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Climate Change Could Become a Global Economic Disaster

www.nytimes.com

Climate Change Could Become a Global Economic Disaster

16 comments
  • The company’s “base case,” the report said, was that the world was moving toward a temperature increase of 3 degrees Celsius.

    What many people might not fully understand is that a world at +3℃ is one in which BILLIONS will die within a few short years.

    There are two major things that will cause this:

    1. Lethally high wet bulb temperatures, to the point where modern consumer-grade air conditioning ceases to effectively function. These high wet-bulb temperatures will strike roughly between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, and even a spell of as little as a week can kill most people in a region. About 4 Billion will have no choice but to migrate to the temperate regions or die.
    2. Chaotic weather making any significant agriculture impossible. Even backyard gardens will be rendered useless. A warmer planet means a dryer planet, as hotter air pulls vastly more moisture out of the soil than before, and prevents rain from condensing out far more effectively. But when the rain does fall, it will also fall that much more severely, damaging or even killing off crops that cannot handle those deluges. And when 80+% of all crops are either directly or indirectly dependent on timely and predictable rain, neither too much nor too little…

    And with the acceleration of warming in the last few years, +3℃ appears to be most likely to be reached shortly after 2035.

    Yes, we have only about a decade before billions begin to die of the heat directly, or via starvation.

    Fun times. Here I thought I was lucky, in that most of this shite was forecast for 2050 and beyond, well past my expected lifespan… looks like I’ll be in the trenches just like everyone else.

    And once again, stuff is happening “much sooner than expected”.

  • It's but one symptom of the dysfunctional way we live on the planet.

    Civilization will collapse, at my most optimistic I'd hoped we would manage that collapse equitably as best we coild but in the 20 years I've been interested I've seen no evidence of that, so ... unplanned and violent it will be.

16 comments