I wonder if there is any point to go to a preindustrial climate though. By the time we get technology to the massive scale required to actually fix it, the worst effects will have already occurred. The climate will have already changed and we will have dealt with it one way or another.
Going back at that point will basically mean another climate change. One that will be mainly for the better but will again have impact on nature that will have adjusted in the mean time. It won't be a 100% positive. I wonder if that is really worthwhile. And if things will really get back to what they were; For one the arctic ice, would that build up again in the exact same places? They have a large effect on jetstreams so I'm not sure if things would really go back to the same way things were in pre-industrial times.
Also, in pre-industrial (and early industrial) times winters were really harsh sometimes. It wasn't all rosy either. I think around the 70s/80s the climate was the mildest though I didn't study it.
It's important to mention that the current-ish (started 10,000 years ago in the Younger Dryas) warmth of Interglacial era made us able to settle down and practise agriculture. Before that, for millions of years - we're stuck as Hunter-Gatherers, forever in the mercy of Nature.
Perhaps in the days of tomorrow, we will once again be in the mercy of Nature? Of course not, as long as we retain our technologies. Ergo, even if you (and I agree) don't think climate change will doom humanity as a whole, I'd still be sympathetic to rational campaigns reducing it's effects.
First, it’s going to be a bigger change than those periods. The “business as usual” scenario is warmer than today by the degree to which today is warmer than the ice ages. (And I think at least some of those were local climate changes, not global ones?)
Second, it’s not about life everywhere except for people who stop as soon as they finish the headlines. Some farmland will go from marginal to good, others from good to marginal. Unfortunately the latter is going to hurt more than the former will help, fortunately there are already solutions, unfortunately they are expensive. Probably more expensive than green subsidies, even if the tech never improves.
Thirdly, IIRC, we don’t yet know the conditions which would interfere with the thermohaline circulation, but we have observed the bit near the the U.K. — the Gulf Stream — moving north. Mess that up and the U.K. suddenly turns from a pleasant mild-ish climate all year round into something more like Newfoundland, which is at the same latitude.
When will this torrent of panic porn related to 'climate' let off? Probably only when there is a more immediate, more tangible, more real threat to write about - war, famine, pestilence and death come to mind and all seem to be champing at the bit to be let free. It is not as if the climate has been static during the evolution of Homo Sapiens and still we made it through, through the Roman and Viking warm periods, through the little ice age, through the volcanic winters of Tambora and Krakatoa, through the several plague epidemics, through the decimation of the population due to several famines, through the most recent glaciation and through the massive changes caused by the industrial revolution and - lo and behold - through the more intense warm period of the 1930's which (together with certain agricultural practices) gave rise to the Dust Bowl in the USA.
Earth will abide. Mankind will abide. The climate will keep changing as it has always done. Some areas will become more amenable to agriculture, others will become less so. The planet will become greener due to the increased carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and later it will become more barren when the carbon dioxide content goes down again as it has done countless times already.
Climate change is putting stress on ecosystems that causes them to change more rapidly than they have in the past. You could go back in history and find similar things, but you'd be hard pressed to go back in history and find as many things happening at the same time.
The better things will not remain so for long. Many of the industry and technical progress came at a huge cost. It's the future generation who will bear it. Data conclusively indicates real-world climate change is tracking the IPCC's worst case scenario.
If the climate warms significantly, we are getting millions of kilometers of previously unusable taiga in what is now largely empty regions of Canada and Russia. And the population in most countries is already in decline. We will need less food and farming, not more.
The fall of ancient civilizations is always a great story but I think we have fundamentally changed when we attained systematic knowledge. There will be no great collapse with massive loss of capacity because we put our understanding of the world and our tech into models and then wrote it all down millions of times.
Basically, we know how to build a nuclear reactor, an internal combustion engine, and a computer, we will never forget it, and therefore can always run an industrial civilization.
A great positive feedback loop, no? Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC) creates a need for more AC which in turn creates more ACC which furthers the need for more AC. Yeah I don't see this going well for the next few decades.
Sorry, nope. The climate community pretty much agrees on this. How we will deal with the changing circumstances is wide open though, so there is some hope there. Given our history though..
edit: Here's a comment I made for released carbon due to permafrost melting (with literature):
I somewhat agree. A climate several degrees warmer than recent history seems like it would be beneficial; in the past, warmer periods coincided with a lush and rich biosphere. More energy is available to life.
Like you, long-term, I'm more worried about the upcoming ice age than runaway global warming. We know how to fix global warming, and will in the next hundred years: Nuclear and solar.
But... warming can still be very disruptive in the short term. Coastlines moving a few hundred feet might be disastrous for entire regions. Staple crops failing in one nation and blooming in another may cause refugees, famine, and war. Politics is local.
