> Almost all countries have ample space that will still be habitable for their entire population in 2100, even if climate change is left unchecked
That's a really dubious one. There's multiple issues with global warming, drought and desertification being one of them (and it probably will not affect a whole country) but the second one is just the max temperature the human body can, withstand especially with high humidity. When this threshold is passed, you can have thousands of people dying at the same time in your country. When every summer, heatwaves take a few of your neighbours you start reconsidering how nice your country is.
Remember, we're going to have more than a 2°C increase in mean temperature by the end of the century, and maybe 4°C. 4°C is the difference between now and the last ice age when the whole Europe was covered by huge glaciers.
Also, many people live near shores, which will be damaged frequently as the see level rises… How would India, who have a borderline genocidal tendency (fantasised mostly at the moment buy still frightening) against Muslims nowadays, react to the massive arrival of Bengali people coming from Bangladesh after a typhoon destroyed their land?
> Italy is a tiny country in terms of land area, so why would they need to take so many?
Because that's where they arrive… I'm not speculating when I talk about Italy, this is happening right now (not 10 millions, but hundred of thousands).
> Anyways, my core point here is (a) we won't need to deal with this migration anyways, because we will solve climate change way before it becomes necessary, and (b) even if we didn't lower our emissions, I'm confident we can solve the migration problem without millions of deaths.
This is an issue, but increased atmospheric carbon and the latitude land distribution of the Earth probably means desertification will be net-negative for at least a while. (I don't have a source for this, but I recall reading that we have more trees today than ever in history?) Keep in mind, carbon is what plants eat.
> When every summer, heatwaves take a few of your neighbours you start reconsidering how nice your country is.
This is also a good point, but once again, there are also people who die from cold. I've been living in Toronto for the last year, and there are many people who die of cold in the winter every year, mainly the poor and elderly. It's not clear that global warming is net-negative at the moment for extreme temperature related deaths.
> we're going to have more than a 2°C increase in mean temperature by the end of the century, and maybe 4°C
I don't agree with this. This might be true if population+QoL growth continues and our emissions per capita stay at today's levels, but that won't happen. Like I said, we are going to fix CC by mid-century, and mean temp increase above pre-industrial levels will be less than 1.5°C by 2100 - not 4°C above today's levels.
> Because that's where they arrive
This is a different type of migration. Nobody is migrating internationally because their country is uninhabitable due to climate change, because there are no such countries today.
> About (a), you should probably read this...
Thank you, I'm aware of what's necessary to accomplish this. We are well on our way. If it wasn't for funding and regulatory limitations, I'm pretty sure we could be net-zero by 2028 just based on the technologies we have in development today.
Massive hyperbole. If temperatures increase 4.5 f - in South America, where most people live around the equator will be fine.
Same for Indonesia.
India's population is pretty heavily focused in the North and should will also not all overheat to death.
Don't know about Africa.
Also - moving north if you think the AOC will collapse is a losing strategy. Scandinavia will be colder than Greenland today. Europe will be colder than Canada.
>We are currently headed to a 3 degrees C temperature increase. Which will cause global hardship on a massive level, but it's not anywhere near what's needed to wipe out even civilization let alone all/most humans.
No but with that also comes a bigger variance in extremes. Which brings more things like the current ridiculous heatwave and crop issues in india and pakistan which have what...1.5 billion people? Things like this should absolutely shock people. Much much smaller things like 9/11 have caused shocked and awe.
> the temperature increases in a few hundred years don't matter in the slightest.
There are dense locations near the equator where the wetbulb temperature has gone over 34-35 degrees celcius, which is higher than is survivable by healthy adults for more than a small handful of hours. These extreme events will keep getting worse, leading to heat stress, prolonged school closures, etc. Not all of these people have access to air conditioning because we're talking about countries with less than $6k GDP per capita. Eventually this will drive climate refugees.
This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country) will be happy to take in a billion people from South-East Asia? Legal immigration is an issue now. This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.
Citation needed. Many (also old) people died in the European heat waves of the last summer. And every year these summers are getting hotter.
Once crops closer to the already dry and hot areas of the globe stop to yield, and people migrate away from those areas — how many people die in the resulting conflicts, how much human suffering will be produced there?
What impact will the usage of resources we use to safeguard costal cities against rising waters have on other areas that prevent human suffering?
Answering the possible fallout from even a moderate change in global climate is nowhere near as clear cut as you make it out to be.
On top of that: the ddcisions we take now could potentially be multiplied by the next 1000 human generations, only idiots would take that risk lightly.
> How do you know all that will happen in your second paragraph?
