It won’t be long before climate change starts causing mass migrations and the associated conflicts. With the current unstable world order we could really do without another massive problem.
I recall reading about a paper in SciAm or American Scientist a couple of decades ago, where they had trained a ML model to predict regional conflicts or civil wars. The main input was scarcity of food, mainly through price IIRC.
They trained it on historical data up to the 90s or so, and had it predict the "future" up to the time of the article. And as I recall it did very well. They even included some actual near-future predictions as well which also turned out pretty accurately as I recall.
Which I suppose isn't a huge surprise after all. People don't like to starve.
My memory isn't good enough to recall the name of the paper, however doing some searching I see the field has not stood still. Here[1] is an example of a more recent paper where they've included more variables. A quote from the conclusions:
The closest natural resource–society interaction to predict conflict risk according to our models was food production within its economic and demographic context, e.g., with GDP per capita, unemployment, infant mortality and youth bulge.
Iran specifically had infrastructure in place to help manage the water for Tehran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat). The Ayatollahs not only _destroyed_ that infrastructure and the system of humans needed to maintain it, but they also encouraged pumping of water from local aquifers, among other obviously stupid water management techniques: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/khomeini...
So, you are right, but in Iran's case, the current regime pretty much did the opposite of anything you should have done, while also chopping of their hands to do anything more.
This equals about 1.7 Million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per day, which is an increase of 120% since year 2000 and corresponds to about 2% of the global CO2 emissions.
No nation on earth like Iran, save perhaps for China and Norway, is in such a unique position of power, both economically, socially, and with the engineering knowhow) and political ability to actually do something to prevent climate damage. Instead they are making the situation more difficult.
Climate change is actually a strong reason for better management. The same is true everywhere. More floods? You need to provide better drainage. Drier climate risking more forest fires? You need to manage forests better.
In many cases governments are cutting back on spending on dealing with these sorts of problems because they can avoid blame by saying it is a result of climate change and few people ask why they did not act to mitigate the effects.
I agree with those causes. But climate change is also a cause. It magnifies the consequences of mismanagement, reducing the luxury incompetence margin that an equally incompetent theocrat/autocrat could have relied on 30 years ago.
As climate change gets worse in the future, the margin for error will keep shrinking. More countries will start to experience similar problems. Only the most competent will survive, but eventually regional instability will attack the foundations of that state capacity as a contagion byproduct, making it harder to be the competent outlier.
This all becomes a push driver for migration towards the colder north, as the equator becomes progressively destabilized and uninhabitable. Not only water shortages in dry climates but wet-bulb temperatures in temperate climates that make existing outdoors dangerous for periods of the year.
Yes I agree that climate change is a huge problem but it doesn’t release the leaders of a country of their responsibility to mitigate the effects wherever possible.
This argument is particularly pernicious as it can, in it's general form, always deflect from the issues of climate change and always focus on blaming local governments.
This is what will happen in the future btw - climate change will apply pressure via famine and droughts, but the fallout will always be attributed to the failure of local governments to correctly "manage the change".
We'll go from "climate change is a hoax" to "climate change is just a given and it's your duty to manage it".
while the drought was the last straw, i think the mismanagement of their water resources by the regime (for embezzlement of public funds, direct or indirect, into insider pockets etc) is the true root cause. There's "enough" water to last thru the current drought, if it was better utilized in the past.
They have been talking about climate change for years (ozone layer - get rid of your old fridge). And the media really does highlight weather events in other countries. I think the idea is one corporations can get behind - change, like war, is good for business.
As others have said, it's already happening, and it'll only get worse. But since it's not western countries it's not highlighted much.
But when the AMOC stops and western Europe's winters get longer there will be huge changes too. If I recall correctly, the AMOC stopping is a trigger for an ice age, that is, ice sheets / the north pole going down way south. This would make anything above France uninhabitable, if not wiped off the map entirely.
But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters, so likely in our lifetime it'd mainly mean we change how we build houses and buildings. But long term, people would move.
I'm not sure I get why everything above France would be rendered uninhabitable? The coldest place inhabited by humans year round is Oymyakon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon
Temperatures are generally above 0°C in summer, -50 approximately in winter.
Will an Ice Age actually be worse than that?
I would expect somewhat better, although maybe not much. I might expect Denmark and Southern Parts of Sweden and England to reach 10 degrees in Summer, and -20 in Winter. But that is of course just a guess on my part so I am certainly willing to hear that I have guessed wrong.
Yeah but I would think that is still survivable, unless it comes like that one dumb movie in which the ice age is a super quick one and everything happens in the space of 24 hours approximately.
Of course I'm thinking survivable with the magic of "technology" and maybe I'm adding wishful thinking into this science fiction scenario here, but I'm not sure if the result of the new Ice Age will be the same as the last one.
>>But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters
I was in Switzerland last summer, in Glarus Alps, and walking around I found a sign that basically said that the reason why all the mountains around it were "smooth" in appearance is because during last ice age all of it was covered in ice, and the rock got smooth as the ice started to shift and slide over the course of hundreds of years. It said that only the highest peaks would be free of ice, and even then just barely - and all of those were above 2000m above(current) sea level. It's crazy to think that an ice age doesn't just mean "it's very cold" - it means there is enough ice to bury europe under 2 kilometers of ice. That's not survivable in any way, we would just have to move south somewhere - but like you said, even if it happens again it will take thousands of years to get to that point.
Not sure it would take that long - the Younger Dryas only lasted 1,200 years and resulted in fairly significant glaciation here in Scotland - although nothing like the depth of ice of the full ice age.
Politicians look at best at next term, CEOs look at next quarter. Climate changes took decades to manifest effects. And those 2 groups produce most news "worthy" messages. Journalism is quite close to being dead (with local reporting already being buried), as rephrasing PR statements is cheapest and fastest way to produce "content". Who is supposed to nudge public discourse in that direction, "influencers"?
Not sure, but I have heard that more than plenty in public discourse (NL / W-Eur) and even the repeated blatant lies about the 2015 wave of migration to be due to climate change.
It is difficult to have a reasonable discourse when starting with such overkill positions. The topic is way too nuanced. The civil war in Syria had many reasons, political, economic, religious, but also environmental.
Climate change massively increases the risk on water supply and harvesting yields, and if that risk manifests in a situation where people are already unhappy due to other reasons, it can be the trigger for large-scale reactions.
With all that having many factors, you'll rarely be able to point to one thing as "the" cause. That does not make it less relevant, though.
Are you writing from e.g. 2008? In 2010 Russian forest fires caused grain shortages and the price to go up, creating the Arab Spring and including the start of the Syrian civil war. That caused a wave of refugees that peaked in 2015. That caused the rise of right wing racist populism in Europe...
In that instance climate change (probably?) played a role, but that is unfortunately not obvious enough to reach the people who are not already concerned about climate change. Millions migrating from India somewhere else because there is no water or wet bulb temperatures become deadly hopefully would cause more people to notice.
I always considered the conflict between India and China a bit silly, considering the size of those countries compared to tiny disputed territories. But the are totally are going to war over Himalayas water resources, aren't they?
Maybe they'll finally find the nuclear device lost on Nanda Devi, that has the potential to - *checks notes* - poison North India (via the glacier that feeds the Ganges).
What's your opinion on a sudden flooding that happened some years ago in that region. I am an Indian so for some days our news were showing only that flooding news. It was sudden and super mssive and some news people suspected that same device or maybe one of the devices being accidentally going off. It was all speculation but the sudden and massive flooding was also unexplained to some extent. There has been several massive flooding in the region recently but all are due to extensive rain and cloud bursts. But one was unexplained in my untrained opinion. I remember it was some huge construction site. Wha they were building now I have forgotten that
The high-power unit had 300 grams of Pu-238 in 1965. Given its 87.7 years half-life, only 187g of Pu-238 remaining. It's very hard to do much damage with this amount of radioactive material.
U-234 is ~3000x less radioactive than Pu-238, so having ~120g of U-234 is negligible.
I really fail to see a problem with these tiny amounts of non-brittle material embedded into a solid case. It's still very dangerous, but it's locally dangerous (meters away), not at the scale of whole countries.
Even in optimistic scenarios we won’t see this actual global temperature decrease again in our lifetimes. We can only hope to minimize the impact so that the curve softens and maybe in a century starts to go down.
I visited Greenland for 6 weeks in 1998 (youth expedition with BSES) and it's surprisingly green in the summer, with thick foliage at the lower altitudes. And the midges, oh my! They sure had a taste for visitors.
What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system. More pertinently, today we also have the intellectual tools to come with the right solutions for a good part of this problem. Solutions most likely won't require dramatic breakthroughs in fundamental science; probably just more clever engineering and better social and political coordination.
The real problem is that this is happening in one of the most socio-economically underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite isolated centers of modest excellence, India still hasn't fully absorbed the implications of the scientific revolution at a popular, cultural level. A good part of the population are still caught up in pre-modern modes of thinking. Rather than addressing this gap, the political establishment is only deepening an irrational and romantic belief in the worth of India's classical worldviews to continue their hold on power.
More than climate change, I dread the self-inflicted servitude to infantile notions that is holding India hostage. It's not really difficult to emerge out of this - we just need to shed our intellectual timidity and face reality as it is.
> What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system.
Speak for yourself. I have never forgotten that Earth is more inhabitable than Mars or Jupiter
Nobody wants to sacrifice their own economic growth / position.
But also, would it actually make a difference at this point? That is, can it be stopped, or have we passed the point of no return? I believe the latter.
India produces abundance of food and got vast fertile lands. Modern farming is good but its gonna wipe out tens of millions of jobs if its done in no time.
There are also pockets of India that are more advanced than many places elsewhere. I have a lot of love for Kerala. It doesn't have too many jobs, but it has a ton of heart and forward thinking people (which is why industrialists are scared of it).
Question is, is this human-caused change or the usual natural climate shift that Earth goes through every few thousand centuries or millennia? And is there anything humans should do about it, other than adapting to it?
Have you seen literally any chart covering just the past one to two hundred years, or even just the past 50-70 years that covers emissions, population, industrial scale, environmental destruction, weather patterns, etc.? They would answer your question.
There is no end to the concrete evidence of the negative effect of humans towards the climate.
Here's something simple. Deforestation is directly caused by humans. (Note that wildfires "deforest" but without human intervention, they grow back and thus reforest.). So then ask yourself, what is the role of forests and jungles within the environment and climate?
Look at this article: https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation. What began 10,000 years ago, 200 years ago, and 100 years ago? This couldn't possibly be major changes in human activity could it?
This isn't actually the question though, and have you done any research yourself or are you Just Asking Questions [1]?
tl;dr we have extensive historical records of past weather progression through e.g. ice cores and the recent weather and climate changes are unheard of outside of cataclysmic events like meteor strikes or volcano eruptions, with a very close correlation with emissions. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_last....
As for whether we can do anything about it, personally I don't think so, we passed the point of no return... probably decades ago, even if emissions suddenly stopped then, the wheels were set in motion, for example through the melting of permafrost causing ???? amounts of sequestered plant matter to start decomposing and releasing methane and the like.
The human impact is unquestionable. Is it part of a bigger cycle? maybe, but I feel like people use that as a cope to not do anything. "it doesn't exist", "it exist but it's not bad", "it's bad but it's not our fault", &c.
A third of humans are fed as a result of the melt of the Himalayan ice sheet. No ice sheet, no runoff, no flooding the rice paddy's, no rice…. famine.
Are you saying we need global warming for the melt to increase?
Global warming is the likely reason why there is nothing to melt in the first place.
It won’t be long before climate change starts causing mass migrations and the associated conflicts. With the current unstable world order we could really do without another massive problem.
Arguably Iran is seeing turmoil, at least partially, due to drought.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/17/nx-s1-5500318/iranian-officia...
I recall reading about a paper in SciAm or American Scientist a couple of decades ago, where they had trained a ML model to predict regional conflicts or civil wars. The main input was scarcity of food, mainly through price IIRC.
They trained it on historical data up to the 90s or so, and had it predict the "future" up to the time of the article. And as I recall it did very well. They even included some actual near-future predictions as well which also turned out pretty accurately as I recall.
Which I suppose isn't a huge surprise after all. People don't like to starve.
Link?
My memory isn't good enough to recall the name of the paper, however doing some searching I see the field has not stood still. Here[1] is an example of a more recent paper where they've included more variables. A quote from the conclusions:
The closest natural resource–society interaction to predict conflict risk according to our models was food production within its economic and demographic context, e.g., with GDP per capita, unemployment, infant mortality and youth bulge.
[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6574 Revisiting the Contested Role of Natural Resources in Violent Conflict Risk through Machine Learning (Open Access)
https://homerdixon.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Environmen...
But the drought was not caused by climate change, but by mismanagement ie complete neglect of the problem.
Is not climate change mismanagement or complete neglect of the problem?
Iran specifically had infrastructure in place to help manage the water for Tehran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat). The Ayatollahs not only _destroyed_ that infrastructure and the system of humans needed to maintain it, but they also encouraged pumping of water from local aquifers, among other obviously stupid water management techniques: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/khomeini...
So, you are right, but in Iran's case, the current regime pretty much did the opposite of anything you should have done, while also chopping of their hands to do anything more.
Absolutely.
But the problems are on different time scales and spheres of influence.
Iran can’t do anything on their own against climate change. But they can decide to fund water projects instead of bombs.
It’s a bit like saying: I went to the beach for a day and got sunburned. It’s climate change!
Yes the sun got more intense because of climate change (maybe) but why didn’t you buy an umbrella or sun screen?
Over 50% of their economy is petroleum, managed by the Ministry of Petroleum government body.
They pump over 4 Million barrels per day (https://ycharts.com/indicators/iran_crude_oil_production).
This equals about 1.7 Million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per day, which is an increase of 120% since year 2000 and corresponds to about 2% of the global CO2 emissions.
No nation on earth like Iran, save perhaps for China and Norway, is in such a unique position of power, both economically, socially, and with the engineering knowhow) and political ability to actually do something to prevent climate damage. Instead they are making the situation more difficult.
Yes I agree. Still it isn’t either or. You can do both if you’re sensible.
One will help in the mid-term and the other in the long-term.
> But they can decide to fund water projects instead of bombs.
And become again a client state of the West, you forgot that part.
Oh yes sorry. I forgot that it’s much better to let your people starve then to be a client state of the West. I think you have your trade-offs right.
People in western client states still starve just with less of their countries resources.
> And become again a client state of the West, you forgot that part.
That matters if you live in a functioning democracy.
If you are being exploited and oppressed by your own ruling class rather than a foreign one it makes little difference. You might even be better off.
Climate change is actually a strong reason for better management. The same is true everywhere. More floods? You need to provide better drainage. Drier climate risking more forest fires? You need to manage forests better.
In many cases governments are cutting back on spending on dealing with these sorts of problems because they can avoid blame by saying it is a result of climate change and few people ask why they did not act to mitigate the effects.
Monocausality is quite the assertion.
First of all, usually "and" denotes at least two separate things.
Second mismanagement is a super broad term showing failure on all levels of the state.
It’s definitely not monocausal but the effect many years of utter betrayal of their own people.
I agree with those causes. But climate change is also a cause. It magnifies the consequences of mismanagement, reducing the luxury incompetence margin that an equally incompetent theocrat/autocrat could have relied on 30 years ago.
As climate change gets worse in the future, the margin for error will keep shrinking. More countries will start to experience similar problems. Only the most competent will survive, but eventually regional instability will attack the foundations of that state capacity as a contagion byproduct, making it harder to be the competent outlier.
This all becomes a push driver for migration towards the colder north, as the equator becomes progressively destabilized and uninhabitable. Not only water shortages in dry climates but wet-bulb temperatures in temperate climates that make existing outdoors dangerous for periods of the year.
Yes I agree that climate change is a huge problem but it doesn’t release the leaders of a country of their responsibility to mitigate the effects wherever possible.
This argument is particularly pernicious as it can, in it's general form, always deflect from the issues of climate change and always focus on blaming local governments.
This is what will happen in the future btw - climate change will apply pressure via famine and droughts, but the fallout will always be attributed to the failure of local governments to correctly "manage the change".
We'll go from "climate change is a hoax" to "climate change is just a given and it's your duty to manage it".
I don’t man. It sounds as if you don’t want to answer a simple question and instead like to wander into theoretical thought experiments.
The case here is very simple: invest in infrastructure for your people or invest in bombs to attack foreign states.
And you’re saying it’s climate change? I’d like to live in your world.
Arguably the climate change we see today (and will see in the future) is also largely caused by mismanagement and complete neglect of the problem.
while the drought was the last straw, i think the mismanagement of their water resources by the regime (for embezzlement of public funds, direct or indirect, into insider pockets etc) is the true root cause. There's "enough" water to last thru the current drought, if it was better utilized in the past.
That, plus decades of mismanagement and corruption...
They have been talking about climate change for years (ozone layer - get rid of your old fridge). And the media really does highlight weather events in other countries. I think the idea is one corporations can get behind - change, like war, is good for business.
Some say it was a factor in Syria as well:
https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...
As others have said, it's already happening, and it'll only get worse. But since it's not western countries it's not highlighted much.
But when the AMOC stops and western Europe's winters get longer there will be huge changes too. If I recall correctly, the AMOC stopping is a trigger for an ice age, that is, ice sheets / the north pole going down way south. This would make anything above France uninhabitable, if not wiped off the map entirely.
But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters, so likely in our lifetime it'd mainly mean we change how we build houses and buildings. But long term, people would move.
I'm not sure I get why everything above France would be rendered uninhabitable? The coldest place inhabited by humans year round is Oymyakon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon
Temperatures are generally above 0°C in summer, -50 approximately in winter.
Will an Ice Age actually be worse than that?
I would expect somewhat better, although maybe not much. I might expect Denmark and Southern Parts of Sweden and England to reach 10 degrees in Summer, and -20 in Winter. But that is of course just a guess on my part so I am certainly willing to hear that I have guessed wrong.
Last ice age had a km thick ice sheet going down to Berlin.
Yeah but I would think that is still survivable, unless it comes like that one dumb movie in which the ice age is a super quick one and everything happens in the space of 24 hours approximately.
Of course I'm thinking survivable with the magic of "technology" and maybe I'm adding wishful thinking into this science fiction scenario here, but I'm not sure if the result of the new Ice Age will be the same as the last one.
So did global temperature was higher during last ice age? Or is that only two related to Europe and more local dynamics?
>>But it'd be a steady process of increasingly cold winters
I was in Switzerland last summer, in Glarus Alps, and walking around I found a sign that basically said that the reason why all the mountains around it were "smooth" in appearance is because during last ice age all of it was covered in ice, and the rock got smooth as the ice started to shift and slide over the course of hundreds of years. It said that only the highest peaks would be free of ice, and even then just barely - and all of those were above 2000m above(current) sea level. It's crazy to think that an ice age doesn't just mean "it's very cold" - it means there is enough ice to bury europe under 2 kilometers of ice. That's not survivable in any way, we would just have to move south somewhere - but like you said, even if it happens again it will take thousands of years to get to that point.
Not sure it would take that long - the Younger Dryas only lasted 1,200 years and resulted in fairly significant glaciation here in Scotland - although nothing like the depth of ice of the full ice age.
I am really puzzled that this topic is not present in the public discourse.
Politicians look at best at next term, CEOs look at next quarter. Climate changes took decades to manifest effects. And those 2 groups produce most news "worthy" messages. Journalism is quite close to being dead (with local reporting already being buried), as rephrasing PR statements is cheapest and fastest way to produce "content". Who is supposed to nudge public discourse in that direction, "influencers"?
I'm puzzled why you think it isn't.
Not sure, but I have heard that more than plenty in public discourse (NL / W-Eur) and even the repeated blatant lies about the 2015 wave of migration to be due to climate change.
Climate change was likely a factor in 2015.
https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...
> even the repeated blatant lies
It is difficult to have a reasonable discourse when starting with such overkill positions. The topic is way too nuanced. The civil war in Syria had many reasons, political, economic, religious, but also environmental.
Climate change massively increases the risk on water supply and harvesting yields, and if that risk manifests in a situation where people are already unhappy due to other reasons, it can be the trigger for large-scale reactions.
With all that having many factors, you'll rarely be able to point to one thing as "the" cause. That does not make it less relevant, though.
Are you writing from e.g. 2008? In 2010 Russian forest fires caused grain shortages and the price to go up, creating the Arab Spring and including the start of the Syrian civil war. That caused a wave of refugees that peaked in 2015. That caused the rise of right wing racist populism in Europe...
In that instance climate change (probably?) played a role, but that is unfortunately not obvious enough to reach the people who are not already concerned about climate change. Millions migrating from India somewhere else because there is no water or wet bulb temperatures become deadly hopefully would cause more people to notice.
That will be the case, ie. cognitive dissonance / denial, for many future climate change caused incidents as well.
This kind of reasoning: "California wildfires and tornadoes have always been part of the US weather patterns"
Whilst ignoring the increasing frequency and magnitude / intensity.
I always considered the conflict between India and China a bit silly, considering the size of those countries compared to tiny disputed territories. But the are totally are going to war over Himalayas water resources, aren't they?
Maybe they'll finally find the nuclear device lost on Nanda Devi, that has the potential to - *checks notes* - poison North India (via the glacier that feeds the Ganges).
What's your opinion on a sudden flooding that happened some years ago in that region. I am an Indian so for some days our news were showing only that flooding news. It was sudden and super mssive and some news people suspected that same device or maybe one of the devices being accidentally going off. It was all speculation but the sudden and massive flooding was also unexplained to some extent. There has been several massive flooding in the region recently but all are due to extensive rain and cloud bursts. But one was unexplained in my untrained opinion. I remember it was some huge construction site. Wha they were building now I have forgotten that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanda_Devi_Plutonium_Mission
> that (checks notes) has the potential to poison most of North India.
How large is the amount of plutonium in there? I highly doubt that it has the claimed potential.
I found the specs for the fuel source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/SNAP-19C_Moun...
The high-power unit had 300 grams of Pu-238 in 1965. Given its 87.7 years half-life, only 187g of Pu-238 remaining. It's very hard to do much damage with this amount of radioactive material.
It decays to uranium-234 though, which still isn't exactly nice. It'll be a long time before it's a block of inert lead.
U-234 is ~3000x less radioactive than Pu-238, so having ~120g of U-234 is negligible.
I really fail to see a problem with these tiny amounts of non-brittle material embedded into a solid case. It's still very dangerous, but it's locally dangerous (meters away), not at the scale of whole countries.
Around three pounds, and something like 40% of it has already decayed away since this happened in the 60s.
What notes did you check?
Even in optimistic scenarios we won’t see this actual global temperature decrease again in our lifetimes. We can only hope to minimize the impact so that the curve softens and maybe in a century starts to go down.
Hey, not so fast, we might fuck up the AMOC and reduce western europe temps by up to 15c!
On the bright side, at least the ski areas here in Scotland would have reliable snow!
If you know languages, the 'phrase Himalayas bare and rocky' is particularly sad, because himālaya/हिमालय in Sanskrit literally means 'house of snow'.
I’m disappointed at the lack of before/after photos in that article. My ape brain would love them.
On the flipside, it might make greenland actually green.
I visited Greenland for 6 weeks in 1998 (youth expedition with BSES) and it's surprisingly green in the summer, with thick foliage at the lower altitudes. And the midges, oh my! They sure had a taste for visitors.
