In germany we have a drought right now. I never assumed that we in germany get water issues.
Now farmers said things like 'i have never seen so little water at this time of year in the 30 years im a farmer'.
I don't have the feeling we are recognizing the elephant in the room.
My personal take on this is to buy a farm, buy water reserve tanks, have a little garden and trying to become independend. Which is not a bad plan in general as it helps to cut costs down anyway if you do it smart enough. Its not that i get money when i put it in the bank and corona showed how volatile shares can be.
I think there is a difference between "it's raining" and it's raining enough. The last two summers lowered the ground water levels and that takes a lot to refill. Here in the mid east it's all "rainy weather" too, but two days of clear skies let's the vegetation's leaves droopy. Humidity is super high all the time, I think most of the water just evaporates and does not reach deeper grounds.
Seeing trees sick and dying put climate change on my immediate threat plate 2 years ago. Too late but oh well, I am trying to change the people around me vigorously :)
It makes me incredibly nervous about what happens when water and food gets scarce and you have cities full of people with no ability to acquire these basic needs from the land. You can desal water on coastal communities with cheap renewables, but you can’t grow food in concrete.
The farmers are supported by climate scientists and meteorologists. I don't get your sentiment.
What's the point of "the issue is more nuanced!!1!" all the time? We collectively need to act now. Everyone of us. You are draining momentum to what end?
Given that IPCC and other world bodies suggest we need to be reducing emissions by 7.6% every year for the next decade (starting this year). We're doing the almost exact opposite.
The US and China are increasing hostilities and are locked in a downward spiral of increased military spending (and associated emissions).
Most of the economic elite, while paying lip service is in utter denial about the direness of the situation.
With a few exceptions (New Zealand), every developed and developing society is prioritizing the economy and economic development over the preservation of a viable human future.
If you want to compare which problems are worse, plenty are much worse than slow effects of climate change, like wars, contagious diseases, exploitation of poor people, poverty and inequality in general, political systems controlled by the rich that want to keep it that way, etc. Those problem cause massive suffering and even death. And what's the worse that could happen to humans due to climate change? Some foods might disappear, some people might need to modify their houses for new weather, some might need to relocate. It's not insane to simply ignore the problem altogether, it's very rational. Now how to solve all those actual problems is a big question.
Not sure where you're getting your information. We've consistently underestimated how fast things are happening, and how much sooner they're happening.
All of those problems you identified are accelerating global warming and will be made worse by it. Unless we reduce emissions drastically immediately (and stop the biosphere collapse), we're likely en route to at a bare minimum a +3C world, with a ~20% chance of a +4C world within our lifetimes.
Estimates of what survive at a +4C world range from a few hundred million to a maybe 1-3B people. That's what, somewhere between 50-90% of humanity dying off. Look to your left, look to your right, unless we do something today, those people are going to die.
The World Bank in 2012 came out with a report as to Why We Need to Avoid a 4C world. At that time, they suggested that +4C is a low probability as early as 2050's-60's. Their assumptions then were that we'd stop curbing emissions in 2015 (they've gone up), and they also drastically underestimated how much higher CO2e concentrations would be increasing in the atmosphere (they assumed CO2e concentrations would go up by 1.5 ppm / year, but instead, they've gone up 2.6 ppm / year)
The issue with climate is compounded by something called "thermal inertia", which in practice means that the action we take today won't bear fruit for another 30 years.
So yea, unless we drastically reduce emission and stop the biosphere collapse, this generation, meaning YOU, meaning the elites who ignore this, and yes me, will likely be responsible for the largest die off of life since ... well the last mass extinction event.
So yea, pay attention to the science. Pay attention to the scientists and the literature.
Um... There's actually quite a bit. What is the basis of your claim?
The most famous is the limits to growth model (developed by the Club of Rome in the 1970's, which we're unfortunately tracking quite closely). You can read about that model here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth , though there are many academic articles about. That is a quantifiable, falsifiable model that has had about 50 years of predictive power. The next 30 years according to that model are horrific.
Another scientific effort is what is being calculated by the global footprint network - https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/climate-change/. We've been in a deficit also since about the 1970's, and that overconsumption is directly connected to the current scientifically documented biosphere collapse which suggests that we're in the middle of the 6th mass extinction event on earth.
> Micronesia is gone – sunk beneath the waves. Pakistan and South India have been abandoned. And Europe is slowly turning into a desert. This is the world, 4°C warmer than it is now.
90% of where humans currently inhabit would be inhospitable to human life. That's about 6-7B people that will have to move across 1000's of km on the order of less than a decade. Likely into the Arctic and Antarctic ... where .. topsoil formation typically takes 100's of years.
Moreover, if you think xenophobic Europeans or Americans are going to allow Africans, Asians and Central Americans in, when they're putting existing climate refugees into concentration camps RIGHT NOW, you should perhaps rethink your worldview.
It's more than a few foods disappearing or people modifying they're homes- it's entire breadbaskets of the world disappearing and entire cities needing to be abandoned.
Well, we have displaced people from different wars right now, but only some predictions on the possible effects of climate change, and I believe consensus among them is not even favoring the "civilization collapse" side.
Human civilization is just not at the point when it can afford to worry about pretty much unpredictable long term global environmental risks.
Doesn't sound dramatic to me, especially considering the process for calculating these "global" temperatures (stations near growing urban heat islands etc.).
I'd be more interested in long-time temperature increases in specific remote areas. One of the oldest continuous temperature records on a mountain in Germany shows less than 0.7C since 1800: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohenpeißenberg_Meteorological...
You can only avoid this effect by not using urban stations, claiming the effect is small doesn't solve the problem.
I am specifically claiming that there is no known global temperature dataset that is frequently used in such alarming studies and contains no stations affected by the UHI effect. Since the linked article contains no references or links to sources, I cannot be more specific.
Can you reference the point in this research where the process should have taken this into account but didn't? Looking for specific points in primary sources if you don't mind.
Now that you mention it, I'd be interested in some sort of map of where all these weather monitoring stations are, with bolder colors indicating stations that have been in longer continuous operation.
There are thousands of measurement stations spread across the globe - on land, in the ocean and in the air.
Four independent datasets are generated by different groups:
Scientists use four major datasets to study global temperature. The UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit jointly produce HadCRUT4 .
In the US, the GISTEMP series comes via the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS), while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) creates the MLOST record. The Japan Meteorological Agency ( JMA) produces a fourth dataset.
Now farmers said things like 'i have never seen so little water at this time of year in the 30 years im a farmer'.
I don't have the feeling we are recognizing the elephant in the room.
My personal take on this is to buy a farm, buy water reserve tanks, have a little garden and trying to become independend. Which is not a bad plan in general as it helps to cut costs down anyway if you do it smart enough. Its not that i get money when i put it in the bank and corona showed how volatile shares can be.