[danmaz74]

If the temperature increases several degrees, hundreds of million - maybe even billion - of people will be displaced not just from the coastlines, but also from areas becoming desertified. Can you imagine the economic distress, humanitarian crises, and the conflicts this can generate?

[bigbugbag]

I think you are downplaying it a bit here. The temperature is already well on its path of increasing several degrees. Economy will probably cease to exist. There will be no humanitarian crisis but simply people mass dying. The "conflicts" may be nukes or sticks and stones but there's also a possibility that there will be relatively few conflicts depending on the strength of the culture of selfish in the local area.

[danmaz74]

I honestly think you're overplaying it, instead. Whatever the scale of the changes, they will happen during decades, not years. "Economy cease to exist": what does it even mean? There was an economy during WWII, there was an economy during the worst of the middle ages...

[bigbugbag]

I don't know where you get the idea that this kind of change will necessarily happens over decades, a tipping point triggering a change so fast a collapse happens in a matter of days is also among the possibilities.

I was referring to things like the Bundeswehr (German military) study that was leaked in 2010 in der spiegel which explored the probable future to better prepare themselves to face it. Here you'll find page 2 of the english version of the der spiegel article reporting on the partial to complete market failure and global chain reaction causing global economy collapse.

Fun thins is that this report places the collapse around 2025-2030 same as predicted by the world3 in the 1970's.

The other thing I was referring to is a report about the transition period which had a part about risk of violence and war in the event of a societal collapse (they actually evaluated the whole range from steady decline interspersed with rupture points to full civilization collapse), and among the possible scenarios without violence were the ones where the collapse happened fast enough. Sorry I don't have source readily available IIRC I found this report while documenting myself on post oil agriculture in the EU.

It is a common misconception to not understand that the upcoming change is unprecedented in human history, it will be nothing like what we have faced before. Expecting it to be something like past events would be a mistake.

[1]: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/peak-oil-and-the... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3