It seems I have a non-standard definition of dire. I was looking at it in terms of the worst outcome.
I think you’re probably right in so far as when the West will consider it dire. Unfortunately. 
I saw a documentary on HBO that showed that the dire wolves were in dire straits.
Money for nuffin and chickens for free??
Humanity’s effects on the biosphere / hydrosphere are dire but don’t worry, humanity will pass, and cockroaches will inherit a suitable planet. When aliens land and survey the lush wastelands, they’ll smile, and colonize. Some of humankind’s artifacts may surface. Look, another golden arch!
The most dire consequence of Climate Change will happen if we listen to the people who think we need to dismantle global capitalism to fix it. The destruction from that would dwarf the damage from climate change.
Another dire consequence would come from panicking and shutting down fossil fuel use before the alternatives are ready for prime time.
Yet another one would be to start ‘green’ megaprojects that won’t work while ignoring nuclear power - the only technology available that could actually make a large dent in emissions without screwing up the power grid.
Another one would be condemning millions of people in Africa to poverty and starvation because they can’t get access to the kinds of concentrated power needed to create an industrial economy.
Another set of damages could result if we play hardball with China and others, destabilizing the world and risking war.
Another set of damages could occur if we take unilateral action without China and Russia, thereby making them the low-cost energy states and giving them a huge comparative advantage in high energy manufacturing, which will give these bad actors more economic and political clout in the world while moving dirty industry to the places where it will have the least amount of oversight.
Climate change is real and serious. But our interventions can make things worse, impoverish people, and by reducing economic growth reduce the ability of people to mitigate the damages that will result when ineffective policies fail.
Only that none is proposing that, and most of the ones declaring that are the usual powerful groups or the ones financed by those groups that continue to say with misleading information and false reports that proponents of controlling emissions want to dismantle capitalism.
There is fearmongering alright, but is coming from the ones opposing change.
I think a good mark for “dire” would be when one of two things happens:
- Global GDP falls year over year
- The global poverty rate starts increasing
Certainly, there can be dire effects locally. If your house burns down or your town floods or whatever, that’s a catastrophe, but it’s not a global catastrophe.
As long as total wealth is increasing and the percentage of the world in abject poverty is decreasing, you’re going to have a hard time convincing many people that the situation is dire.
When there are wars fought over the dwindling resources.
This seems pretty fuzzy. We’ve fought wars over scarce resources since basically forever, and while climate change will likely exacerbate the scarcity of water, it was pretty likely there’d have been wars fought over water even in the absence of climate change.
How do you feel about Jakarta or the Seychellesor pretty much all of Bangladesh?
You mean like in Syria?
Yes, exactly. I was going to mention just that very example. Consider as well that it was a war that affected not only the Near East, but it also impacted the European continent with one of its largest refugee crises in recent memory, which was a politically destabilizing event.
That’s what we can look forward to. Subtle events that increasingly cause disruption and destabilization over large areas. This will become more noticeable in industrialized societies almost certainly within the next 10-20 years. Consider agriculture, for instance. Even if a healthy market economy can find ways to maintain a healthy food supply, if weather conditions destroy hundreds or thousands of farms, that will be politically destabilizing even if it’s not immediately economically problematic (although it could well be).
There will be a point at which we’re dealing with multiple crises at the same time: water shortages, vanishing coastal cities, devastating hurricanes, wildfires burning across entire regions.
That is quite true, but what I am saying is that climate change will accelerate this changes and nation-states and local states won’t be prepared for them. Climate change is occurring at the same time that our population is expanding.
It’s become an article of faith among global warming activists that the Syrian civil war was due to global warming. I think there’s scant science to support that belief.
The actual position I see is that there is not much into declaring that climate change was the sole cause*, the point is that it was a factor. A factor that it is bound to increase unrest as there are not many places the climate refugees will go if very little is done.
- As it usually happens in discussions like this one, that is mostly a straw man, when one reads the research it is clear that they have not said that climate is the sole reason for the conflict.
Speaking of the PNW, with the exception of the end of September, our fall season here in Eugene has been very dry. October was down by half, and so far this current November we’ve had exactly one day with any measurable precipitation.
This isn’t something that really impacts us so far, and I’m sure a lot of us are actually glad to have a few more dry weeks; so many people do complain about rain. But it’s troubling to picture what this could mean if the whole region becomes dryer over the long term. For one thing, hydro power would become less viable and we would have to build fueled power plants, or buy such power from elsewhere in the grid. It’s disappointing to think it could be possible, without increasing our power consumption, to still ramp up our carbon footprint.
So Bashar Assad is a dwindling resource?
Psst–
There would be hundreds of millions of deaths in any 20-year time span even if the climate was static.
Ever hear of something called “old age”? It’s a real killer.
Those are extra deaths from climate change effects.