5 ms·

The UN and IPCC estimates there will be up to a billion climate refugees by 2050 so your dates and predictions are off by quite a bit.

eloff 6y ago
If things are truly that bad in 30 years when temperature is only a fraction of a degree warmer and sea level has barely moved - imagine how fucked we are in 200 years when polar melting is advanced, sea levels are many meters higher and temperatures are 4 degrees or more warmer than today. I don't buy that claim though, it's hard to believe you could have a billion refugees with such tiny changes. We've already changed more than that since 1900 and there aren't a billion climate refugees. Why is the next half a degree of warming so much worse? I'd need to see what they base that estimate on.
- delecti 6y ago
  >Why is the next half a degree of warming so much worse? A 3 degree F fever is okay with some bedrest and ibuprofen, but a 6 degree F fever can kill you. There are breaking points in every system. Half the stress of a breaking point is usually fine.
  - eloff 6y ago
    This is true, but the percent change here is very small. I just find it highly improbable at best. I'm not going to buy into something so unbelievable without seeing a very strong line of evidence behind it.
    - delecti 6y ago
      Why do you think your intuition is more relevant in the face of expertise about climate than the experts in the countless other fields you trust daily? Do you demand to see structural analysis reports before going into unfamiliar buildings?
      - eloff 6y ago
        I question things, the more outlandish the claim the more I question it. Experts are not always right you know. That's especially true on charged topics. I want to follow their line of reasoning and understand the claims more fully. And I was not wrong. If you see the post above going into more detail than the OP, 1 billion is the upper estimate, with 5 million the lower end of the range. That's a pretty wide range.
    - jbay808 6y ago
      > the percent change here is very small How are you measuring this as a percentage change? What's the denominator? The Earth's atmospheric CO2 is up about 30% since 1900.
      - eloff 6y ago
        No, change in temperature. From now to 2050 we're looking at a 0.5 C change in average temperature. You could also say change in sea level will be relatively small as well. Averages are funny, and that's a global average so it's more pronounced at the higher latitudes. But still it's half of what we've already done since 1900. And as a percentage change in temperature in a given region, it should be fairly small. Just intuitively it doesn't make sense that relatively small changes suddenly produce such disparate outcomes when they haven't to date. Looking into the numbers a bit from what was shared above, I'm not wrong. 1 billion is the upper end of an estimate, with 5 million at the lower end. That's a very wide range.
        jbay808 6y ago
        I'm still not understanding -- how do you calculate an 0.5 C change as a percentage? Edit: Regarding your other point, I'm sure you agree that an 0.5 C change from -0.25 to +0.25 will have a certain obvious dramatic impact. It might seem like I picked a particularly pathological example there, but if you imagine latitude on a globe or elevation on a mountain, you'll find somewhere (like the Laptev sea) hovering at that boundary and ready to cross it. But that's only one boundary; there are many others, where the dominant plant or insect species changes from one to another, where methane gas starts to get released faster than stored, etc. So it's rather like a staircase, and when the average shifts, there's always somewhere on the planet that goes through a confusing and dramatic transition.
        eloff 6y ago
        Average global temperature for the 20th century was 13.9°C. So 0.5C is a relatively small change, and less than half of what's already happened - and produced precious few climate refugees I might point out. I don't like using averages like that, as you rightly point out the difference in a particular region could be quite stark.
- btilly 6y ago
  One of the reasons why you can is that higher temperature move climate zones around. In particular they increase the size of deserts like the Sahara. Rich areas with expanded deserts, like California, can pipe in water from elsewhere. But areas like subsaharan Africa are a different story. In short, it is easy to become a climate refugee from a little warming when that results in drought for you.
  - eloff 6y ago
    And some areas will get wetter. Higher temperatures mean overall more water in the atmosphere and overall more precipitation. That definitely makes winners and losers and refugees, but not in such huge numbers by 2050, or at least that would be very surprising and counter-intuitive.
- eloff 6y ago
  I don't see why people are giving me so much flak on this, the OP made a bold, unintuitive, and hard to believe claim - and people are saying I should be more gullible? More trusting of authority? Less skeptical? As it turns out it's moot. The claim was the high end of a range starting at 5M. If your range is that wide you really have no business calling it an estimate. It's a WAG - a wild ass guess. I was right to be skeptical. They may as well have just said we don't know how bad it's going to be, but it won't be good. And leave it there.
FooHentai 6y ago
Low end is 5 mil, upper is 1 bil. Most commonly cited figure and the basis for most extrapolation is 200 million. However that's still a lot. To put it in perspective: "The current global estimate is that there were around 272 million international migrants in the world in 2019, which equates to 3.5 per cent of the global population" UN World Migration Report 2020 - https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf Back to the 200 million figure: "This is a daunting figure; representing a ten-fold increase over today’s entire documented refugee and internally displaced populations. To put the number in perspective it would mean that by 2050 one in every 45 people in the world will have been displaced by climate change." IOM Migration & Climate Change - https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=5866 https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=... To be clear, these figures represent how many people will have relocated by that point in time, not the number of people actively relocating at that point in time. Today, about 3.5% of the global population lives in a country other than the one they were born in. This prediction is that by 2050 that figure will have an extra 3% on top attributable to climate change.
- eloff 6y ago
  Thank you for looking into and sharing that. That's a more believable scenario.

