What about all the people who say the world will be greener and therefore there will be more plants and food? It's almost like they just made that up to suit their worldview?
The world will become unevenly greener. Population density and recent population rise is inversely correlated with places that will get greener.
Polar and Continental regions will get greener at the expense of the tropical and equatorial regions.
Mass migration is the inevitable conclusion of uneven impacts of climate change. Ie. In 2026, Political climate and physical climate are moving in mutually incompatible directions.
The greening is uneven. Canada/Siberia are getting warmer so plants have longer growing seasons there. But it's getting browner in other areas because of increased drought and heat. Overall the predictions are for lower global food production on net.
The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
Where you go wrong is in misrepresenting the argument as “more plants and food”. That’s a straw man. Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food, but that doesn’t mean that existing patterns of food production will exist unchanged, or that adaptation won’t be required. But we’re also talking about a 100+ year change timeline. People who tell you that this year’s weather are indicative of urgent, rapid change are exaggerating.
You seem to be willing to accept wild extrapolations of doom without evidence, while rejecting scientifically well-founded statements of fact, so I’d challenge you to examine your priors.
> The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
However it's important to remember that world isn't a high school physics experiment, and you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2:
| Climate change can prolong the plant growing season and expand the areas suitable for crop planting, as well as promote crop photosynthesis thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, an excessive carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere may lead to unbalanced nutrient absorption in crops and hinder photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration, thus affecting crop yields. Irregular precipitation patterns and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods can lead to hypoxia and nutrient loss in the plant roots. An increase in the frequency of extreme weather events directly damages plants and expands the range of diseases and pests. In addition, climate change will also affect soil moisture content, temperature, microbial activity, nutrient cycling, and quality, thus affecting plant growth.
> Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food
That does not seem to be what agricultural researchers believe:
| In wheat a mean daily temperature of 35°C caused total failure of the plant, while exposure to short episodes (2–5 days) of HS (>24°C) at the reproductive stage (start of flowering) resulted in substantial damage to floret fertility leading to an estimated 6.0 ± 2.9% loss in global yield with each degree-Celsius (°C) increase in temperature
| Although it might be argued that the ‘fertilization effect’ of increasing CO2 concentration may benefit crop biomass thus raising the possibility of an increased food production, emerging evidence has demonstrated a reduction in crop yield if increased CO2 is combined with high temperature and/or water scarcity, making a net increase in crop productivity unlikely
| When the combination of drought and heatwave is considered, production losses considering cereals including wheat (−11.3%), barley (−12.1%) and maize (−12.5%), and for non-cereals: oil crops (−8.4%), olives (−6.2%), vegetables (−3.5%), roots and tubers (−4.5%), sugar beet (−8.8%), among others
You spent a lot of words arguing with me about things I didn't say.
> you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2
...I never said you could? I explicitly said that there will be changes that require adaptation.
> Global above ground biomass is projected to decline by 4 to 16% under a 2 °C increase in climate warming
That paper is talking about a net reduction in biomass due to projected losses in places with temperature increases exceeding 10 degrees C. It's not just a model, it's science fiction -- it all hinges on the assumptions one makes regarding the proliferation of deserts, which is something we cannot currently predict.
Use the IPCC report instead of cherry-picking studies that support your opinions, and it's obvious that you're wrong. From AR6 Chapter 2, section 2.3.4.3.3 ("Global Greening and Browning") [1]:
> AR5 WGII briefly discussed changes in global vegetation greenness derived from satellite proxies for photosynthetic activity. Observed trends varied in their strength and consistency, and AR5 thus made no confidence statement on observed changes. SRCCL subsequently concluded that greening had increased globally over the past 2–3 decades (high confidence).
> Vegetation index data derived from AVHRR and MODIS depicts increases in aspects of vegetation greenness (i.e., green leaf area and/or mass) over the past four decades (Piao et al., 2020). NDVI increased globally from the early 1980s through the early 2010s (Liu et al., 2015c). Pan et al. (2018a) found NDVI increases over about 70% of the Earth’s vegetated surface through 2013, and Osborne et al. (2018) noted strong upward changes in NDVI in the circumpolar Arctic through 2016. Globally integrated Leaf Area Index (LAI) also rose from the early 1980s through at least the early 2010s (Zhu et al., 2016; Forzieri et al., 2017; Jiang et al., 2017; Xiao et al., 2017) and probably through near-present; for example, Chen et al. (2019) documented an LAI increase over one-third of the global vegetated area from 2000–2017. Although less frequently analysed for temporal trends, Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FAPAR) likewise increased over many global land areas (particularly China, India, and Eastern Europe) in the past two decades (Figure 2.33) (Forkel et al., 2014; Gobron, 2018; Keenan & Riley, 2018). There are also documented changes in specific vegetation types, such as a 7% rise in global tree cover for 1982–2016 (Song et al., 2018) and an expansion of shrub extent in the Arctic tundra over 1982–2017 (Myers-Smith et al., 2020). The increased greening is largely consistent with CO2 fertilization at the global scale, with other changes being noteworthy at the regional level (Piao et al., 2020).
> In summary, there is high confidence that vegetation greenness (i.e., green leaf area and/or mass) has increased globally since the early 1980s. However, there is low confidence in the magnitude of this increase owing to the large range in available estimates.
