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Ready for the next Ice Age? Winter is coming.
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Biggest scam in human history. Really sad anyone falls for this dreck.
Will climate change kill everyone — or just lots and lots of people?
That’s the theory put forward in a recent viral Vice post: “New Report Warns ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Within 30 Years.’”
Anyone who fell for this nonsense should feel embarrassed.
Will climate change kill everyone — or just lots and lots of people?
That’s the theory put forward in a recent viral Vice post: “New Report Warns ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Within 30 Years.’”
Anyone who fell for this nonsense should feel embarrassed.
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I often wonder at your sense of confidence - that it's all going to be alright. You don't seem to appreciate how tenuous the situation really is, how quickly everything can go from - OK to Dead, and, just as with the mega oil tankers, how long you can know it's going to be bad before it suddenly IS bad. Big boats are slow to turn - if you miss the window of action then you can be certain you'll ground a long time before you ground. The environment (and ecosystem/natural resources) is a very big ship - and we can see the problems coming from a long way off but when it gets here it can feel pretty sudden for the average Joe. When it's over, it's over. California has this coming for it,
Lots of cities in the US face similar futures but it doesn't feel like it right now. While you are sucking on the straw, everything is fine, but you don't see the water level falling. Anything that changes the equilibrium of rain versus usage will add up over time. A small change in reduced rainfall will lead to a long slow falling of groundwater levels (as will a slight increase in use). Yet that is invisible to the end user until they suddenly die of thirst. Hundreds of large population centers are facing this but the people have no sense of it. When it comes for them they will stay and fight for what little is left or move and possibly fight for a share of what YOU have. This is Jenga. A small wobble may pass, or it may bring down everything.
US wheat plantings are down to the lowest levels since records began in 1919, and that, in itself, is no big deal. Demand is down and people see more profit in corn and soy - except this year the planting season for those has been a disaster. Drought continues to impact Australia's wheat output. Russian output is expected to fall. Europe is expecting an increase, and so is Canada but the field conditions are a bit iffy, so we'll see. And so it goes, in any year, one area is impacted negatively by weather, another positively. But as more energy stays in the climate system it becomes more likely that too many bad things will happen at once. Whereas it might have been that one area was a bit dry and another area was a bit wet, neither is so bad as to result in a total loss - but when "a bit hot" turns to drought and "a bit wet" turns to flood then you get no crops from either place. You do NOT want to do things that increase the chances of things like that happening. Civilisations can fall within weeks when the food or water run out. If we are to make our decisions on what to do based on conspiracy theories then we are left to chose whether we should believe that the powerful would gin up an emergency to consolidate their power, or whether they would try to cover up impending doom so as to maintain their power, at least until they could figure out a way to get out of Dodge with as much loot as they could.
Make a list sometime of all the things that have to keep working just right for you to continue obtaining the necessities of life. Where I live, if the internet went down for a week there would be people starving because no-one uses cash and there isn't enough physically in town to continue conducting commerce.
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The situation in Chennai is pretty alarming and should serve as a wake up call but it probably won't.
As you say, the problems, even at this local level, should have been seen coming from a long way off. Four reservoirs, serving a city of almost 5 million, don't dry up overnight.
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Occam's razor applies here. According to the 90s and 00s panic, we're all already dead. Miami and NY are under 10 feet of water, and polar bears are extinct. The goal posts keep shifting for each generation. Now we're all dead in 12 years, or 30 depending on if someone is running for (D) office.. Strangely, the elite keep buying oceanfront property.
Confirmation bias
Description
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning
The 2 major flat earth organizations started off as tongue and cheek joke in the 90s. I remember them well, almost no one took them serious. Their web pages couldn't have been more satirical. Something funny happened though. Some really low-brow people couldn't see the satire and believed it. The 2 groups played along and became more dry in their satire, ultimately to the point they started playing serious. Today you have large groups of people who actually believe the world is flat. They have no idea that they simply aren't in on the joke. They have an idea planted in their head, and they will seek out any information to reinforce that belief. The plain and simple reality is there for anyone to see, of course the world isn't flat, but they will never accept that reality.
AGW believers are on about the same level as flat earthers. They were also fed a false narrative, and they seek out any information that seems to confirm that belief. All that is happening is a narrative is being pushed that feeds into post-hippie greenie belief that people=bad no matter what. It is not much better when it comes to "scientists". The only groups who get government funding are the ones who play up the narrative. If you are hired to do a job, you do it or you get fired. These people aren't scientists, they are PR propaganda firms. Individuals or groups that nut-up and push against the narrative not only aren't funded, they are attacked and blacklisted in the industry.
Pull up those cities, and look up which elites have recently bought waterfront properties.
