I know it wouldn’t be anything like Waterworld. Earth’s continents have never been entirely submerged since Pangaea. But what’s the very worst that could happen? How much land could we lose to the rising sea levels? And how bad could desertification get? And what would be the impact on humanity?
The worst I can imagine is that I was sharing it with you!
You’re living with that now, LOUIS. Try to have more imagination.
Put “earth changes” into Google and stand back. The spiritual community have been predicting severe earth changes since the 1960’s, there are some maps that show what might happen. Also things like pole shifts, may be in store. I heard a documentary of the Mayans and their calendar which stops at the year 2012 when they believed earth changes would destroy most of the world.
Who really knows? No one does. But if you understand you are spiritual and don’t need this world to live on, you won’t worry yourself so much.
Don’t worry, I’ll sleep like a baby!
So what? They also predict the Rapture and the Antichrist. I ain’t gonna hold my breath.
One possibility I’ve heard is that the shifting ocean currents and jet stream will cause the climate of Europe to become like Canada, making it impossible for them to grow the food they need. At the same time, rising oil prices/decreased supply will make shipping enough food in more expensive, assuming enough food is even available.
Well, afaict from watching Discovery/TLC/History Channel this week (I was recovering from surgery this week), the worst case could include:
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A shift in the great ocean conveyor resulting in the loss of the British Isles, most of Northern Europe and Northern America, which would be uninhabitable due to severe cold/snow/ice age conditions/gods know what else, while the middle part of the North American continent would be plagued by drought. Or we could get Snowball Earth or a new ice age from various other things (see super volcano below).
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Massive rise in sea levels (like 100 feet) as every spec of ice melts.
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Various other disasters, including a Super Volcano™ which will go off in Yellowstone (or several other places), causing not only wide spread disaster in North America but also a drop in temperature of something like 10 degrees C (and bringing on a new ice age), meteor impacts doing much the same, super storms, super earthquakes, and alien invasions for all I know. I also saw part of a show claiming that a huge burst of cosmic radiation from a distant supernova could basically wipe the planet away instantly…and that within a few hundred (or thousand, or tens of thousands, or millions…who knows?) years the sun will start heating up even more than it already is, forcing us to go underground and eventually making the planet uninhabitable. Oh, and several shows on Big Foot and the search for Noah’s Arc…and such.
If you want ‘worst-case sceneraio’ type stuff then I defintely encourage you to get a Tivo and tape a few days worth of programming…its enough to make your hair stand on end. If you believe all that stuff anyway.
Now, if you want a REALISTIC worst case scenario, I think we are talking a few degrees rise in temperature in the next century, which will correspond to a few inches (or maybe a few feet I suppose) sea level rise in the same time period. In addition I think its safe to say that we are going to get hit with a lot more storms…and more powerful storms as well. Couple that with heavier rains in some places and drought conditions in others and it will be…well, pretty much the Earth as we know it.
From what I saw this last week we humans have had it soft for hundreds if not thousands of years…this planet is normally deadly and its a true wonder we are still about…
-XT
In my non-expert opinion, I feel that not too much will change. Like xtisme said the most likely outcome will be is that the water rises a bit, some places get warmer, some places get colder, and it will rain a lot more in some places, and less in others. How signifigant those changes could be will vary, but I don’t think civilization will come to an end.
Even if it does, life moves on, the human race is not doomed, they will just go back to struggling a little bit, and perhaps build up somewhere else. Climatically, I think the system is self-correcting, the cause of the global warming is civiliation, it warms up, causes that civilization to collapse, and the temperatures drop back down. Worse case scenario.
OK, Europe gets colder; but Greenland and arctic canada warms up! The Russuan tundars warm, and the forests move northward. meanwhile, the American Southwest dries up, and some pacific islanders have to move.
No big deal, the human race will adjust>
With a great deal of suffering and dying, so it is a big deal.
And why do people assume that the warming will continue to be slow ? As the famous frozen Siberian mammoths ( among other things ) demonstrate, Earth is capable of rapid climate changes that last a very long time. The climate could easily reach a tipping point where it warms up in a few years, not a few decades ( such as might happen if the world’s undergound methane reserves warm up enough to evaporate ). Good luck moving millions of people and reshuffling the world agriculture system on the fly without a lot of people dying.
I doubt we’ll see the end of civilization, much less humanity from global warming alone, but I expect the results will be a like combination of the Great Depression and a world famine/drought/flood.
I think it goes back a bit further than that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failed_predictions#A_History_of_doomsday_prophecies
I don’t think there’s any evidence they believed any such thing - that date is calculated to be the point at which the Maya calendar would require a substantial reset, but the doomsday aspect of this argument was added later by the modern media, pseudoscience and assorted nutters, not the Mayans themselves.
