[A_D_E_P_T]

Nah. It's really as simple as this: Southern climates are moving north. (In the northern hemisphere.) If you want a vision of the future, consider a New England that looks more like the Southeast.

There will be winners and losers. As climate zones move toward the poles, weather patterns and agricultural viability will shift with them. This will eventually turn current breadbaskets into deserts while warming up northern/southern regions for longer growing seasons.

Various regions will cross ecological thresholds, causing sudden, dramatic shifts in local climates. For example, a warmer Earth could bring monsoon rains back to the Sahara and Arabian deserts, turning them green once again. In general, a warmer world is a wetter world due to increased oceanic evaporation.

Sea levels will gradually begin rising, but perhaps at a rate of 1-2" per year. It takes a lot of heat to melt glaciers.

Human existence is not in doubt on account of the climate alone -- our prehistoric forebears had a lot worse to deal with -- but there could be mass population movements and alterations in how agriculture is handled globally. Current political structures are not up to this challenge.

[defrost]

That's how it starts, sure.

Give that state you described another 50 odd years again and things can get worse - the land based glaciers are already greatly reduced, almost gone. The bulky polar ice is retreating a little - but the warming sea surface is the thing, it'll carry warm water and melt more and more ice.

Now it's fun and games for predicting what comes next - the insulation in the atmosphere is still increasing and the same amount of trapped energy that now goes to turning a mass of ice to a mass of water (at much the same temperature) will now turn to raising that same mass of water from near 0 C to about 60 C (roughly IIRC) - speeding up ice melts.

There's also the increasing amounts of water and methane in the atmosphere that come along with rising temperatures, these are much much better insulators that measly old CO2 and will serve to trap ever more energy from the sun.

Geophysically that's how this all goes in the absence of any serious reduction of insulation in the atmosphere.

[mike_hock]

Climate change itself is not gonna endanger humans as a species, but secondary effects might. Such as wars resulting from dramatic shifts in the value of territories and wars over resources.

[A_D_E_P_T]

War won't end human existence. If there's one thing you can learn from the recent wars in Iran and Ukraine, it's that conventional air-bombing has acquired a terrible cost:efficacy ratio that cannot be sustained, that drones have leveled the playing field on the ground, and that attackers generally appear to lack the stomach for mass mobilization and mass casualties in war.

Again, there'll be winners and losers. Some in fortresses; others in famines and droughts. It is, of course, imperative that we do what we can do now to mitigate this. But the continuation of the human species is, I am sure, not in doubt. Our ancestors in prehistoric times have, assuredly, gone through FAR worse, including real population bottlenecks.

[adrianN]

War definitely can end technological civilization. Bootstrapping it again will be quite difficult as a lot of the easily accessible natural resources are already depleted.

[A_D_E_P_T]

> Bootstrapping it again will be quite difficult as a lot of the easily accessible natural resources are already depleted.

That's a myth, but let's assume it isn't. I'm thinking it sounds like a job for you.

Okay, here's what you've gotta do. Buy some titanium slabs. Etch onto them, in simple and decipherable language (there's a technical way to approach this, I can explain later,) the secrets of solar panels, how to refine scrap metal, the basics of modern materials science, and so forth. Include the secrets of nuclear power, germ theory, semiconductors, DNA, important mathematical and physical formulae, and whatever else you feel like they ought to know. Warn them against the once-low-hanging fruit of fossil fuel; tell them that hydrocarbons ought to be used as chemical building blocks, solely.

Bury the slabs in a seismically stable vault, and leave clues to its existence at various geographic landmarks.

That's it, you've saved technological civilization in 50,000AD.

[adrianN]

Any high technology has incredibly long dependency chains. I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty of bootstrapping, say, WW2 level tech from irradiated wastelands after major nuclear exchanges.

[A_D_E_P_T]

"Irradiated wastelands" -- surely you realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are large cities today? Harmful radiation usually doesn't stay harmful for very long.

In any case, I don't share your low opinion of future humans. They'll be as capable as we are; maybe far more capable.

You also over-estimate and over-weight how destructive nuclear exchanges really are, the readiness state of the world's nuclear arsenals, and the willingness of their possessors to lash out at effectively unaligned countries like Argentina, Chile, Austria, Morocco, Fiji, and I could go on all day.

[iso1631]

Depends if that war turns nuclear. Perhaps a few million will survive with sustinance living in areas like patagonia, new zealand, global population of nomadic tribes around the same level as pre-agricutural civilisation - say about 10k years ago

[Dumblydorr]

You seem to forget about hydrogen bombs. War can 100% end everything.

[intended]

This is… one way to look at the death of billions, the end of nations, and the collapse of society due to the ensuing refugee crises.

Not to forget, we are dependent on the food web. These changes mean species will be wiped out, fishing stocks will crash, and invasive will spread.

Since you are likely in the developed world, tropical temps in Europe would mean refurbishment of houses.

People won’t remember things like the lakes freezing over or ice skating.

[bob001]

> collapse of society due to the ensuing refugee crises

Society won't collapse. Humans will do amazingly evil things to survive. The British were happy to starved millions of Indians to death until the country gained independence. All to support the British empire. We live in an era of basically unprecedented niceness in the history of humanity. Even the great empires of the past oppressed and killed multitudes more through slavery or serfdom or constant expansionist wars or other such means.

> refurbishment of houses

Perfect work for refugees to do at gun point.

