[andreyk]

TLDR: "For the first time, I do start to see it. Five billion people is almost 600 New Yorks. Almost 600 future New York Cities will need more water. Everyone I pass on my bicycle (including the climate refugees soon to be sequestered next to the old airstrip) will be thirsty. Everyone on the subway, everyone visiting the Empire State Building, everyone in a Broadway audience — thirsty, if they live in the wrong New York City. And repeat that 600 times. Oddly then, I can see the shape of that number. And 5 billion, along with the parts per million and degrees of warming, starts to make sense. To learn this stuff requires new intuitions. The old ones don’t scale. ... We use the world “unimaginable” a lot, and rarely with optimism. But the world is far, far more imaginable if you see everything as a multiple of home."

Pretty common sense stuff. Personally, I think we need to have a lot more "climate change art". Nothing has driven the reality of how catastrophic climate change will be for me quite like the opening chapter of The Ministry of the Future - https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-ministry-for-t...

[it_citizen]

I read that chapter just before a heat dome settled over the pacific north west.

Climate change had never felt so real to me.

[whatshisface]

"Be thirsty" is not a remotely likely outcome for cutting back on the vast majority of water use patterns... you shower with more water than you drink and our agricultural system is based on aquifer-supplied irrigation.

[monknomo]

the aquifers are discharging faster than they are recharging in an awful lot of cases

[whatshisface]

Yes, and almost all of that water is going to non-potable water applications.

[hh3k0]

Allow me to recommend you an outstanding novel:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60806778

[1-more]

Ooooh if we're doing climate change novels allow me to add 1) almost anything by Paolo Bacigalupi and 2) two of Kim Stanley Robinson's latest three novels

1. PG short story The Tamarisk Hunter audio and text. What if federalism broke down and California paid a water bounty to keep the Colorado river flowing to CA. https://escapepod.org/2013/02/21/ep384-the-tamarisk-hunter/ canonical author's link: https://windupstories.com/books/pump-six-and-other-stories/t...

2. PG novel The Water Knife expanding on The Tamarisk Hunter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23209924-the-water-knife...

3. KSR novel New York 2140. What if sea rise into the cities led to a financial market on real estate involving day trading on those values? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29570143-new-york-2140?r...

4. KSR novel Ministry for the Future. What if the UN had to put together a team to keep the earth habitable as heatwaves started causing mass casualty events particularly in the subcontinent? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50998056-the-ministry-fo...