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Rime posted:Wasting time responding to Arkane is a fools errand, just put him on ignore and move along. I'm not sure why you think we have anything better to do, when he's not here the thread just get's stuck on the same boring loops endlessly rehashing the same arguments over personal responsibility, nuclear energy, and apocalypse prep. Arkane is not wrong when he points out the absurdity of many doomsayers here, whose fantasies are as divorced from an empirical understanding of the climate and economy as the worst climate skeptics. There is a tendency to take every new grim prediction as an iron prophecy, which leads to ridiculous cases like the guy asking why governments weren't erecting mass euthanasia clinics for the inevitable climate apocalypse. Maybe the one thing that is certain is that there's a lot we aren't sure of, knowledge that is both fearful but also a source of hope when facing the most dire predictions. I'm interested we're still going on about the hiatus. Wasn't that old canard put to bed by the recent recalibration of the sea surface temperature (SST) observations? http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full quote:Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s NCEI do not support the notion of a global warming “hiatus.” As shown in Fig. 1, there is no discernable (statistical or otherwise) decrease in the rate of warming between the second half of the 20th century and the first 15 years of the 21st century. Our new analysis now shows that the trend over the period 1950–1999, a time widely agreed as having significant anthropogenic global warming (1), is 0.113°C decade−1, which is virtually indistinguishable from the trend over the period 2000–2014 (0.116°C decade−1). Even starting a trend calculation with 1998, the extremely warm El Niño year that is often used as the beginning of the “hiatus,” our global temperature trend (1998–2014) is 0.106°C decade−1—and we know that is an underestimate because of incomplete coverage over the Arctic. Indeed, according to our new analysis, the IPCC’s (1) statement of 2 years ago—that the global surface temperature “has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years”—is no longer valid. Kind of lame repeating the same outdated research based on biased observations.
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May 3, 2016 04:21
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Rime posted:I experienced 50 degrees Celsius last year in southeastern Turkey. It's hard to put that kind of heat into words: the air hurts to breathe, it's hard to stay conscious in the shade, entering the sun for just a minute is like stepping into the flame of a BBQ. You can't even swim in rivers, because the water acts as a magnifying glass and cooks you. By 8am it was over 30 degrees, and it was still over 22 at midnight. I was in Turkey/Armenia/Georgia last August. When we landed in Yerevan, it was 48 degrees. Unfuckingreal. The entire meteorological summer (June - August) last year was absolutely ridiculous in northern Italy. Every day had a maximum temperature between 37 to 41 degrees C, while it cooled off to 30 by dawn. My unair-conditioned apartment was generally 32 degrees when I came home from work each day. This is with the shutters shut during the heat of the day and opened again at night. No breeze, except for the odd thunderstorm that would temporarily produce one. Italy is only going to get hotter as well. There was a ridge of high pressure over northern Africa which was mainlining Saharan heat directly into southern France, Italy, Croatia, etc. My Italian friends told me that they can now grow apples and grapes at elevations that have never been used for agriculture before. Sicily is in big trouble, since it is so reliant on agriculture and the rest of Italy on agriturismo.
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May 3, 2016 06:32
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Oh wierd, we either just missed each other or might have crossed paths somewhere. Southern Armenia was insane in June, I can't even imagine it in August. The locals were really worried about the water shortages last summer, said it's been getting steadily worse since the 80's but without the USSR to geoengineer they see the south losing a lot of people soon. The bowl of Yerevan must have been hell. There was heat lightning every night when I left. Then you look at these desertified hellscapes and realize 500 years ago they were the heart of civilization in the caucasus, massive ruined cities everywhere that go back 8000 years. Ani just across the border eclipsed Constantinople ffs, and now it's too hot to breathe there in the summer let alone grow crops sufficient to sustain a city of a quarter million. Hell, even 30 years ago Armenia was one of the most productive agricultural regions in the USSR. Makes you think. Rime fucked around with this message at 07:48 on May 3, 2016 |
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May 3, 2016 07:19
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Rime posted:I experienced 50 degrees Celsius last year in southeastern Turkey. It's hard to put that kind of heat into words: the air hurts to breathe, it's hard to stay conscious in the shade, entering the sun for just a minute is like stepping into the flame of a BBQ. You can't even swim in rivers, because the water acts as a magnifying glass and cooks you. By 8am it was over 30 degrees, and it was still over 22 at midnight. WaryWarren posted:I was in Turkey/Armenia/Georgia last August. When we landed in Yerevan, it was 48 degrees. Unfuckingreal. The entire meteorological summer (June - August) last year was absolutely ridiculous in northern Italy. Every day had a maximum temperature between 37 to 41 degrees C, while it cooled off to 30 by dawn. We've got some crazy exaggeration/lying going on here - the all-time heat record for the entire of Turkey is 48.8C, which was 20 years ago (and lol at river water magnifying the heat and twice witnessing self-combusting grass), the all-time record for Yerevan is 42.0C, and I'd be interested to hear which part of northern Italy had a daily "maximum temperature between 37 to 41".
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May 3, 2016 16:05
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Weather stations present an aggregate measurement across large regions which does not account for localized outliers. The thermometers I observed in Hasenkeyf read 50-51 degrees while I was there.
Rime fucked around with this message at 20:18 on May 3, 2016 |
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May 3, 2016 20:15
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Rime posted:Weather stations present an aggregate measurement across large regions which does not account for localized outliers. The thermometers I observed in Hasenkeyf read 50-51 degrees while I was there. He misunderstood you as saying the water gets super hot when I think you were probably talking about the ridiculous sunburns. Edit- you edited thepart I was replying to as I quoted you haha.
