Pretty cool WSJ article. Global warming is actually a good thing because less people will die of the cold.
The exclusive focus on heat deaths is also misleading. Across the world, low temperatures are much more dangerous than high ones: Half a million people die each year from heat, but more than 4.5 million die from cold. While rising temperatures will increase heat deaths, they will also decrease cold deaths. A recent Lancet study found that rising temperatures since 2000 have on net reduced the number of temperature-related deaths. Researchers concluded that by the end of the 2010s, rising temperatures globally were causing 116,000 more heat deaths annually, but also leading to 283,000 fewer cold deaths a year.
Come the fuck on, we’ve been going over this shit for like 40 years. In what universe do they not understand that climate change will produce more extreme outcomes on BOTH sides of the temperature scale.
This is the fault of the west. The west should be paying developing nations to protect these types of natural resources. Payment should far exceed anything the private sector can pay.
It’s unfair for the west to expect developing nations to absorb the globes externalities.
We’re either going to science our way out of this mess or we’re going to see massive amounts of climate deaths in the next century and huge swaths of land lost to the sea.
Anyone expecting reasonable collective sacrifice to prevent or reverse it after watching covid play out is in denial.
Is there a timeline on that? The best modeling of rising sea level impact I’ve seen only goes up to 10 feet. You basically draw a line from Naples to Ft. Lauderdale, and everything South of it is ocean. Most east coast barrier islands are gone. Low lying chunks of major northeast cities are gone.
I think 24 feet could mean massive encroachment inland. I had previously heard talk that in the worst climate scenarios, the Appalachian Mountains become the new east coast. I had heard that the wealthy were buying up property there. The dude came off as conspiratorial and crazy but now I’m wondering. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if 24 feet was enough to wipe out most of southern New Jersey, for example.
If you think about the topography of the east coast, once it hits a certain threshold, the amount of land lost becomes exponential.
me and a close friend were talking about what the planet looks like as the century progresses, and I agreed that eventually almost everything will be dead we don’t directly cultivate. we’ll save a lot of the fauna species that we can, but they’ll be confined to zoos and sanctuaries. not many animals natural habitats even remain anymore, and I can’t off the top of my head think of any that will be able to survive this, except maybe the typical super survivors like crocodiles.
i don’t think it’s “alarmist” anymore. I look at stuff like the great sequoia groves by where I live. nature created a truly indestructible tree. they actually need wildfires to survive and they still won’t survive this - drought and invasive species have made them too weak. these things are used to living multiple millennia and only really die when they get too big for the physics to support them standing. they’re toast.
I’m really glad I got to see a living blue whale in my life time. gonna try to see a bunch of other stuff like that.
100% this. The only solution to climate change is to not exploit fossil fuel reserves. The rich world must then pay for the poor world’s energy reserves and by treaty agree to never exploit them.
My prediction has always been medium amounts of both the above, and then we take it seriously and science the fuck out of it and save society as we kinda sorta know it. It has to start getting really ugly before we throw $$ and time at it because we suck, though.
Clearly my moving to the shitty mountainous sub-suburbs of northwest NJ 20 years ago, because I couldn’t afford to live in the nice suburbs, was a genius move. Once my house is worth $5M I can take out a home equity loan to afford the moat and gates to keep the climate refugees out.