And here I thought weather was not climate. Nope, it is when it fits a narrative. South Florida is experiencing well above average rainfall this spring. It's annoying even. Nothing is being reported about it on the news, either locally or nationally. Half of the state relies on Lake Okeechobee for potable water. In times like this, Lake Okeechobee is drained down, pumped out to the ocean. The reason they do this is partially worries about the levy, but mostly under the pretense that "we may get a hurricane which will overwhelm it". I could get into specifics, but during heavily wet times they pump it down to ridiculous low levels. The moment we have a dryer than average season? National news about a "historic drought" brought on by "Global Warming", and "we will never see rainfall again".
Localized climate has always changed during the history of man, both written and oral history. You pointing out individual areas with alleged problems is just more confirmation bias being fed to you. Ever heard of the Aztecs? They had elaborate rituals to ensure, in their mind, that the gods would give them enough rain. They would even perform human sacrifices, killing people and even little children, throwing them into cenotes. They had a massive empire from 1300 to about 1521. Their empire mysteriously collapsed extremely quickly. The best hypothesis is it collapsed due to an extreme long and severe drought. Well, that is the accepted hypothesis until it is revised. History keeps getting revised to fit AGW nonsense, like the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ace Age which supposed never happened now. Was the Aztec drought modern AGW? No, obviously not. Is this modern AGW hoax hysteria causing humanity to sacrifice people including little children? Yes, yes it is. A segment of the world's population have not evolved, still praying and sacrificing to a false god.
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I should also point out that hysteria over localized crop issues is a modern manufactured crisis. 100 years ago almost everyone grew/raised their own food. 50 years ago a majority of people grew/raised at least a good portion of their own food. Now? Most people have no idea where food comes from. Ask them where any kind of food comes from, and they will tell you "the store".
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Those are mostly caricatures and media hype, not what the scientists were saying - but it is what the "skeptics" like to claim scientists were saying. Try to follow that stuff back. It always ends up in a dry paper that doesn't say what the headline says or it's an off-the cuff comment that a reporter runs with.
Of course I see it completely the reverse. The flat earthers aren't completely unreasonable - the curvature is very hard to see or measure. The science is good but the flat earthers seem to have distorted views of what the science says and are always saying stuff like - "if X were true then we couldn't Y" without really understanding either X or Y.
The curvature of the earth leads to a gradual deviation from the level that is difficult to notice. Global warming leads to a long term rise in average temperature very difficult to detect without instruments and reams of measurements to average over. It is hard to see through the daily changes.
Apparently the sea level in south Florida has risen 3.5 inches since 1992. That is pretty hard to notice - an inch a decade - for the average person especially that the daily tides are orders of magnitude larger. However, it makes a difference at the very highest tides and an inch of water can go a long way on a flat surface. How frequent do nuisance floods have to get before they are more than a nuisance? How do you empty your sewers when you are under water? A bit of water is a little problem but lots of things don't like getting wet (electricity for one) and a small bit of sea water can turn into a lot of hurt in a hurry when it gets somewhere it's not wanted. I hear your aquifers are not doing so well down there either as they have drawn down the fresh water and salt water is infiltrating. Still, it's livable - right up to the time when it relatively suddenly isn't.
Correct. It isn't. Tide is not sea level either - but as the average sea level rises, the high tides become more of a nuisance. The extremes remain the problem. Most of the time you are fine, but as the average rises the extremes get worse. A high sea time that would formerly be OK now becomes not OK, and times that were already bad become worse.
Rainfall depends on evaporation and global warming will give you more of that. You'll probably sea heavier rains going forward. Just more water to deal with.
So the conclusion is that climate change is nothing to worry about.
Localized changes is one thing. One area changes but another area remains survivable or gets better. That's disruptive but normal. We have been in a very unusually stable and temperate climate window that has allowed humans to become a global force and advanced civilisation. That civilisation depends on the climate we have. We have not prepared for a different one and it is not apparent that we can. The climate was different in other periods on the planet but in all those other periods there were either very few humans or none at all. The climate on earth has almost killed everything at least once. It wouldn't take too much to kill most people on the planet. Humans are pretty smart but we don't live significantly longer than anything else if we don't eat. You personally might be OK with a very hot, or a very wet couple of weeks - but it could be fatal to your food and that's going to catch up to you sooner or later. If you have a bad crop from time to time but you have stores then you should be able to scrape by, but if you have more frequent bad crops as the climate average moves a small amount you will start to run down your stores until you are eating your seed for the next planting - then it goes bad fast without extreme good luck. Eater Island was once a lush jungle island. the locals thought they'd never be able to use it up - but they did. At least it didn't harm the rest of the planet. That is not the case now. Our emissions don't stop at borders.
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And even if they know in theory, they don't really know.
Most of our food comes from holes in the ground and the ocean floor. It takes more energy to grow it and bring it to you than you will get from eating it.
