The Climate Change Discussion Thread

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by milomilo

If the price of stopping climate change was higher electricity prices, even significantly, do you not believe it would be worth it?

When you don't believe climate change is a threat or don't care about it, then there's no justification for any price above the absolute lowest possible. Essentially, people like him believe pollution should be free. That is what it comes down to. If this was the 80s, these folks would be arguing that sulfur and CFCs weren't a big deal. Cause who cares about acid rain and the hole in the ozone? This is our generation's version of the same ignorance.

[jawagord]

Is it still Confirmation Bias when the source of the confirmation is a climate change believer? A few tidbits from strategic advisor FutureMap on Canada, it’s winner winner chicken dinner, provided we accept the inevitability of climate change and start adapting.

...the British journal New Scientist forecast the effect of rising temperatures on global agriculture through the application of leading research. The resulting map produced for my book, Connectography, illustrated a dramatic conclusion: Northern Hemisphere wins, Southern Hemisphere loses …

Canada will be as close to a winner as there can be, Australia is fated to be a loser. Australia has long been known as “the lucky country,” but could it be Canada that will be the lucky one?

Canada, meanwhile, has a much greener climatological forecast. According to the map, it is destined to become one of the world’s two centres of subsistence agriculture – farmer to the world. Furthermore, as Canada warms, its agricultural output has swelled, with organic farming and crop rotation across millions of hectares producing ever greater yields of wheat, legumes, millets, flax and oats.

With warmer temperature and strong precipitation leading to massive crop diversification and yields, ……… Canada’s population by 2040 could well be 100 million people, about the same as Russia’s will be by that date.

Neither Canada nor Australia can do much to dictate the future of climate change and global warming, but both have a long way to go to adapt. Neither will achieve economic diversification without sustained immigration, which hinges on investing both in climate resilience and deploying technologies.......


https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opin...rth-to-canada/

[someone123]

I have noticed that a lot of people try to argue that climate change is universally bad and will create nothing but losers. I think sometimes this is a well-intentioned manipulation attempt based on the idea that people are more likely to support anti-climate-change measures if they think they will personally feel a negative impact. But I believe this undermines credibility and is worse than honesty.

I don't believe that being a "winner" would absolve us of responsibility of helping other parts of the world that experience negative impacts that are consequences of our activities. Or that we shouldn't help others out of simple human kindness even if we did not cause their suffering.

(Note: I am not a climate change "denier" or activist, I just look at the data. There's pretty good data on rising atmospheric CO2 levels, sea levels, and temperature, but predictions are inherently less certain and we can't say much at all about specifics like storms in the far-off future.)

I have always thought Canada will basically be a net winner. There's sea level rise, sure, but that is slow, can sometimes be dealt with by engineering (1/3 of the Netherlands is below sea level), and the fact is that Canada's coastline is not that vulnerable and most of the population is inland. All of Canada's larger coastal cities are in hilly areas and only a small portion of land will be affected under any reasonable scenario.

Obviously most of Canada would be better off if it were warmer.

The data on precipitation is sparse but we have abundant precipitation and fresh water resources for now, so our starting point is probably the most secure of any country on earth. North America in general is well off in that regard, and has a good endowment of resources in general.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by jawagord

Is it still Confirmation Bias when the source of the confirmation is a climate change believer? A few tidbits from strategic advisor FutureMap on Canada, it’s winner winner chicken dinner, provided we accept the inevitability of climate change and start adapting.

...the British journal New Scientist forecast the effect of rising temperatures on global agriculture through the application of leading research. The resulting map produced for my book, Connectography, illustrated a dramatic conclusion: Northern Hemisphere wins, Southern Hemisphere loses …

Canada will be as close to a winner as there can be, Australia is fated to be a loser. Australia has long been known as “the lucky country,” but could it be Canada that will be the lucky one?

