Can anyone provide a list of bad things that have happened because of climate change, genuinely curious and I want to learn from the experts here!
One difficulty you will encounter when looking into the effects of climate change is that you can't generally attribute individual events to it (or very rarely at least). Its effects are only really visible in more general (abstract) statistical measures (Just like me losing a coin flip doesn't mean the coin is weighted, but when i lose 8 out of 10 flips i will start getting suspicious)
Compare it to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-... where there is strong evidence that using more energy directly leads to more prosperity. We've got much better chances to do well if we stick to using the cheapest available energy. Then people can just build over the top of any disasters that strike.
I'm not sure I'm following? A raise in temperature doesnt in itself cause any particular wildfire, drought or tsunami (just like the weight in a coin won't), but these events get more and more likely (just like losing the coin flip as the coin gets more and more unfair). This doesn't assume anything about the actual probability or trajectory we're on, if i measure my coinflips and they turn out to be 50/50 the argument is just as valid
> strong evidence
I think that pointing to 1 singular graph as "strong evidence" is a bit shallow. there are plenty of reasons to think that there are many confounding variables here.
In Belgium alone 665 people died in June's extreme heatwave that would otherwise still be alive. This is not even just old people. Other European countries have similar numbers.
Europe's inland waterways have extremely low water levels because of climate change related drought. Mainly the Rhine, which is a very important transport route. Ships can't load as much, meaning goods can be delivered at a slower pace. This causes enormous economic damage.
Not only droughts are a problem, but floods as well. In the past few years we've already seen large scale floods necessitating people to flee their homes
Technically most of everything else is weather, not climate, do you want a list of bad weather events?
For the argument to work it must be that climate change causes more extremes on both sides. It's difficult to look at the evidence through an objective lens, but whenever I've looked it seems like warming the earth by a few degrees is most likely to save lives overall. There are of course other unknowns and it it's a very risky experiment to run.
That may well kill more people than climate change. Hard to tell as both have the potential to spiral out into a variety of intertwining tragedies.
Pacific islands failed to sink. Hurricanes failed to become more frequent. Fewer people died due to cold temperatures (which kill far more people than hot temperatures).
See also:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/27/what-caused-th...
I agree! Intuitively i would think that most ecosystems evolved to adapt to their environment and, unless this environment is characterized by large swings in temperature and other conditions, will suffer in conditions different from the ones they evolved to thrive in. That means that any change in conditions needs to be slow enough for these ecosystems to gradually adjust by whatever means they have access to.
> The planet is greener, even the Sahara is shrinking
The UK was baked brown in the heat and it was so bad it was visible by satellite, we had uncharacteristic wildfires all summer. Google has literally no idea what you're talking about by claiming the Sahara is shrinking, the best I can find is "maybe the expansion is slowing?"
> The Great Coral Reef has just had its best 5 years ever.
Apparently it had its most devastating coral bleaching event just 2 years ago, so I'm not sure this is true?
> On average, crops produce more due to higher CO2 levels.
I mean, yeah if you are into the average crop? People tend to like stuff like corn and coffee which are threatened by raised heat levels. With current heat levels we're projected to lose upwards of 1/5th the corn harvest by 2030.
> Pacific islands failed to sink.
I mean some of them did, like a decade ago, just none of the ones you care about.
> Hurricanes failed to become more frequent
Same frequency but wind force increases by water temperature, so a cat 1 hurricane like Rafael ends up a cat 3 hurricane due to climate change. I am seeing a pattern with your selective presentation of the facts.
> Fewer people died due to cold temperatures
Is that not because a large share of the world's old were taken out by COVID within the last 6 years? That is the group most likely to die to cold.
And it's largely recovered [1]
> With current heat levels we're projected to lose upwards of 1/5th the corn harvest by 2030.
Who is projecting that? Globally we're producing 8% more corn YoY [2]. Do you expect all of the sudden in the next 5 years for 20% of that to vanish?
> I mean some of them did, like a decade ago
Which ones specifically? The Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands all still exist, and some have experienced growth [3]
> That is the group most likely to die to cold.
I think you're arguing against yourself here. Fewer people died from extreme cold because of climate change and higher average temperatures.
[1] https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co... [2] https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0440000 [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1
It looks like you've done exactly what the other commenter did, googled some keywords and then posted links you didn't read.
> Which ones specifically? The Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands all still exist, and some have experienced growth [3]
Solomon Islands, have fun learning.
I encourage you to take your own advice and actually read the links to get a full picture of the available science and data. Climate change is real and a serious problem, but not every single thing you are fed by your algorithms is the ground truth. Nitpicking one example and ignoring the entire body of science is just as dishonest as folks who deny climate change.
Here's a paper you can read and not just dismiss as something that I didn't read [1]. Some islands will vanish, some will grow, it's not as simple as everything is doomed everywhere. Have fun reading :)
> This record comprises 568 islands from 42 atolls spanning the western to the central Pacific Ocean from the Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu, and is one of the first robust attempts to statistically attribute the drivers of observed island changes within the past half-century. Our analyses demonstrate that island change and a range of its potential controls, including oceanographic, climatic and local-scale morphometric characteristics of reefs and islands, are not correlated, underscoring that no single variable could predict a uniform response across the study islands. The lack of association between sea-level rise and shoreline change on this large sample of islands addresses the common notion of a linear relationship between rising sea levels and magnitude of erosion in reef island systems.
> Analysis of 568 islands across the Pacific indicates that most islands have exhibited significant morphological changes over the timescale of analysis (1944–2018). Accretion was observed on 39% of transects, while 27% of transects showed erosion. Aggregated at the island scale, the balance of erosional and accretionary changes indicates a predominance of accretion on islands, with an average shoreline change of 0.51 m/decade resulting in a net expansion of 444.63 ha (~ 2.25%) of land area.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-023-02103-5