eloff 6y ago

If things are truly that bad in 30 years when temperature is only a fraction of a degree warmer and sea level has barely moved - imagine how fucked we are in 200 years when polar melting is advanced, sea levels are many meters higher and temperatures are 4 degrees or more warmer than today. I don't buy that claim though, it's hard to believe you could have a billion refugees with such tiny changes. We've already changed more than that since 1900 and there aren't a billion climate refugees. Why is the next half a degree of warming so much worse? I'd need to see what they base that estimate on.

delecti 6y ago
>Why is the next half a degree of warming so much worse? A 3 degree F fever is okay with some bedrest and ibuprofen, but a 6 degree F fever can kill you. There are breaking points in every system. Half the stress of a breaking point is usually fine.
- eloff 6y ago
  This is true, but the percent change here is very small. I just find it highly improbable at best. I'm not going to buy into something so unbelievable without seeing a very strong line of evidence behind it.
  - delecti 6y ago
    Why do you think your intuition is more relevant in the face of expertise about climate than the experts in the countless other fields you trust daily? Do you demand to see structural analysis reports before going into unfamiliar buildings?
    - eloff 6y ago
      I question things, the more outlandish the claim the more I question it. Experts are not always right you know. That's especially true on charged topics. I want to follow their line of reasoning and understand the claims more fully. And I was not wrong. If you see the post above going into more detail than the OP, 1 billion is the upper estimate, with 5 million the lower end of the range. That's a pretty wide range.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    > the percent change here is very small How are you measuring this as a percentage change? What's the denominator? The Earth's atmospheric CO2 is up about 30% since 1900.
    - eloff 6y ago
      No, change in temperature. From now to 2050 we're looking at a 0.5 C change in average temperature. You could also say change in sea level will be relatively small as well. Averages are funny, and that's a global average so it's more pronounced at the higher latitudes. But still it's half of what we've already done since 1900. And as a percentage change in temperature in a given region, it should be fairly small. Just intuitively it doesn't make sense that relatively small changes suddenly produce such disparate outcomes when they haven't to date. Looking into the numbers a bit from what was shared above, I'm not wrong. 1 billion is the upper end of an estimate, with 5 million at the lower end. That's a very wide range.
      - jbay808 6y ago
        I'm still not understanding -- how do you calculate an 0.5 C change as a percentage? Edit: Regarding your other point, I'm sure you agree that an 0.5 C change from -0.25 to +0.25 will have a certain obvious dramatic impact. It might seem like I picked a particularly pathological example there, but if you imagine latitude on a globe or elevation on a mountain, you'll find somewhere (like the Laptev sea) hovering at that boundary and ready to cross it. But that's only one boundary; there are many others, where the dominant plant or insect species changes from one to another, where methane gas starts to get released faster than stored, etc. So it's rather like a staircase, and when the average shifts, there's always somewhere on the planet that goes through a confusing and dramatic transition.
        eloff 6y ago
        Average global temperature for the 20th century was 13.9°C. So 0.5C is a relatively small change, and less than half of what's already happened - and produced precious few climate refugees I might point out. I don't like using averages like that, as you rightly point out the difference in a particular region could be quite stark.
btilly 6y ago
One of the reasons why you can is that higher temperature move climate zones around. In particular they increase the size of deserts like the Sahara. Rich areas with expanded deserts, like California, can pipe in water from elsewhere. But areas like subsaharan Africa are a different story. In short, it is easy to become a climate refugee from a little warming when that results in drought for you.
- eloff 6y ago
  And some areas will get wetter. Higher temperatures mean overall more water in the atmosphere and overall more precipitation. That definitely makes winners and losers and refugees, but not in such huge numbers by 2050, or at least that would be very surprising and counter-intuitive.
eloff 6y ago
I don't see why people are giving me so much flak on this, the OP made a bold, unintuitive, and hard to believe claim - and people are saying I should be more gullible? More trusting of authority? Less skeptical? As it turns out it's moot. The claim was the high end of a range starting at 5M. If your range is that wide you really have no business calling it an estimate. It's a WAG - a wild ass guess. I was right to be skeptical. They may as well have just said we don't know how bad it's going to be, but it won't be good. And leave it there.

FooHentai 6y ago

Low end is 5 mil, upper is 1 bil. Most commonly cited figure and the basis for most extrapolation is 200 million. However that's still a lot. To put it in perspective: "The current global estimate is that there were around 272 million international migrants in the world in 2019, which equates to 3.5 per cent of the global population" UN World Migration Report 2020 - https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/wmr_2020.pdf Back to the 200 million figure: "This is a daunting figure; representing a ten-fold increase over today’s entire documented refugee and internally displaced populations. To put the number in perspective it would mean that by 2050 one in every 45 people in the world will have been displaced by climate change." IOM Migration & Climate Change - https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=5866 https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=... To be clear, these figures represent how many people will have relocated by that point in time, not the number of people actively relocating at that point in time. Today, about 3.5% of the global population lives in a country other than the one they were born in. This prediction is that by 2050 that figure will have an extra 3% on top attributable to climate change.

eloff 6y ago
Thank you for looking into and sharing that. That's a more believable scenario.