8 ms·

> low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 20

by j0057 5y ago

> low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a more future-proof elevation. Worst case if Greenland's ice sheet melts, that adds 7 meters to sea level, and Antarctica's another 60 meters. I won't see that in my lifetime but my children might.

walrus01 5y ago
the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and in a theoretical scenario like that happening with bangladesh, simultaneously other groups of aggregate hundreds of millions of low-income coastal residents from around the world also trying to move to safety at the same time.
- mooreds 5y ago
  Yup. It's about to get really really bad for refugees. Here's a PDF report talking about the challenges: https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=5866 https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=...
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Not just inundated places. Much of the tropics will become literally uninhabitable: being outside, in the shade, not moving, you die of heat stroke. Not every day, but in several days of the year, which is entirely enough. Before that, of course, the crops fail. The effect of massive refugee influx has been seen to drive a rise of fascism in democratic nations.
- jaybrendansmith 5y ago
  Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When food prices start to skyrocket, and refugees swarm in from lowland countries and every direction including our own country, where will we go? This should absolutely be seen as a slow motion meteor strike, a world-buster event that happens right in front of our eyes before we can truly react. But we must take action. The danger of methane release, particularly methane hydrates, is beyond scary. That, and the raising of sea levels by 2-7 meters, and other unknowns such as the halting of the gulf stream, species die-off, ocean acidification, coral reefs and god knows what else. As a society, we must intelligently react to these dangers as we've done in the past with threats like the ozone layer. We must plan as if a comet was going to hit the planet, starting now.
  - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    > We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. Why not? We have a lot of promising developments both in cheap energy production and in reducing the cost to vacuumed green house gases out of the atmosphere. I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still achieve net negative carbon by just ripping it out of the air. Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      even if we completely stopped emitting carbon immediately (impossible), the damage done might mean that we're still going to see a large percentage of greenland slide into the sea in the next 20-50 years.
    - mjmahone17 5y ago
      > Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly. COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons. If things get real bad people will dig deeper to try to protect their own lifestyle right now, even if that means screwing things up 10 years from now. And enough of those people have enough wealth and power to effectively counter even movements supported by the majority of humanity.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  The answer is pretty simple, though you may not like it: lots of people will die.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    yes, very likely, how many need to die before low lying nation state governments collapse into absolute chaos and civil war remains to be seen.
  - erosenbe0 5y ago
    Plenty of people already currently die from poverty, disease, lack of sanitation, poor nutrition, and conflicts. So maybe the number of these preventable deaths stays about constant as poverty improves but climate worsens?
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      No. If you start forcibly moving people in those numbers out from some of the real estate that we've invested 100's of years of hard work and income into then that number will not stay about constant. These are the most productive parts of our planet that we're talking about.
      - erosenbe0 5y ago
        Agreed. Very scary
  - ruined 5y ago