Climate change is obviously the cause and this is not good for the environment.
But on the flip side, does this mean it's never been easier to climb the Himalayan mountains?
What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system. More pertinently, today we also have the intellectual tools to come with the right solutions for a good part of this problem. Solutions most likely won't require dramatic breakthroughs in fundamental science; probably just more clever engineering and better social and political coordination.
The real problem is that this is happening in one of the most socio-economically underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite isolated centers of modest excellence, India still hasn't fully absorbed the implications of the scientific revolution at a popular, cultural level. A good part of the population are still caught up in pre-modern modes of thinking. Rather than addressing this gap, the political establishment is only deepening an irrational and romantic belief in the worth of India's classical worldviews to continue their hold on power.
More than climate change, I dread the self-inflicted servitude to infantile notions that is holding India hostage. It's not really difficult to emerge out of this - we just need to shed our intellectual timidity and face reality as it is.
> What we tend to forget is that even with the catastrophic effects of climate change, the Earth is still vastly more inhabitable than other planets in the solar system.
Speak for yourself. I have never forgotten that Earth is more inhabitable than Mars or Jupiter
We already have all the tools needed to stop climate change. The current problem is that nobody wants to pay for it.
Nobody wants to sacrifice their own economic growth / position.
But also, would it actually make a difference at this point? That is, can it be stopped, or have we passed the point of no return? I believe the latter.
More and faster warming is always worse than less and slower warming, so every reduction in CO2 helps.
India produces abundance of food and got vast fertile lands. Modern farming is good but its gonna wipe out tens of millions of jobs if its done in no time.
I don't know what you are on about. You have pivoted to politics needlessly.
Current administration is investing in renewable energy. You are making them seem climate change deniers.
Keep your politics to reddit.
I don't know what you are on about.
Your current administation stopped large offshore wind projects and uses the slogan "drill baby drill".
We are talking about India here...
There are also pockets of India that are more advanced than many places elsewhere. I have a lot of love for Kerala. It doesn't have too many jobs, but it has a ton of heart and forward thinking people (which is why industrialists are scared of it).
> but it has a ton of heart and forward thinking people (which is why industrialists are scared of it).
You can check the name of the party in power to check what industrialists are scared of.
Industrialists are scared of communists and unions, for good reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokku_kooli
That's not communism, nor a union. That's just racketeering.
"cLiMaTE cHaNgE" ("man-made")
Al Gore would be proud of you guys.
Question is, is this human-caused change or the usual natural climate shift that Earth goes through every few thousand centuries or millennia? And is there anything humans should do about it, other than adapting to it?
Have you seen literally any chart covering just the past one to two hundred years, or even just the past 50-70 years that covers emissions, population, industrial scale, environmental destruction, weather patterns, etc.? They would answer your question.
There is no end to the concrete evidence of the negative effect of humans towards the climate.
Here's something simple. Deforestation is directly caused by humans. (Note that wildfires "deforest" but without human intervention, they grow back and thus reforest.). So then ask yourself, what is the role of forests and jungles within the environment and climate?
Look at this article: https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation. What began 10,000 years ago, 200 years ago, and 100 years ago? This couldn't possibly be major changes in human activity could it?
This isn't actually the question though, and have you done any research yourself or are you Just Asking Questions [1]?
tl;dr we have extensive historical records of past weather progression through e.g. ice cores and the recent weather and climate changes are unheard of outside of cataclysmic events like meteor strikes or volcano eruptions, with a very close correlation with emissions. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_record_of_the_last....
As for whether we can do anything about it, personally I don't think so, we passed the point of no return... probably decades ago, even if emissions suddenly stopped then, the wheels were set in motion, for example through the melting of permafrost causing ???? amounts of sequestered plant matter to start decomposing and releasing methane and the like.
The human impact is unquestionable. Is it part of a bigger cycle? maybe, but I feel like people use that as a cope to not do anything. "it doesn't exist", "it exist but it's not bad", "it's bad but it's not our fault", &c.
https://xkcd.com/1732/