Suppose the world does nothing about climate change (or what we do is too little, too late). Humans are fantastic at adapting to new environments, and our ability to adapt increases as our technology does. Will we be able to adapt (albeit with many disgusting glitches) to a new climate or are we headed to a Venusian hellscape, inhospitable to life as we know it?
Thanks,
Rob
No climate-change scenarios I am aware of predict a “Venusian hellscape.” Of course we’ll adapt. Predicted temperature changes are not outside the range of places where people live today.
The issue isn’t whether we can adapt, but what the cost will be. Changes in rainfall and sea level are likely to cause massive disruptions in agriculture and habitable areas, resulting in starvation in some areas and large population movements that can provoke conflict.
I also think that we will adapt, but the issue has been: adapt to what extremes?
IMHO one thing many need to take into account is that in the meantime the adaptation will take place while passing a bottle neck. The issue here is how narrow we will let that bottle neck to be.
We may get into a situation that perhaps that change would be beneficial to Canada, Europe, Russia and a few others; but my background is in social studies and history, and sadly, I do not see how to get around the issue of the xenophobia seen around the world.
It tells me that the expected movement of a lot of people that climate change is likely to cause will be combated (even by deadly force) by powerful nations. At a larger scale than what it has been seen with refugees nowadays. So that what James Burke and others predicted 30 years ago is likely: that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will die before we control emissions and make them stable so as to eventually allow the climate to reach a new more predictable state.
Bad changes are really a preventable thing, but I think that a lot of what could be done now is not being done. And then regarding adaptation, I also do not see much of an effort to prepare by (for example) taxing our emissions and using the revenue to prepare coastal and desert cities, and to fund large scale solutions or to change to energy sources with less or no CO2 and other green house gas emissions.
Currently it is clear that we will have to adapt to changes that will very likely take place, but we should not forget that even if some changes are inevitable we should still control our emissions. Because it can get worse. Once we do control emissions then the moving target (or bottle neck) that tell us how much we should adapt to will be easier to deal with.
Countries will erect massive barriers to keep out the rising sea, or people will live on higher and higher elevations. Governments may begin spending trillions of dollars on finding a way to scrub those carbon emissions out of the atmosphere. One way or another, humanity won’t take it lying down. Something would be done.
You’d think something would be done…
The wealthy countries will adapt; the poor in the poor countries can’t. Here is a table of countries by GDP per capita.
And here a map of the world’s temperature
How do you think the extremely poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa can adapt? There are biological limits to the temperatures the human body can handle. And if your per capita income is less than $1,000/year you can’t afford air conditioning.
Huge swathes of Europe, China and both seaboards of the United States will be under water. That’s to say nothing of what will happen in the rest of the world, but these are some of the most densely populated parts of the world, so the disruption will be utterly colossal.
So over time, we’ll have to both relocate billions of people to new homes, house them, and feed them, with considerably less fertile land available to do so, and lord knows what will happen to drinkable water supplies.
Humanity would survive, but we’d have centuries of utter misery, chaos and disruption for all but the absolute richest, as capital cities like London disappear under the waves taking their infrastructure and history with them.
Perhaps we could persuade Trump to build his wall around Florida instead, for starters?
You mean like massive areas of North America and Asia where once there was arctic tundra could thus become suitable for farming and settlement? Yes.
Remember Greenland and Iceland once had warmer climates and thus allowed the vikings to settle there.
Urbanredneck, do you think it is costeffective to abandon a complete existing urban infrastructure of roads, harbours, industry, agriculture, buildings, sewers, canals, all ducts and cables underground and aboveground, in flooded areas ? And build them again, from the ground up, in Greenland? Remember the cost of Trumps wall? Now think of building, quite literally, entire cities anew.
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They won’t overnight. It took centuries, thousands, of years for the soil to become suitable. Even then, Greenland and Iceland aren’t exactly burgeoning utopias capable of supporting millions, are they?
Universally yes, a portion will survive and adapt, even to hellish temperatures.
Personally no, I am unhappy when temperature is over 60 F.
Climate change doesn’t simply means rising sea levels. It also induces changes in weather patterns, sometimes devastating - tsunamis, tornadoes, superstorms and the like. Also mudslides, sinkholes, floods & droughts… And those can happen in-land, too.
There’s also the issue of the permafrost losing its “perma” prefix, which is bad news for anything built on top of it.
We could learn to terraform and counter the global change. Orbital mirrors or something. We could also learn to bioengineer stuff to our new ecosystem to counter it.
We could, but the point still stands about how fast can we develop those technologies and at what cost? There will be massive die offs in wildlife, bigger and more powerful hurricanes, and massive flooding on the coasts. There will be wars as poorer countries fight for dwindling resources. It might behoove us to be a little more proactive at limiting it’s severity now, rather than reacting to the large scale global upheavals later.
Canada will actually be habitable! Watch out, neighbor to the north. You are about to be invaded!!
Just a nit, you are correct on almost all, the doubtful item is that the best research points that it is likely that fewer hurricanes can happen (still, when those few show up they are likely to be stronger) but that after a period of time and more warming the numbers could increase then.
It is a bit of a roulette and if we get the black number then the cost to deal with that increase in numbers will be added to other more certain things like ocean rise, ocean acidification, ocean oxygen loss, and the growth of the deserts.
Could you quantify “huge swathes”? How many square miles are we talking about?
“Surrender, eh?”
Of course humans will adapt … but that’s never been pretty … the basic form of human adaption has been historically through warfare … just how ugly it gets depends entirely on how fast these changes happen …
One BIG advantage today is we can foresee these changes … we no longer ascribe the rising seas to the angry gods who are fickle and vengeful … so our children are safe from the high shaman’s knives … and we can prepare for these changes … like adding a few feet to our sea walls every generation like the Dutch have done these past 750 years … building aqueducts … continue replanting the forests … things we’ve already been doing … there’s nothing in the math that says we can’t get this done before we’ll need it …
Strictly speaking, tsunamis are caused by geologic activity … earthquakes, land slides, volcanoes … the atmosphere has no roll in this … all these other disasters are occurring with the current weather patterns … all humans are doing is changing the probabilities of these events happening … and how these are changing is still not completely clear … we generally talk about average temperature increases but that doesn’t imply universal temperature increases … there’s some evidence that the polar regions are warming much faster than the equatorial regions … potentially reducing the sizes, intensities and frequencies of “superstorms” (which I assume you mean major hurricanes) …
Things look really bad for Florida and Bangladesh … otherwise the inundation will be fairly marginal … if you’re familiar with the Los Angeles are note that LAX is 34 feet above mean sea level, the only people who will have to pack up and move will be the people who can most easily afford to do so …
+++++
Humans have adapted to not only every climate on the face of the Earth, but people have walked on the lunar surface and lived to tell about it … very few (multicellular) species have this global distribution …
Buy property now, these prices won’t last … the first 10 million who move get to take over the vote there …