Plant response to CO2 is not only logical, it's actually happening, and well-documented by a number of different lines of evidence. The only thing you can say in response is that, in the distant future, losses due to desertification might offset this growth. That's fine, it's an argument, but it's basically fortune telling given the scale of the system and the distance into the future. We don't even have the ability to quantify the differences we've observed since the 80s!
> you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2
>> I never said you could?
I took the fact that you explicitly mentioned "high-CO2 environment" and claimed there was no room for argument over the "fact"s as an indication that you were trying to separate out the impact of CO2 from other factors caused by climate change such as heat stress and drought. If that wasn't the case then apologies for misunderstanding.
> That paper is talking about a net reduction in biomass due to projected losses in places with temperature increases exceeding 10 degrees C.
The abstract says:
| with great biomass reductions in regions where mean annual temperatures exceeded 10 °C
Unless the abstract is especially badly written that suggests that it's not 10°C _change_ but 2°C change leading to biomass loss in areas that are already at 10°C on average.
> IPCC report
Thanks, that's a useful reference! Do you have a link to the final report? That one seems to be a draft and I didn't find the right published version (but there are many so I'm sure I'm missing it).
I note the paragraph you quoted concludes:
> The increased greening is largely consistent with CO2 fertilization at the global scale, with other changes being noteworthy at the regional level (Piao et al., 2020); examples include agricultural intensification in China and India (Chen et al., 2019; Gao et al., 2019) and temperature increases in the northern high latitudes (Kong et al., 2017; Keenan and Riley, 2018) and in other areas such as the Loess Plateau in central China (Wang et al., 2018). Notably, some areas (such as parts of Amazonia, central Asia, and the Congo basin) have experienced browning (i.e., decreases in green leaf area and/or mass) (Anderson et al., 2019; Gottschalk et al., 2016; Hoogakker et al., 2015). Because rates of browning have exceeded rates of greening in some regions since the late 1990s, the increase in global greening has been somewhat slower in the last two decades
So it sounds like a combination of the CO2 increases up to about the year 2000, along with agricultural intensification and various other factors have indeed increased the amount of plant cover, but we are already seeing changes to that picture with further rises to CO2 levels.
> You spent a lot of words arguing with me about things I didn't say.
Well you started with
> The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
And my central point is that the model you're implying there is one in which there's a monotonic relationship between CO2 levels and plant growth. However in reality things are clearly more complex than that, and there is indeed legitimate argument over what factors are dominant in different scenarios.
Your claim that things will only change over long-enough timescales so that you don't have to worry about also seems to lack evidence. In systems with significant feedback loops it seems dangerous to assume that changes will only happen slowly unless you're very confident that you fully understand all the system dynamics. With climate change it's clear that we don't fully understand the system, and some changes are happening faster than earlier models predicted. So _maybe_ we have a few centuries to figure out how to move global agriculture to northern latitudes, and deal with more variable conditions, but from a risk-analysis point of view it seems like a rather poor strategy.
The conclusion is the same, though they've added a paragraph talking about browning in some areas "somewhat slowing" the rate of aggregate increase since the late 90s. Conclusion is unchanged, and in fact, they strengthened it versus the draft by directly attributing it to CO2:
"The increased greening is largely consistent with CO2 fertilization at the global scale, with other changes being noteworthy at the regional level (Piao et al., 2020)"
> So it sounds like a combination of the CO2 increases up to about the year 2000, along with agricultural intensification and various other factors have indeed increased the amount of plant cover, but we are already seeing changes to that picture with further rises to CO2 levels.
Not really. The observations are also made in uninhabited areas. See above.
> And my central point is that the model you're implying there is one in which there's a monotonic relationship between CO2 levels and plant growth.
I said nothing about a monotonic relationship. I said that the earth will have more plants (plant mass, really) with more CO2. This is inevitable. It could follow a monotonic relationship, or it could do something else as factors shift. For example, one big, unpredictable factor that likely swamps everything else, is the randomness of human behavior.
> However in reality things are clearly more complex than that, and there is indeed legitimate argument over what factors are dominant in different scenarios.
No. Greening is occurring, and has been for some time. We have multiple lines of evidence. The IPCC report confidence is high. The only debate is over what might happen in the future, which, again, is fortune telling -- involving not only the climate system, but the actions of people.
> In systems with significant feedback loops it seems dangerous to assume that changes will only happen slowly unless you're very confident that you fully understand all the system dynamics.
I grant you that one can imagine theoretical scenarios in which all sorts of doomy feedback loops happen. The problem with that kind of imaginative exercise is that you have to bring evidence of their existence. So far, with regard to global vegetation, no such evidence exists, and in fact, the opposite of the doom loop scenario is occurring.
Could this change? Maybe! But that's just storytelling right now.
You made a scale-free claim about increasing greenness with increasing CO2 concentration. That implies a monotonic relationship.
> The only debate is over what might happen in the future, which, again, is fortune telling
The idea that using models of physical systems to predict their future evolution is "fortune telling" will surprise many scientists. Indeed, you yourself have proposed a simple model and used it to make a prediction about the future ("the world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment"), and used linear extrapolation of the past to justify the adequacy of your model.
That's not necessarily a bad starting point, but when actual studies with more complex models show different behaviours you should consider there's a possibility you're over-confident in your predictions.
Anyway, I suspect this conversation has become rather pointless. It's always unclear online to what extent people are engaging in good faith, but if it was then I'm rather sure you've now mentally pigeonholed me as a "doomer" who can't be reasoned with.
Its exactly the opposite. Plants grow larger with higher CO2. And they also reduce in digestive quality significantly as more of the material is lignin.
> At the levels of concentration of CO2 we’re seeing, plants are decreasing in size. Trees grow smaller.
No, they don't. Not due to CO2, anyway (maybe temperature, or changes in precipitation for particular plants).
Even if you want to (inaccurately) argue that specific plants will grow smaller, abundant CO2 will lead to more plants.
> There’s a balance to how much CO2 plants can adapt to and absorb while maintaining their growth and yields.
Again, no. Plants are limited by their genetics, and the availability of inputs, one of the most important of which is carbon. CO2 does not limit a plant's growth. That's just silly.
> Right, my bad... it's not directly the CO2 but the effects of CO2 on climate that is restricting plant growth overall [0]. The net effect is the same.
The net effect is not the same. The net effect is that the earth has been getting greener, in multiple measurable ways, since at least the 1980s.
See my sibling comments containing the IPCC AR6 report citations, where they state that this global greening is happening, and has been happening for decades, with high confidence.
There’s low confidence in the magnitude of this effect in that report.
I don’t think these two things are strongly related.
More leaf surface area and biomass is increasing in tandem with climate models. But there have also been observations that the size and quality of individuals has been affected.
That is a very long chain of dependencies (what is a dependency, what is not can be shown differently than below), meaning there are less and less likely to be many people following the entire chain of dependencies. This is sometimes a key part of how a straw man is constructed.
The thing is, not all edible plants like higher temps. Then there's the issue of changing weather patterns, more extreme weather, drought. Agriculture is easier when weather stays predictable and pattern.
Also, it's entirely possible Europe will get a new ice age as a result of global warming, as it might cause AMOC to collapse. Thus, it appears global warming is causing more harm than good to food production.
I cant read GPs flagged comment anymore, but guessing from your response, it must have been something like "climate change is actually good for plants bc CO2 is just plant food. Checkmate liberal.".
Your reply to this assumed idiotic take was quite good, stable conditions are generally preferable but i think you missed one good point. Even though some small increases of parameters like temperature or CO2 can have initial positive effects, in some cases, these effects dont scale linearly with the parameters! This is not how metabolism works! You dont eat and grow infinitely more, the more (not just food but one ingredient) sugar is on the table too!
This over and over repeated idiocy bothers me so much, because its main purpose is to support irrationality and ignorance. This is poisioning the dialog and not my hostilty towards it!
Thank you for pointing that out. Also, according to Wiktionary, the first part, "hima", is cognate with English "hibernate" (snow and winter are close enough), and the second part, "alaya", is cognate with English "slime" (which is less obvious, but slime is sticky and you stick things together to make a house).
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.
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.
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.
What gets me is that the same politicians in the US sat things med to be managed better but also that we always need to be spending less. It’s basically “not my problem, someone else can take care of that.”
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.
The closest semi-Westernized country to Iran in the same region is Turkey:
* Highly educated population.
* Remnant of an ancient non-Arab Islamic empire.
* Almost precisely the same population count.
And people don't starve in Turkey. Why would they starve in a Western-aligned Iran? The main problem in the richer half of the world is already obesity.
Iran is an ancient and developed civilization, though. One of the oldest in the world. There is no reason why it should develop into the next South Sudan.
And some African countries are, in fact, developing as well. I don't think that an average Kenyan starves either.
> I forgot that it’s much better to let your people starve
It's actually the US making the Iranian people starve on account of their (US's) economic war against Iran, and the same goes for Cuba and the Cubans living in Cuba. Saying that the Iranians should embrace with full arms the same Westerners that are making them starve right at this moment has to be a bit.
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 would say the climate change argument is particularly pernicious as its general form implies we all need to submit to more government control, we all need to feel guilt for being alive, and suffer higher prices or all sorts of market manipulation (EV rebates, "green programs", shuttering power plants) while the rich elite fly around on private jets burning hundreds of pounds of fuel per hour. While corporations simply outsource manufacturing to Asia, completely circumventing any environmental laws, cutting jobs, and burning bunker oil to move the product back here.
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.
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.
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
It takes a certain kind of self-delusion to blame climate change and at the same time ignore that your own actions has been one of the major drivers, both in the past and today, of that very same climate change.
While you cannot put the blame on climate change onto iran alone (all of humanity has a part in it), the regime wants to deflect the blame conveniently onto climate change so as to absolve themselves of being responsible for their current water crisis.
So it's not really delusion, but irresponsibility and selfishness.
I’m only putting 2-3% of the global climate change as directly attributable to Iran. And their explicit attempts at preventing progress in stopping it.
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.
>>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.
You should study a bit of physical geography and glacialology.
Not all ‘ice ages’ are the same.
A true ice age as you discuss is due to the distance we are from the sun. Unfortunately, we are in the opposite and the compounding effects of human induced greenhouse effect will doom us. It’s a bit like nature/nuture.
