There will be a substantial cost to humans and their way of life. Those least able to deal with life’s challenges on their own will be the most impacted. Many of them won’t survive. Food will be relatively more expensive, not less because of it. People who are old enough and smart enough to remember how it was will write immense volumes about what we should have done.
NYC is already underwater during storms. That will occur with increasing frequency.
And personally, I see no offsetting benefits from the acidification of the oceans.
From a global perspective (not just an American one), global warming is far more bad news than good. Hurray for Canada, but there are a lot more people living in a far smaller area in Bangladesh, and there’s really no upside in global warming for them. If you look at the distribution of people and land on earth, there’s a lot more in tropical/hot areas around the equator than closer to the poles (the Earth is round; surprise! surprise!)
So someone holding this idea that if there are loses due to global warming, there must be offsetting and equal gains from global warming makes me wonder how that someone managed to graduate from grade school.
NOW we’re talkin’. So the shrewd move is to marry a wallaby and move to Siberia or North Dakota. Is there really much of a difference? Which has more layman’s prestige, U of N. Dakota or U. of Irkutsk?
Useful lives of most fixed assets aren’t much more than 30 years or so anyway. If there is change at a low rate, the world can easily adapt to it. (Disclaimer: I’m not ceding the point that there will be any significant change, or that there has been. )
That’s what we’ve been trying to tell the state and federal transportation departments about our aging bridges and highways, but they always come up with another story.
I guess I’m missing some peoples’ points (too ignorant, apparently). Is the idea that humans are incapable of migrating inland away from rising sea levels and building the appropriate infrastructure over the course of 100 years? I assume the ones needing to move would go to areas that are generally inhabited now, and expand on the existing infrastructure, just like cities out here in the West grew. I’m still stuck on the idea that this will be impossible.
Not impossible. Just costly (in terms of money and lives). And that assumes that free migration is allowed by everyone everywhere. Where will the 150M extremely poor, barely subsisting now Bangladeshi go once half their country is flooded/flooding, @Bay? Mind taking in a few hundred thousand of them in your neighborhood?
I can’t speak to Bangladesh. I do know many of them migrating into India right now.
From a practical standpoint, what I envision is my children electing to buy their home inland from mine, due to an understanding that coastal lands will become unstable. And their children will do the same, if necessary. This does not strike me as costly in terms of money and lives. Just an elective choice. I may die with less money to pass along due to the devaluation of my home, but that is not important.
Well global warming contributed to the extent of the wildfires last summer, which
Im a little disturbed at how Americentric, the concerns seem to be.
Over 2,300 people died in India last month from the heat.
Should they just go buy air conditioners?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/01/asia/india-heat-wave-deaths/
Two billion people depend on Asias rivers, the rivera depend on glaciers, which are disappearing.
http://www.jonasbendiksen.com/National-Geographic/The-Big-Melt/2/
I would be interested to know what you propose for shipping after this inland move. In some apocalyptic scenario where coastal cities and plains really are inundated how would we navigate the lost underwater cities? Would we still have enough deep water ports that were safely accessible?
Personally, I am not looking forward to the arrival of bull sharks in northern waters and inland waterways. That would be my personal apocalyptic scenario. X_X
Water is a concern. I can only deal with one issue at a time (sorry, I’m slow). Is the idea that we will be unable to solve the water problem over the course of 100 years? We have the capability to desalinate now (Israel does it now I believe), but it is costly. We can choose to spend more money on water.
Your (and your children’s) 640 acre inland dream retirement ranch is going to cost a lot more surrounded by condos for all those Bangladeshi.
I’m ready! I just bought a ski vacation home in the mountains. If the alarmists are wrong, I keep enjoying powder. If they’re right, I’ll have a nice beach front property.
@gmtplus7:
A lot of scientists are irritated at the alarmists, because they are applying mathematical models that show the extremes of what Global Climate change could do. Al Gore is the subject of ire because in an “inconvenient truth” the visualizations he gave, the outcomes, were based on the worse case models, which makes great theater, but is also pretty stupid if you are trying to advocate for something.
Why? For the very reason that it gives the deniers something to pin on the idea of climate change, that an outrageous exaggeration in a particular model means the whole thing is untrue (it is very much the same stuff with evolution and the fundamentalist idiots denying it is real, when some part of evolution either doesn’t have a clear path, or if a hypothesis, theory is shown to be wrong, they jump on it, saying ‘see evolution is false, they just proved it wrong’ (which to their followers, who are not exactly well educated, especially in science, they think that is true).
