 6y ago
  It was always going to be uneven and as usual it will be the rich who feel its effects the least.
• tzs 6y ago
  Some of those people who are likely to have a really bad time have nukes. India and Pakistan, for example. They both depend on water from Himalayan glaciers. If they get in a war over dwindling water and it goes nuclear, the effects could be felt globally. Ironically, a big effect could be global cooling, which would set crop yields around the world plummeting. That would only last for a few years, maybe 10 tops, and then we'd be back to warming, but a hell of a lot of people would have died due to widespread famine during that time. China also makes heavy use of Himalayan glacier water, but I don't think they'd nuke anyone over it. A few other countries also depend on the glaciers, but India, Pakistan, and China are the only ones with nukes.
  • PeterisP 6y ago
    I don't think that an India-Pakistan nuclear conflict has the potential to lead to a global cooling effect. All the nuclear doomsday scenario estimates are based on the cold war NATO-Warsaw Pact nuke arsenals, where something like 30000 warheads might have been fired. That's a huge number of nukes, the world does not have nearly as much nukes now, and even less so for the smaller powers (90% of all nukes are held by USA and Russia). India and Pakistan together have ~300 warheads; if India and Pakistan blow all their nukes, that's comparable to something like two years worth of nuclear weapons testing back in the 1960s, and the 1960s tests were nowhere close to triggering a worldwide famine.
    • robohoe 6y ago
      Do note that the testing wasn't done on the cities. If anything I could see cities in those regions getting bombed.
      • PeterisP 6y ago
        Yes, that's a good point - the global cooling effect IIRC was largely based on the emissions from burning cities, not the direct effects of nuclear explosions. Still, in an India-Pakistan war there would be much less burning cities than in the hypothetical cold war turning hot, which would burn the urban areas of the whole northern hemisphere. It's a bit weird to guesstimate about so horrible hypothetical events, but perhaps the consequences of such a war might be comparable to all the many cities burned in firebombing and otherwise during WW2 - which, again, did not trigger a global cooling that might threaten global agriculture.
• rektide 6y ago
  For sure, this will bifurcate, cause those on one side to suffer greatly, & those on the other side will as usual pay for the convenience of it not affecting them. But at the same time, I think the level of crisis is perhaps bigger than we realize. Climate scientists talk about the conveyor systems of the ocean, that literally keep the ocean flowing around the world. It's not spoken of very much, but the threat really does go up to "the ocean stops circulating" (is drastically drastically reduced in circulation). The ocean acidifies, runs out of dissolved oxygen,... dies. Meanwhile we're already in an era of mass extinction for the animals. How many more shocks can the animals take? Maybe the rich can get by on a deadening husk of a world without really noticing, maybe human life goes on. Who am I kidding, of course it does, but my general gist is that the current pattern of extreme weather & disasters being localized is knitting together as the crisis marchs into ever more dire territory into something truly globespanning & globe-wrecking, where earth itself will visibly no longer support the same everyday vitality of life, and where we have to find new means to artificially sustain the ecosphere & pollenate our farmlands.
  • PeterisP 6y ago
    I believe that vegans have made a strong point that humans can live reasonably well without any animal-derived foods and other materials, so a mass extinction of animals would not destroy our way of life. The same goes for pollinators - while there are many commercially important plants that rely on pollinators (e.g. almonds as one of main exports of California), the staple crops that feed humanity - wheat, rice, corn, potatoes - do not require pollinators and would be viable even if all insects died. So even the horrible ecological disaster scenarios threaten human wellbeing and comfort, but they don't really threaten the existence of humanity; fucking up our ecosystem would be a great cultural loss but industrialized farming could still march on.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      But then there's soil depletion. Also, whatever food we won't be getting from the sea will become an extra strain on agriculture.
• wraptile 6y ago
  I think one thing a lot of people learned from this pandemic that misfortunate does "trickle up". As a software-engineer I wasn't really affected by the lock-down but my quality of life definitely dropped just because a lot of people around me are struggling. So yeah, even if you don't own a house and don't rely on impacted economies -- you'll still be in trouble! Unless you're %1 rich.