[Discussion] Climate Change

This is an interesting (though a little over my head technically) paper predicting that the temperature in the North Atlantic will drop 5 degrees C sometime this century. I'm guessing the current warming trend will cancel out an ice age, but it still means that the North Atlantic region will get colder over the next 100 years, not warmer. Also missing is where all that energy will go.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s414...

This is very strange. Nuuk is the capital "city" of Greenland. Most Americans would consider it a smallish town. As a Canadian, I can assure you our political will is nowhere near strong enough to plan ahead and build or expand cities for people on speculation. Look at rent and housing cost trends in every city in Canada with maybe the exception of Montreal and you will be astounded at the increase in prices in the last 5 years. Even rurally, prices have more than doubled here in the last 5 years. It is interesting in a way. Covid brought a large influx of people from cities across Canada to Nova Scotia. They could work from home so they didn't need to be in Toronto or Vancouver any longer. They brought large amounts of cash from house sales in the city and bought properties here. Many of them were retirees contributing very little to the tax base but requiring extra services. Because of this, we now have a huge housing shortage. We also have a medical system that is falling over due to a lot more patients. We will need years to build out and catch up. Very similar things will probably happen during an influx of climate refugees but without the money. We have an example in Nova Scotia of what is coming, but we have no resources or will to prepare.

We are completely unprepared for climate refugees. It probably won't matter here anyway in the slightly longer term as a 3-5 meter sea level rise will destroy a large amount of our roads which trace a line around the coast.

I should not be surprised any longer, but it's still impressive that we have now moved on to the "Actually, it isn't hot outside" phase of denialism.

Yup. Canada needs immigrants because our population is quickly approaching the point where we will have more retirees than working folks, and our birthrate is not high enough.

Yeah we've talked about it but not seriously looked. My wife and I are both 40s now but we got 2 kids under 5. Surely they want our kids?

Farley if you think about it in terms of the bottom line, Canada can't afford you. Your health care will cost more than you contribute. A 25 year old engineer will pay a lot of tax before they become a net minus on the health care and other social support systems. It sucks, but it's probably never going to change.

I posted a while back that we (Americans and advanced countries that have not made changes) would continue to be surprised by these kind of events until one is so shocking that we pay attention. But at that point, it's likely going to be too late.

This was, horribly, not that event. Nor was Phoenix. Nor was the flooding in New England and Nova Scotia. Or the fires in the US over the last few years, or the ones this year in Canada. Not the 90 degree temps in Alaska, or the bathtub hot water temps on the Florida Coast, or the wildfires in Europe.

I shudder to think what it will take for us to wake up. 50,000 dead in LA during a heat wave? ...might not be enough for Congress to get off its ass.

Honestly, I don't think there will ever be one. With half of Congress dedicated to preventing the other half from doing anything at all, no incident will be enough to get the half who might actually care (and not all of them do) to prioritize it over maintaining or regaining majority status, let alone spend the political capital necessary to actually implement solutions that, at best, will only reduce how bad things will get. They're too focused on fighting over who gets to be in charge of rearranging the deck chairs to do anything else.

The US is too big. There won't be a single sentinel event that wakes everyone up. It will be an ongoing series of major events in different parts of the country that serve as separate wake-up calls. And that's why we won't take enough action -- we're not as united as our name implies.

Yeah, I fear a million people could die in a single climate related event, and enough of the Republican base, right-wing media, R politicians, and profit-focused corporations would still continue to effectively oppose meaningful change. They'd sooner die themselves than admit the Democrats were right about something, and they were wrong. Hell, they'd sooner see their children die (see mass shootings).

No, they'd blame it on wokeism, immigrants, God's punishment for LGBTQ, etc. At the end of the day, if civilization completely falls apart, they'll just say it's the Biblical end times and hole up in their basement with their rifles and ammo and gold coins and Jim Bakker survival gruel for the rest of their short and miserable lives. But they'd still be self-satisfied they were right all along and never doubt for a second.

So yeah, put me in the pessimist camp.

I’m pessimistic by nature so I think it is going to get a lot worse than we think but there is some hope. The EU can’t double down on fossil fuel consumption since they don’t have domestic sources other than coal. China is similar. So two of the three economic blocs in the world have a strong financial incentive to move to solar/wind/nuclear. As they scale the global cost to deploy these will reduce until even US survivalists will have a solar array, battery bank and an electric car. It’s going to be a lot worse than if the US Federal government hadn’t wasted the years since Carter put solar on the White House. The energy transition is happening, it’s inevitable. The question isn’t whether we transition, it’s how much damage we do on the way.

Techno-optimism is generally a bad vibe but it’s not all doom and gloom. I watch a lot of things like Undecided by Matt Ferrell and this is looking less like a technology development problem and more of a technology deployment problem. Political problems are strictly easier than physics problems.

I disagree, DoveBrown. Political problems are far harder to solve than physics problems. We've known the answers to this via physics for decades, and keep finding new engineering solutions, but physics is not actively working against their implementations, politics is.