The key factor here is science does not agree on timelines, it doesn’t agree on even how the effects will play out, which is not surprising, given that how climate will play out is a crapshoot, models are approximations at bests, with some idea of probability (for example, other than hardcore deniers, a large percentage of scientists agree that climate change is quite real and is more than likely man made in origin), what they don’t agree on is when and how, because there is no way to know. The thing about climate is it is a classic example of non linear dynamics, the “butterfly effect” used in describing this mathematical concept was taken from climate, small changes can have huge consequences, big ones may do relatively little. The deniers, especially the ones who are informed from certain sources, do things like laugh at a very cold winter like Boston had, or say when let’s say the drought in California happened and say “yuck, yuck, droughts been happening for long time, cold winters same thing”, which is true, but what they aren’t doing, in part I think to be able to put their head in the sand, is to look at global trends. Boston has a winter from hell, Alaska is ridiculously warm; Northern California is very, very warm, and has 7% of its normal snowfall, which Texas and the Midwest has a drought of classic proporitions. Places that 30 years ago had no problems with termites, because it was cold enough that termites have a hard time exisitng, suddenly are infested. Diseases, fed by insect migrations, spread to places the insects could never go to. The Northwest passage, that was once so icebound they made a big deal about a nuclear powered icebreaker getting through in the depths of summer, is now being talked about as a potential commercial waterway, and so forth.
As far as the cost of all this, as can be seen by Sandy, it doesn’t take much to make a disaster. A very strong hurricane season combined with huge crop losses from drought could cause a major recession in the US; a plague virus could come out of the shifting environment, including if permafrost that hasn’t melted for hundreds of thousands of years melts, a virus could be released we have no immunity to (want an idea? The Spanish Flu of 1918 was not a unique flu virus, but it was one because it hadn’t been around for in a long time, the young had no immunity to, it is why Spanish flu was weird, to tended to take people under 30 more than older people, which is rare).
As far as dealing with the consequences of global climate change, we barely have the will to deal with things now. Our power grid is a patchwork that is almost third world in many ways, our roads and bridges are falling apart, we have political debates over funding the highway trust fund and instead of answers, we have stopgap bills…so where is this response going to come from? What is really sobering is that the deniers are often the same people saying no to doing basic infrastructure work now, and they are going to drag their heels, like the Tobacco industry, to the death, and if the dire claims are true, or even the more moderate predictions of other models are true, it will be either even more crippling to fix it then, or impossible. The interesting part is there are a not small group of scientists who admit that global climate change is very real, but that there isn’t anything we can do to stop it, and they are saying we need to start acting to handle the effects, whether it is hardened infrastructure, sea walls, better investment in irrigation, being prepared for pandemics, food shortages, whatever, the problem being the deniers won’t even concede that.
Keep in mind that many inland cities get their fresh water from eastern slope snow melt and some, like Denver, even rely on piping water from western slope melt. Reduced snow pack due to climate shifts would impact inland cities (and agricultural centers) pretty significantly.
Desalination would not be a cost effective option for large inland cities which are separated from the coast by one or more mountain ranges. Most of the country of Israel is quite close to the sea as the eastern border, at its widest part, is only 71 miles from the sea.
@GMTplus7 - had you purchased a ski home near our local slopes you would not have gotten much use out of it other than a home base for mountain biking. They finally had to cancel and refund all ski school and the slopes only opened for brief days her and there. It was an unmitigated disaster.
A couple years ago I lived in a house that was built in 1909. When I lived with my parents our house was built in the 1950s. The Empire State Building was built in 1931. Perhaps you can defend your point.
If the oceans swallow up thousands of coastal cities with all their inherent toxins, refineries, chemical plants, etc., your desalination will also need to have a massive purification process as well. But, you will say that in 100 years we will have a way to do that cheaply and easily. Essentially, there is no problem, be it disease, logistics, or otherwise, that will not be cured with time so there is really no discussion here.
Part of my post didnt get finished.
What I wanted to mention that while 353 homes were destroyed during the Carlton Complex fire, FEMA refused individual aid to help the community rebuild, although they did grant funds for infastructure.
http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=10989
Are we fine with the extinction of thousands of species that depend on fresh water?
https://water.usgs.gov/nwsum/WSP2425/birdhabitat.html
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/science/new-estimates-for-extinctions-global-warming-could-cause.html?referrer=&_r=0
Ironic, that on an education website, some folks cling to their ignorance.
Nope, just asking basic questions that seem logical to me, that I don’t see having been refuted, other than in the usual broad, catastrophic terms. Meanwhile, I’ve had to endure being called dense, ignorant, incapable of understanding anything, clinging to my ignorance, a denier, and I forget what else. I’m taking that to mean that basic questioning is not allowed.