There is stuff we can control. How we handle our species and our home, the earth.
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'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.
Survivable is a strong word. We can survive for a long time huddled around breeder reactors. IMO the better question is how many of the affected people would try to migrate to better areas and how much firepower they bring with them when they’re not welcome.
You'd need to pull habitations up by a couple meters each year for a few decades if that one km of ice sheet builds up gradually :D Probably survivable, but inside yurts instead of fully furnished flats with amenities.
This completely overstates the problem, is not supported by the evidence, and is exactly the kind of alarmism that undermines genuine climate science.
An AMOC slowdown or even collapse does not trigger an ice age. Full glacial periods are driven by orbital forcing, not ocean circulation alone.
The evidence points to regional cooling of a few degrees in parts of Western and Northern Europe, not rendering everything north of France uninhabitable.
Past ice sheets advanced over millennia under much colder global conditions than today, not on human timescales.
Even severe AMOC scenarios would be major and costly disruptions, not close to Europe being wiped off the map.
Any source for this? Every source I can find speaks for three to eight degrees colder in longer winters. That's still very much survivable, most of Germany rarely gets in the negative double digits as of now.
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.
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.
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.
Meteorologists, however, also add that there have been heavy snowfalls during some winters in recent years, but these have been isolated, extreme events rather than the evenly distributed precipitation of past winters.
Anecdotal but this is not dissimilar to how Japan has been lately with snowfall in the northern regions. It was once 30cm a night, almost every night during winter, fairly stable and predictable weather, we're still getting a lot of snow most winters, but it seems to happen in these major storm events now. Not consistent manageable snowfall, but more like a snow bomb goes off once a week, it gets warm, quite a lot of melt occurs and then boom, hit again. It's actually. taking some getting used too and requires adaption. It's a small thing but it makes it quite hard to plan for, and it makes life generally quite stressful. Also due to the rapid warming and cooling ice is a bit more of an issue now, like more injures from people getting hammered on icy / slick roads and paths.
It’s the same in the Cascades. In a couple decades we’ll probably need a bunch of dams to have water capacity for the summer, because the snowpack melts so fast.
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 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?
Not quite. Chinese rivers are fed by the eastern tibetan plateau while South Asia is fed by the western glaciers by the tallest mountains.
Bangladesh would be at risk because the Bramhaphtra sees upstream fresh water use by China. But China's use of Bramhaputra water is mostly energy related, not for drinking water or irrigation.
If decreasing population trends continue then this problem will solve itself.
IIRC the Himalayas are still being pushed up, as the indian plate pushes against Eurasia. That makes me wonder if the loss of ice will result in taller mountains, with less ice to grind the upwelling rock.
The ice grinding primarily happens at the base of glaciers, in valleys.
Above the bergschrund (the head of the glacier), erosion in high mountains is accelerated by freeze-thaw cycles. Temps above freezing obviously contribute to this. But even well below freezing ambient temps, exposed dark rock in sunlight can absorb enough energy to cause local thawing, which results in rockfall.
No, the lack of snow and ice has greatly increased the rockfall hazard. It’s way easier to climb the highest mountains on snow and ice than on crumbling rock.
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.
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).
Kerala has alternated between a left-wing coalition(the Left Democratic Front - LDF) and a centrist to centre-right coalition(the United Democratic Front - UDF) for a long time. The current major communist party in Kerala, though ideologically Marxist-Leninist, is practically a social democratic one in its policies and actions.
I have a hard time believing that your team who were mostly from Kerala asked you not to set up a development centre there, as IT is pretty immune to militant trade unionism. A lot of companies have development centres in Trivandrum, some were set up more than twenty years ago.
I don't disagree that Kerala was known for being rather unfriendly to big industries, but things are changing. The Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry ranked Kerala at the top in 2024 for "Ease of Doing Business Reforms".
As for the clothes manufacturer, I believe you are talking about Kitex. They didn't go anywhere and their factories are still there in Kerala. They did set up a new factory recently in Telengana though, which, along with the rest of the company, is going through a rough phase now because of Trump's tariffs.
I think I was a bit hasty in expressing disbelief about your experience. Your team asked you not to set up a development centre in Kerala probably because it was not really known for being industry-friendly at the time. Apologies.
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.
While it's clear the parent poster was talking about another country, I'll add in the context of your reply: The current US administration is pushing low-carbon pro-nuclear energy which for one plant replaces hundreds of wind turbines.
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?
People who hold this viewpoint interest me because you always seem to display a certain confidence that because the changing climate is "just part of a natural cycle" it's going to be fine. Not all changes on earth have been "just fine" and quite the contrary.
Look at a chart and you will see just how quickly the climate is changing and how we've done almost nothing to improve the situation, then why do you think it's "ok" because its "natural"? Are you nor alarmed about the mysterious force making the earth hotter? Isn't that alarming to you that we're just going along with a hotter and hotter planet? At what stage does this natural cycle stop?
Clearly, thanks to science, we know it's because of human activity, and I guess you could argue that is "natural", like our behavior is part of nature, but to pretend it's just some unknown warming force that's making the climate change seems much more disturbing to me than actually know why it's happening and addressing the issue?
> 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?
From the parent post who he was talking about...it does say "natural climate shift" and mention adaption. I think the point is that some people are way too sure sure that we can just adapt to a rapidly shifting climate even if we don't understand the mechanism behind the warming.
Most natural shifts are explainable by science, so why is the trend of the last 75 years, unexplainable yet people are fine with it and just make assumptions we can adapt if we don't understand what's driving the warming?
I do see this view a lot on podcasts like Joe Rogan (which has one of the largest audiences in the world) and it does seem to maintain the idea that climate change is a natural thing and because of that it will be fine. It's not really a fringe idea even though it's a completely baseless idea IMO.
If it is man-made, blame your science, not people who is interested in path forward, instead of wailing about what happened, as if someone else did that. Western world is mostly responsible, and they are the ones who keep blaming some imaginary agent and shouting in online forums.
Let's talk about per capita energy usage and garbage dumping. Your businesses are cramming you homes, offices and roads with the stuff that you don't need. Basically, businesses are like high pressure pumps that circulate garbage through homes.
> That’s rarely the opinion of those who hold that view.
I've tracked climate science deniers for decades and that simply isn't true.
> If climate change has any non-human causes, then to what extent are we humans able to have an affect on those non-human causes?
Of course climate change has some non-human causes, but most of them aren't the ones that we humans are able to have an effect on, so the question is off base. It's the human causes that we humans are able to have an extensive effect on, obviously.
Your question can possibly be read as implying that the causes are either non-human or they are human, rather than there being both types of factors ... if that's the case then it reflects an extraordinary lack of knowledge about the subject.
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.
If we are past the point of no return decades back, what are the current goal of talking about it now? Our social and economic structures, and life styles are also well past the point of no return. Energy and resource consumption is at vulgarity levels. We bring a 10 ton machine from 10 miles, to sweep a floor of 10 square foot area. That's us. The expectations are set, supply chains are set, global domination goals are set. Science is only a force to drive us towards these directions. That's our choice made.
You asked whether there anything humans should do about it other than adapting to it, and the answer is yes. And we may be past the point of returning to some baseline (it's interesting that you took one person's opinion that we are as if it were an established fact) but that doesn't mean that we can't possibly hold the line at some higher level.
> Energy and resource consumption is at vulgarity levels.
That sounds like a very good reason to be talking about it.
> Science is only a force to drive us towards these directions.
This is not at all true. And given your original very uninformed question about "natural cycles" vs. human causes (which is quite the false dichotomy), I don't think you're any sort of authority on science.
What else, other than science, has enabled climate change through uncontrolled exploitation of resources and nature? I resisted myself not to comment on your authority on science.
What else has enabled global trade and business motives that led to everything that caused the climate change?
> What else, other than science, has enabled climate change through uncontrolled exploitation of resources and nature?
You're changing the subject and attacking a strawman. That's not at all what I said is not true. And you're cherry picking, focusing entirely on negatives and ignoring all positives of science, which is how you come up with "only a force to drive us towards these directions". Science is also giving us wind, solar, and geothermal power, EVs, etc.
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.
What about all the people who say the world will be greener and therefore there will be more plants and food? It's almost like they just made that up to suit their worldview?
The world will become unevenly greener. Population density and recent population rise is inversely correlated with places that will get greener.
Polar and Continental regions will get greener at the expense of the tropical and equatorial regions.
Mass migration is the inevitable conclusion of uneven impacts of climate change. Ie. In 2026, Political climate and physical climate are moving in mutually incompatible directions.
put another way, it's Central Canada that's going to be the rainforest
the existing rainforests will turn into Sahara 2.0
The greening is uneven. Canada/Siberia are getting warmer so plants have longer growing seasons there. But it's getting browner in other areas because of increased drought and heat. Overall the predictions are for lower global food production on net.
it'll be warmer but not better for growing -- you need sunlight, and a warm winter in Canada still means great darkness.
long days in the summer but the tropical plants from equatorial regions would suffer
The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
Where you go wrong is in misrepresenting the argument as “more plants and food”. That’s a straw man. Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food, but that doesn’t mean that existing patterns of food production will exist unchanged, or that adaptation won’t be required. But we’re also talking about a 100+ year change timeline. People who tell you that this year’s weather are indicative of urgent, rapid change are exaggerating.
You seem to be willing to accept wild extrapolations of doom without evidence, while rejecting scientifically well-founded statements of fact, so I’d challenge you to examine your priors.
> The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
However it's important to remember that world isn't a high school physics experiment, and you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2:
| Climate change can prolong the plant growing season and expand the areas suitable for crop planting, as well as promote crop photosynthesis thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. However, an excessive carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere may lead to unbalanced nutrient absorption in crops and hinder photosynthesis, respiration, and transpiration, thus affecting crop yields. Irregular precipitation patterns and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods can lead to hypoxia and nutrient loss in the plant roots. An increase in the frequency of extreme weather events directly damages plants and expands the range of diseases and pests. In addition, climate change will also affect soil moisture content, temperature, microbial activity, nutrient cycling, and quality, thus affecting plant growth.