    death is never simple. it turns out to be highly motivating, and motivated people tend to do all kinds of complicated things.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Yes, motivated people will try all kinds of things, but that's not guarantee for success. And usually we're talking about problems at a completely different scale, how we deal with one like this we do not know but if the pandemic is any indication then you have a nice sample of what a response could look like and how effective it will be. The big mistake is that we try to solve global problems with local control.
- causi 5y ago
  I wonder where the global cultural position will be when the time comes. Will we of the West choose economic ruin and cultural dilution by mass importation of unskilled bodies or choose to watch 150 million people kill each other while starving to death? Right now the stakes are much lower and our nations would still rather watch refugees die.
- Psychlist 5y ago
  Imagine if all those desperate engineers in Bangladesh decided that rather than nuclear weapons to match India and Pakistan, they wanted them to build an Orion ship. A really, really big one. Think lofting 100M Bangladeshis into space. And moving to Mars. That would create a whole different sort of climate change.
kjs3 5y ago
That's the point, isn't it: all those things aren't exactly equal. You likely don't even really have to worry about selling your house now...worst case you loose equity and move someplace else. Personally traumatic & unpleasant, but not exactly the end of the world. Here in the US, I expect people in Miami and Boston and NYC to be partying right up until the point the water laps up against their front door, and then there will be a government program to move you to higher ground. If you're in Bangladesh, where can you go, other than another country. And people will fight for that. They'll fight wars. With neighbors that have nuclear weapons. That will not end well for any of us.
- wombatpm 5y ago
  So global warming solved by nuclear winter?
  - kjs3 5y ago
postmeta 5y ago
what model predicts 5m rise in 100 years?
- samplatt 5y ago
  It's not (necessarily) about sea-level rise drowning us out. It's about proximity to the sea-level being an indicator of severe damage done to property and infrastructure done by sea-level-rise and other climate-change factors like increased storm severity and frequency, increased dilapidation speed from salt and extreme temperature changes, etc. Not to mention the increased cost of living due to the above even if damage to life and property is minimal.
bezospen15 5y ago
You have a solid 20 years before it impacts value. We are getting out in 10 years
- celeduc 5y ago
  Timing a market that's absolutely sure to collapse is notoriously difficult.
  - causi 5y ago
    As long as half your buyers are convinced it isn't going to happen, probably not that hard. Real estate in flood and wildfire zones is still valued very highly today.
klipt 5y ago
Maybe nations like Bangladesh will deploy solar geoengineering to counter final warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering It's risky, but if their alternative is millions of deaths, why wouldn't they?
inasio 5y ago
Friend of mine works at IEA, specifically on water projects. Over drinks he told me his biggest worry is the Himalayas basin destabilizing. Water from those glaciers supply something like 2bn+ people.
- divbzero 5y ago
  One of the Mission: Imposible films contains a bastardized version of that scenario.
beambot 5y ago
I love the irony in SFBA of major tech companies building their new HQs right on the water's edge. They'll be the first to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change, yet I've never been able to get a satisfactory justification for their realestate decisions.
- aldonius 5y ago
  They expect to be able to move (or out of business) by the time that it becomes an issue. If it's just an office building in the downtown, the tech company doesn't own the building anyway, they've just signed a reasonably long lease.
- neuronic 5y ago
  That might be because they still believe every single problem on Earth is solvable by technology - their technology in the optimal case.
- erosenbe0 5y ago
  Maybe because Silicon Valley is the ultimate location for maximizing race and class exclusion. It is a de-facto exclusionary zone with minimal accessibility for Black workers and Black families, often by designs, covenants, zoning, and hostility going back 100 years. In order for those entities to opportunity hoard for their own children they need a class exclusive, car-dependent community with low access for 'others.' Edit: not accusing any particular person, ceo, or entity of malice.
