Drought like this, driven by global warming, was predicted in the book Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, published in 2007.
He read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree, with extensive references. Massive drought in the western U.S. was in his chapter for one degree of warming, right where we're at now.
Given what's in his later chapters, I'm not too happy about seeing him accurate so far.
It's been several years since I read it, but up through two degrees, things were a terrible mess but life goes on. By three degrees, the South American rainforest burns to the ground, and some major agricultural regions dry up because they depends on dry-season melt from glaciers that don't exist anymore. Hundreds of millions of refugees.
After that it got bad. I forget the details but by four degrees it looked to me like modern civilization would have a hard time staying viable, and by six it was hard to imagine our species surviving.
> by six it was hard to imagine our species surviving
I suspect before we got near extinction point there would be plans for the last few tens of thousands to survive underground/underwater/in domes/at high altitude/latitude etc. We have people talking seriously about a colony on another planet, after all.
All of those ideas are much more problematic than people acknowledge. I can only compare them to the badly conceived startup ideas that have gone under the minute easy money disappeared.
In terms of underground or dome living, that has been attempted at small scale and timeframe and with external support and failed. People talk about a lot of things, but ultimately only 12 humans have ever step foot on anything other than the Earth, for total of less than a week. Mars is 500 times further away than the moon. The underground stuff is most plausible and has lots of issues.
It is extremely frustrating to read stuff like this because it's easier and more likely to succeed to prevent global warming in the first place than it is to deal with the worst consequences.
It's entirely up to you. If you'd like a different name, let us know. If you're attached to this one, carry on.
The only thing we don't allow is trollish usernames, since they end up trolling every thread they post to. That includes special cases like using someone else's real name (we had a pseudo-Britney Spears the other day).
I can't reply to your first reply, but you completely misread me, "it's easier and more likely to succeed to prevent global warming in the first place than it is to deal with the worst consequences"
It is critical to human survival in the current and next generation to almost completely eliminate fossil fuel consumption, as well as mine and sequester vast amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. It will be easier and more likely to succeed to do that than create bio domes or extraterrestrial colonization.
To be fair how different is it from using a random name like 'growlist'? Since when does the handle someone uses to post correlate to the substance of said post?
Sounds like that would require significant planning and building. Who decides who “the last few tens of thousands” will be? What will everyone else think about that?
People talk seriously about a lot of things, doesn’t mean they are viable or realistic.
I'd bet those plans do exist somewhere. We had plans for pandemic defense too, but we didn't bother actually stockpiling masks and ventilators. At least for that we can afford to catch up.
The more intensive ideas like underground bases would have to be built well before modern civilization collapsed. They'd cost a lot, and we'll have less and less resources available as the damage worsens, so doing it in time might require more foresight than we've shown so far.
Just going to high altitude would be less protective but relatively cheap. But any small refuge would have to deal with a lot of well-armed people fighting over it, plus epidemics brought on by overcrowding and mass migration. It might be safer to be on Mars.
But sure, in theory a small population could eke out an existence in an enclosed base.
No. We didn't even have a plan for a pandemic, much less our extinction. There may have been some think tanks that have put some thought into it but I seriously doubt any plan was ever put into place.
EPICA core samples show fluctuations of 16 degrees over 100ky, but there is no evidence of ancient rainforests burning. I'm not denying anthropogenic climate change but it's difficult to take such predictions seriously.
And yes, I use throwaway accounts because the HN hivemind slaughters anyone that goes against the mainstream opinion. If you don't want to respond to me because of this, then don't. If moderators want to remove this comment, then by all means please do. But I don't know who it helps.
You needn't use your real name of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I don't think it's true that "the HN hivemind slaughters anyone that goes against the mainstream opinion", and I'm not seeing that in most of the comments you've posted.
I believe it's the range from hottest to coolest, over 100KY. Which of course is exactly like a 2-3C change over a couple of hundred years, so no big deal... right? /s
He read 3000 peer-reviewed papers on the effects of climate change and summarized them, one chapter per degree, with extensive references. Massive drought in the western U.S. was in his chapter for one degree of warming, right where we're at now.
Given what's in his later chapters, I'm not too happy about seeing him accurate so far.