Going at the rate we’re going now, how long until the most dire consequences of climate change occur? How long until even the billionaires are suffering its effects?
When they can no longer buy property insurance.
Since “most dire” is undefined, this is not a simple factual question. There is a wide range of estimates even among scientists, depending on models and assumptions. So let’s move this to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I read somewhere (sorry) that this year’s economic dip due to climate change is around 3%. Not the most dire scenario, but the billionaires will notice.
It sort it depends on what you mean by “dire”.
The US military, for example, is currently worrying about dealing with mass migration caused by increased rates of food insecurity across the planet. This isn’t that report (just the first one that I found from the US government, on the topic) but it uses Syria as one example:
https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/696460.pdf (PDF)
In the case of the United States, while it is unknowable what the world would be like without climate change -so we can’t say for sure - it’s entirely conceivable that Katrina might not have destroyed New Orleans and Maria might not have totalled Puerto Rico if it weren’t for climate change. Those sorts of events are what we do predict to be one result.
But, despite these happening now, and not in the future, it is somewhat fair to not call these dire since they don’t affect everyone and the rate of change is so gradual. When things change slowly, you adapt to them and you don’t notice that things are getting better or worse.
In the Pacific Northwest, for example, in the last many years there has been a big cloud of smoke settling over Seattle for a couple of weeks each year, from all the vast forrest fires in Alaska. That was never a thing before and now it’s normal and people just consider it to be part of living in Seattle and not an indication that “the world is changing considerably”.
And as, say, hurricanes become more strong we will build structures that are more resistant. As Northern climates become warmer, the optimal plant species will change per area and your local farmers market will slowly shift to something else. The farmers will have spent a fair amount of money adapting but you will never see it and you will never really notice unless you’re keeping track.
If you live in a rich nation the odds are decent that climate change will never be dire for you. If, for whatever reason, it does start to become a clear negative in the daily lives of your average American and German and Brit, it would probably be reasonable to guess that our governments would quickly start to act to clean up the air and fix the issue so that this period (depending on efficiently we can do something like “cleaning the air”) might actually just be a temporary nuisance.
If you live in Syria, well, no such luck.
Of course, we don’t know if there will be a point at which we hit a runaway feedback loop where, for example, large masses of the animal kingdom start dying out and we have no chance of correcting the situation. Theoretically, we could already be in that position already and just don’t know it yet. Potentially it could be a decade away or never. The science is out on when things go from “change” to “oh fuck”. There’s no known answer and, at the moment, the hope is to not find out.
The only reasonable answer is “it already has.”
Billionaires are feeling its effects all the time on their coastal and island properties, in the properties being burned in the rich canyons of Los Angeles, in losses to their businesses from droughts, floods, and storms. The more property and investment people have worldwide, the more they will be affected by the global climate change.
If by effect you mean when will they start screaming for relief, the answer is “soon.”
(I think moving the thread from GQ to GD wasn’t radical enough! The thread belongs in IMHO; mine will be an IMHO answer.)
To feel “dire” do we need to live in the grim future, or just be able to see the coming future clearly? Certainly property values will react to impending disaster before the disaster hits.
Further complications are:
(1) We don’t know which early climate-related disaster will be most devastating or newsworthy. I was shocked by Europe’s recent high temperatures, but that’s just old news now I guess. And which would seem more “dire” — flood affecting beautiful Venice? Or a flood affecting millions in Bangladesh?
(2) Other human-caused ecological destruction interacts with climate change, with or without clear cause-effect relationships. For example, groundwater subsidence, changes in rainfall patterns, intenser storms, and rising sea levels can all contribute to drought or flooding. As another example, ocean ecology is being devastated, partly due to temperature rises, partly due to CO[sub]2[/sub] acidification, but partly due to other non-climate but human-caused damage.
(3) What is “dire” anyway? If Canada becomes a vast fertile region that can support millions of people flooded out from Bangladesh, some might find that a good thing. Certainly OP’s billionaires will be happy with their smart real-estate investments. I personally regard mass extinctions as dire — once gone, biodiversity can take millions of years to recover — but many care only about Homo sapiens.
One possible problem which combines the ambiguities of (1), (2) and (3) is insect population reduction. Many estimate that average insect populations are falling at 2.5% annually; at that rate the population halves in 27 years. Climate change is only part of the reason for the decline: should we still consider it? Do we care if insects decline? — I’m happy to do without mosquitoes and stinging ants. Beautiful butterflies may become rare? So what: poets will find something else to write about. Populations will also fall for birds that prey on insects — do we care? For a decade or so, China has been using human hands, rather than honeybees, to pollinate apple trees.
