As regards flooding, the U.N. IPCC admits having “low confidence” in even the “sign” of any changes-in other words, it is just as likely that climate change is making floods less frequent and less severe. In a study on the climate impact on flooding for the USA and Europe, published in the Journal of Hydrology, Volume 552, September 2017, Pages 704-717, the study found: ‘The number of significant trends was about the number expected due to chance alone.’ ‘Changes in the frequency of major floods are dominated by multidecadal variability.’ ‘The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded (Hartmann et al., 2013) that globally there is no clear and widespread evidence of changes in flood magnitude or frequency in observed flood records.’ ‘The results of this study, for North America and Europe, provide a firmer foundation and support the conclusion of the IPCC that compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.’
Definitely worried about climate breakdown, but the true geopolitical consequences of it are very rarely put into the public consciousness, or how large scale civilisation like this is nothing but us trying to organize ourselves at a scale never seen before, and has become incredibly complex and fragile. We're already seeing huge populist unrest with an economic system that's catered towards the interests of the super wealthy, where our concept of money has been distorted by the financial institutions focusing on immaterial and unfathomable amounts of money based on speculation causing the value of normal people's wealth to decline even if they're earning the same as before, and many of our public services are really struggling to function under this weight and the over complexity of this new system we treat as absolute. The challenge only increases when you take into account all those intricate moving parts this system relies on, which will become more and more strained as crop failures, water shortages increase, as well as the very likely huge increase in people trying to flee homes in areas that used to be habitable enough. We need to end this era of neoliberalism where the focus has been on more and more perceived capital which end up in the hands of the super rich, and look at much bigger systematic changes of organising our societies around the health and wellbeing of the ordinary person, and shunning this norm of mass marketing encouraging people to buy more and more things they don't need. Degrowth may be a pipedream in many ways, but we could take many lessons from it.
It is very curious how things are going to unfold. There are a few (near) certainties however: in a few decades there will be a shortage of drinking water in souther Europe. So the migration flows we’re now seeing coming in from the Middle East and Northern Africa will be coming from our southern EU countries. Meanwhile, the north of Europe is heavily reliant on the import of energy, the costs of which will rise as a simple function of the supply and demand curve. As we’re past the peak in global oil production, we’re going to be extracting less oil while demand will continue to rise as it always has in the post World War II era. It may also get a lot more difficult to extract that oil and gas, but fortunately we can still opt for fracking in Europe. Some countries, including France, Belgium and Sweden, have invested heavily in nuclear power plants while other countries like Germany, the Netherlands and the UK will not be able to generate their own energy. Russia, historically our biggest energy supplier, we have antagonized, so we will be dependent on the US, international markets and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East that are at least as unethical actors as Russia is. Meanwhile, the masses will take to the streets in a false believe that the world can still be saved, demanding that we stop all extraction of oil and gas, while the reality is we can’t feed billions of people if we do so and on top of that people will die because they can’t get their medicines. Where does this lead? They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but in this case the intentions of the oil companies definitely weren’t good. I foresee scenarios not unlike the French Revolution where they bring out the guillotines for the oil execs, a deep and prolonged economic depression, and potentially the kind of mass destruction only seen in the world wars and by other peoples when us Europeans set foot on their shores.
We are already past the point of know return. We have already triggered multiple tipping points. There will be an ice free Arctic next summer, & the latent heat no longer using it's energy to melt the ice, will sent us well past the already 2.5c increase which we are already at when measuring co2, methane, nitrous oxide, water vapor & all the other trace greenhouse gases.
@@davidgifford8112 I guess I should be more specific. The peer reviewed literature states that there will be a blue ocean event, which means no ice in the Arctic Ocean in the summer of 24
Unfortunately you are correct. Any collapse in society would lead to the aerosol masking effect being removed which would increase temperature +2 degress inside a week. Then there's the 600 nuclear reactors worldwide.
Know return? Seriously? You may be dyslexic, but I typically don’t read comments by people who can’t even spell, cause nine times out of ten they lack any insight or understanding of the problem at hand I agree though with the notion that we’re probably at the point of no return. I think that if we want to save our civilization that someone should let some very dangerous viruses escape from some labs and if they kill the majority of people on earth, then we can use the nuclear power plants we have to extract co2 and methane from the air and we should start building huge mirror complexes that reflect sunlight back into space and all sorts of those initiatives. That’s our only chance collectively, although for you and me and most other people that will probably mean we will die (and nobody, including our leaders, wants that)
Yep, and this is only the beginning. Within a few years we will probably have our first ice free arctic summer, which will set into motion all sorts of not so joyous events such as the change in ocean flows which will introduce in Western Europe the kinds of winters they now have up in Canada. This while energy prices will continue to rise and protests of uninformed masses calling for us to stop the extraction from oil and gas will grow larger and larger. Brace yourself for very challenging times ahead
It's totally insane to allow 1.2C let alone 2.7C that we are heading towards by relying on hope and not science based policy. Climate intervention will be required to end the climate crisis caused destruction.
What would that intervention look like in your opinion? I’ve done my research and I’ve concluded that there is no way out of this that doesn’t involve billions of people dying prematurely
Tipping Points is the only way that these disaster scenarios can occur. We can see that despite 1+C warming since (the end of the little ice age... hmmm...) 1880 the obvious signs of disaster are not visible. When we talk about wildfires in Finland and that they havent happened in a long time we are ignoring that they have happened before. There are no climatic conditions today that have not occurred in the past 1,000 years and we did not hit any tipping points or go into any feedback loops. These tipping points are used by modelers and campaigners to create a scarier forecast.
More importantly we have hit the tipping point of creatimg mass psychosis and panic, justifying the ESG, and the big gravy train of cash and power for those at the top.
The ESG itself reveals this - why have a "environmental social score" - ie, shouldn't environment be a whole seperate score to social - by nature itself these two things are at odds with each other, so why roll them together ? Answer: because ESG is a communist driven idea nothing to do with the actual environment.