We have barely reached 1.5° C and people are already dying by the thousands, people are already fleeing by thousands more—and people are already not accepted as refugees. There are entire areas which are become more and more inhospitably which are experiencing disproportionately more famines, coups, and even wars (namely the Sahel region in Africa).
Yes I am a climate doomer, but I believe doomerism is the reasonable reaction to our climate reality.
> People apparently survived during the Ice Age, which was quite a bit colder than 4 deg, so I'm guessing the +4 deg is handleable, too.
As far as I'm concerned, the point isn't about what temperature is objectively best, it's about the degree of change, and the cost of adaptation. Modern industrial civilization is built up progressively in certain geographical locations, with absolutely enormous sunk investments. If we had built our cities, our towns, our power plants, and ports during a climactic equivalent to the last ice-age, we would be absolutely fucked if the climate shifted in a short period of time to where it is now. During the last ice age there was a land mass which linked Britain to Norway, Denmark, France and the Netherlands, and sea levels were 100m lower than they are today. The northern ice cap covered everything north of London, and the Sahara was fertile. To go from that climate to the climate today would involve a level of cost that it is difficult to comprehend.
> It could be a fact that climate is changing. And also that we contribute to it in some known ways.
> Who will be responsible for the consequences? Also, we can keep adapting, as we always did if the climate is changing.
> I do not see the point in taking every piece of news from climate change like the end of thw world: we will have to keep adapting.
This is only because you don't understand the problem, or don't listen/trust the entirety of the scientific community. Like all organisms on Earth, humans and human society can adapt to a limited set of circumstances. We can create thriving societies in Finland and at the Equator, but we can't create thriving societies in Antarctica or the Sahara desert.
What (the certainly man-made and certainly happening) climate change is doing is going to make a lot more of the Earth unlivable for humans. Even the livable parts will become much more variable in their livability. Humans will migrate in massive numbers from the now-unlivable places (such as Bangladesh, currently housing ~160 million people) to places where society can still thrive - but as can be seen from the massive reaction to the minuscule trickle of refugees from Syria to Europe, this is met with utter hostility. Further, scarcer resources (especially water in many places, such as the US south or India and Pakistan) will likely lead to wars, further creating refugee crises and disrupting supply chains.
The timeline is indeed unclear, and there have been cycles of too-pessimistic predictions and too-optimistic predictions. The current discussions seem to imagine massive changes in the 50-100 year range, but recent weather patterns seem to suggest we may be on the optimistic side at the moment.
But regardless of timeline, the general trend is clear and undeniable, as are the conclusions. In some sense, you are right that "we will adapt", as humanity as a species or even human civilization are unlikely to simply end. But they are also not going to remain the change, and there is no plausible path from current society to a +2-4C average temp society that does not involve the deaths of billions.
> So yeah, I'm pessimistic about how climate change will unfold.
It's probably not even a black and white thing honestly. For the person dealing with unlivable temperatures in India it might feel one way. For the person living in Siberia that just got a couple of hectares of farmland it might feel differently.
I'd wager a bet that in the future, more people will be impacted by war caused by climate change than the actual climate change effects, if we cannot solve the issue technologically.
> Yes society will survive. No, climate change does not mean that things are getting worse.
Either you are insanely optimistic (to a point where it is actually ridiculous), or you lack information.
You do realize that climate change is, right now, going to make entire parts of Earth unlivable (the most humid ones, around the equator), right? As in "human beings won't be able to survive outdoors on their own because it is too warm"?
You do realize that this means billions of climate refugees, which in turn means global instability, wars and famines, right?
> Climate change is unavoidable (because nature)... but so is human ingenuity
For the first part: not nature, because every carbon emissions today won't have any significant effect until 2040.
For the second part: Yeah, the 2010 drought in Russia was handled so well, millions starved and we're still paying for the political instability it brought in 2011.
And the temperature differential between the troposphere (that warms up) and the stratosphere (that cools down faster than the troposphere warms btw) are becoming more predictible, so when we will have even stronger meteorological events, we might be able to warn the population and to prevent planes to go through them, nice.
And when wet-bulb temperature will be to high, we will be able to grow high-yield plants and harvest them at nigh, while sleeping underground during the day, seems ingenius enough.
Yeah, we will survive, i don't think anybody doubted that. Will the civilization stay the way it is? It won't be the bronze age collapse, but consider this: over 300 year, the Anatolia region lost between 10 and 25% of its precipitations and it almost destroyed 3 empires. Do you think we're that much politically stable?
>But I don't see how a mere 12C rise in temperature (or even double that) would make it impossible for humans to survive.
