Human civilizations have always blossomed in warmer climate. All this scaremongering about global warming ending human civilization and destroying nature is just laughable.
Every coastal city is under threat, and east Asia (where half the world's population lives) is especially vulnerable. I have a feeling things are going to get really, really bad in about 20 years because there's no realistic plan to do anything about it.
Not if other humans deny the process of "coping".
Refugees aren’t bad people, but they are desperate. They will not abide by your country’s rule of law if it means they starve as a result.
The global political environment is actively hostile to coordinated climate action. Without that, we’re just going to see a series of uncontrolled crises spilling over into neighboring nations as countries fight over limited and shifting resource patterns.
What are your qualifications that enable you to come to this conclusion?
I would be very interested in studying your publications - where can I find your analysis?
Also it would be really very appreciated if you would like to publish the datasets that lead you to this conclusion - would you like to give us a public repo with the data, so we can check your results?
Thank you very much!
Second, the problem here is not only the total temperature variation but the speed at which the temperature is changing.
Think of the difference between a car going from 130 km/h to 0 km/h in 8 seconds, and a car going from 130 km/h to 0 km/h in 0.3 seconds. Not really endearing.
Just for the sake of argument, let's say you find yourself in a car in the second scenario, with no known way to stop it. What would you do? I say this as a pragmatist - if we take the headlines at face value, and we only have ~10 years to avert a catastrophe, then the only realistic way to avert it is if 90% of the world's population spends that 10 years planting trees before killing themselves.
As far as we know, the loss of arable land caused by the climate change (and other anthropogenic environmental changes) far outweighs possible gains elsewhere, and even if it didn't, agricultural land area is not exactly fungible.
As for his point about humans preferring warmer temperatures - hopefully that is self-evident.
>As far as we know, the loss of arable land caused by the climate change (and other anthropogenic environmental changes) far outweighs possible gains elsewhere
Would like to see an analysis of arable land gained vs. lost. This is all purely hypothetical, of course - such a change would be drastic, and as you point out, arable land isn't exactly fungible.
12C warmer would put vast amounts of the land area of the planet outside habitable conditions for humanity. We'd probably be restricted to former arctic regions, and not much else. So no, I don't think it's self evident at all. It won't take many degrees rise to rule us out of equatorial regions, then tropical...
My concern is we're changing the climate at geologically unprecedented rates, likely far too quickly for species to evolve and migrate, even if we hadn't locked up 50% of the world's landmass for our own use. That will play interesting havoc with food chains no matter what former permafrost and arctic is freed up for use (with its own emissions load on melting).
That leaves dramatic and expensive global scale action. We're not doing it. There's no sign we're thinking about doing it. Let the market resolve is the sole incredibly weak suggestion.
I don't think history is going to view citizens and politicians of the 21st century kindly. I can forgive and understand those contributing to the problem before say 1990, before the awareness was widespread. We've emitted more since 1990 than in the entire time before.
So a planetary scale game of chicken...
Do you have a source for this or are you just basing it on "common sense"
It does toe that Hans have primarily impacted species that tend to sit higher on the food chain. We have caused the extinction of more animals than plants. Rapid warming can kill of plants that can't move quickly migrate quickly enough to stay within the temperature ranges where they can survive.
It isn't just matter of spreading their seeds far enough (like the reforestation of New England), many plants rely on a prexistingnset of conditions created by the the presence of other species to be able to grow. When the required shifts get large enough there simply may not be enough time for those conditions to be established elsewhere before the temperatures in the current areas kills off the species.
Plants species (and animals like coral) serve as a critical component for many other species. It is quite conceivable that rapid global warming will lead to an extinction event that far exceeds anything that humans have managed to date.
Our understanding of ecological systems is still pretty limited and I don't think we can know for sure how bad it will be. I am personally hopeful that we can delevope terraforming techniques to assist with ecosystem relocation that can mitigate some of this.
>It is quite conceivable that rapid global warming will lead to an extinction event that far exceeds anything that humans have managed to date. >When the required shifts get large enough there simply may not be enough time... >Our understanding of ecological systems is still pretty limited
You've made a number of assertions here about ecology with no reference to research.
This is one of my main issues with the way climate change is presented - much is made of tipping points and the scale of the incoming catastrophe, but the fact is we simply don't know. Even if it is true that we have a low number of decades until irreversible catastrophe, what exactly can be done about that?
I made relatively few assertions and the ones I did make are basic ecological science. I was pointing out that your strong claim was irresponsible given the plausible possibilities and our limited knowledge.
Take a look again at what you are responding too and what you said, it is not at all clear that we're were contrasting past effects on diversity. Indeed, given the topic of the the prospective of rapid global warming causing it is unclear what relevency that point would have.