> Likely, climate change will cause 1-2B people to flee to temperate areas
Rationally, that is the thing to do.
All predictive models agree that temperatures are not going to decrease during the following decades. We should be organizing the largest human migration in history, and instead we are wasting time on comfort solutions that give people the illusion to do something while accomplishing exactly nothing.
> This is way more of a nightmare scenario than climate change and nobody is batting an eye.
there is a probability that an irrational leader orders a nuclear attack and somebody executes it instead of deserting.
climate change is a certainty at this point and the only question is how bad will it be. for people living by the sea and in the parts of the tropics displacement in a single lifetime is next to certain.
> Gradual relocation will be our primary means of fighting it.
That highlights what's wrong with your PoV. If sea-level rise were the only issue, your comment might actually make some sense ... but that's not the case. Climate change will also lead to droughts, floods, famine, conflicts over water, species extinction, possible collapse of entire ecosystems, and a host of other ills too numerous to mention. Normal technical progress isn't going to solve biodiversity problems we barely understand, or human-society problems that will be driven by warming. It would require a major leap on par with the birth of atomic physics or molecular genetics. Maybe more than one. You want to talk about what's rational? Faith in the modern equivalent of miracles is not rational.
>no mathematical function has been found to fit the observed data. Fact! Conclusion: the situation is much more complex than we currently understand and does not support the horribly destructive policies which are very much in the interests of a clique of politicians and folk with dependent jobs.
I don’t understand this thinking. The fact that we don’t have a good predictive model is extremely worrying. We may hit a non-linearity or positive feedback loop that increase the average temperature by 10C in a very short time (this is unlikely, but we can’t rule it out). The whole thing is like jumping off a cliff into the ocean when you have no idea what is under the surface.
Horseshit. There is not a single scientific model that predicts human extinction from climate change. Parts of humanity, yes. All of humanity, no chance.
There a plenty of models that predict human extinction from AGI.
> Fairly soon, estimated climate change refugees in one of the most prosperous and advanced areas of the world is going to be at one order of magnitude more[0], i.e. about 1 person in 10 in Europe will have been fleeing death.
I initially read this wrong and tried to find where in the report they said that 1 in 10 Europeans would be fleeing due to climate change.
The claim is that 10-20 million will be fleeing draught or extreme weather events in Africa and they will tend to flee North not South. I’m seeing a quote from a US General but not a link to an actual study.
Longer term, over the next 40 years, they have this to say;
> There is no clear global dataset on displacement by slow-onset climate extremes such as sea level rise and desertification; often this migration is classed as economic or other planned migration, failing to acknowledge fully the ‘push’ resulting from climate change impacts. This leaves the full human impact of climate change unknown and depends not only on the magnitude of the event, but also on the vulnerability of the area and the society it impacts. Communities from Alaska to Fiji and Kiribati have already been relocated, or are making plans to do so
because rising sea levels threaten their lands. Developing countries - that have contributed least to climate change - are experiencing the strongest negative impacts, with increasing frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events that pose potentially disastrous consequences for agriculture and food security.
> According to a recent study, 1.4 billion people could be forced to leave their homes by 2060 and this number could rise to two billion by 2100. This estimate is based on combined projections of population growth, submerging coastal zones, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary production, desertification and urban sprawl.
It’s not much of an analysis, but it’s rooted in something real. Coastal populations number about 600 million, maybe up to 1 billion this century. SLR (sea level rise) has been 0.4m since 1900 and estimated to be between an additional 0.4-2.5m this century. “As a result, SLR is anticipated to be one of the most expensive and irreversible future consequences of global climate change.”
I liked this Nature article for a more balanced review of the literature;
It looks at various estimates ranging from 80 million to 1.4 billion people displaced by the end of this century based on SLR and the various assumptions being made by the respective models. For example, looking at areas which lie in 100-year floodplains assuming they’re were all inhabitable, that would impact an estimated 444 million people by 2100 factoring in population growth.