Where is your intuition for this coming from? Note that 12C rise in global temperature is a very different statement than 12C rise in average temperature of where you live. The temperature increase is applied non-uniformly. Also, the volatility in weather scales exponentially with global temperature increase. For example, 1.5C to 2C rise is expected to create 4 times more extreme weather events globally.
>Life would probably greatly resemble a Max Max movie
We don't need a fictional movie to see what life would be like. We are seeing glimpses of it already with these mega weather events hitting areas with a higher risk index such as the recent flooding in Pakistan that resulted in 33 million people impacted, ~600K people displaced, ~2,000 people dead, and ~10 billion USD in damages:
> All the UN data points to a warmer atmosphere equating to more food and higher quality of life
All data point to countries warmer than Spain having significant drops in life expectancy. Human body is less healthy in a tropical climate than it is in continental climate.
A numbwr of cities will exceed 36 degrees C Wet Bulb Temperature in the summmer. Do you understand what that means? Over heating to death. Sweating does not work any more.
Everyone living in those areas will become refugees.
We are also losing all snowpack. No snowpack means droughts in summer and floods in winter.
Lastly, we expect climate change to cause food shortages. It will not bw just poor countries that suffer. Nations will respond by banning food exports. Britain depends on imported food, it has not been self-sufficient for 100 years
We have no crops that handle high heat well. We neber domesticated perrenial plants properly, they give much lower yields. Perrenial wheatgrass has half the yoeld of wheat.
Potato planta shut down in high heat even if you provide them with water. You can turn the entire field i to soup, at 40 degrees potatoss don't grow.
It is sad that most people do not comprehens the huge cost we will have to deal with this problem.
> globally harvests will go down and we will see a lot of refugees and hunger as a result.
The science predicts these with some degree of uncertainty but surely in the past 100 years of warming we should have seen some of that already? Harvests are up lately, hunger is very much down and the regions where population growth is highest are among the hottest in the world, closest to the equator.
The Arctic has a huge influence on the climate of Europe and NA. Also the warming will trigger climatic feedbacks (arctic ice, methane, etc) if that hasn't happened already. There's no human way to stop feedbacks. It's like trying to stop an earthquake.
> And I rather doubt that you personally have verified the climate science, so what makes you so sure?
I also read that report, but I got a different vibe from it than you did. What I read was a bunch of settled stuff, a bunch of stuff where the results are predictable but the exact circumstances are not and a bunch of still open stuff requiring more research hopefully resulting in being able to settle other questions. It's pretty much like any other scientific report that I've read with the difference that it spans the globe.
The tricky bit is that the countries that are doing the least to help stave this off are also the ones best positioned to ride it out unless we end up with one of the worst case scenarios.
But locally some countries are already experiencing the first set of symptoms and it isn't pretty. (Notably: the South of Europe and North Africa)
> Btw it is not about humans influencing climate (of course they do), but about the doomsday scenarios.
The doomsday scenarios will come to pass if we don't make some pretty drastic changes. Personally I won't live to see it, but my kids most likely will, even if they're off by a couple of decades.
Because the thing that there is a lot of discussion about is the exact dates, not necessarily on what the consequences are.
Anyway, you seem to have made up your mind on this and I have more important things to do (in the short term...).
That's a really dubious one. There's multiple issues with global warming, drought and desertification being one of them (and it probably will not affect a whole country) but the second one is just the max temperature the human body can, withstand especially with high humidity. When this threshold is passed, you can have thousands of people dying at the same time in your country. When every summer, heatwaves take a few of your neighbours you start reconsidering how nice your country is.
Remember, we're going to have more than a 2°C increase in mean temperature by the end of the century, and maybe 4°C. 4°C is the difference between now and the last ice age when the whole Europe was covered by huge glaciers.
Also, many people live near shores, which will be damaged frequently as the see level rises… How would India, who have a borderline genocidal tendency (fantasised mostly at the moment buy still frightening) against Muslims nowadays, react to the massive arrival of Bengali people coming from Bangladesh after a typhoon destroyed their land?
> Italy is a tiny country in terms of land area, so why would they need to take so many?
Because that's where they arrive… I'm not speculating when I talk about Italy, this is happening right now (not 10 millions, but hundred of thousands).
> Anyways, my core point here is (a) we won't need to deal with this migration anyways, because we will solve climate change way before it becomes necessary, and (b) even if we didn't lower our emissions, I'm confident we can solve the migration problem without millions of deaths.
Regarding (a), you should probably read this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_budget
Regarding (b), I admire your confidence, but it sounds delusional in regard of the whole human history.
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