Canada, meanwhile, has a much greener climatological forecast. According to the map, it is destined to become one of the world’s two centres of subsistence agriculture – farmer to the world. Furthermore, as Canada warms, its agricultural output has swelled, with organic farming and crop rotation across millions of hectares producing ever greater yields of wheat, legumes, millets, flax and oats.

With warmer temperature and strong precipitation leading to massive crop diversification and yields, ……… Canada’s population by 2040 could well be 100 million people, about the same as Russia’s will be by that date.

Neither Canada nor Australia can do much to dictate the future of climate change and global warming, but both have a long way to go to adapt. Neither will achieve economic diversification without sustained immigration, which hinges on investing both in climate resilience and deploying technologies.......


https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opin...rth-to-canada/

So you don't believe in ACC, but you will gladly trumpet any positive outcomes?

Man, you really haven't got any shame.

Upton Sinclair must have been thinking about you when he wrote this:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

[WarrenC12]

Canada may be a net winner on paper, but the impacts of global instability as a result of climate change could make us all worse off.

Jawagord spinning as usual.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by WarrenC12

Canada may be a net winner on paper, but the impacts of global instability as a result of climate change could make us all worse off.

Sure, it's possible. We don't really know. There's a big difference between predicting global temperature and predicting geopolitics or economics.

I wonder if the pandemic will adjust our outlook on what a crisis looks like a bit. 0.4 mm sea level rise per year may be an important issue to consider when making policies but it is not a crisis. Before this pandemic there were a lot of people who acted as though they were living through really tough times because of atmospheric CO2 levels and how bad they feel after reading stuff on twitter.

[WarrenC12]

Originally Posted by someone123

Sure, it's possible. We don't really know. There's a big difference between predicting global temperature and predicting geopolitics or economics.

I wonder if the pandemic will adjust our outlook on what a crisis looks like a bit. 0.4 mm sea level rise per year may be an important issue to consider when making policies but it is not a crisis. Before this pandemic there were a lot of people who acted as though they were living through really tough times because of atmospheric CO2 levels and how bad they feel after reading stuff on twitter.

Well the pandemic is a fast-motion version of what can possibly happen if we don't take steps to mitigate it. There are some good analogs to climate change. But the usual suspects appear to be lining up on each side.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by WarrenC12

Well the pandemic is a fast-motion version of what can possibly happen if we don't take steps to mitigate it. There are some good analogs to climate change. But the usual suspects appear to be lining up on each side.

Sure. We're living in a lot of slow motion crises. For example the sun is going to die eventually and before then will probably engulf the earth. I imagine we'll be struck by a large asteroid too without some intervention.

We have no clue what human technology or possible interventions will look like in 2050 or 2100, a period when we might have a 1-3 degree temperature increase or a modest rise in median sea levels. I suspect we won't really be on fossil fuels anymore in that time range.

[someone123]

I remember stories about Bangladesh, which was the poster child for both climate change vulnerability and "population bomb" problems back around the 80's and 90's. By now it's supposed to be a deeply impoverished crowded place where millions periodically die from flooding. I largely believed these predictions at the time.

Bangladesh's births peaked in the late 1980's. Economically they had a kind of "golden decade" in the 2010's, with poverty dropping by 50%. It's possible they're a bit worse off due to sea level rise, not sure. But it didn't interfere with economic growth. And I really doubt it has outweighed the 5x change in GDP they have seen since 2000. GDP does not go up 5x in tragedy-stricken areas.

You might argue that Bangladesh is worse off than it otherwise would have been without climate change, e.g. they would have had 507% GDP growth without and they had 498% with or something like that. That may be true. But it's not what the predictions were from the "perpetual crisis" crowd.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by WarrenC12

Canada may be a net winner on paper, but the impacts of global instability as a result of climate change could make us all worse off.

The same logic also applies inside Canada. The whole country being better off can be true while specific regions get really screwed. I would think Albertans would understand this now that fires are becoming a seasonal thing for them.