Etymologists consider the loss of insects to be “dire” …
… but should we? Here’s an article that alarms about insect reduction, but it might lose a sense of special urgency when it starts by recalling the extinction of the Rocky Mountain locusts in the Great Plains more than a century ago. Here’s another article on insect decline.
But please note: I am NOT saying that insect population catastrophe will be the dire crisis that dominates the news a decade or two from now. I’m saying we DON’T KNOW what the big crisis will be; I mention insect depopulation just as an example of a possible crisis that’s barely on the radar now.
To expand on that… Forest fires in British Columbia have been worse in the last decade - attributed to warming expanding the range of insects which destroy trees, leaving swaths of forest full of dead trees - fuel for forest fires brought on by changed (reduced) rainfall patterns leaving the woods extra dry. Much of northern Canada, where there are small settlements, has a problem with permafrost thawing. The permanently frozen ground a foot or more down is slowly thawing, going from hard ground to soft mush and causing problems for roads and buildings.
The big problem with hurricanes nowadays is not that there are more - there does not seem to be - but that hurricanes running over much warmer water pick up more moisture, and the result is severe flooding from rainfall measured in feet - and worse when the storm stalls over any location.
@cjackson - you need to explicitly define for whom: for what country & what group of people within that country. A single country, especially large countries like Canada, the US, Russia etc. will have varied effects. Most will be dire but some parts may see positive changes.
I’m not quite sure what you mean “even the billionaires are suffering its effects”. They are now, but they can easily abandon their private islands in the Maldives and go somewhere else. Is that suffering the effects? Or do you mean irreparably suffering the effects? The many average Joes in the Maldives or other low lying island nations have already lost their homes due to rising sea levels, that’s already irreparable to them.
If your yardstick for “dire” is billionaires, then that’s a long way off and meaningless. They can build themselves a private climate controlled bunkers and stay insulated from climate change for the rest of their lives.
I can’t think of a good joke. (I think you mean “entomologists”.)
For the USA, it will become dire only after it affects McDonald’s .
When something small in their supply chain goes wrong.
Maybe, I dunno, there’s a drought in the great plains states that reduces corn output, and leads to a shortage of some kind of, I dunno, corn syrup which is a necessary ingredient to keep their hamburger buns fresh.
Suddenly, it’s not a price problem; there’s a real shortage.Hamburger buns turn green during shipping.
So customers are being turned away, hungry.
Riots will ensue.
Climate change will be viewed as dire when it begins to affect the global food supply sufficiently to disrupt the eating habits of wealthy countries. Famine in third-world countries has never been considered ‘dire’, but interruptions in fruit, meat, and wine will cause outrage.
That’s a corollary to the Waffle House Index.
United States Army War College, “Implications of Climate Change for the U.S. Army”
More reports here.
Lloyds of London, "Catastrophe Modelling and Climate Change "
There are more available online for various military forces, intelligence agencies, insurers, banks, etc. They also have reports on peak oil. Several are listed here.
Yeah, already here. That’s the only possible answer. Reaching the targets needed for a 1.5C global temperature increase is, more or less, gone. The ability to hit 2C change is fading fast. It seems very likely that we’re going to be somewhere around 3C at best. Dealing with climate change is so frustrating when you have right-wing media lying about climate change and calling it a hoax. Including, at the moment, the President. I’ve listed some papers below. I could easily list hundreds if not thousands more. Some of them are rather old (from a scientific point-of-view). The science has been out there for decades. The problem is nobody is going to read them unless they’re a scientist. Instead, people listen to their preferred news sources, so you end up with people like Crowder, Shapiro, Limbaugh, etc. telling lies. And make no mistake, they’re lying. Not making a mistake, they know what they’re doing. Consider this article by Crowder (NASA REPORT: Antarctic Ice Sheet is Actually... Growing By Billions of Tons? - Louder With Crowder). This is not a mistake you can make on accident. He purposefully took a very small slice of a much larger graph and lied about it. You have people saying that the data is being faked because there was a controversy about a data adjustment. There’s no controversy. The climate change denial side is all a lie. And it will be a costly one. A few weeks back I was at a symposium for food and water security. I wish every person on the planet could have been there. The situation is dire. As has been presented over and over again, we’re looking at an emergency that will cause human suffering on a scale never before seen in history (including the World Wars). And that’s assuming you only care about human suffering, the effect on ecosystems will be catastrophic.