  - mekkkkkk 5y ago
    How did you manage to get a race angle into this? And which "designs" and "covenants" are you talking about?
    - erosenbe0 5y ago
      We are piling on tech companies that purport to care about climate and diversity and other such things while locating their HQ in Silicon Valley, which is obviously not the optimal strategy if those are really priorities. I refer to the [once legal] housing deeds that literally excluded sales to Blacks, developers who did not sell to Blacks as a way of marketing to whites, extreme zoning designed to limit working class residents, allowed discrimination against Blacks at Stanford, overt racism against Blacks by noted founder of Silicon Valley, and so on.
fy20 5y ago
There's also the option of migration within the country. If we take an elevation map of Bangladesh and compare it to a climate map, there are areas that are higher and still have good climates for crops. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karar-Ahsan/publication/283621958/figure/fig9/AS:669502031278107@1536633131684/Elevation-map-of-Bangladesh.ppm https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karar-Ahsan/publication... https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicolas-Guilpart-2/publication/314304326/figure/fig3/AS:469673536954373@1488990305674/Climate-zones-in-Bangladesh-and-the-four-selected-locations-Bogra-Dhaka-Rajshahi-and.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicolas-Guilpart-2/publ... People aren't going to migrate unless there is infrastructure and job opportunities there, so if we want to help these people we should be helping these countries to build new cities that are outside the risk of flood zones. We could even take the opportunity to provide more western standards of living - Dhaka only treats around 1/4 of its waste water - and build more environmentally friendly buildings - Dhaka is within a climate where houses could be heated passively.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  People will leave anyplace they cannot live in anymore, no matter what the situation is wherever they are obliged to go. It is easy to say people can move someplace else in their own country, but other people already live in those places you suggest they move to. People obliged to move out with just what they can carry are generally not equipped to build new cities. People already in places they hope to move to are generally ill-disposed to building them a place to live for free.
baq 5y ago
good news is it'll take a loooong time to heat up that much water.
divbzero 5y ago
> Worst case if Greenland's ice sheet melts, that adds 7 meters to sea level, and Antarctica's another 60 meters. I won't see that in my lifetime but my children might. How likely is this worst case? IPCC in 2021 [1] projected a 0.5 m to 2.0 m sea level rise by 2100 (see Figure SPM.8) and NOAA in 2020 [2] suggested a worst case of 2.5 m sea level rise by 2100. It appears that neither are considering the possibility of an entire ice sheet melting? [1]: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_final.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... [2]: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
lproven 5y ago
Import fact to remember: it's not about melting. Ice is less dense than water... but only just. If an ice sheet collapses into the sea, it doesn't need to melt. The ice will displace seawater perfectly effectively just by floating. Most of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits on rock that is well under sea level – in places, a kilometre under sea level. It doesn't need to melt: it just needs for the seawater to get underneath it, allowing it to slide off into the sea and break up. Seawater is, obviously, salty and warmer than ice. The resultant sea-level rise will only take on the order of 12 days to stabilise world wide. I looked at the figures for this and it was a factor in my decision to sell my house on the outskirts of London and move to Czechia, which is above the level of any possible sea-level rise. Its lowest points are ~120m above mean sea level. I couldn't afford Austria or Switzerland, and most of the other high-and-dry countries don't have the employment prospects (or beer as good) as the Czech Republic.

by j0057 5y ago

walrus01 5y ago

the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and in a theoretical scenario like that happening with bangladesh, simultaneously other groups of aggregate hundreds of millions of low-income coastal residents from around the world also trying to move to safety at the same time.

mooreds 5y ago
Yup. It's about to get really really bad for refugees. Here's a PDF report talking about the challenges: https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=5866 https://www.ipcc.ch/apps/njlite/srex/njlite_download.php?id=...
ncmncm 5y ago
Not just inundated places. Much of the tropics will become literally uninhabitable: being outside, in the shade, not moving, you die of heat stroke. Not every day, but in several days of the year, which is entirely enough. Before that, of course, the crops fail. The effect of massive refugee influx has been seen to drive a rise of fascism in democratic nations.
jaybrendansmith 5y ago
Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When food prices start to skyrocket, and refugees swarm in from lowland countries and every direction including our own country, where will we go? This should absolutely be seen as a slow motion meteor strike, a world-buster event that happens right in front of our eyes before we can truly react. But we must take action. The danger of methane release, particularly methane hydrates, is beyond scary. That, and the raising of sea levels by 2-7 meters, and other unknowns such as the halting of the gulf stream, species die-off, ocean acidification, coral reefs and god knows what else. As a society, we must intelligently react to these dangers as we've done in the past with threats like the ozone layer. We must plan as if a comet was going to hit the planet, starting now.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  > We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. Why not? We have a lot of promising developments both in cheap energy production and in reducing the cost to vacuumed green house gases out of the atmosphere. I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still achieve net negative carbon by just ripping it out of the air. Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    even if we completely stopped emitting carbon immediately (impossible), the damage done might mean that we're still going to see a large percentage of greenland slide into the sea in the next 20-50 years.
  - mjmahone17 5y ago
    > Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly. COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons. If things get real bad people will dig deeper to try to protect their own lifestyle right now, even if that means screwing things up 10 years from now. And enough of those people have enough wealth and power to effectively counter even movements supported by the majority of humanity.
jacquesm 5y ago
The answer is pretty simple, though you may not like it: lots of people will die.
- walrus01 5y ago
  yes, very likely, how many need to die before low lying nation state governments collapse into absolute chaos and civil war remains to be seen.
- erosenbe0 5y ago
  Plenty of people already currently die from poverty, disease, lack of sanitation, poor nutrition, and conflicts. So maybe the number of these preventable deaths stays about constant as poverty improves but climate worsens?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    No. If you start forcibly moving people in those numbers out from some of the real estate that we've invested 100's of years of hard work and income into then that number will not stay about constant. These are the most productive parts of our planet that we're talking about.
    - erosenbe0 5y ago
      Agreed. Very scary
- ruined 5y ago
  death is never simple. it turns out to be highly motivating, and motivated people tend to do all kinds of complicated things.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Yes, motivated people will try all kinds of things, but that's not guarantee for success. And usually we're talking about problems at a completely different scale, how we deal with one like this we do not know but if the pandemic is any indication then you have a nice sample of what a response could look like and how effective it will be. The big mistake is that we try to solve global problems with local control.
causi 5y ago
I wonder where the global cultural position will be when the time comes. Will we of the West choose economic ruin and cultural dilution by mass importation of unskilled bodies or choose to watch 150 million people kill each other while starving to death? Right now the stakes are much lower and our nations would still rather watch refugees die.
Psychlist 5y ago
Imagine if all those desperate engineers in Bangladesh decided that rather than nuclear weapons to match India and Pakistan, they wanted them to build an Orion ship. A really, really big one. Think lofting 100M Bangladeshis into space. And moving to Mars. That would create a whole different sort of climate change.

kjs3 5y ago

That's the point, isn't it: all those things aren't exactly equal. You likely don't even really have to worry about selling your house now...worst case you loose equity and move someplace else. Personally traumatic & unpleasant, but not exactly the end of the world. Here in the US, I expect people in Miami and Boston and NYC to be partying right up until the point the water laps up against their front door, and then there will be a government program to move you to higher ground. If you're in Bangladesh, where can you go, other than another country. And people will fight for that. They'll fight wars. With neighbors that have nuclear weapons. That will not end well for any of us.

wombatpm 5y ago
So global warming solved by nuclear winter?
- kjs3 5y ago

postmeta 5y ago

what model predicts 5m rise in 100 years?

samplatt 5y ago
It's not (necessarily) about sea-level rise drowning us out. It's about proximity to the sea-level being an indicator of severe damage done to property and infrastructure done by sea-level-rise and other climate-change factors like increased storm severity and frequency, increased dilapidation speed from salt and extreme temperature changes, etc. Not to mention the increased cost of living due to the above even if damage to life and property is minimal.

bezospen15 5y ago

You have a solid 20 years before it impacts value. We are getting out in 10 years

celeduc 5y ago
Timing a market that's absolutely sure to collapse is notoriously difficult.
- causi 5y ago
  As long as half your buyers are convinced it isn't going to happen, probably not that hard. Real estate in flood and wildfire zones is still valued very highly today.

klipt 5y ago

Maybe nations like Bangladesh will deploy solar geoengineering to counter final warming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering It's risky, but if their alternative is millions of deaths, why wouldn't they?

inasio 5y ago

Friend of mine works at IEA, specifically on water projects. Over drinks he told me his biggest worry is the Himalayas basin destabilizing. Water from those glaciers supply something like 2bn+ people.

divbzero 5y ago
One of the Mission: Imposible films contains a bastardized version of that scenario.

beambot 5y ago

I love the irony in SFBA of major tech companies building their new HQs right on the water's edge. They'll be the first to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change, yet I've never been able to get a satisfactory justification for their realestate decisions.