Billions may die but society will go on with a somewhat lower regard for life and a larger amount of nationalism. Arguably what we consider western society will collapse but that's only existed for under a century.

In some ways that is more depressing than society simply collapsing. We will leave behind a rotting zombified corpse of our society to future generations.

[intended]

> Billions may die but society will go on with a somewhat lower regard for life and a larger amount of nationalism. Arguably what we consider western society will collapse but that's only existed for under a century.

It is easy to write provocative things when we do not let ourselves bear the weight of their implication. This is horror being outlined.

In earnest conversation, these are sombre and sobering implications, not frivolous or minor things.

This is a sea of humans, extending from one end of the horizon to the other, hungry, lost, frightened, confused, sad and angry. It is the loss of culture, history and fascinating things that one cherishes.

[bob001]

I never said it's not a horror.

> In some ways that is more depressing than society simply collapsing.

The inability to discuss a horror in realistic terms is how you get a horror. Not exaggerated "society will collapse" but actually tangible realistic and terrible outcomes. Society collapsing is an abstract and nebulous thing. The thing we will get is much worse and unless we look it in the face we will get it.

[usrnm]

Even anatomically modern humans have gone through similar events several times in the history of our species, let alone our ancestors. Climate change itself will not be the end of humanity, but it may be the end of the current civilisation.

[spwa4]

There are several highly problematic areas, but they are local (very, very big, but local, not remotely close to covering the whole of human civilization).

[intended]

I am curious how humanity is not affected as a whole by climate change.

You already said these are massive geographic issues.

Yet these different, large, geographic problems are of a size that doesn’t end up having even a remote effect on human civilization?

How? Is there some geography which is not impacted at all? A geography where a massive portion of human civilization is situated?

[KPGv2]

You're shifting goalposts or misunderstanding the discussion. Up the comment chain, the conversation is specifically centered around "the end of humanity." As in, extinction.

You're driving at changes to how we live.

Changes to how we live, even large ones, does not equate to "the end of humanity."

[iso1631]

> the collapse of society due to the ensuing refugee crises

This is what worries me.

At some point more northern facing countries will decide enough is enough and start mass genocide of any population attempting to flee.

Europe will be ok with just killing a few hundred million trying to flee in boats, and the eastern frontier is securable, especially with drones, but even with conscripts. Hell Ukraine has done a solid job on its own against an organised army on its doorstep.

America will act as a buffer for Canada and will have no problem with wiping out refugees. Argentina will be interesting but it's too small and isolated to matter globally.

The big global risk is that India and Pakistan have nukes and will be trying to flee into China and central Asia.

Setting aside refugees, far bigger risk for Europe isn't reurbishment of housing, it's tropical diseases in the south, it's the collapse of food security, and the general collapse of society as the economy falls over.

[intended]

I agree.

I find it very difficult to maintain an even tone and address statements that posit climate change positive effects on society.

There are so many incredibly bad things about climate change it boggles the mind.

I try and believe people are burying their heads in the sand to avoid the pain of reckoning with the end of everything they hold dear. This ends up with punches being pulled.

[b112]

One thing. "Longer growing season" is not predicated upon temperature. Length of the day, sunlight, is a hard requirement for some plants. And the further north you go, the less the sun gets up over rhe horizon, even at noon.

So extending the time before frost, won't help many plants reach maturity. The days will be shorter, and when the sun comes up there is barely any light anyhow. Raw "daylight hours" are meaningless here, when the sun only gets barely over the norizon.

One month of June light is like 6 months of December light in much of Canada.

[Aachen]

> our prehistoric forebears had a lot worse to deal with

Do you mean in terms of climate change? I know some temperatures were different but this was much more gradual afaik, which is no problem for anyone with two feet and a sense of where to go, but they were much more dependent on the ecosystem which struggles to keep up with the speed of today's changes

From what I hear, what we're causing is unprecedented for humans. Not dinosaur meteorite level of course (it's not an overnight change) but an ecosystem extinction event is nevertheless going on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction)

I agree with the broader point that we'll survive and the question is more about the amount of suffering we inflict on ourselves and other animals along the way. Just curious if any old human (or even any great ape from the 'homo' genus) did experience worse

[A_D_E_P_T]

Prehistoric climate change was sometimes much more sudden than anything we've experienced. See e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas

There are others.

[Tarsul]

The present has accepted this challenge. As Wiki states: "The scientific consensus is that severe AMOC weakening explains the climatic effects of the Younger Dryas." And with the news about AMOC weakening today, we could as well be off to quicker temperature swings (particularly in Europe) than we've seen the last decades that might well challenge the Younger Dryas.

[Aachen]

"in the tropics, the cooling was spread out over several centuries" but "2–6 °C in Europe and up to 10 °C in Greenland, in a few decades. Cooling in Greenland was particularly rapid, taking place over just 3 years or less"

That's indeed a lot more extreme in a shorter amount of time, at least regionally. Feel like I should have known that! Thanks

[illiac786]

Let’s say the end of our civilization and going back to middle age or something like that.

[spwa4]

The middle ages were in the middle of something called "the little ice age" which was entirely different and, obviously, mostly had the opposite effect.

The most dramatic story about that is what happened to the settling of Greenland (more than once). Basically during a cold spell the city was gradually abandoned, with sometimes the last few people literally freezing to death when their fuel ran out.

[illiac786]

I think you missed my point. What’s coming will obviously not be the middle age, that’s in the past. It will still be bad.