The real interesting bit is the finances involved. Live in a jurisdiction where there's a high fire or flood risk? The day is coming when insurers will simply refuse to insure your home or business. So while the country may be well off, there are people who could well end up destitute due to climate change, in our life time. And of course, just in case anybody thinks I'm making this up:

https://www.theguardian.com/environm...-people-report

Banks and insurance companies have some of the best modeling out there. I've had the chance to play with elements of these tools. Unbelievable at what they can simulate.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by someone123

I remember stories about Bangladesh, which was the poster child for both climate change vulnerability and "population bomb" problems back around the 80's and 90's. By now it's supposed to be a deeply impoverished crowded place where millions periodically die from flooding. I largely believed these predictions at the time.

Bangladesh's births peaked in the late 1980's. Economically they had a kind of "golden decade" in the 2010's, with poverty dropping by 50%. It's possible they're a bit worse off due to sea level rise, not sure. But it didn't interfere with economic growth. And I really doubt it has outweighed the 5x change in GDP they have seen since 2000. GDP does not go up 5x in tragedy-stricken areas.

You might argue that Bangladesh is worse off than it otherwise would have been without climate change, e.g. they would have had 507% GDP growth without and they had 498% with or something like that. That may be true. But it's not what the predictions were from the "perpetual crisis" crowd.

The timing might be off a bit. But the stories on Bangladesh are absolutely right. India is building a border fence/barrier around all of Bangladesh because salt water infiltration into mangroves from sea rise is leading to more and refugees and illegal migration from Bangladesh.

Island countries like the Maldives are actively planning on buying a new homeland in other countries because their countries may cease to exist in our lifetime.

There's a reason the Pentagon called climate change a serious threat. Lots of folks thought this was political. It wasn't. If you're in uniform, climate change looks like both an accelerant and a threat multiplier. We (collectively the developed world) will get to deal with massive increases in illegal immigration as competition for scarcer resources drives conflict and entrenches non-state actors. Imagine the groups that come into conflict, for example, at the boundary of the Sahara as desertification accelerates. We're getting a taste in Chad. Places where I've had colleagues deployed.

The fundamental problem with these discussions is that people seem to think that if a forecast is not 100% true by the date forecasted that the entire forecast is junk. That attitude really speaks to the level of scientific illiteracy amongst the public. The Pandemic provides a real insight into this and into how difficult it is to explain non-linear concepts to Joe six-pack.

[MolsonExport]

Climate change will be the primary culprit for mass movements of people in the decades to come. Arguably it already is. Conflict is often driven by resource constraints. Continental countries like the United States and China can divert whole river systems and build gargantuan canals to move water from wetter areas to places that are drying out. Most countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia haven't the geographical scope or economic clout to invest in the infrastructure that would mitigate the effects of climate change. tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, will be impelled to move due to the desiccation of their environments, shifting rainfall, depleted groundwater, saltwater invading aquifers and groundwater, rising sea levels, and weather volatility/intensity. In many places this will be exacerbated by overpopulation.

[someone123]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Climate change will be the primary culprit for mass movements of people in the decades to come. Arguably it already is. Conflict is often driven by resource constraints. Continental countries like the United States and China can divert whole river systems and build gargantuan canals to move water from wetter areas to places that are drying out. Most countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia haven't the geographical scope or economic clout to invest in the infrastructure that would mitigate the effects of climate change. tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, will be impelled to move due to the desiccation of their environments, shifting rainfall, depleted groundwater, saltwater invading aquifers and groundwater, rising sea levels, and weather volatility/intensity. In many places this will be exacerbated by overpopulation.

The problem with framing a prediction this way is that it is more of a prophecy than a forecast. It is not falsifiable through future observation, since it can be interpreted so flexibly, and establishing a clear causal link through fossil fuel burning to global climate change and onto geopolitical events is impossible.

Bad events happen all the time and even without human factors we'd see climate change. Human conflict has always been with us too. This doesn't mean our GHG gas emissions aren't making it worse but it does make it hard to point to a specific drought or flood or war and say that GHG emissions "caused" it.

We are in a comparatively peaceful period right now:


Source

It's easy to come up with single examples of conflicts while not addressing the overall pattern. I think we've already seen a significant amount of warming since 1900, so if it really were a potential leading cause of wars you'd expect a chart that looks a little different. Maybe it will become the leading cause of conflict on a comparatively peaceful planet where large-scale armed conflict drops to ~0.

Depleted groundwater often has nothing to do with climate change. Many aquifers are being depleted much faster than they were ever replenished. Even in a world with constant GHG concentrations in the atmosphere, groundwater would be an issue in some places.

[MolsonExport]

It really isn't difficult to make some intelligent guesses as to what will transpire if ACC continues as forecast. Far better for experts to weigh in with their predictions, than to sit on our hands or brush off possible consequences with a "there have always been bad things happening" excuse.

Modern society relies on predictions drawn from scientific research and leading indicators to function.

If we fail to act, we cannot escape our grim fate. Technology may postpone the day of reckoning (Hardin, 1968), but it will come sooner or later.

Looking at that graph (yearly and 10-year moving average), perhaps we are in a period analogous to the 1930s, when deaths were comparatively lower than the periods before and after.

[Truenorth00]

War aside, I see real issues with trade if more desperation starts setting in. Notably tariffs on embedded carbon in imports, from countries that aren't imposing carbon taxes. Europe is already heading this way. More will follow. And that itself has implications for prosperity everywhere.

[flar]

Originally Posted by jawagord

Is it still Confirmation Bias when the source of the confirmation is a climate change believer? A few tidbits from strategic advisor FutureMap on Canada, it’s winner winner chicken dinner, provided we accept the inevitability of climate change and start adapting.

...the British journal New Scientist forecast the effect of rising temperatures on global agriculture through the application of leading research. The resulting map produced for my book, Connectography, illustrated a dramatic conclusion: Northern Hemisphere wins, Southern Hemisphere loses …

Canada will be as close to a winner as there can be, Australia is fated to be a loser. Australia has long been known as “the lucky country,” but could it be Canada that will be the lucky one?

Canada, meanwhile, has a much greener climatological forecast. According to the map, it is destined to become one of the world’s two centres of subsistence agriculture – farmer to the world. Furthermore, as Canada warms, its agricultural output has swelled, with organic farming and crop rotation across millions of hectares producing ever greater yields of wheat, legumes, millets, flax and oats.

With warmer temperature and strong precipitation leading to massive crop diversification and yields, ……… Canada’s population by 2040 could well be 100 million people, about the same as Russia’s will be by that date.

Neither Canada nor Australia can do much to dictate the future of climate change and global warming, but both have a long way to go to adapt. Neither will achieve economic diversification without sustained immigration, which hinges on investing both in climate resilience and deploying technologies.......


https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opin...rth-to-canada/

Warmer temperatures would be welcome in most of Canada, but we might change our minds if they come along with drought, flooding, tornadoes, fires, disease and other extreme events that seem to happen when humans mess with the environment.

I also don't think Canada would be a very nice place with 100 million people. We already have too many people, IMHO.

[SaskScraper]

Originally Posted by jawagord

Is it still Confirmation Bias when the source of the confirmation is a climate change believer? A few tidbits from strategic advisor FutureMap on Canada, it’s winner winner chicken dinner, provided we accept the inevitability of climate change and start adapting.

...the British journal New Scientist forecast the effect of rising temperatures on global agriculture through the application of leading research. The resulting map produced for my book, Connectography, illustrated a dramatic conclusion: Northern Hemisphere wins, Southern Hemisphere loses …

Canada will be as close to a winner as there can be, Australia is fated to be a loser. Australia has long been known as “the lucky country,” but could it be Canada that will be the lucky one?

