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shillyshally t1_iu2uhuq wrote

Reply to comment by Less_Noisy in Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View by lightscameracrafty

It's not hard to predict that humans are fucked. The tricky part is how fucked and how soon.

Temps are approaching the wet-bulb limits in many parts of India. The drought in the West is nearing catastrophic with Lakes Powell and Mead drying up and now news that the Mississippi is as well in areas. The American coasts - all coasts, really - are increasingly prey to violent weather. Jakarta is close to being under water and more and more areas are water precarious. Where will all these people go? The bitching about borders now is nothing compared to what it will be as the relatively safe areas hunker down and forbid entrance.

It doesn't have to get to maximum bad, the situation only has to get a wee bit worse.

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Less_Noisy t1_iu30w3q wrote

I agree. My dad was one of the first environmentalists after WW2 and was a top public health official under four governors. He used to tell me growing up in the 60's that the biggest threats to mankind were pandemics, pollution and nuclear war. He turned out to be right and it seems to be all happening quicker than anyone thought it could. The momentum of the global industrial and military complex is not something that can be turned on a dime after 125 years of largely unregulated expansion fueled by power and money. He always said that real change only comes about through crisis and catastrophe, e.g. world war.

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shillyshally t1_iu31xt6 wrote

Powell warned about the the vulnerable Colorado river nearly 150 years ago. Cadillac Desert laid out the inevitable drought collapse in detail to stopped up ears. The immigration problem won't be limited to India and Africa headed for the EU. People on the American East Coast will be getting ugly re migrants - AMERICAN migrants - from the American West. It's not as if you need to back that far, just to 1930 to see all the hearts harden within minutes towards the drought refugees.

Humans will survive and get through this but at vastly reduced numbers and those who will survive will probably not be people you would care to have to dinner. They won't even like one another.

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monosodiumg64 t1_iu375pe wrote

None of those events are unequivocally attributable to anthropogenic climate change. Sea levels are rising now at half the speed they were rising for several thousand years just before the Egyptians started building pyramids. No cities got flooded then, that we know of, because as far as we know there were no cities. In the places were sea levels are rising fastest, most of the rise is due to land sinking or subsidence, not anthropogenic climate change

The American West has a long history of long severe droughts. Droughts were wiping out local civilisations centuries before modern co2 rise. How can one possibly attribute observed recent drying of any of these water features to climate when all of them have been massively affected by modern changes in water use, land use and engineering?

Find more plausible examples.

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Less_Noisy t1_iu41ya0 wrote

I think you have a valid point. It's really difficult to apply root cause when we've only been around in a sliver of time in the grand scheme of things. I do have one anecdotal observation. When I was growing up in Nashville, we would have 3-5 decent snow falls a winter of maybe 3-5 inches. Now it just doesn't snow there - only ice storms of sleet. I don't think that's from Nashville sinking. What's really causing it? I don't know. I just know it's not good to piss in your bath water.

You are right in that the droughts experienced in the west are not the main reason the Colorado is getting hammered. It being drained to water grass and grow avocados. I now live at the headwaters of the Colorado river. Up until the fifties the upper tributary I live close to was a big river and magnificent fishery. Now it's just a little creek that can't support native trout due to it being siphoned off to the front range and pollution from pesticides/herbicides and oil runoff from the trains.

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compaqdeskpro t1_iu45ohv wrote

Growing up in the 2K's in Massachusetts, snow would start to ramp up in November, fall consistently throughout February, then March would kick off Spring. Now, it barely snows and stays in the 50's even through to Christmas, blizzards come through in February and March, and April is still freezing most of the month. That's only across a period of less than 30 years, and I've never lived to see an Ice Age. I doubt we have any control over this.

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