Comment by energy123
13 hours ago
The initial pain will be diffuse and not obviously caused by global warming.
For example, destabilization of equatorial countries due to wet bulb temperatures, through multiple causal paths: worse education outcomes (many days off school during hot months), worse economy (can't work outside), worse life satisfaction -> more autocracies, more water scarcity.
Then you get more emigration to the colder north, more conflict and more suffering. But not much of it is easily and directly attributable to temperatures.
Much of it is foregone upside, like GDP growth that's 3% instead of 5%.
That's the sum of climate change. "GDP growth of 3% instead of 5%."
Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount of otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.
And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.
That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.
By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and is cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives.
Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.
And then when the GDP finally collapses, there will have been nothing that could be done about it for the last 50 years and they'll ask wtf we were doing in 2040, why we didn't stop it then.
That's the nasty thing. It doesn't "finally collapse".
The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going.
There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse". A loss of what could have been.
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I am not sure how not directly linked to global warming. I am currently on the phone but I remember a study that mentioned that Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh would see a deadly heat (wet bulb temperatures) from basically 0 as it is right now to 30 days/year by 2050 or 2060. I can't remember right now.
If that is not linkable to global warming I am not sure what is. And that is a huge event. In Europe we are struggling with accomodating perhaps 10M people. What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
Chapter 1 of "The Ministry of the Future" describes a fictional wet bulb event. It's grisly and horrific and I highly recommend you read this chapter, it changed my view on climate change.
https://books.rockslide.ca/read/780/epub#epubcfi(/6/14!/4/2/...
Thank you. I will
> What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
We sink the boats.
Indeed, no reason to expect anything will happen differently from what is currently happening, but on a 150x bigger scale.
Y E S
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There are also statistics showing that mortality because of cold is much higher than mortality because of heat.
About 9 times higher.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254251962...
"What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"
More taxes go to ammunition for autonomous border guard systems.
> "What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?"
You think that’s bad... Up here in Canada we’ll have to deal with Murican immigrants as things heat up. Talk about killing the vibe.
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This is not inevitable. We have time, now, to prepare for the future, which doesn't have to be a carbon copy of today.
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Patricia Anthony published a novel about this in '93. Cold Allies. It's good military sci fi. Doesn't pretend to offer answers.
> What happens when 1.5B come knocking because if they stay they die?
Like let them build few of those sci-fi domes and let them keep buying disposable bottled oxygen? I don't get the pessimism. India makes its own rockets. Pakistan has nukes. Why are they supposed to be incapable of holding the nation together on Mars-like Earth?
Tokyo is already hitting 40C/100F at >90% RH during summers. It's already mildly unsurvivable. Nobody cares. Maybe in 10-20 years we'd be wearing spacesuits, but do anyone seriously think the equatorial regions will be uninhabitable and land prices on northern Europe is going to skyrocket???
The fact people already live in some of the hottest places in the world today should speak a little to human resiliency.
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"Migration to the colder north..."
Maybe that's why the Trump regime wants so badly to invade Canada and the Groenland?
Wasn't a drought originally part of the cause of Syria's collapse into civil war? Climate change is already causing unrest in equitorial countries, mass migration and a corresponding rise in authoritarianism / right wing populism in Europe.
You're making the "It's snowing there can't be global warming" argument in reverse.
One local drought can't be attributed to or be proof of global warming.
It's like smoking causing lung cancer; (the following numbers are made up) 5 in 100 non-smokers might get lung cancer but 20 in 100 smokers do. 5 of those smokers would have gotten lung cancer anyway and 15 wouldn't have but there's no way to know which individuals are in which cohort.
Not necessarily. Climate change means there will be more droughts; and if droughts cause civil war, there will be more civil war (that's the GP's relevance); even if we can't tell which ones were caused by global warming, that's still bad.
Oh no, on the contrary, I'm saying it's already started and people aren't paying attention.