5 ms·

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 p

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.
    - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
      > COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons. COVID is different because you need a massive majority, 80%+, to follow certain guidelines (vaccine, masks, etc). For carbon it just needs to happen, anyone can do it. If the tech gets cheap enough Bill Gates will just setup shop in the desert and start sucking.
      - ponyfleisch 5y ago
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.

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.
  - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    > COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons. COVID is different because you need a massive majority, 80%+, to follow certain guidelines (vaccine, masks, etc). For carbon it just needs to happen, anyone can do it. If the tech gets cheap enough Bill Gates will just setup shop in the desert and start sucking.
    - ponyfleisch 5y ago

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.