[https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/14/6/1236]
In global models of climate change the overall impact on plant growth is significant, but not positive:
| Global above ground biomass is projected to decline by 4 to 16% under a 2 °C increase in climate warming
[https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420379122]
> Certainly it’s more favorable for growth of plants that make food
That does not seem to be what agricultural researchers believe:
| In wheat a mean daily temperature of 35°C caused total failure of the plant, while exposure to short episodes (2–5 days) of HS (>24°C) at the reproductive stage (start of flowering) resulted in substantial damage to floret fertility leading to an estimated 6.0 ± 2.9% loss in global yield with each degree-Celsius (°C) increase in temperature
| Although it might be argued that the ‘fertilization effect’ of increasing CO2 concentration may benefit crop biomass thus raising the possibility of an increased food production, emerging evidence has demonstrated a reduction in crop yield if increased CO2 is combined with high temperature and/or water scarcity, making a net increase in crop productivity unlikely
| When the combination of drought and heatwave is considered, production losses considering cereals including wheat (−11.3%), barley (−12.1%) and maize (−12.5%), and for non-cereals: oil crops (−8.4%), olives (−6.2%), vegetables (−3.5%), roots and tubers (−4.5%), sugar beet (−8.8%), among others
[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10796516/]
You spent a lot of words arguing with me about things I didn't say.
> you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2
...I never said you could? I explicitly said that there will be changes that require adaptation.
> Global above ground biomass is projected to decline by 4 to 16% under a 2 °C increase in climate warming
That paper is talking about a net reduction in biomass due to projected losses in places with temperature increases exceeding 10 degrees C. It's not just a model, it's science fiction -- it all hinges on the assumptions one makes regarding the proliferation of deserts, which is something we cannot currently predict.
Use the IPCC report instead of cherry-picking studies that support your opinions, and it's obvious that you're wrong. From AR6 Chapter 2, section 2.3.4.3.3 ("Global Greening and Browning") [1]:
> AR5 WGII briefly discussed changes in global vegetation greenness derived from satellite proxies for photosynthetic activity. Observed trends varied in their strength and consistency, and AR5 thus made no confidence statement on observed changes. SRCCL subsequently concluded that greening had increased globally over the past 2–3 decades (high confidence).
> Vegetation index data derived from AVHRR and MODIS depicts increases in aspects of vegetation greenness (i.e., green leaf area and/or mass) over the past four decades (Piao et al., 2020). NDVI increased globally from the early 1980s through the early 2010s (Liu et al., 2015c). Pan et al. (2018a) found NDVI increases over about 70% of the Earth’s vegetated surface through 2013, and Osborne et al. (2018) noted strong upward changes in NDVI in the circumpolar Arctic through 2016. Globally integrated Leaf Area Index (LAI) also rose from the early 1980s through at least the early 2010s (Zhu et al., 2016; Forzieri et al., 2017; Jiang et al., 2017; Xiao et al., 2017) and probably through near-present; for example, Chen et al. (2019) documented an LAI increase over one-third of the global vegetated area from 2000–2017. Although less frequently analysed for temporal trends, Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FAPAR) likewise increased over many global land areas (particularly China, India, and Eastern Europe) in the past two decades (Figure 2.33) (Forkel et al., 2014; Gobron, 2018; Keenan & Riley, 2018). There are also documented changes in specific vegetation types, such as a 7% rise in global tree cover for 1982–2016 (Song et al., 2018) and an expansion of shrub extent in the Arctic tundra over 1982–2017 (Myers-Smith et al., 2020). The increased greening is largely consistent with CO2 fertilization at the global scale, with other changes being noteworthy at the regional level (Piao et al., 2020).
> In summary, there is high confidence that vegetation greenness (i.e., green leaf area and/or mass) has increased globally since the early 1980s. However, there is low confidence in the magnitude of this increase owing to the large range in available estimates.
Plant response to CO2 is not only logical, it's actually happening, and well-documented by a number of different lines of evidence. The only thing you can say in response is that, in the distant future, losses due to desertification might offset this growth. That's fine, it's an argument, but it's basically fortune telling given the scale of the system and the distance into the future. We don't even have the ability to quantify the differences we've observed since the 80s!
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... (page 101 in that file)
> I _explicitly_ said that there will be changes that require adaptation.
I think this understates how incredibly expensive, violent, and deadly that adaptation will be.
> you can't easily separate out CO2 concentration from the other impacts of increased CO2 >> I never said you could?
I took the fact that you explicitly mentioned "high-CO2 environment" and claimed there was no room for argument over the "fact"s as an indication that you were trying to separate out the impact of CO2 from other factors caused by climate change such as heat stress and drought. If that wasn't the case then apologies for misunderstanding.
> That paper is talking about a net reduction in biomass due to projected losses in places with temperature increases exceeding 10 degrees C.
The abstract says:
| with great biomass reductions in regions where mean annual temperatures exceeded 10 °C
Unless the abstract is especially badly written that suggests that it's not 10°C _change_ but 2°C change leading to biomass loss in areas that are already at 10°C on average.
> IPCC report
Thanks, that's a useful reference! Do you have a link to the final report? That one seems to be a draft and I didn't find the right published version (but there are many so I'm sure I'm missing it).