We should remember that we are currently in an ice age[1]. If climatology can be reduced to an effective engineering practice that would be awesome, but we should remember that a frozen Earth will be far worse for most human beings than a hothouse Earth. In the worst case scenarios of Global Warming, the burdens and costs will be largely born by the developed world, both in terms of geographical changes such as sea level rise as well as absorbing migrants from more southerly regions. And the developed world is up to those challenges. On the other hand, when, not if, the reglaciation occurs, it will be devastating to the entire human population of the planet. It would be darkly comical if unintentional human warming were staving off the next freezing period, and we brought catastrophe on our planet by trying to fix it. Humility is called for.
We are not going to a new normal, because even if we stop everything feedback loops will keep worsening things till we can't adapt anymore, will be no mark in the sand saying that we will stay there.
It is not just about temperature, or sea level, is a system where we thrived while it was stable enough, going to a long period of chaos. Agriculture and food production in general, infrastructure, travel and more will be increasingly disrupted.
Passive adaptation may not be the way out, just letting the water to boil up till the frog is cooked, or risk ending things faster with the some of the surprises that climatologist are getting year to year. Stopping or compensating emissions, and aggressive/extensive carbon capture may be a way out. Going into silos much like what happened in Wool may be another (where a lot of things can go wrong, anyway).
Any change to the normal brings with it the need for adaptation, it does not matter whether that change brings lower temperatures (e.g. past and coming glaciations, the 'little ice age', etc.) or higher temperatures (the interglacial temperature rise up to the climatic optimum some ~8500 years ago, the Roman and Viking warm periods, the current warm period). When it gets colder crop yield goes down, crops fail, tree lines go down (as in 'trees fail to thrive on high places') and the productive potential of a given area of land goes down. People will have to move or starve. Many of them will move to lower ground, displacing those who were there already. The displaced will move elsewhere, displacing others. When it gets warmer again the opposite happens, the productive capacity of marginal land will rise while the capacity of land which was already optimal can go down due to drought and subsequent erosion. People will move to this newly productive land, displacing those who were already there. The displaced will move to higher ground or to less productive regions.
Another important - and in this case probably the most important - factor is that bad news sells much better than good news. A warmer climate has the potential to make currently suboptimal regions in places like Russia and Canada suitable for productive agriculture. This has happened before - e.g. grapes were grown and wine was probably produced in Denmark during the Viking age [1], the Sahara desert used to be 'covered in vegetation and lakes' [2] - and will happen again. You probably will not hear much in the news about the greening of deserts just like the fact that the planet is a lot 'greener' than it has been in recent history is not published or if it is is put in a bad light like the New York Times 'Global Greening’ Sounds Good. In the Long Run, It’s Terrible. [3] put it.
There is some good progress, but there is so much still to do, especially when you consider the other impacts to the eco-systems around the world (pollution, species extinction etc).
We know that there will more energy in the weather systems as a result of the high levels of CO2, leading to more frequent severe weather.
A real concern is climate tipping points, where the weather patterns shift and stick in new patterns. Living in Scotland, the Gulf Stream weakening further or stopping would be a real change to a much colder climate. It’s already cold enough.
One thing this latest heat wave is worrying me about is that climate disasters seem like they will happen no matter what happens with CO2.
Like, the hottest temperatures from Death Valley are from a century ago.
Tornadoes, droughts, heat waves, monsoons, floods, hurricanes -- not to mention earthquakes and volcanic eruptions -- will all continue even if CO2 goes back to pre industrial levels.
The issue is that we crossed those previous thresholds and ... the world kept improving?
If you look at sites like Our World in Data then nearly all metrics of human progress have dramatically improved over the past century, while temperatures increased 1°C.
So it isn't clear that another degree increase will lead to catastrophe. The numbers are round and arbitrary. Our increased wealth and technology has improved lives far, far more than the increased temperature has diminished them, and I don't see why that trend won't continue.
I guess we've decided that temperatures in 1850 were the perfect temperatures, and we're going to stick with them. If humans continue to live in a peaceful and technological world over thousands or millions of years, the natural climate ups and downs will seem to be suddenly forced into an unnaturally straight line, starting somewhere around now, due to everyone being unwilling to allow change.
Going back at that point will basically mean another climate change. One that will be mainly for the better but will again have impact on nature that will have adjusted in the mean time. It won't be a 100% positive. I wonder if that is really worthwhile. And if things will really get back to what they were; For one the arctic ice, would that build up again in the exact same places? They have a large effect on jetstreams so I'm not sure if things would really go back to the same way things were in pre-industrial times.
Also, in pre-industrial (and early industrial) times winters were really harsh sometimes. It wasn't all rosy either. I think around the 70s/80s the climate was the mildest though I didn't study it.
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