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Investors (and billionaires) don't care. They aren't there for the long term. If you are investing then you are only holding for a short time. If you are a billionaire then dropping a few million for a beachfront home that will be gone in ten years is just the price of having a beachfront home for ten years - and then they can get another one.
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And that is what is going to kill the most people if a worst case scenario occurs. The industrial food system is a horrendous machine that could collapse at any point. It wouldn't take some theoretical man made warming. Which reminds me, I have to be more active with my home vegetable gardens and finally start raising chickens. I need to get more comfortable with it, in case the worst happens.
The industrial food system in the US could potentially switch off. You mentioned wheat crop failures and immediately attributed it to AGW. Have you ever considered the failure of a GMO strain? GMOs are not natural.
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Declassified satellite images show how Himalayan glaciers have shrunk
And the rate of ice loss is increasing.
The spy satellite images produced one snapshot in the mid-1970s, and then modern satellite stereo images become available in 2000. The researchers calculated a 1975-2000 trend, and then a 2000-2016 trend to see how things were changing.
One clear result is that the rate of ice loss has increased. Converting ice and snow to the equivalent volume of liquid water, the average thickness change from 1975 to 2000 was about 0.2 meters lost per year. From 2000 to 2016, those same glaciers lost around 0.4 meters per year in thickness—roughly double the rate of shrinkage.
Extrapolating that rate to the rest of the Himalayan glaciers would mean that about 4 billion tons of ice disappeared in 1975-2000. For 2000-2016, that number is about 7.5 billion tons of ice. For context, this means 87% of the Himalayan glacial ice present in 1975 was still around in 2000. By 2016, 72% remained.
And the rate of ice loss is increasing.
The spy satellite images produced one snapshot in the mid-1970s, and then modern satellite stereo images become available in 2000. The researchers calculated a 1975-2000 trend, and then a 2000-2016 trend to see how things were changing.
One clear result is that the rate of ice loss has increased. Converting ice and snow to the equivalent volume of liquid water, the average thickness change from 1975 to 2000 was about 0.2 meters lost per year. From 2000 to 2016, those same glaciers lost around 0.4 meters per year in thickness—roughly double the rate of shrinkage.
Extrapolating that rate to the rest of the Himalayan glaciers would mean that about 4 billion tons of ice disappeared in 1975-2000. For 2000-2016, that number is about 7.5 billion tons of ice. For context, this means 87% of the Himalayan glacial ice present in 1975 was still around in 2000. By 2016, 72% remained.
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We plant a limited number of strains that are tuned to a limited set of environments. If we ran out of fuel the food supply would collapse. If we ran out of that narrow environment, food supply would collapse. When the climate causes the ideal conditions to migrate across the land, the farmers can't necessarily move their production and adapted seed to follow it. The land may not be flat and fertile there.
GMOs are not natural and nor the current warming. Naturally we on the cooling end of the cycle. That would also be bad, BTW. If GMO strains don't need water, or they can grow underwater then that would be a plus. However, most of the GMOs are made to grow in largely the same conditions as the old crops (except that they are resistant to roundup or whatever). If you have fields you can't plant in because they are waterlogged, it doesn't matter if what you were going to plant was GMO or not, it's not going to grow if it wasn't planted. The GMOness of the crop is largely irrelevant in this case. Saying it could be GMOs is very much clutching at straws.
We are having more frequent problems with extreme weather events. What kind of weather yet get is what defines the climate, but climate isn't weather. The Sahara can reasonably said to have a dry climate while England has a much wetter climate. Saying that England has a wet climate doesn't mean that it is currently raining right now over all of England. Nor would rain in the desert tomorrow mean that the Sahara now had a wet climate. It would still be true that on any given day you would be more likely to be rained on in London than in the Sahara. The weather is what you get today, the climate is how likely you are to see that weather again. If you go from having one flood every ten years to having two floods every year, you have definitely had a big change in climate (and a devastating one if you are trying to grow crops that don't like being underwater) but that does not mean it is raining every day. You could have lots of nice days - except you starve to death because you can't grow your crops all the way to harvest.
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We can now add France the list of countries that recorded their highest ever June temperatures this week and is also expected to get close to its highest temperature ever later today.
-EDIT-
Prediction was correct:
-EDIT 2-
It's gone up another degree and a half in the last couple of hours:
France hits record temperature of 45.8C
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The heatwave should be letting up in Europe over the next few days and the record that was set in france was 45.9C which is about 114F in American. What they experienced was the opposite of a polar vortex. Instead of a locked loop of the jet stream bringing cold from the Arctic, a locked loop brought hot from the Sahara. You can say that this is "natural" if it makes you feel better but it is unusual historically. These loops are becoming more common and are causing extreme weather to sit for much longer over areas as the jet stream gets more sluggish and chaotic.
Even if it's natural, something needs to be done.
Even if it's natural, something needs to be done.
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Look back to history, and how past cultures coped.
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They died out.