7 ms·

Climate change ? I don't doubt it's happening but the doom scenarios seem in line with all those predictions

by reader_mode 6y ago

duxup 6y ago
Any prediction being right doesn't really have much to do with all the wrong predictions IMO.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  It does if taken in the context of all the wrong ones being taken as a bayesian prior, and that strategy will have predictive value.
xyzzyz 6y ago
Climate change definitely is the next one. It is most surely happening, and probably faster than we want or expect, but if you listen to scientific consensus (eg. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report), it is pretty clear that, while serious and troublesome issue, it most definitely is not an existential threat.
- eloff 6y ago
  Probably not directly. It will cause mass migration and refugee crises as coastal cities and low lying areas slowly flood. That seems inevitable at this point. That could maybe lead to wars, and nuclear war is still an existential threat. If the changes somehow disrupt the ability to support cereal crops in the northern hemisphere (which actually is also the biggest risk from nuclear winter), that could lead to widespread starvation and more wars. Not an existential crises necessarily, but not pretty.
  - OrbitRock 6y ago
    What worries me most is the patterns of precipitation shifting. If we saw significant changes to where is wet and where is dry, we’d be scrambling to catch up and the fallout could be pretty large.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      Related to that, destabilizing weather patterns in general - a few weeks ago the polar vortex dipped further south in the US than ever before and Texas was caught really off-guard.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    No large coastal city will become flooded on a permanent basis. Building levees is just too easy and cheap relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask medieval Dutchmen. By the way, the scientific consensus for predicted sea level rise in the worst temperature growth scenario is still less than 1 meter by 2100. That’s less than the difference between low and high tide. Some areas will get flooded (eg large parts of Florida Everglades), but 1 meter is really not a big deal. Similarly, there is no reason to be very concerned about crops: we already are able to grow crops in a very wide variety of climates, and we have cultivars specially selected for local climate conditions. While climate change is very fast on geological scale, it’s rather slow on human scale, which gives us plenty of time to adjust our crops and farming patterns. This is the biggest reason why climate change is not an existential threat: we are not going to sit on our thumbs, and watch the steamroller slowly ride over us, at speed of 1 cm per day. That’s not going to happen: mitigating the problems associated with climate change is rather simple, relative to other problems our societies solve on a regular basis, and we have a lot of time for it.
    - tzs 6y ago
      > No large coastal city will become flooded on a permanent basis. Building levees is just too easy and cheap relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask medieval Dutchmen. Levees don't work in south Florida. Well, they work to stop water that comes in horizontally above ground level, but in south Florida floods usually come in by bubbling up through the porous ground.
      - Animats 6y ago
        Yes. Miami needs to move a few meters straight up. This is quite possible. Galveston, TX [1] and Chicago [2] did that a century ago. Miami Beach is raising some main roads, finally. Here's Miami's flood zone map.[3] Worldwide, cities on river deltas face problems. Mostly in Asia. New Orleans is the only US city built on sand flatland at the mouth of a huge river. Asia has several of those. New York is building a seawall around lower Manhattan. The West Coast isn't that vulnerable because the coast is mountainous. Even in areas of LA that look flat, go a few blocks inland and you're up 10m or so above sea level. The parts of SF built on fill may have problems. This isn't the end of the world. But some cities will need rebuilding. [1] https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/texas-story-project/raising-galveston-above-the-gulf https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/texas-story-project... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago [3] https://mdc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=685a1c5e03c947d9a786df7b4ddb79d3 https://mdc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
  - undefined1 6y ago
    it's not an overnight disaster, so it won't work like that. people are moving to Miami in droves right now and there's a big push to turn it into the next Silicon Valley. that's an aspirational goal and future facing in a geography that's among the most vulnerable to climate change. they know we can solve slow moving disasters.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    Any flooding of cities will take decades. This gives plenty of time for people to build and/or move to new cities on higher ground.
    - eloff 6y ago
      Where do you move the hundred million people in Bangladesh? What do you do in Florida?
      - BurningFrog 6y ago
        First of all, people can move themselves. They don't need someone else to move them. Floridians have a continent of 49 other states to move to. The Bangladeshis are in a tougher spot, since they're approaching 200 million and might need to cross a political border. If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands.
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        >If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands. The "if" is funny. There's already many hundreds of millions of poor people around the world that have the borders closed to them. I don't see why 200M extra poor Bangladeshis wouldn't suffer the same fate. And there is no reason to believe Siberia will be habitable, at least not in exactly the timeframe it needs to be to offset other habitable areas that are lost. Climate change will be a slow moving, albeit accelerating, series of crisis that will grind those who are poorer and don't have the power to move to suffer losses.
        eloff 6y ago
        > Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands. Because of Russia's famous open borders policy, and China happy to open their borders to let refugees pass through? What planet do you live on? That's like saying the US would open its southern border to let migrants pass thorough up to Canada.
  - xwolfi 6y ago
    It will most likely not do all this. It s sad and bad, it's happening and our fault, but there has been costal cities in trouble before, people already mass migrate in time of despair without the need for the climate, and wars happen for far less. You can roll up agonizing in fear, or you can prepare yourself for a bit of struggle. We can help lower the impact, but there's no reason to panic. Most likely the impact on humanity will be minimal, if not the impact on life itself will be medium, and the Earth will spin a few more cycles with or without us. This doesn't really matter, and we should just take it calmly, and talk to each other. No need for end of the world nuclear war hysteria.
    - eloff 6y ago
      I'm fine with taking things calmly. But what your advocating is the ostrich approach to problems. That's just being blind about the problems. Nuclear war is all one of the biggest existential threats to civilization. It didn't end with the cold war. Think of all the close calls we've had. Now look forward 100 years, what's the odds it happens? 1000 years? 10000? We're our own worst enemy and our civilization is the biggest threat to civilization.
      - bryanlarsen 6y ago
        It'll cost a few trillion to prevent climate change from getting worse. It'll cost a few tens of trillions to mitigate climate change and many non-human species will be in serious trouble if we don't do anything about it. Either way, humans will be fine. But I still advocate strongly for option number 1.
  - dillondoyle 6y ago
    I just read a study showing this europe crops crisis. And to the parent of this thread we keep seeing constant research showing IPCC is off (sometimes wayy off) in their worst case (e.g. we're there or past it in many respects). Armagedon is the last battle. To me that's what climate crisis is and how we need to look at it and take immediate action. We battle and win or we lose and it's really really really bad. Maybe others have better examples of worse than imagined climate problems, but here is one I read from Reddit/HN last week. New research shows faster slowing Gulf Stream. I can't find the exact thread that summarized - it did a direct comparison to the recent article to IPCC showing IPCC's worst case is not even close to as bad as the new measured slow down. A few sources below, one decade old one says 10x from IPCC's worst and the recent article showed even faster slowdown; like on the scale of a less than a century we could be past a tipping point. When it tipped in the past it made europe very cold and rose eastern us sea levels a lot. From my understanding, this would affect staple crops in Europe (google says europe 300 tonnes, us at 440), help melt a LOT more ice & sea level rise etc. I think that the faster than expected melting ice in greenland we're seeing also increases the slowdown? "totally unexpected decline in the AMOC of about 30% - far greater than the range of interannual variability found in the climate models used for the IPCC assessments" "10 times as fast as predicted by climatemodels." https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/earths-gulf-stream-system-its-weakest-over-millennium https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/earths-gulf-stream-syste... http://archive.is/YRqDY http://archive.is/YRqDY https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/weather/learn-about/climate/deliverables/amoc.pdf https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metoffi... https://www.rapid.ac.uk/research/tenyearsofrapid.php https://www.rapid.ac.uk/research/tenyearsofrapid.php https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0897-7.epdf?sharing_token=m8QWSQ95dU8zBfFouFihL9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0P_fenNJ290SiWJMw_C9w9HjACLcf4Q500Kz1xQHqomoTQOlFgsihVnpATv5Es0B7VV0K0dAIf7c4G6fqS6ekAVBx36wXeY4q1Kz19Er6D5oGLV6FcWcVUD91dF0JoWi7CdLmlgvbo8FWkmi7a7tNdynoKaSdHcmVazMR-WZUzTdjV8lxj6dqjWoNZgSxjRI6w%3D&tracking_referrer=www.realclimate.org https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0897-7.epdf?shari... https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/j6nl18/siberian_arctic_ice_still_hasnt_started/ https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/j6nl18/siberian_a...
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      > And to the parent of this thread we keep seeing constant research showing IPCC is off (sometimes wayy off) in their worst case (e.g. we're there or past it in many respects). Of course, that's expected. Even if you assume that IPCC is 100% on point, then with p-value threshold of 0.05, you'd expect 1 in every 20 studies to show that IPCC is off. The real question is whether the scientific consensus changes by the time the next IPCC report comes out. Maybe it will, we shall see. At the same time, consider what kind of message you are sending here: you are asking everyone to not listen to scientific consensus, and instead promote alarmism, because there are a few studies that challenge the consensus. There is nothing wrong with challenging the consensus, that's how we get progress, but how do you want to win trust of the society, which is required to deal with this planet-wide situation, when, right after the (mostly won) fight for people to stop with denialism and believe the science, you turn around and say "yeah, that consensus we asked you to believe, instead of a handful of contrarian papers, is not what we actually want you to believe, instead you should believe this other handful of contrarian papers"? That's only going to sow distrust and alienate people.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Climate change ? I don't doubt it's happening but the doom scenarios seem in line with all those predictions

duxup 6y ago

Any prediction being right doesn't really have much to do with all the wrong predictions IMO.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
It does if taken in the context of all the wrong ones being taken as a bayesian prior, and that strategy will have predictive value.

xyzzyz 6y ago

Climate change definitely is the next one. It is most surely happening, and probably faster than we want or expect, but if you listen to scientific consensus (eg. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report), it is pretty clear that, while serious and troublesome issue, it most definitely is not an existential threat.

eloff 6y ago
Probably not directly. It will cause mass migration and refugee crises as coastal cities and low lying areas slowly flood. That seems inevitable at this point. That could maybe lead to wars, and nuclear war is still an existential threat. If the changes somehow disrupt the ability to support cereal crops in the northern hemisphere (which actually is also the biggest risk from nuclear winter), that could lead to widespread starvation and more wars. Not an existential crises necessarily, but not pretty.
- OrbitRock 6y ago
  What worries me most is the patterns of precipitation shifting. If we saw significant changes to where is wet and where is dry, we’d be scrambling to catch up and the fallout could be pretty large.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Related to that, destabilizing weather patterns in general - a few weeks ago the polar vortex dipped further south in the US than ever before and Texas was caught really off-guard.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  No large coastal city will become flooded on a permanent basis. Building levees is just too easy and cheap relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask medieval Dutchmen. By the way, the scientific consensus for predicted sea level rise in the worst temperature growth scenario is still less than 1 meter by 2100. That’s less than the difference between low and high tide. Some areas will get flooded (eg large parts of Florida Everglades), but 1 meter is really not a big deal. Similarly, there is no reason to be very concerned about crops: we already are able to grow crops in a very wide variety of climates, and we have cultivars specially selected for local climate conditions. While climate change is very fast on geological scale, it’s rather slow on human scale, which gives us plenty of time to adjust our crops and farming patterns. This is the biggest reason why climate change is not an existential threat: we are not going to sit on our thumbs, and watch the steamroller slowly ride over us, at speed of 1 cm per day. That’s not going to happen: mitigating the problems associated with climate change is rather simple, relative to other problems our societies solve on a regular basis, and we have a lot of time for it.
  - tzs 6y ago
    > No large coastal city will become flooded on a permanent basis. Building levees is just too easy and cheap relative to cost of giving up on a city, just ask medieval Dutchmen. Levees don't work in south Florida. Well, they work to stop water that comes in horizontally above ground level, but in south Florida floods usually come in by bubbling up through the porous ground.
    - Animats 6y ago
      Yes. Miami needs to move a few meters straight up. This is quite possible. Galveston, TX [1] and Chicago [2] did that a century ago. Miami Beach is raising some main roads, finally. Here's Miami's flood zone map.[3] Worldwide, cities on river deltas face problems. Mostly in Asia. New Orleans is the only US city built on sand flatland at the mouth of a huge river. Asia has several of those. New York is building a seawall around lower Manhattan. The West Coast isn't that vulnerable because the coast is mountainous. Even in areas of LA that look flat, go a few blocks inland and you're up 10m or so above sea level. The parts of SF built on fill may have problems. This isn't the end of the world. But some cities will need rebuilding. [1] https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/texas-story-project/raising-galveston-above-the-gulf https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/texas-story-project... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago [3] https://mdc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=685a1c5e03c947d9a786df7b4ddb79d3 https://mdc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
- undefined1 6y ago
  it's not an overnight disaster, so it won't work like that. people are moving to Miami in droves right now and there's a big push to turn it into the next Silicon Valley. that's an aspirational goal and future facing in a geography that's among the most vulnerable to climate change. they know we can solve slow moving disasters.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  Any flooding of cities will take decades. This gives plenty of time for people to build and/or move to new cities on higher ground.
  - eloff 6y ago
    Where do you move the hundred million people in Bangladesh? What do you do in Florida?
    - BurningFrog 6y ago
      First of all, people can move themselves. They don't need someone else to move them. Floridians have a continent of 49 other states to move to. The Bangladeshis are in a tougher spot, since they're approaching 200 million and might need to cross a political border. If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        >If the rest of the world closes its borders, maybe they'll have to look into landfills, flood walls etc. Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands. The "if" is funny. There's already many hundreds of millions of poor people around the world that have the borders closed to them. I don't see why 200M extra poor Bangladeshis wouldn't suffer the same fate. And there is no reason to believe Siberia will be habitable, at least not in exactly the timeframe it needs to be to offset other habitable areas that are lost. Climate change will be a slow moving, albeit accelerating, series of crisis that will grind those who are poorer and don't have the power to move to suffer losses.
      - eloff 6y ago
        > Or maybe they can settle the newly habitable Siberian lands. Because of Russia's famous open borders policy, and China happy to open their borders to let refugees pass through? What planet do you live on? That's like saying the US would open its southern border to let migrants pass thorough up to Canada.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  It will most likely not do all this. It s sad and bad, it's happening and our fault, but there has been costal cities in trouble before, people already mass migrate in time of despair without the need for the climate, and wars happen for far less. You can roll up agonizing in fear, or you can prepare yourself for a bit of struggle. We can help lower the impact, but there's no reason to panic. Most likely the impact on humanity will be minimal, if not the impact on life itself will be medium, and the Earth will spin a few more cycles with or without us. This doesn't really matter, and we should just take it calmly, and talk to each other. No need for end of the world nuclear war hysteria.
  - eloff 6y ago
    I'm fine with taking things calmly. But what your advocating is the ostrich approach to problems. That's just being blind about the problems. Nuclear war is all one of the biggest existential threats to civilization. It didn't end with the cold war. Think of all the close calls we've had. Now look forward 100 years, what's the odds it happens? 1000 years? 10000? We're our own worst enemy and our civilization is the biggest threat to civilization.
    - bryanlarsen 6y ago
      It'll cost a few trillion to prevent climate change from getting worse. It'll cost a few tens of trillions to mitigate climate change and many non-human species will be in serious trouble if we don't do anything about it. Either way, humans will be fine. But I still advocate strongly for option number 1.
- dillondoyle 6y ago
  I just read a study showing this europe crops crisis. And to the parent of this thread we keep seeing constant research showing IPCC is off (sometimes wayy off) in their worst case (e.g. we're there or past it in many respects). Armagedon is the last battle. To me that's what climate crisis is and how we need to look at it and take immediate action. We battle and win or we lose and it's really really really bad. Maybe others have better examples of worse than imagined climate problems, but here is one I read from Reddit/HN last week. New research shows faster slowing Gulf Stream. I can't find the exact thread that summarized - it did a direct comparison to the recent article to IPCC showing IPCC's worst case is not even close to as bad as the new measured slow down. A few sources below, one decade old one says 10x from IPCC's worst and the recent article showed even faster slowdown; like on the scale of a less than a century we could be past a tipping point. When it tipped in the past it made europe very cold and rose eastern us sea levels a lot. From my understanding, this would affect staple crops in Europe (google says europe 300 tonnes, us at 440), help melt a LOT more ice & sea level rise etc. I think that the faster than expected melting ice in greenland we're seeing also increases the slowdown? "totally unexpected decline in the AMOC of about 30% - far greater than the range of interannual variability found in the climate models used for the IPCC assessments" "10 times as fast as predicted by climatemodels." https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/earths-gulf-stream-system-its-weakest-over-millennium https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/earths-gulf-stream-syste... http://archive.is/YRqDY http://archive.is/YRqDY https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/weather/learn-about/climate/deliverables/amoc.pdf https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metoffi... https://www.rapid.ac.uk/research/tenyearsofrapid.php https://www.rapid.ac.uk/research/tenyearsofrapid.php https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0897-7.epdf?sharing_token=m8QWSQ95dU8zBfFouFihL9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0P_fenNJ290SiWJMw_C9w9HjACLcf4Q500Kz1xQHqomoTQOlFgsihVnpATv5Es0B7VV0K0dAIf7c4G6fqS6ekAVBx36wXeY4q1Kz19Er6D5oGLV6FcWcVUD91dF0JoWi7CdLmlgvbo8FWkmi7a7tNdynoKaSdHcmVazMR-WZUzTdjV8lxj6dqjWoNZgSxjRI6w%3D&tracking_referrer=www.realclimate.org https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0897-7.epdf?shari... https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/j6nl18/siberian_arctic_ice_still_hasnt_started/ https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/j6nl18/siberian_a...
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    > And to the parent of this thread we keep seeing constant research showing IPCC is off (sometimes wayy off) in their worst case (e.g. we're there or past it in many respects). Of course, that's expected. Even if you assume that IPCC is 100% on point, then with p-value threshold of 0.05, you'd expect 1 in every 20 studies to show that IPCC is off. The real question is whether the scientific consensus changes by the time the next IPCC report comes out. Maybe it will, we shall see. At the same time, consider what kind of message you are sending here: you are asking everyone to not listen to scientific consensus, and instead promote alarmism, because there are a few studies that challenge the consensus. There is nothing wrong with challenging the consensus, that's how we get progress, but how do you want to win trust of the society, which is required to deal with this planet-wide situation, when, right after the (mostly won) fight for people to stop with denialism and believe the science, you turn around and say "yeah, that consensus we asked you to believe, instead of a handful of contrarian papers, is not what we actually want you to believe, instead you should believe this other handful of contrarian papers"? That's only going to sow distrust and alienate people.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]