aldonius 5y ago
They expect to be able to move (or out of business) by the time that it becomes an issue. If it's just an office building in the downtown, the tech company doesn't own the building anyway, they've just signed a reasonably long lease.
neuronic 5y ago
That might be because they still believe every single problem on Earth is solvable by technology - their technology in the optimal case.
erosenbe0 5y ago
Maybe because Silicon Valley is the ultimate location for maximizing race and class exclusion. It is a de-facto exclusionary zone with minimal accessibility for Black workers and Black families, often by designs, covenants, zoning, and hostility going back 100 years. In order for those entities to opportunity hoard for their own children they need a class exclusive, car-dependent community with low access for 'others.' Edit: not accusing any particular person, ceo, or entity of malice.
- mekkkkkk 5y ago
  How did you manage to get a race angle into this? And which "designs" and "covenants" are you talking about?
  - erosenbe0 5y ago
    We are piling on tech companies that purport to care about climate and diversity and other such things while locating their HQ in Silicon Valley, which is obviously not the optimal strategy if those are really priorities. I refer to the [once legal] housing deeds that literally excluded sales to Blacks, developers who did not sell to Blacks as a way of marketing to whites, extreme zoning designed to limit working class residents, allowed discrimination against Blacks at Stanford, overt racism against Blacks by noted founder of Silicon Valley, and so on.

fy20 5y ago

There's also the option of migration within the country. If we take an elevation map of Bangladesh and compare it to a climate map, there are areas that are higher and still have good climates for crops. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karar-Ahsan/publication/283621958/figure/fig9/AS:669502031278107@1536633131684/Elevation-map-of-Bangladesh.ppm https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karar-Ahsan/publication... https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicolas-Guilpart-2/publication/314304326/figure/fig3/AS:469673536954373@1488990305674/Climate-zones-in-Bangladesh-and-the-four-selected-locations-Bogra-Dhaka-Rajshahi-and.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicolas-Guilpart-2/publ... People aren't going to migrate unless there is infrastructure and job opportunities there, so if we want to help these people we should be helping these countries to build new cities that are outside the risk of flood zones. We could even take the opportunity to provide more western standards of living - Dhaka only treats around 1/4 of its waste water - and build more environmentally friendly buildings - Dhaka is within a climate where houses could be heated passively.

ncmncm 5y ago
People will leave anyplace they cannot live in anymore, no matter what the situation is wherever they are obliged to go. It is easy to say people can move someplace else in their own country, but other people already live in those places you suggest they move to. People obliged to move out with just what they can carry are generally not equipped to build new cities. People already in places they hope to move to are generally ill-disposed to building them a place to live for free.

baq 5y ago

good news is it'll take a loooong time to heat up that much water.

divbzero 5y ago

> Worst case if Greenland's ice sheet melts, that adds 7 meters to sea level, and Antarctica's another 60 meters. I won't see that in my lifetime but my children might. How likely is this worst case? IPCC in 2021 [1] projected a 0.5 m to 2.0 m sea level rise by 2100 (see Figure SPM.8) and NOAA in 2020 [2] suggested a worst case of 2.5 m sea level rise by 2100. It appears that neither are considering the possibility of an entire ice sheet melting? [1]: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_final.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... [2]: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

lproven 5y ago

Import fact to remember: it's not about melting. Ice is less dense than water... but only just. If an ice sheet collapses into the sea, it doesn't need to melt. The ice will displace seawater perfectly effectively just by floating. Most of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits on rock that is well under sea level – in places, a kilometre under sea level. It doesn't need to melt: it just needs for the seawater to get underneath it, allowing it to slide off into the sea and break up. Seawater is, obviously, salty and warmer than ice. The resultant sea-level rise will only take on the order of 12 days to stabilise world wide. I looked at the figures for this and it was a factor in my decision to sell my house on the outskirts of London and move to Czechia, which is above the level of any possible sea-level rise. Its lowest points are ~120m above mean sea level. I couldn't afford Austria or Switzerland, and most of the other high-and-dry countries don't have the employment prospects (or beer as good) as the Czech Republic.