How are you coping with climate change?
How are you coping with climate change?
This has been a doozy of a year. And it's the best year so far blah blah. So how are you all coping? Does it hit anyone else like a bolt of lightning that probably I - we - won't die of old age?
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The Earth has been much hotter than the worst-case scenario for anthropogenic climate change. (It used to be rainforests-at-the-North-pole hot.) Climate change isn't going to kill you unless you're both extremely poor (by global standards, not by first-world standards) and unlucky, although it may significantly reduce your quality of life as resources are redirected to mitigation. Where do these "mass death everywhere" ideas come from? They're not a product of the scientific consensus.
As for me: it seems like the climate where I live is getting warmer. There has been much less snow recently than there was when I was a kid; it's convenient but unsettling. The summers are getting hotter too, although the difference isn't as dramatic. I'd like to move to somewhere further north, or maybe a place like coastal California which is without temperature extremes, but I would want to do that even if the climate wasn't changing.
The earth has never heated this rapidly before. And it's not just heat, but other planetary boundaries as well being crossed.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
That climate change is killing bigger multicellular organisms isn't debatable, we are in an extinction event that was made significantly worse by bird flu. If we lived outside, we'd be dying too. And soon, our power grids will start failing even more, just like Texas.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2023/09/human-driven-mass-extinction-eliminating-entire-genera
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/05/29/thousands-seabirds-starved-death-bering-sea-scientists-see-fingerprint-climate-change/ (^Bird deaths from 2019, before bird flu started decimating them too)
Where do these "mass death everywhere" ideas come from?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
The problem isn't that it's going to be warmer. The problem is that it's getting warmer so quickly that populations won't be able to adapt. Ecological collapse is absolutely on the table here. There is no real debate in the scientific community about this, just deceptive propaganda that's disguised as 'conflicting science' but is simply a smoke screen to keep people ignoring the problem.
We're going to lose a lot of diversity but hardy, fast-growing species will spread into niches formerly filled by specialists. Some models even predict that net ecological productivity will increase significantly (there does exist disagreement about this).
Look at who funded that study, and the actual contents.
According to this study - funded by the Chinese government, the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions on earth - we'll see increased plant growth in the short term under controlled warming. Even ignoring the incredible conflict of interest, the fundamental assumption of the study is that we'll be able to get warming under control and stick to the goals of the Paris agreement, maintaining only 2 degrees of warming by 2070. That's absolutely absurd. We'll be incredibly lucky to not hit 2 degrees of warming by 2040 at this rate. Besides that, they are essentially just looking at how plant growth responds to changes in temp and CO2. Of course plant productivity increases with higher temps and more available CO2, that's not where the problems come in.
The problems occur when those hardy, fast growing species start really exploding. Cyanobacterial blooms that deoxygenate massive swaths of the ocean, killing millions of fish at a time. Population explosions of pests, contaminating food supplies and starting future pandemics. The ecosystem is complex and interconnected, things will adapt eventually, but the transition period will be catastrophic.
We are not a hardy, fast growing species. I have no doubt that people will survive, but it's going to effect everyone, and a lot sooner than you think.
The study looks at that particular increase in temperatures but a higher increase would probably lead to even more plant growth.
I agree that that there will be disasters during the transition period (and even if there aren't, transitioning will be very expensive). However, humans are extremely hardy and fast-growing. We're probably the most hardy, fast-growing species of large terrestrial animal that has ever existed - right now humans and domesticated animals make up the overwhelming majority of terrestrial mammal biomass. Climate change is going to affect me, at least because I live in a large coastal city and seawalls cost a lot of money, but it is unlikely to kill me.
Temperature is not the problem. No climate scientist has ever worried that plants won't produce well in higher temperatures. Acting like they're 'exploring the consequences of climate change' is a smokescreen, it's a way of making it seem like the fears are overblown. They're testing a hypothesis with an obvious conclusion that's somewhat related to global warming, while conveniently ignoring the things real scientists are actually worried about.
The fears come from the other effects of rising temperature and greenhouse gasses. Most of the real scary stuff is happening in the oceans. Things like the potential for massive amounts of algal death and the loss of potentially 60% of the oxygen creating organisms on earth. Plants are gonna grow great when oxygen levels drop to 15% and people have to wear breathing masks anytime they venture to the surface.
We are absolutely not a hardy or fast growing species. It takes years, for our children to be remotely self sufficient, and over a decade to reach sexual maturity. We have a similar growth pattern to elephants, outside of whales, we're some of the slowest growing animals alive. We can't survive extreme temperature swings, radiation, loss of oxygen. We've created things to overcome our physical mediocrity, but those things can very quickly disappear for most of the population when the infrastructure supporting global shipping and manufacturing collapses. The fact that we make up such a huge portion of mammal biomass mostly just means we'll be a great food source for whatever bugs evolve to eat us. Keep in mind that we may be about 30% of mammal biomass, but livestock make up more than 60%. That's not because they're small and adaptable, it's because they're food.
This is a 'transition period' on a geologic scale. We're talking about the next 50,000 years at best, it's not something we're just to ride out and things go back to normal.
Humans have drastically altered ecology permanently anyways, during fruits and vegetables into near monocrops and changing them within just a few decades, it's pretty clear that can be done for temperature changes. Though yeah of course temperature changing changes ecology, but why assume that change will be disastrous collapse
Because higher temperatures aren't the problem, the rate of change is. I assume the worst because we've seen it before in the fossil record. The best comparison is the Triassic-Permian extinction. Rapid change in temperatures led to global ecological collapse and the death of 85% of all life on earth. Now, during the Triassic-Permian extinction CO2 levels rose from 400 ppm to ~2500 ppm over the course of ~50,000 years, with an estimated rate of change of around .05 ppm per year. We're starting out lower at 280 ppm before the industrial revolution, but we've already hit 420, and we're now adding about 2.5 ppm every year, with that number increasing every year. So we're currently experiencing warming that's 50 times faster than the most devastating extinction event in Earth's history.
The fact that our entire food industry is based around genetically engineered monocultures is just another point of failure. It's a constant game of cat and mouse to continually keep each generation of plants protected against changing diseases and pests, and because the vast majority of the seed is coming from one company, if something does adapt to overcome the engineered defenses, it's devastating to the entire global population of that crop.