Thats very true…rapid climate shifts seem to be the norm, not the exception in the past. Usually very NASTY rapid climate shifts. And you are equally right…usually after the transition period said climate is what we re stuck with for very long periods (thousands or even millions of years worth).
Here’s the rub though…they happen with or without us, for reasons that are little understood by even the best scientists studying them. In THIS case man seems to be a major contributing factor…and we are talking about relatively short time periods, geologically speaking. So, while we COULD get a very rapid and nasty climate shift in that time period, its hardly predictable. AFAIK, the best estimates for that time period based on the current models being used indicate that the highest probability event is: A few degrees steady rise in temperature over the next century resulting in the continued melting of the poler ice caps and various glaciers around the world…which will further result in between a few inches and a few feet rise in the ocean levels, more energetic storms than we have recently experienced, more rainfall in some places (and more sever winters in some) and drought in others.
We COULD get hit with a meteor or a super volcano/earthquake/storm/alien invasion, etc, which would of course change things rather radically. However, those are all low probability events…as is the complete melting of the poles/glaciers around the world.
I guess my point is that we have built our civilization around what is in fact a weather anomaly…good, relatively stable and mild weather. The norm seems to be much more extreme and unstable, with small periods of what we think of as ‘normal’. Certainly WE seem to be a contributing factor (this time) to the possible shift, but if we can’t adapt to whatever comes eventually we are doomed anyway. Simply put we can’t control the monster we live on, so we best learn to adapt to whatever it can throw at us.
-XT
This recent newspaper report describes a glacier in the Himalayas receeding at the rate of 120 feet, more than twice as fast as 2 decades ago. This glacier feeds the river Ganga, which several hundred hundred million people depend on for freshwater for drinking and irrigation.
So yeah, big problem.
Wanted to add this:
If the rate of drying increases, we’re looking at a sudden seasonal surplus of water, i.e. flooding, eventually followed by the river itself becoming seasonal, i.e. dependent on the monsoon.
From what I’ve read it seems Asia and Africa will have the worst of it. Desertification, massive starvation, rise in tropical diseases. Whereas America and Europe will not be hit as hard at least in the short-term. Supposedly we will have a longer growing season too.
Here’s a summary of health effects from the IPCC
In this case, “likely” means a 66-90% probability.
So, going worst case scenario, I guess that you could say the health status of almost everybody will be affected. Billions of people will suffer and die. Billions of people will suffer and live. I mean, if you want to go worst case scenario, you have to think of the reality of these situations. The real nitty gritty. Think about all those people who don’t have enough food to eat or water to drink. Not only will they be suffering, they’re also not just going to lay down and die quietly. Their actions, their panic, their suffering, are going to affect a lot of other people.
What about having more hurricanes like Katrina and having them more often? Think of the suffering of those thousands of people. What happens when it becomes millions of people?
According to the NRDC, warmer sea surface temperatures will fuel more intense hurricanes in the southeastern Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Can you imagine having a Katrina event every year? What if there’s more than one a year? That is going to affect everybody in this country. We don’t have the resources to handle those kinds of events. I base that opinion on what happened before, during, and after Katrina. We are, apparently, spectacularly incapable of dealing with a situation like that. Do you think all the people affected by those hurricanes are just going to go away? No, there’s going to be crime, disease and misery aplenty… enough for all of us. Christ, no way FEMA has enough trailers to hide those people in…
Thinking about the worst case scenario means facing reality. Climate change can affect everything. Water, air, agriculture, health. It’s not like one day civilization exists and the next day it’s gone and a hearty band of survivors gets on with things. No, it would be a long, long period of suffering, disease, crime, inhumanity, starvation, war, dead bodies, all that stuff.
Have a great weekend, everybody! 
True, more or less. But this is not a valid argument for complacency about current anthropogenic climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. (Not saying that you’re trying to make that argument, but many “climate skeptics” do, along the lines of: “Eh, so what if we’re screwing up our existing climate equilibrium right now, because periodic orbital effects in the next few thousand years will produce even more severe climate changes! Let’s give up worrying about prevention and just concentrate on adaptation!”)
We should definitely prepare ourselves as a species for the difficult task of coping with dramatic natural variations in global climate in the distant future. But that doesn’t mean that it’s smart for us to further unbalance the existing climate equilibrium with unchecked emissions in the immediate future.
That would be like a guy who knows he has to ride a bicycle along a tightrope over the Grand Canyon ten years from now, deciding to start training right now by amputating his feet.
Um, speaking of which, xt, congrats on getting through your surgery successfully! Hope your recovery is going well and not too boring.
(By the way, BG, there have been other discussions of worst-case climate scenarios in recent climate-change threads such as this one.)
The worst-case scenario is that the Earth turns into Venus:
We talked about that a bit in the other thread I linked to in my previous post. I said there: