Thread by @Sustainable2050

Reading The Uninhabitable Earth, by @dwallacewells. Not really looking forward to it, but sometimes you have to squarely look into the face of science, as he puts it. On what climate change means to the way we live on this planet.

When kids born this year turn 61, "without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought."

"Perhaps because of the exhausting false debate about whether climate change is 'real', many of us think of it as 'yes' or 'no'. But it gets worse over time as long as we continue to produce greenhouse gas."

"Rhetoric on the suffering that climate change will cause often fails us, because the only factually appropriate language is of a kind we've been trained, by a culture of sunny-side-up optimism, to dismiss as hyperbole."

"The haunting uncertainty of what will happen to Earth's climate emerges not from scientific ignorance but, overwhelmingly, from the open question how much more carbon we decide to emit."

"The world's natural wheat belt is moving polewards by about 250 km per decade, but the fertile lands are the ones we're already using, and the climate is changing much too fast to wait for the northern soil to catch up."

"Never in the earth's entire recorded history has there been warming at anything like this speed - by one estimate, around ten times faster than at any point in the last 66 million years."
Makes it hard to predict the speed of melting of the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica.

“American wildfires now burn twice as much land as they did as recently as 1970. By the time kids born this year turn 31, destruction from wildfires is expected to double again.”

... and wildfires cause more casualties than those we hear of in the news. “Each year, globally, between 260,000 and 600,000 people die from smoke from wildfires, and Canadian fires have been linked to spikes in hospitalizations as far away as the Eastern Seaboard of the US.”

“Rebuilding a devastated community for a decade in the face of spectacular storms that hit once every 1 or 2 decades, will be difficult, even for countries as rich as the US and regions as well-off as greater Houston.”

“In the Florida Keys, 150 miles (240 km) of road need to be raised to stay ahead of sea level, costing as much as $7 million each mile, or $1 billion in total. The county’s 2018 road budget was $25 million.”

"Billions of people don't have access to (enough) safe water for drinking and sanitation. This water crisis is soluble, at present. But the world's freshwater resources leave an awfully thin margin, and climate change will cut into it."

"By the time kids born today are in their 30s, a billion people in Asia could face water shortages due to climate change."

"In India, already, 600 million face high to extreme water stress, according to a 2018 govt report, and 200,000 people die each year from lacking or contaminated water. 11 years from now, India will have only half the water it needs (without strong new policies and measures)"

[Intermezzo: pondering all of this, “But the world has never been as well off as now”-stories sound a bit like an evening lecture in the theatre of the Titanic. Tremendous progress indeed, but we’re putting most of that at risk in the climate crisis. Time to change course.]

"@PacificInstitut's @PeterGleick keeps a list of all armed conflicts tied up with water issues, with over 200 of those since just 2010.

'There's a saying in the water community', he says, 'If climate change is a shark, the water resources are its teeth.' "

The world’s coral reefs, under siege by ocean warming and acidification, are not just intricate ecosystems and beautiful sights. “They support as much as a quarter of all marine life, and supply food and income for half a billion people.”

“Warmer waters can carry less oxygen. This effect of warming, in combination with pollution, has led to a quadrupling, globally, of the amount of ocean water with no oxygen at all. Dramatic declines in ocean oxygen played a role in many of the planet’s worst mass extinctions.”

Warming contributes to air pollution as well. “The hotter the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by the time kids born this year turn 30, Americans should suffer a 70% increase in days with unhealthy ozone smog, the @NCAR_Science has projected.”

“The footprint of every mosquito-borne illness is presently circumscribed, but those borders are disappearing rapidly, as the tropics expand - now by 50 km per decade. In Brazil, yellow fever left the Amazon in 2016, and by 2017 it had reached areas around São Paulo and Rio.”

" 'Natural' disasters, flooding, and public health crises will hurt the economy. By the time kids born this year turn 26, 14% of the real estate in Miami Beach could be flooded."

"Hsiang, Burke, and Miguel have identified an optimal annual average temperature for productivity: 13°C."
If that's indeed the case, many countries are already losing productivity due to warming (aside from other climate change impacts)."

"In 2018, one paper (by @NewClimateEcon) calculated the global cost of a rapid energy transition, by 2030, to be *negative* $26 trillion."

"Last year, Burke e.a. published a paper finding that global warming of 2.5-3°C would cut per capita economic output by 15-25%, by the time kids burn this year turn 80. And, unlike the Depression, not just temporarily."

The chapter on conflict and wars caused by climate change is a little complicated, but it is clear that an increase in natural disasters and drought, less food security, and rising tempers in hotter weather won’t make the world a more peaceful place.

“By the time kids born this year will turn 32, over 140 million people in just 3 world regions will be made climate migrants, World Bank projected last year, assuming current warming and emissions trends: 86 mln in sub-Saharan Africa, 40 mln in S-Asia, 17 mln in Latin-America.”

“One startling paper by Tamma Carleton (in @PNASNews) has suggested that global warming is already responsible for 59,000 suicides, many of them farmers, in India.”
[@dwallacewells, in The Uninhabitable Earth]

“Under pressure from the forces of climate denial, climate scientists worried so much about erring on the side of excessive alarm that they have erred, routinely, on the side of excessive caution - which is, effectively, the side of complacency.”

“Climate scientists pointed to a selection of social science suggesting that ‘hope’ can be more motivating than ‘fear’ - without acknowledging that alarm is not the same as fatalism, that hope does not demand silence about scarier challenges, and that fear can motivate too.”

Moving to Mars as plan B for the climate crisis "isn't rational. Climate change threatens the basis of life on this planet, but a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much closer to livability than anything we might be able to hack out of the dry red soil of Mars"

"We think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We're think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow - especially judged by how soon we need it."

A rare weak point on p. 184 of The Uninhabitable Earth, where @dwallacewells repeats the nonsense that Germany's carbon emissions are growing (they are not), "due to retiring nuclear power stations", as the legend goes.

"Living in the world of our screens could conceivably be a psychologically useful coping mechanism for living in a dramatically degraded natural world. A generation from now, god help us, tech addiction may even look 'adaptive'. "