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djleni | 2 years ago

For what it’s worth, the average interpretation I’ve seen from climate scientists is:

- No, we won’t hit scorched earth Venus-like runaway warming.

- If we don’t reduce emissions drastically, greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants.

So, not the end times, but definitely dark times.

If you sprinkle a bit of pessimism about current politics it’s not a stretch to assume we probably won’t handle those impacts gracefully, or achieve the drastic emissions cuts required to avoid them.

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iso1631|2 years ago

Millions of migrants seems a massivly optimistic view. I suspect it will be well over a billion in 10 years.

pc86|2 years ago

What's your citation for suspecting that more than 1 in 8 living people will be a migrant? That seems pretty alarmist, and well over any number I've seen suggested elsewhere.

lynx23|2 years ago

Well, this is when the military budget of many countries will be put to a test, for real this time. After all, the reason to keep investing into military force is to be able to defend sovereignty. It is a harsh thought, no question, but we have to admit that we always prepared for this case. Sure, the left is trying to make it a humanitarian thing, but in the end, available space and resources will determine how much the people of a country are willing to accept foreigners. Right now, this "game" is very much leaning in favour of the left, however, one day, it will pivot, and then there will be only tears. The real question is, will you be able to migrate before the borders are closed with military force?

saltminer|2 years ago

> greenhouse gas warming plus various feedbacks will cause extreme weather, render some parts of the world unlivable due to wet bulb temperature, and overwhelm unprepared infrastructure, costing huge amounts of money and creating millions of migrants

This is what I've been trying to tell people for years. Climate change is everyone's concern, if only because entire nations becoming uninhabitable, wars over natural resources (not just oil - now we'll be seeing fighting over arable land and water sources), etc. will cause massive influxes of refugees. Even if many nations did not have a significant split in opinions on migrants, most are still ill-equipped to handle the many millions of climate refugees that will come.

Remember the Syrian migrant crisis? Where people were shouting about "the great replacement" (read: "white genocide") over people fleeing ISIS? That's going to seem like chump change compared to what's coming (and I'd bet good money that new extremist groups will start popping up as conditions deteriorate, governments collapse, etc. - a good chunk of the blame for climate change can be laid at the feet of developed nations, after all, so I would be shocked if no extremist groups decided to take matters into their own hands).

I could write at length about this, but I'll leave it at this: the US is not going to come out of this unscathed. Obviously, sea level rise will lead to coastal flooding, yada yada, but unless American agriculture is forced to be more conservative with its water usage, the aquifers we rely so desperately on for our farmlands will run dry due to over-pumping within this century (and with megadroughts getting worse, our aquifers are recharging far slower than before...this will only get worse as climate change worsens).