It’s becoming apparent that the 21st century will be marked by a series of natural disasters of various severities and speeds that regularly erode global supply capacity and quality of life.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/climate/australia-wildfir...
> A 2018 study led by UCLA’s Daniel Swain found that as temperatures continue to rise, California will see a shift to less precipitation in the spring and fall and more in the winter, lengthening the wildfire season.
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/01/how-climate-c...
> Van Oldenborgh also noted that climate simulations tend to underestimate the severity of such heat waves, suggesting that climate change may be responsible for even more of the region’s high fire risk.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/australia-wildfires-clim...
I don't have data sets, but after the aus wildfires many outlets reported the above posters claims with sources.
I noticed.
But you did cite a few models/predictions. Which is NOT the same as a supporting data set.
And you also admitted to uncritically accepting the assertions of a few "outlets" after the "aus wildfires".
How "science-y"!
The increase in natural disasters is also real, but how large is its impact? Can we say it's "eroding" something that is instead steadily increasing?
Have you seen the Covid-19 lockdowns? Its impact on our life and on the global economy? That is what a real emergency looks like.
But let me break down the parent's statement:
> It’s becoming apparent that the 21st century will be marked by a series of natural disasters of various severities and speeds
Every century is marked by a series of natural disasters. Some natural disasters are made more frequent by climate change. Some extremely serious ones are not: earthquakes, tsunamis (the last big one killed 220 thousand people) or pandemics like the one we're living now. We've never been on great terms with nature, and we've learned to cope: controlling fires, building water management systems, controlling the spread of diseases and developing vaccines, etc.
> that regularly erode global supply capacity and quality of life.
The global wealth is steadily increasing, so it's not clear there is an erosion. Adverse events impact our quality of life, but that's a given, and what we do is preventing and mitigating them. The current pandemic is a natural disaster orders of magnitude worse than anything climate change has brought us- it puts things into perspective.
Donald's statement is:
> It’s becoming apparent that the 21st century will be marked by a series of natural disasters of various severities and speeds that regularly erode global supply capacity and quality of life.
All natural disasters "erode global supply capacity and quality of life". Before and during climate change. (Before much more than now, to be fair, because we spent enormous amounts of energy in securing ourselves from the effects of natural disasters.) Disasters frequency is increasing, according to science. But how much? And how much damage do they cause, in proportion to our wealth? So far, global supply capacity and quality of life have been steadily increasing, despite the "erosion".
So, in order for the statement to be meaningful, it is necessary to specify whether the amount of damages is relevant with respect to our current wealth and rate of growth. I think that so far, despite our obsession with it, the impact has been absolutely negligible. The current pandemic serves as a reminder of what a real global disaster looks like. It's not a newspaper headline or a paper full of "may"s and "could"s. And it's not a "has been made x% more probable", either.
As a result you will see mass migrations as earlier fertile regions become arid, and people compete for scarce resources, exposure to diseases that populations in a region do not have immunity for, and because the changes are due to warming (I.e. an increase in energy in the ecosystem) the greater energy means extreme weather events will become even more extreme, and milder ones will become extreme.