I note the paragraph you quoted concludes:
> The increased greening is largely consistent with CO2 fertilization at the global scale, with other changes being noteworthy at the regional level (Piao et al., 2020); examples include agricultural intensification in China and India (Chen et al., 2019; Gao et al., 2019) and temperature increases in the northern high latitudes (Kong et al., 2017; Keenan and Riley, 2018) and in other areas such as the Loess Plateau in central China (Wang et al., 2018). Notably, some areas (such as parts of Amazonia, central Asia, and the Congo basin) have experienced browning (i.e., decreases in green leaf area and/or mass) (Anderson et al., 2019; Gottschalk et al., 2016; Hoogakker et al., 2015). Because rates of browning have exceeded rates of greening in some regions since the late 1990s, the increase in global greening has been somewhat slower in the last two decades
So it sounds like a combination of the CO2 increases up to about the year 2000, along with agricultural intensification and various other factors have indeed increased the amount of plant cover, but we are already seeing changes to that picture with further rises to CO2 levels.
> You spent a lot of words arguing with me about things I didn't say.
Well you started with
> The world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment. There’s no legitimate argument over that fact.
And my central point is that the model you're implying there is one in which there's a monotonic relationship between CO2 levels and plant growth. However in reality things are clearly more complex than that, and there is indeed legitimate argument over what factors are dominant in different scenarios.
Your claim that things will only change over long-enough timescales so that you don't have to worry about also seems to lack evidence. In systems with significant feedback loops it seems dangerous to assume that changes will only happen slowly unless you're very confident that you fully understand all the system dynamics. With climate change it's clear that we don't fully understand the system, and some changes are happening faster than earlier models predicted. So _maybe_ we have a few centuries to figure out how to move global agriculture to northern latitudes, and deal with more variable conditions, but from a risk-analysis point of view it seems like a rather poor strategy.
> Do you have a link to the final report?
AR6, Working group 1 report, chapter 2. Relevant section starts at page 365:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
The conclusion is the same, though they've added a paragraph talking about browning in some areas "somewhat slowing" the rate of aggregate increase since the late 90s. Conclusion is unchanged, and in fact, they strengthened it versus the draft by directly attributing it to CO2:
"The increased greening is largely consistent with CO2 fertilization at the global scale, with other changes being noteworthy at the regional level (Piao et al., 2020)"
> So it sounds like a combination of the CO2 increases up to about the year 2000, along with agricultural intensification and various other factors have indeed increased the amount of plant cover, but we are already seeing changes to that picture with further rises to CO2 levels.
Not really. The observations are also made in uninhabited areas. See above.
> And my central point is that the model you're implying there is one in which there's a monotonic relationship between CO2 levels and plant growth.
I said nothing about a monotonic relationship. I said that the earth will have more plants (plant mass, really) with more CO2. This is inevitable. It could follow a monotonic relationship, or it could do something else as factors shift. For example, one big, unpredictable factor that likely swamps everything else, is the randomness of human behavior.
> However in reality things are clearly more complex than that, and there is indeed legitimate argument over what factors are dominant in different scenarios.
No. Greening is occurring, and has been for some time. We have multiple lines of evidence. The IPCC report confidence is high. The only debate is over what might happen in the future, which, again, is fortune telling -- involving not only the climate system, but the actions of people.
> In systems with significant feedback loops it seems dangerous to assume that changes will only happen slowly unless you're very confident that you fully understand all the system dynamics.
I grant you that one can imagine theoretical scenarios in which all sorts of doomy feedback loops happen. The problem with that kind of imaginative exercise is that you have to bring evidence of their existence. So far, with regard to global vegetation, no such evidence exists, and in fact, the opposite of the doom loop scenario is occurring.
Could this change? Maybe! But that's just storytelling right now.
> I said nothing about a monotonic relationship.
You made a scale-free claim about increasing greenness with increasing CO2 concentration. That implies a monotonic relationship.
> The only debate is over what might happen in the future, which, again, is fortune telling
The idea that using models of physical systems to predict their future evolution is "fortune telling" will surprise many scientists. Indeed, you yourself have proposed a simple model and used it to make a prediction about the future ("the world will be greener in a high-CO2 environment"), and used linear extrapolation of the past to justify the adequacy of your model.
That's not necessarily a bad starting point, but when actual studies with more complex models show different behaviours you should consider there's a possibility you're over-confident in your predictions.
Anyway, I suspect this conversation has become rather pointless. It's always unclear online to what extent people are engaging in good faith, but if it was then I'm rather sure you've now mentally pigeonholed me as a "doomer" who can't be reasoned with.
At the levels of concentration of CO2 we’re seeing, plants are decreasing in size. Trees grow smaller.
There’s a balance to how much CO2 plants can adapt to and absorb while maintaining their growth and yields.
Its exactly the opposite. Plants grow larger with higher CO2. And they also reduce in digestive quality significantly as more of the material is lignin.
> At the levels of concentration of CO2 we’re seeing, plants are decreasing in size. Trees grow smaller.
No, they don't. Not due to CO2, anyway (maybe temperature, or changes in precipitation for particular plants).
Even if you want to (inaccurately) argue that specific plants will grow smaller, abundant CO2 will lead to more plants.
> There’s a balance to how much CO2 plants can adapt to and absorb while maintaining their growth and yields.
