Thanks for this! Lots of my peers are going on and on about how we're all doomed. I belisve in climate change, and that it's bad and we must act. But I don't think we're gonna be living in Waterworld, which is what my friends are describing.
There is a pretty major flaw in this write up, which is the assumption that the changes we may see will be linear, be it sea level rise, temps, etc.
There are at least 4 tipping points that could upend this. If the Gulf Stream fails, Europe will be much colder than it is now, for example. Rapid breakdown of ice shelfs could quickly raise sea levels.
“It won’t be bad because it has not yet” is thin.
The middle latitudes are set to be in large part unlivable. Just imagine the geopolitical and humanitarian impacts of hundreds of millions of refugees. Just imagine when a country that is the source of a water source decides they need it and more than others downstream and reroute it.
These are massively destabilizing types of things. And not far fetched.
Can you point me in the direction of some stuff that supports the likelihood of these scenarios? The middle latitudes being unlivable does seem extreme and unlikely to me, especially given the explanation in the article about how 85F was used as a threshold for unlivable by some studies.
The threshold is typically 106F "wet bulb", above which much exposure will kill people, literally begin to cook them. Many parts of the world are hitting this.
You should consider the possibility that the climate skeptics are right, also. Imagine how you'd feel if you gave up your chance to have a family, and then one day realized that the scientists weren't being completely honest (as is now widely accepted to have been the case with virology/lab leaks).
Claims about world records in temperature can be extremely confusing. Many times, newly announced "record breaking temperatures" are actually lower than they have been recorded in the past. Here is one recent example:
"As anyone who follows the climate news is aware, July 2021 was the hottest month on record for our torrid little orb, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with a combined temperature 1.67 degrees F higher than the 20th century average of 60.4 F. NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet."
The reason this occurs is that temperatures reported by governments are no longer actual recorded temperatures, but rather the output of models. These models significantly change the historical record, both absolute values and trends, in fact they continuously recalculate old temperature values. Climatology doesn't believe you can answer a question like "what was the temperature at weather station X, Y days in the past" because the answer depends on when you ask it. This isn't really a secret but it's also not well known. NOAA explained it like this:
"NOAAGlobalTempv5 is a reconstructed dataset, meaning that the entire period of record is recalculated each month with new data. Based on those new calculations, the new historical data can bring about updates to previously reported values."
So 120 degrees is not an "all time temperature record" and 2021 was not the "hottest summer ever recorded".
Try to remember, claims about the end of the world come and go. Our parents were being told the world would end due to mass starvation when population growth exhausted food supplies, a new ice age (global cooling) and of course the ever-present possibility of nuclear war. Humanity survived and if they'd taken the attitude you're talking about now, you wouldn't exist.
