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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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