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May 3, 2016 20:19
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http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/may/02/ethiopia-famine-drought-land-restorationquote:The interpretation of forest and landscape restoration is broad. It can cover a range of activities, including agroforestry, timber plantations for the production of fuel wood and the restoration of degraded forests. As greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere continue to break records, restoration is one way to capture carbon dioxide in the soil, trees and other vegetation. For example, restoring 15m hectares in Ethiopia could capture as much as 1.42 gigatons of CO2 – the equivalent of removing almost 300m cars from the roads for one year.
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May 3, 2016 21:27
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Rime posted:Weather stations present an aggregate measurement across large regions which does not account for localized outliers. The thermometers I observed in Hasenkeyf read 50-51 degrees while I was there. Each reporting station produces its own data. The thermometers that you observed (now they've increased to 51 degrees!) were not inside standardized Stevenson-screened boxes (unless you were finding weather stations and cracking them open!), so their measurements will always be higher than the true shade temperature. The highest temperature in Hasenkeyf last year was 44C on the 30th of July... http://m.accuweather.com/en/tr/hasankeyf/320662/month/320662?monyr=7/01/2015 ...in line with this claim that "highest average temperature varies between 40 – 43° C" http://www.posetitursku.com/eng/2009/05/hasankeyf-batman/
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May 3, 2016 23:23
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Placid Marmot posted:Each reporting station produces its own data. The thermometers that you observed (now they've increased to 51 degrees!) were not inside standardized Stevenson-screened boxes (unless you were finding weather stations and cracking them open!), so their measurements will always be higher than the true shade temperature. ITT we discover: it's hotter in the sun than in the shade 
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May 3, 2016 23:32
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:ITT we discover: it's hotter in the sun than in the shade There's still a difference between being in shadow and in a standardized weather station box; an area of shade by a tarmac road is going to be hotter than a correctly positioned weather station, and it's the weather station's measurement that counts.
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May 4, 2016 00:15
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So it was hotter than 44C, then - his original point being that he knew what 50C felt like, which is valid even if he was in a slightly hotter place than the official reading.
Mozi fucked around with this message at 02:07 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 02:03
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Mozi posted:So it was hotter than 44C, then - his original point being that he knew what 50C felt like, which is valid even if he was in a slightly hotter place than the official reading. "Well now wait a minute in your essay you said you were in the army 8 years but here on the record you were in the service for 7 years, 10 months. Which is it fella?"
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May 4, 2016 02:23
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Mozi posted:So it was hotter than 44C, then - his original point being that he knew what 50C felt like, which is valid even if he was in a slightly hotter place than the official reading. If you're going to claim that "you know what 50C feels like" on this basis, then about 99% of people have felt such a thing, as the temperature over a tarmac or concrete surface in the sun in summer is higher than this almost anywhere in the world. This is the reason that shade temperature in a standardized box is the measure for meterological temperature. He was exaggerating or lying in order to brag and/or using inconsistent measures, and we don't need to continue this discussion any further.
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May 4, 2016 03:43
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The Middle East is literally toast, let's move on and discuss how much of a migrant crisis that will cause.
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May 4, 2016 04:25
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But it's already causing one arguably!
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May 4, 2016 04:41
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Grouchio posted:The Middle East is literally toast, let's move on and discuss how much of a migrant crisis that will cause. Luckily we can look to Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, Canada for an instructive example. Exceptionally dry conditions and high temperatures have caused an out of control wildfire that has since forced the evacuation of the entire city. It is unprecedented. The town is also ground zero for Canada's oil extraction industry so there might be some kind of irony there or something.
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May 4, 2016 04:52
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sitchensis posted:Luckily we can look to Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, Canada for an instructive example. Exceptionally dry conditions and high temperatures have caused an out of control wildfire that has since forced the evacuation of the entire city. It is unprecedented. I was quite literally writing a post around this picture when I refreshed just in case. A great example of a decade of warming allowing invasive pests to decimate the boreal forest, leaving it a pile of tinder for uncommonly hot temperatures. 
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May 4, 2016 04:56
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I have a question for the thread: I research the vulnerability of social systems to climate change for my job, and my general impression so far is that the social science of climate change is either (a) very cautious, case-specific, or vague, (b) hugely alarmist and not that well grounded in empirical facts, (c) largely ignored or misunderstood by the people working on the climate/governance side of things, or (d) pragmatic to the point of ignoring the severity of the issue at hand. I say this because I'm increasingly of the mind that the worst impacts of climate change will be moot from our civilization's perspective when the various ultra-nationalists and other xenophobic political fronts start to gain majority power in major industrialized countries as a result of even moderate up-ticks in global refugee flows. I'm also very concerned that near- to medium-term (by 2050) water shortages - even if periodic - will contribute to global instability in ways that far outstrip most peoples' expectations, mainly due to things like relative deprivation and the heterogeneity of water resources across most political entities. There are just too many systems already operating in tolerable (and even quite attractive, in some cases) but nevertheless highly vulnerable watersheds, and Trump is winning big in most of those states already, let's just say. In other words, I'm operating under the assumption that it doesn't actually have to get "apocalyptic" for social systems (at whatever scale) to start having very serious reactions. Of course, I don't say any of that out loud, because I like my (very carefully conducted) job, but I'm wondering if anyone in this group of posters has come across any good reading on the topic of social system responses to systemic stress over both long and short periods of time, particularly as relates to thresholds beyond which those systems begin to break apart. I've read a lot of the collapse archaeology literature, and pretty much all of the contemporary social vulnerability to climate change and extreme events literature (Adger et al.; Oliver-Smith; and the like) literature, as well as all the NCA, IPCCC, and UNFCC stuff, but I'm always surprised by what the internet knows about. Edit: tl;dr: Does anyone know of any good books about the relationship between climate stressors and social instability? Fasdar fucked around with this message at 06:55 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 06:51
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Fasdar posted:I have a question for the thread: Funny enough, I just finished a major research paper as part of my masters that touched on this subject. The best all-in-one sort of book I've found about the topic is Climate and Human Migration: Past Experiences, Future Challenges by Robert McLeman. He, like you, points out that currently we just don't know what will happen when poo poo really starts to hit the fan. However, past events involving rapid-onset and slow acting environmental degradation can be instructive. In his book he provides lots of examples and some good summaries of current knowledge. Some of his own research on the experience of Okies who moved to California during the dust bowl is really fascinating, too. Other than that, I'd suggest looking at authors who have studied linkages between environmental degradation/resource depletion and conflict. Homer-Dixon comes to mind in this respect.
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May 4, 2016 07:07
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sitchensis posted:Funny enough, I just finished a major research paper as part of my masters that touched on this subject. Thanks this looks like a great resource. I'm starting a PhD in the fall and I want to figure out a way to do something relating to climate change that isn't "figuring out how to get ranchers to sell their land to conservation groups," but I think I'll need to bring some firepower to that particular discussion with my advisor.
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May 4, 2016 07:24
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sitchensis posted:Funny enough, I just finished a major research paper as part of my masters that touched on this subject. Haven't read up on this topic at all, would you mind giving a short synopsis of your take on this based on your work with these sources? Goes for the both of you, really. I find this issue very interesting if not completely central to the topic of the thread and I'd love to see some more discussion on it.
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May 4, 2016 09:13
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Placid Marmot posted:If you're going to claim that "you know what 50C feels like" on this basis, then about 99% of people have felt such a thing, as the temperature over a tarmac or concrete surface in the sun in summer is higher than this almost anywhere in the world. This is the reason that shade temperature in a standardized box is the measure for meterological temperature. He was exaggerating or lying in order to brag and/or using inconsistent measures, and we don't need to continue this discussion any further. Local boy proves heat waves wrong with one weird thermometer trick. Doomers HATE him!
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May 4, 2016 11:13
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Rime posted:I was quite literally writing a post around this picture when I refreshed just in case. A great example of a decade of warming allowing invasive pests to decimate the boreal forest, leaving it a pile of tinder for uncommonly hot temperatures. BC is also having higher than normal temps and wildfires a'plenty, but this one in Ft. McMurray is awful, and I feel bad for those people leaving (saw one photo of the traffic going south). Ironic too, considering the oil sands is really very marginal oil that takes a lot of resources to extract/mine, including water from dwindling glacial rivers and thus contributing more, ground to wheel, to climate change than lighter weight oil. I am involved largely in the literary genre of eco-fiction, where a lot of authors are writing stories related to climate change. I have talked with Jeff VanderMeer, whose upcoming Southern Reach trilogy's 1st novel Annihilation is being made into a movie in 2017 (from Alex Garland, who did Ex Machina). I think authors and filmmakers will probably do more to reach people about climate change than scientists might, at least for the general populations who don't really follow data. The Southern Reach is basically new weird fiction, but the author talks a lot about climate change as a hyper object, dark ecology, etc., and The New Yorker called him the "weird Thoreau"...it's good to see such authors' works warning about climate and environmental issues. Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel is New York 2140, coming next March I think. There's a lot of other well-known authors dealing with the subject (Barbara Kingsolver, Paolo Bacigalupi, Emmi Itäranta--who I've also interviewed). It's just another link to how we may do something about it.
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May 4, 2016 18:46
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Are there any good resources or papers regarding hypothetical Malthusian and climate-change related migrant crises mid-century that would dwarf the current ones and (possibly) bring forth first-world societal collapse? Can these fears be alleviated or solved somehow?
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May 4, 2016 20:34
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Grouchio posted:Are there any good resources or papers regarding hypothetical Malthusian and climate-change related migrant crises mid-century that would dwarf the current ones and (possibly) bring forth first-world societal collapse? Can these fears be alleviated or solved somehow? yes but give me like, a few hours
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May 4, 2016 21:19
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Nice piece of fish posted:Haven't read up on this topic at all, would you mind giving a short synopsis of your take on this based on your work with these sources? Goes for the both of you, really. I find this issue very interesting if not completely central to the topic of the thread and I'd love to see some more discussion on it. Are you referring specifically to the issue of climate change induced migration or general social dimensions of climate change? Because I can do the latter moreso than the former, but I'd be happy to put something together later tonight.
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May 4, 2016 22:32
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Fasdar posted:Are you referring specifically to the issue of climate change induced migration or general social dimensions of climate change? Because I can do the latter moreso than the former, but I'd be happy to put something together later tonight. Both are actually very interesting, the first because it'll be one of the first big effects of climate change, and the second I'm generally interested in because I don't know enough about it by far. sitchensis posted:yes but give me like, a few hours But please both of you, take your time. Climate change isn't going anywhere.
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May 4, 2016 22:49
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Nice piece of fish posted:Haven't read up on this topic at all, would you mind giving a short synopsis of your take on this based on your work with these sources? Goes for the both of you, really. I find this issue very interesting if not completely central to the topic of the thread and I'd love to see some more discussion on it. Sure. I just finished the program and I doubt anyone will actually ever read my paper, so might as well post about it on a dead gay comedy forum. Billions displaced! Millions dead! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!  There has been a lot of popular press about the future tidal wave of human migration that climate change may cause. While to a certain extent it is true that climate change will force people to relocate, the actual reality of the situation is much more nuanced and complex than what it's made out to be. For starters, the "apocalyptic" predictions that have been popularly cited have questionable quantitative methods backing them. The most widely cited comes from a British environmental scientist named Norman Meyers. Myers wrote several papers in the late 1990's to early 2000's to alert policy-makers about the growing phenomenon of environmental refugees. His most influential paper was in 2002, where he estimated that up to 200 million people could be displaced by climate change by 2050. However, his methodologies have received considerable criticism. For the 2002 estimate, for example, Myers apparently forecasted the number of people that are expected to live in at-risk regions by 2050 and used this estimate as his basis for the prediction, assuming that all would be forced to leave. That said, Myers work did bring significant political and media attention to the potential for climate change to displace people, so I can't come down too hard on the guy. But Myers hasn't been the only author on this topic. For a brief period during the early 2000's, there almost seemed to be a fad among policy wonks, NGO's and advocacy groups to come out with increasingly dire predictions regarding climate change and migration. Yet most of these predictions have only been published in 'grey' literature, not scientific publications, and thus have not been subjected to any sort of academic rigor. In fact, all forecasts of climate displacement have been met with considerable skepticism from the scientific community. Regardless of academic credibility, these predictions have since punched above their weight when it comes to media sensationalism and policy making. They are often cited as scientific truth, without having their methodologies questioned. Moreover, even in the scientific community, now struggling to find a way to actually make an informed prediction, no clear consensus has emerged on exactly what kind of methodology should be used to measure displacement or how predictions should be modeled. This is reflected by the IPCC's noticeable absence on addressing environmental migration resulting from climate change. So far, the IPCC has not thrown weight behind any numbers, instead choosing to make vague statements about the potential for climate change to displace people. What? So there's no such thing as migration due to environmental conditions? Well, no, not exactly, but surprisingly it's really goddamn hard to pin down exactly what environmental migration is. If you accept that it is someone who simple packs up and leaves to move permanently to another location because their home has become intolerable due to environmental conditions, then an elderly couple relocating permanently from Minnesota to Florida would fit the bill. However, a young woman who leaves her home on the Niger delta due to flooding but then returns several months later would not. Yet we could probably agree that both scenarios are radically different in terms of the agency of the individuals involved and the resources available to them. In one, the relocation is voluntary. In the other, the relocation is not. Given this lack of methodology and empirical study, the field is wide open for guesses and doom-and-gloom estimates rather than actual numbers. This ties into the crux of the problem with drawing linkages between climate change and migration: People decide to relocate from one place to another as the result of a multitude of reasons, and not just for one reason in particular. In fact, research indicates that most migration is intra-national rather than international. That is, individuals who decide to relocate often do so within the borders of their own country before looking elsewhere. And, given this, how do you determine the difference between an individual who has relocated to a nearby city because his farmland dried up, versus an individual who has relocated because he is seeking better employment opportunities? What if both reasons are one-in-the-same? Bear in mind that the ability for state-actors or NGOs to calculate these types of movements are very much limited in developing countries. OK Arkane  , so you're saying that climate change WON'T cause a migration crisis?No. But saying that it will dangerously simplifies the situation by making such movements deterministic on one particular factor. Climate change will no doubt force households to migrate, but to what extent is proving to be exceptionally difficult to quantify because the other factors that go into a household to make such a decision are multiple and contextual. For example, assume your home is destroyed by a hurricane. Will you stick around and try to rebuild in the community where you've lived for your entire life, even if you suspect that there will be more hurricanes? Or will your strike out on your own, abandon your close-knit social ties, and head to the nearest major city to find employment and hope that they are better prepared for hurricanes there? What if you have two generations of family living with you? What if you have children? What if you are the sole breadwinner of the household? In fact, some really interesting research has shown that intra-migration flows tend to decrease after a sudden-onset environmental disaster. This is likely due to the type of aforementioned scenario above: people are attached to the places they know, and will expend a huge amount of effort and energy trying to rebuild their lives in-situ rather than seek shelter elsewhere -- often because they simply have no choice. It's a devil-you-know type of situation that is compounded by poverty and social ties. Yeah but won't climate change force many people to migrate? So, as it turns out, different people have different reactions to different types of environmental degradation. For example, a family in the Philippines who is displaced by a typhoon and is evacuated from their village may return afterwards to start rebuilding. On the other hand, a farmer in Malawi might weather through a few drought seasons before he realizes that his family will die if they do not find a way to make ends meet, and thus decides to take his chances in Lilongwe. Conversely, an affluent family in Delhi might attempt to immigrate overseas to a country with better air quality and a large Indian ex-pat community because they are starting to feel the effects of the pollution, even if it means accepting a lower standard of living. Each decision is one that is made within the context of that households perceived needs, resources and capabilities, and it is virtually impossible to predict or categorize this. Which is why it's so easy to fall into a trap of blanketing all of this with 'climate refugees', with a tinge of xenophobia as images of radicalized young brown men overwhelming Europe and converting ice cream trucks into mobile FGM units come to mind. OK, I get it, but a lot of people have said that climate change was a cause of the civil war in Syria! Good. Now this is the meat of the issue. Climate change by itself will not cause a global refugee crisis. However, it will be a contributing factor. Some academics think Syria is a good example of this. The incredibly simplistic tl;dr is that unprecedented drought conditions in Syria, exacerbated by climate change, caused agricultural production to decline and forced many rural families to relocate to urban centers. Farmers got pissed off at Assad for his lack of action and started to agitate for change, finding themselves with a population base to rally from in the cities... and, well ... you know the rest. The point is: climate change will exacerbate existing conflicts and tensions, and could in turn cause these to escalate, especially if there are concerns over a shortage of resources that reliant on environmental conditions (water, food, etc.). OH poo poo. OH poo poo. OH poo poo. I KNEW IT. I KNEW IT!!! Calm the gently caress down, chicken little. Yes, climate change likely did play a role in Syria's civil war and will likely cause more conflicts. But if it was to be the determining factor, we should expect neighboring Jordan to be in similar turmoil due to its ongoing drought -- moreso, even, considering it has been the 'go to' point for refugees from Iraq, Palestine and Syria. But it hasn't, and there are probably lots of reasons for this. Generally speaking, environmental degradation and resource conflicts can be managed. But this, too, is determined by many factors. The most important of which appears to be the strength of national, sub-national, and community institutions to address big problems. For instance, some studies have shown that in some drought-stricken areas in sub-saharan Africa, farmers didn't just go all crazy and kill each other over to have their cattle graze on limited lands, but instead set up councils to manage disputes and negotiate pasture rights for the benefit of everybody. In fact, more often than not, it is cooperation that becomes the hallmark of resource shortages, rather than violence or conflict. But again, this appears to be very much dependent on how well institutions are able to withstand slow or rapid-onset changes. A nation with weak governance regimes and little public trust is more susceptible to conflict events than a nation with stronger institutions and more public 'buy-in'. There are also other factors at play here, too. One geo-spatial analysis of global conflict events indicate that the factors that best predict whether a region will experience conflict is falling GDP and increasing urban population density. Resource shortages, such as water availability and arable land, though identified as factors, were relatively minor compared to the first two. The authors of the analysis speculated that there were several reasons for this: 1. Increased urban to rural migration caused conflict in receiving areas. As more people pour in from the countryside, more conflict occurs over housing, jobs, and access to services between the existing residents and newcomers. 2. Less GDP means less material wealth for citizens and less revenue for the government. As the economy declines, more people are out of work and the government receives less money in taxation, leading to a decline in services just when people need them the most. 3. More people in a city means more of a population base to build a movement from. Proximity to people with simmering grudges against either their perceived persecution or their unhappiness with existing power structures can lead to the formation of organized resistance groups that can credibly threaten the legitimacy of a weak government. In terms of declining GDP and an increase in the population of urban areas, climate change will obviously impact both. Thus, you can start to imagine how climate change won't necessarily be the cause of future refugee flows, but rather will be one of many determining factors for those refugee flows. What does all this mean? The good news is that all this means that we have the capacity right now to prevent future refugee flows. Yes, climate change itself is inevitable, and yes, this means that some areas of the planet will likely see human settlements relocate. However, although the environmental effects of climate change might be 'baked-in' for the next half century, the way we handle those effects are by no means certain. First and foremost would be to recognize that sounding all alarms on the potential for a migration crisis that will result from climate change is counter-productive. It's certainly useful for lighting a fire under the asses of policy-makers to take the issue more seriously, but it does nothing in the long run to address the real problem which is the inability of the institutional structures of many developing nations to cope with what's coming. If we want to focus on ensuring that a migration crisis does not occur, we must go directly to the source instead of cowering behind guard towers and barbed wires. Here is a quick illustrative scenario to hopefully get the point across: Let's say climate change causes a farmer to miss a growing season or two due to drought, high temperatures, invasive pests, whatever. In France, this farmer would be relatively certain that she could cover her losses through insurance or through government subsidy and simply wait things out. Worse comes to worse, she declares bankruptcy and moves in with family in Boredeaux, where she can rely on the stability of the state to provide her with welfare until she can find a new job. In Zambia, however, it's a different story. Barely able to make more than subsistence, the farmer is now completely unable to feed himself or his family. With no other option, and with no extended family for support, he decides to take a chance in Livingstone. Yet he will likely be unable to find state support, and will have to rely on luck and chance to find another job or become well established. Maybe he succeeds. Maybe he gets involved with petty crime to support himself -- its easy when the police can be bribed. Maybe he gets assaulted for being another migrant trying to steal someone's job. But in any case, his future trajectory is much different than that of the French farmer. So, uh, what do we do? This is where things get thorny, because there are really only two answers to this question. And, in my opinion, it's starkly apparent which one we are choosing. I'll leave it up to you to decide which one you think that is. Answer #1: Let the Fuckers Die  Oh sure, we will cluck our tongues, send our prayers over Twitter, maybe make a donation to the Red Cross, but generally speaking, we will just let the fuckers die. The wealthy nations of the world will continue to calcify their borders, come up with even more elaborate and sophisticated surveillance methods, and withdraw from international obligations in order to sort out their own climate-change strategies at home (hey, those barriers to protect New York City from storm surges aren't free you know). What seems like a surveillance state to us now will seem like a paradise of liberty and freedom to future generations -- if they are even aware of the kind of freedoms we had. Ultimately, we will keep the status quo going for as long as humanly possible, with maybe a few social-democratic changes here and there to keep everyone happy and well-fed in the lifeboats. Regardless, since we are all basically powerless to stop the inertia of our economic, social, and political systems, and since attempts to collectively come together to address potential reforms will likely be smothered-in-the-crib both online and in reality, we will simply have to be content to click the frowny face on Facebook that accompanies the article about the tens-of-thousands who died in Thailand during the most recent typhoon in order to register our impotent horror at what the world is coming to. Internationally, we can expect to witness institutional and social collapse on an unprecedented scale in the developing world, but don't expect it to affect us. For the ones who try to escape, they will simply become part of the meat-grinder of human misery within their own borders. For the incredibly lucky ones who get within spitting distance of a wealthy western nation and don't drown in the process, they will either be detained in horrific conditions (see: Australia), or simply blown up or shot -- all outside the public eye, mind you. Maybe to try and soothe our collective guilt we will have some token efforts to accept a piddling amount of refugees through a 'humane' and 'fair' determination method -- possibly a lottery? Who knows. In any case, I don't envision that we will see migrants being shot or detained on the borders of the inner core of privileged countries. We will leave the grisly duty of thinning the asylum claims to transit states like Hungary and Greece (or, in the case of North America, Mexico), whom I imagine we will start making some pretty sweet deals with in return for some, uh, discrete and 'enhanced' border security measures. Pros: We will be fine! Cons: Untold millions die and the planet becomes much more hostile to human civilization and for the love of god lets hope India and Pakistan don't duke it out! Answer #2: We Do Something!  Armed with the knowledge that the best way to prevent a migration crisis is to make drastic efforts to strengthen and enhance the institutional capabilities of the most vulnerable regions of the world, humanity collectively decides to invest enormous resources into development programmes that allow global populations to mitigate and adapt in place for the effects of climate change. I don't think I can over emphasize enough the scale of resources, international cooperation, and jurisdictional overlap that would have to occur under such a scenario. The actions necessary to coordinate for this would dwarf by several orders of magnitude anything seen during WWII. We would essentially be undertaking a generations long process with the following goals: 1. Ensure that almost all nations on earth have the capability to mitigate or adapt to the effects of climate change within the next thirty years; 2. Undertake this process in a way that does not repeat the mistakes of colonialism and respects national autonomy and diversity of populations; 3. Do all of the above in a manner that simultaneously reduces carbon emissions; and, 4. Ensure the process is uninterrupted, even if results will not be seen for half-a-century or more, and even if it may cause a slight material reduction in the quality of life for those living in the global north. Pros: Humanity enters a golden age where nations and cultures deeply commit themselves to planetary stewardship for the benefit of all current and future generations! Cons: We don't get new iPhones every three years and our taxes go up! Uh... Yeah, tl;dr we are so screwed. But hey, I hope this was informative for someone. Edit: grammar and such sitchensis fucked around with this message at 00:49 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 23:45
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That was an excellent write-up. Almost wish it was published.
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May 4, 2016 23:54
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Thank you for sharing that with us.
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May 5, 2016 01:59
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Should perma-link that in the OP. Also as someone who does similar research on the intersection of climate change and social instability I'd love to read your paper, published or not.
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May 5, 2016 02:02
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That was awesome and a quality post, thanks for taking the time to do that.
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May 5, 2016 02:06
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Would it be possible to take a third option and combine the two options into something more flexible without being too unrealistic? Either way excellent paper.
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May 5, 2016 02:13
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Thank you for taking the time to write that, that was excellent. How likely do you think #2 will be accomplished? Obviously business as usual would die a slow and painful death, but at a certain point wouldn't there be enough...upheaval I suppose is the best word that state actors would have to respond actively to the problem?
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May 5, 2016 03:01
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I realized a bit into it that I had only been thinking in terms of areas becoming completely uninhabitable, and not appreciating the wider context. Thanks for the writeup.
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May 5, 2016 03:02
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Posts like that one make enduring months of shitposting worth it.
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May 5, 2016 03:53
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I can't guarantee anything as entertaining as that post, but what sitchensis talked about underscores a lot of what I research, namely, the vulnerability of social systems to climate change and its various effects. As sitchensis noted, in so many ways, context is everything when it comes to climate change's ultimate impacts, both in terms of its effects on local weather and overall climate profiles (how hot and cold it is; at what times is it hot and cold, etc.) as well as its effects on the people and communities that live in various places. To understand why this is the case, however, it is important to pay attention to what "vulnerability" actually means. First off, vulnerability is generally thought of by most researchers working in the climate change field as being made up of a variety of components. The first of these is Exposure, which, as the name suggests, is the degree to which a given unit of study (an ecosystem, a town, a country, or whatever) is likely to be confronted with a given stressor. In the case of climate change, which has numerous - often contradictory - effects, all of which will occur to some degree everywhere on earth, everyone on planet is, to a certain degree, "exposed." However, some communities are much more exposed to certain stressors - for our case, we'll pick drought - than others. Some places already experience intense droughts pretty regularly (for example, the Great Basin in the U.S.). Some places get most of their water from snowpack, which, if melted more quickly or reduced overall, will lead to less overall water availability (pretty much the entire Western U.S.). Some places rely on monsoon rains, which means that oceanic-atmospheric heat exchange events like El Nino can have serious impacts on how much water they receive in a given year. Other places still have soils and vegetation communities that result in massive losses of soil moisture when temperatures rise beyond a certain point, meaning that, even in a rainy year, the soil itself (as well as any underground aquifers) will be short on water. All of these places are therefore "exposed" to drought, but some are more exposed than others due to geography, geology, ecology, and topography. The Middle East, which has long been a desert with very sandy soils low in organic matter, low levels of overall average precipitation, and high average temperatures is therefore probably the most exposed region on Earth when it comes to drought. Another easy example when thinking of exposure is to look at flooding, which, generally speaking, is a phenomenon that occurs in places that are at the low end of the local topographical gradient. I say "local topographical gradient" because many high elevation places - like Estes Park in Colorado - are actually highly exposed to flooding, due to the fact that people in that town live in the rare fingers of flat land found in mountain valley bottoms and along streamways. On the other hand, places like New Orleans are also highly exposed, due to the fact that they are simply well below both sea level and most of the land in the greater Mississippi basin, meaning that any rain that falls within the area surrounding the city will eventually make its way towards the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain, both of which the city was created to access easily. In other words, exposure is both a matter of how close you are to a given hazard source - in New Orleans' case, the ocean - and how often one can reasonably expect a hazardous event to occur - again, in New Orleans' case, pretty drat often, because it rains a lot, hurricanes a lot, and so on. However, just because a place is exposed to a given hazard doesn't mean that it will always have a negative impact. Many places that are extremely dry are pretty used to being extremely dry, and though they will no doubt suffer along various dimensions during any potential future mega-droughts (5+ years of lower than average precipitation), most of the plant communities, wildlife species, and human systems of habitation and infrastructure are probably already set up to deal with a lack of water. On the other hand, as the recent drought in California has shown, droughts that occur in places where precipitation levels are normally pretty high can have catastrophic effects, because the various ecosystem services operating in the area simply aren't able to tolerate the strain of low water availability. As a result, even relatively short droughts, if severe enough, can have massive, transformative, and sometimes catastrophic impacts. Trees die, animals stop grazing drought tolerant grasses, soil loses carbon to the atmosphere (thus retaining even less water), and people have to re-organize their ways of life to deal with these relatively unusual conditions. Put another way, they have a higher Sensitivity to perturbations. A really good example of this is the way wildfires are impacting communities all across the U.S. and Canada (as seen in Fort McMurphy). Because most of the settlements in these areas utilize technology, materials, and philosophies of land use that are founded, at their root, in the relatively stable conditions of the Eastern North American Seaboard and Europe, these communities have basically no means of tolerating the normal variances of fire ecologies like forests. The houses are flammable and immovable, the infrastructure is out in the open and also flammable, and the people themselves value a lifestyle that is rooted in one place and built upon the accumulation of material goods that are hard to move quickly, even when the communities they live in (like oil field camps) are nominally 'temporary.' On the other hand, it is widely believed that most of the indigenous populations of these same areas were highly adapted to fire, and often utilized it as an important agricultural, silvicultural, and hunting tool. Moreover, they were mostly nomads who had few material possessions and had the ability to relocate with their cultural systems and identities intact on short notice. That is, sensitivity also varies highly from community to community and place to place. Further, within communities, some people will be able to shrug off the loss of all their things due to a diversification of resources and high levels of wealth, while others who lack those tools will be utterly devastated. Generally speaking, if someone is poor, disconnected from various systems of familial and institutional support (i.e., a member of a marginalized group), and generally ignorant of the climate driven hazards they might face, then odds are they are highly sensitive to those same hazards. The third dimension of climate change vulnerability normally talked about in social science (and socio-ecological science) circles is probably the most difficult to neatly summarize, and is definitely the most difficult to accurately assess. This dimension is adaptive capacity. Now, at first, this seems simple enough: after all, if a person is wealthy, knowledgeable, and in general, capable of reconfiguring their life in any way they so choose, then they must have pretty high adaptive capacity, right? Well, maybe. First off, are they willing to change? People often respond to various climate-driven disasters with something like, "well why don't they just move?" As sitchensis mentioned, however, a hell of a lot of things come into play when even considering the prospect of moving away from a place you know and, quite possibly (given most human beings deep, deep attachment to familiarity) love. Thus while they are capable of "adapting" to a given hazard by simply lowering their exposure and moving away, the costs associated with that approach are simply too much to bear. In another case, people may be totally willing and able - at least on paper - to initiate certain ostensibly adaptive strategies, but nevertheless fail to do so due to a lack of flexibility in the systems with which they interact. Here, water scarcity in the west provides a good example: most of the western U.S. is relatively wealthy, educated, and has some of the best access to building materials and industrial infrastructure on earth. However, there are only so many things the communities in that area can do to increase their available water supplies. They may build more dams, sure, but