> However, ...residence in the 100-year floodplain may not necessarily result in migration responses to SLR. Indeed, many low-lying areas in the 100-year floodplain, such as Asia’s densely populated ‘mega-deltas’, possess fertile soil and ample water, which is ideal for farming and fishing. Floodplains thus attract large numbers of migrants from other areas, notwithstanding the presence of coastal hazards. Simple residency in the 100-year floodplain does not, therefore, result in migration; it is only when the costs of increasing exposure to SLR hazards exceed the benefits of coastal environments that migration may occur.
If you look at just areas that would become permanently inundated, it is a much smaller land area and estimated to impact 88 million people by 2100.
SLR may be among the greatest/costliest threat of climate change, but SLR models have a huge variance of outcomes, and fairly long time horizons.
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.
> Several studies have demonstrated that it is cheaper to avert climate change than to deal with the effects.
Studies based on climate models that are overpredicting warming, plus economic and sociological models that have even less predictive power.
> moving coastal cities or engineering mega-projects to combat flooding
If your coastal city has a problem with sea level rising a couple of feet, your coastal city has already had a problem for a century or more, and you ignored it. How is that all of a sudden a climate emergency?
> your problem has not gone away
I've already said climate change is something we're always going to have to deal with, just as humans have had to deal with it during all of human history. The idea that we can magically stop the climate from changing ever again is ridiculous.
> 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?
> Global warming is going to open up the northwest passage and the arctic trade routes which would cut shipping times by a huge percentage from asia to europe. It would be the greatest boon to world trade in human history.
Climate change is going to cause droughts and starvation for millions and millions of people, who are either going to die or desperately seek to migrate to the parts of the world that are less inhospitable.
An increase in potential global trade is a drop in the ocean against the instability that large scale climate migrations are going to cause, especially considering how hostile our governments and media have acted against immigrants for decades.
> into accepting the mass arrival of "climate refugees" that's going to happen no matter what.
So, either climate change exists, and this will cause refugees (as will anything that causes a place to become unsupporting of human life, war, famine etc. etc.)
Or, climate change doesn't exist, or does but is exaggerated, and the "climate refugees" are going to be forced on us by some unmentioned power with climate change being used as the excuse.
If do belive in climate change but don't particularly like immigrants then your only real option is to prevent climate change. People will leave their homes when the place they live becomes unlivable (for instance, in the case of Bangladesh, underwater). This is a hard fact, it's not something unique to these people, it's what everyone would do. Only the insane would stay behind railing against the encroaching ocean.
If you don't believe in climate change (despite the overwhelming evidence that it exists) then you're left with some sort of conspiracy theory that refugees are somehow being sent to punish you and climate change is being used as an excuse. This is fantasy, and there's not much that can be done to help you in this situation because what you're taking part in at this point is a religious belief (the evidence points to X but you're going to believe Y).
>> thinking the problem with anthropogenic climate change is the change itself when the real problem is the rate of that change.
No, people keep acting like life on earth is going to die due to higher temperatures. It will probably just move north. In that sense it's not so bad. It is still disruptive, but not the end of the world.
> 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 original climate change predictions were pretty much on the mark even though they weren't complex models.
No? It's 2022 and our cities should be sunk in the ocean and we should be boiling or frozen and there should be no drinkable water left and blah blah blah.
> 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.
> How do you simply adapt to temperatures which are literally unlivable such as wet bulb temperatures hitting 33C+ in areas such as the Middle East and South Asia?
You move.
Climate change of the magnitude you are talking about does not happen overnight. That change happens over a few hundred years, not over a weekend.
Rationally, that is the thing to do.
All predictive models agree that temperatures are not going to decrease during the following decades. We should be organizing the largest human migration in history, and instead we are wasting time on comfort solutions that give people the illusion to do something while accomplishing exactly nothing.
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