Canada, meanwhile, has a much greener climatological forecast. According to the map, it is destined to become one of the world’s two centres of subsistence agriculture – farmer to the world. Furthermore, as Canada warms, its agricultural output has swelled, with organic farming and crop rotation across millions of hectares producing ever greater yields of wheat, legumes, millets, flax and oats.

With warmer temperature and strong precipitation leading to massive crop diversification and yields, ……… Canada’s population by 2040 could well be 100 million people, about the same as Russia’s will be by that date.

Neither Canada nor Australia can do much to dictate the future of climate change and global warming, but both have a long way to go to adapt. Neither will achieve economic diversification without sustained immigration, which hinges on investing both in climate resilience and deploying technologies.......


https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opin...rth-to-canada/

It would be beneficial for Canada to have increasing output for agriculture, especially as world population increases.

Other than The Prairie provinces, I'm not as certain about where increased farmland would open up in Canada though. Places like Newfoundland doesn't have enough land with soil to develop agriculture, Maritimes may actually loose agricultural land due to sea level rise. Quebec and Ontario outside the extreme south could be possible in pockets but climate change and warmer temperatures would have to drastically increase.

The month we are in right now, gets snowfall every May on average over much of Ontario, except for the extreme southern fringes. Quebec would be even worse no doubt .



Some parts of Ontario have gotten snow in June, and even as late (or as early as, depending on how you look at it) as July such as accumulating snow in Kapuskasing, Ontario on Canada Day 2001, so the growing season there is substantially too small to begin with, even though Ontario is a province with low elevation throughout and has no alpine areas that you'd come to expect random snowfall

[CityTech]

Periodic late snowfall is actually beneficial to plants (at least, plants that are actually native or otherwise well suited to the region) as it provides a nice boost of moisture. Most plants typically sprout long before the last snowfalls. It's actually winter temperature that matter more; the colder it gets over the winter, the longer it takes the ground to warm up enough for plants to sprout. Case in point this year: we just had the unusual combination of a very mild winter with temps well above average, followed by a harshly cold spring. Yet plants all sprouted very early; it was a record early bloom for the crocuses and daffodils this year.

Also, those "extreme southern regions" are most of the population lol. Might as well say SK is cold because it's cold at Lake Athabaska.

The real "perk" of climate change for Southern Ontario is going to be an upgrade in hardiness zones and the entire area will likely flip from a Dfb climate to Dfa (it's already borderline), rather than any expansion of cultivatable area; an increase in quality rather than quantity. By the end of the century, tender fruits like peaches will likely be growable at commercial scales throughout Southern Ontario all the way up to Ottawa, by contrast to now when it's only viable in Niagara and the extreme southwest.

[CityTech]

In 2021, the climate data rolls over, and seasonal normals will be defined by 1991-2020 averages instead of the 1981-2010 averages used now. It will be interesting to see how much replacing 1980s data with 2010s data increases average temperatures.

In Ottawa, preliminary data suggests something peculiar: the average temperature will increase in every month of the year... except April, as the 2010s was dominated by colder than normal Aprils.

Would be fascinating if that's just a coincidence that could smoothed out with longer data intervals, or perhaps there's something about the climate change processes underway here that makes early spring colder even as the other seasons get warmer. Anecdotally, as someone who has lived in Ottawa all my life, it does seem like summers are getting hotter, winters milder, and summer heat is lasting longer into the fall; yet it also seems that winter cold is lasting longer into the spring as well. I'm not even remotely surprised to see that April anomaly.

[VANRIDERFAN]

Originally Posted by CityTech

Would be fascinating if that's just a coincidence that could smoothed out with longer data intervals, or perhaps there's something about the climate change processes underway here that makes early spring colder even as the other seasons get warmer. Anecdotally, as someone who has lived in Ottawa all my life, it does seem like summers are getting hotter, winters milder, and summer heat is lasting longer into the fall; yet it also seems that winter cold is lasting longer into the spring as well. I'm not even remotely surprised to see that April anomaly.

Much rather having a cooler April that limits the possibility of devastating spring floods.