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by firestarter223 1808 days ago
Regions becoming uninhabitable, sea levels rising, mass extinctions.

As of now it is difficult to find any significant damage that is not actually the result of direct human mismanagement that they try to blame on climate change.

Edit: no, not climate change. Things like diverting water and pumping wells dry, planting the wrong trees and preventing small fires that leads to huge fires, for example.

3 comments

> Regions becoming uninhabitable, sea levels rising, mass extinctions.

Every single one of those things has already started happening.

Sea level rise is already starting to threaten low lying coastal areas, including places like Miami beach where sea water is more and more frequently seeping up through porous bedrock and flooding roads and other public spaces. It's also exacerbating the effects of king tides and creating far more destructive storm surges.

Parts of India are more frequently hitting the wet bulb temperature where humans can no longer survive, something which will occur with increasing frequency.

And we're smack in the middle of a major mass extinction event.

What more do you want?

"Started happening" - nothing severe has happened yet, though. And coastal regions often have other issues than rising sea levels. For example land sinking because too much water has been pumped from the wells. Also human settlements are probably expanding, at times into places that were not fit for building to begin with.

The places with "wet bulb temperature" probably are uninhabited already. Such places have always existed (death valley perhaps an example in the US).

I don't claim climate doesn't change, just the dramatic downsides don't seem to happen somehow.

> The places with "wet bulb temperature" probably are uninhabited already.

The least you could do is use Google before making uneducated claims like this:

https://news.yahoo.com/hotter-human-body-handle-pakistan-095...

> Jacobabad crossed the 35C wet bulb threshold in July 1987, then again in June 2005, June 2010 and July 2012. Each time the boundary may have been breached for only a few hours, but a three-day average temperature has been recorded hovering around 34C in June 2010, June 2001 and July 2012. The dry bulb temperature is often over 50C in the summer.

> just the dramatic downsides don't seem to happen somehow.

If you're ignoring when it happens, changing goalposts, interpreting facts to fit your preconceived notions, and dismissing things based on the No True Scotsman fallacy, I could see how you might think that.

Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching so often now it can't recover, extreme weather has become more common, glaciers are retreating, coastal areas are eroding, and on and on.

But if you want to keep ignoring what's happening right in front of your eyes, there's nothing I or anyone else can do about it except shake our heads, sigh, and continue to have no hope anything will change.

I haven't changed the goal posts, criteria were clearly stated higher up. If Jacobabad gets abandoned, perhaps we can talk. Although in "Collapse" you can read about places that were abandoned after thousands of years in the past, so even such a thing is not proof that we are doomed.
Are you including climate change in the results of direct human mismanagement?
No, I mean direct "mechanical" impact, agriculture, building, deforestation and so on.
Once those things have happened, it's way, way too late to stop things from getting worse.
There is an infinite number of alarmist scenarios. We can not react to all of them. The argument that it would be too late if some thing x would really happen is not very useful for decision making.

For example a meteorite could hit earth and wipe out all life. Clearly we should pour all resources into building space ships.