Melillo, J. M., Richmond, T. T., & Yohe, G. (2014). Climate change impacts in the United States. Third national climate assessment, 52.
Wuebbles, D. J., Fahey, D. W., & Hibbard, K. A. (2017). Climate science special report: fourth national climate assessment, volume I.
Parmesan, C., & Yohe, G. (2003). A globally coherent fingerprint of climate change impacts across natural systems. Nature, 421(6918), 37.
Wheeler, T., & Von Braun, J. (2013). Climate change impacts on global food security. Science, 341(6145), 508-513.
Doney, S. C., Ruckelshaus, M., Duffy, J. E., Barry, J. P., Chan, F., English, C. A., … & Polovina, J. (2011). Climate change impacts on marine ecosystems.
Lindner, M., Maroschek, M., Netherer, S., Kremer, A., Barbati, A., Garcia-Gonzalo, J., … & Lexer, M. J. (2010). Climate change impacts, adaptive capacity, and vulnerability of European forest ecosystems. Forest ecology and management, 259(4), 698-709.
Pecl, G. T., Araújo, M. B., Bell, J. D., Blanchard, J., Bonebrake, T. C., Chen, I. C., … & Falconi, L. (2017). Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Science, 355(6332), eaai9214.
Kjellstrom, T., Briggs, D., Freyberg, C., Lemke, B., Otto, M., & Hyatt, O. (2016). Heat, human performance, and occupational health: a key issue for the assessment of global climate change impacts. Annual review of public health, 37, 97-112.
Kerr, J. T., Pindar, A., Galpern, P., Packer, L., Potts, S. G., Roberts, S. M., … & Wagner, D. L. (2015). Climate change impacts on bumblebees converge across continents. Science, 349(6244), 177-180.
Descamps, S., Aars, J., Fuglei, E., Kovacs, K. M., Lydersen, C., Pavlova, O., … & Strøm, H. (2017). Climate change impacts on wildlife in a High Arctic archipelago–Svalbard, Norway. Global Change Biology, 23(2), 490-502.
As noted, what dire consists of is an opinion. Mine is that we’re nowhere close to dire. In my opinion dire is when major coastal cities which are above current sea level (Venice and New Orleans need not apply) start sinking underwater. When New York, London, Shanghai, Mumbai, Rio, Sydney, and Tokyo are underwater due to the icecaps in Greenland and Antarctica fully melting, that will be dire. People living in that time period will look at 2019 like a walk in the park. As far as when that will happen, my guess is that at our current rate we’re looking at something like 50 to 100 years.
Personally, in my view, that’s well past dire. I respect your opinion, but I don’t see how the impending (probable) deaths of tens to hundreds of millions of people isn’t dire (between 2030 and 2050). And this is the low-end estimate. As others have pointed out, those deaths won’t largely be in North America and Western Europe, so sadly they don’t seem matter to a lot of people (I’m not accusing you of this). What will matter to the West will be the climate change refugees, and the political instability causing conflict because desperate people make desperate acts including acts of violence. I could very easily see terrorist groups using Western indifference to local human suffering as a recruiting tool and to foster hate. In fact, if you include the Syria conflict, which is thought to be aggravated climate change conflicts in the literature (I will note that there is some disagreement on this issue in the literature), then to some degree they already are doing so.
Gleick, P. H. (2014). Water, drought, climate change, and conflict in Syria. Weather, Climate, and Society, 6(3), 331-340.
De Châtel, F. (2014). The role of drought and climate change in the Syrian uprising: Untangling the triggers of the revolution. Middle Eastern Studies, 50(4), 521-535.
Since most people have already said what my first thought was (it’s already dire), I’m going to go with a more snarky answer. It will be ‘dire’ when we get serious about building nuclear power plants on large scales and when people start taking what’s going on with China more seriously, and start hammering them for what they are doing. When I see both of those things happening then I’ll know things are ‘dire’.
Of course, by then, we will probably be screwed, if we aren’t already…but both of those are the equivalent of ‘dogs and cats living together’…
The joke that would work is:
I don’t know the difference between an etymologist and an entomologist but an etymogist does.