they can't make more snow fall. Further, the bigger the dam, the more water they lose to surface evaporation (see here, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which actually cause more water to be lost to the atmosphere in the greater Colorado River system than were that river and its various tributaries to flow freely). Ranchers in these areas can dig ponds and pump water, as well, but in doing so may thereby have to give up valuable acreage that could otherwise be used for grazing, and further, reduce the feasibility of future generations conducting such actions on the same land. They can store water in large tanks and underground facilities, but, again, the costs associated with doing so - both in terms of land and cold, hard cash - are simply too high to be tolerated within their existing, highly libertarian, nigh upon spend-thrift political cultures. And so on. Which brings me to the fourth (and much more variously understood) dimension of vulnerability, Resilience. A highly attractive concept to many thinkers within the Right and, in general, those who value the persistence of the status quo, resilience has become something of a buzzword among corporate and governance circles. In these cases, it is generally taken to mean "invulnerability" or the opposite of vulnerability, and is thought of as the ability of a given system to bounce back from hazard impacts with little to no perturbation to the way in which things are done. For others (including myself) it takes on a much more problematic tone, one outlined pretty clearly by the very reason that conservatives value it, namely: the lack of change. Born out of ecology, the term resilience as currently used draws heavily upon its original, ecosystem science-based definition, which was simply the ability of a given plant/animal community to return to a previous configuration following a perturbation. Neither necessarily good or bad, it was basically another term for "elasticity," if the vitality of a system is conceived of as a line stretched and contorted by various stressors. In the context of climate change, however, "resilience" may not always be a good thing. If one is referring to cultural systems of identity, meaning, connectivity, and purpose, then resiliency is usually preferable for those inside of the culture, as it is those things that allow human beings to live out their lives without entering into a radically different reality. For example, Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations have proven very resilient as a cultural phenomenon, because it can develop, move, and rebound, thanks to its de-centralized leadership and organization, even after it has been almost eliminated. Likewise, Western Pop Culture is also extremely resilient against efforts to curtail it, as it is built around its own transformation, cooptation, and abandonment. Similarly, the oil and gas industry's culture, which rests mainly on the ideas of profit and the primal value of energy, is also extremely resilient, and will likely survive through even the most stringent efforts to restrict it, both as a result of its great wealth and power, the never ending needs of consumers for energy, and the relative simplicity (as compared to, say, coal mining) of oil and gas extraction. In other words, resilience can actually lead to a system resisting adaptations that mitigate future risks, mainly because the system in question is able to ignore the impacts of events that fall below its notice. Again, however, because climate change will likely present us with hazard conditions that increase both in severity and occurrence - as well as many hazards that many have not foreseen - this ability to shrug off impacts may actually lead to a sort of systemic false confidence when we are faced with climate conditions that fall well outside of historical ranges of variability. A particularly good example of how resilience can end up loving you in the end is basically the entire state of Texas. Texas has made more requests for presidential disaster declarations (and thus aid money) than any other sate. They also spend less per capita than almost any state on emergency management. How do they get away with this? Well, they are a massive contributor to the U.S. economy, for one, and two, most of their infrastructure is privately owned. Three, they value - and indeed, lionize - industry, jobs, and "small government" (except after disasters) to the degree that attempting to regulate things like floodway and coastal development are pretty much non-starters. As a result, places like Houston are constantly flooding, mainly due to really, really bad development decisions and what appears to be a goldfish-level institutional memory when it comes to preparing for future floods. That said, because Houston is so extremely well positioned to conduct trade - and has most of the U.S.'s petrochemical processing infrastructure, it will likely remain a major urban center right up until it is totally underwater. Thus while Texas may never "adapt," at the local level, to climate-driven stressors, they will always be able to return to their pre-disaster state due to the outside resources that flow into the state for various economic and political reasons. So, what does this mean when we think about the effects of climate change on the human world? Basically, it means that while climate change is a global phenomenon with many consistent impacts (e.g., 2 degrees C of global warming - at least - by 2050, increased atmospheric water vapor content, reduced polar-temperate temperature gradients, increased equatorial extreme heat, higher sea levels, and so on), the localized impacts of these averaged changes will be vastly different depending upon where, when, and with what groups they interact. They will also vary widely in terms of geography, as some places are simply ill-suited to suffer further climatic deprivations while others may in fact welcome things like warmer temperatures. Some states, eager to develop in new and ecologically sound ways, may be able to respond quite successfully to long-term climate change, even if they are both highly exposed and sensitive to various climate hazards (the Netherlands, for example, will probably be more or less ok because of their willingness to change in the face of the encroaching ocean). Others, while facing relatively benign impacts - even in the long-term - may find themselves facing down social chaos regardless due to entrenched systems of inequality (and resentment), poor planning in the face of even well-known hazards, and an unwillingness to change, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that doing so would be both easier and cheaper (again, see Texas minus Austin). It also means that relatively strong systems - like, for instance, agriculture in the United States - may face serious negative impacts from even slight perturbations in the status quo. I may come back and outline what makes up a "social system" and where the greatest opportunities for meaningful action seem to lie in another post if people are interested, but this is already super long. Tl;DR: Climate Change Vulnerability is V = E x (S - AC +/- R); You, specifically, may or may not be screwed in the near to medium term. Edit: Grammar; spelling. Fasdar fucked around with this message at 07:08 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 06:18
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Thank you also for that excellent piece.
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May 5, 2016 06:48
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Fasdar posted:I may come back and outline what makes up a "social system" and where the greatest opportunities for meaningful action seem to lie in another post if people are interested, but this is already super long. Please do, I enjoy these post and find them informative.
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May 5, 2016 06:59
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So will the core nations do something now that a city of 80k in a core country got wiped out by climate change fueled cleansing hellfire? Or will the root cause just be ignored? I mean, the Trudeau government has already made some moves, but will the US pull their heads out of their asses?
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May 5, 2016 09:02
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