Again, no. Plants are limited by their genetics, and the availability of inputs, one of the most important of which is carbon. CO2 does not limit a plant's growth. That's just silly.
Right, my bad... it's not directly the CO2 but the effects of CO2 on climate that is restricting plant growth overall [0].
The net effect is the same. We're not going to see Northern Canada turn into a lush farmland. It's much more complicated than that.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/co2-trees-1.5000709
> Right, my bad... it's not directly the CO2 but the effects of CO2 on climate that is restricting plant growth overall [0]. The net effect is the same.
The net effect is not the same. The net effect is that the earth has been getting greener, in multiple measurable ways, since at least the 1980s.
See my sibling comments containing the IPCC AR6 report citations, where they state that this global greening is happening, and has been happening for decades, with high confidence.
There’s low confidence in the magnitude of this effect in that report.
I don’t think these two things are strongly related.
More leaf surface area and biomass is increasing in tandem with climate models. But there have also been observations that the size and quality of individuals has been affected.
That is a very long chain of dependencies (what is a dependency, what is not can be shown differently than below), meaning there are less and less likely to be many people following the entire chain of dependencies. This is sometimes a key part of how a straw man is constructed.
> all
> the people
> who say
> the world will be
> greener
> and therefore there will be
> more plants
> and food
I mean, didn’t take more than 15 minutes for one to comment with some talking points designed for those who can’t read a scientific paper.
[flagged]
The thing is, not all edible plants like higher temps. Then there's the issue of changing weather patterns, more extreme weather, drought. Agriculture is easier when weather stays predictable and pattern.
Also, it's entirely possible Europe will get a new ice age as a result of global warming, as it might cause AMOC to collapse. Thus, it appears global warming is causing more harm than good to food production.
I cant read GPs flagged comment anymore, but guessing from your response, it must have been something like "climate change is actually good for plants bc CO2 is just plant food. Checkmate liberal.".
Your reply to this assumed idiotic take was quite good, stable conditions are generally preferable but i think you missed one good point. Even though some small increases of parameters like temperature or CO2 can have initial positive effects, in some cases, these effects dont scale linearly with the parameters! This is not how metabolism works! You dont eat and grow infinitely more, the more (not just food but one ingredient) sugar is on the table too!
This over and over repeated idiocy bothers me so much, because its main purpose is to support irrationality and ignorance. This is poisioning the dialog and not my hostilty towards it!
A reliable citation for any of these claims is lacking.
Are you saying we need global warming for the melt to increase?
You can't melt snow that's not there.
Global warming is the likely reason why there is nothing to melt in the first place.
If you know languages, the 'phrase Himalayas bare and rocky' is particularly sad, because himālaya/हिमालय in Sanskrit literally means 'house of snow'.
Thank you for pointing that out. Also, according to Wiktionary, the first part, "hima", is cognate with English "hibernate" (snow and winter are close enough), and the second part, "alaya", is cognate with English "slime" (which is less obvious, but slime is sticky and you stick things together to make a house).
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...
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.
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.
What gets me is that the same politicians in the US sat things med to be managed better but also that we always need to be spending less. It’s basically “not my problem, someone else can take care of that.”
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.
It's a clear case of sleeping in the bed you made yourself. Climate change has made droughts more common and more severe.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/warming-...
I mean. If they didn’t sell the oil, a man in orange shows up declaring the spice must flow. The best spice.
> 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.
The closest semi-Westernized country to Iran in the same region is Turkey:
* Highly educated population.
* Remnant of an ancient non-Arab Islamic empire.
* Almost precisely the same population count.
And people don't starve in Turkey. Why would they starve in a Western-aligned Iran? The main problem in the richer half of the world is already obesity.
Client state doesn't mean westernized.
Just pick a random African country where the West helps.
Iran is an ancient and developed civilization, though. One of the oldest in the world. There is no reason why it should develop into the next South Sudan.
And some African countries are, in fact, developing as well. I don't think that an average Kenyan starves either.
> I forgot that it’s much better to let your people starve
It's actually the US making the Iranian people starve on account of their (US's) economic war against Iran, and the same goes for Cuba and the Cubans living in Cuba. Saying that the Iranians should embrace with full arms the same Westerners that are making them starve right at this moment has to be a bit.
> 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.
Thank you!
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.
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I would say the climate change argument is particularly pernicious as its general form implies we all need to submit to more government control, we all need to feel guilt for being alive, and suffer higher prices or all sorts of market manipulation (EV rebates, "green programs", shuttering power plants) while the rich elite fly around on private jets burning hundreds of pounds of fuel per hour. While corporations simply outsource manufacturing to Asia, completely circumventing any environmental laws, cutting jobs, and burning bunker oil to move the product back here.
I don't believe a single thing they say.
That's a false dichotomy.
"Since there are murderers out there, it is fine for me to murder/there is no point in trying to reduce murder rates."
It's a false equivalency to put carbon emissions on par with any crime, much less a violent felony.
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.
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...
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.
Supporting this:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/iran-water-drought-dams-qanat...
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
It takes a certain kind of self-delusion to blame climate change and at the same time ignore that your own actions has been one of the major drivers, both in the past and today, of that very same climate change.
While you cannot put the blame on climate change onto iran alone (all of humanity has a part in it), the regime wants to deflect the blame conveniently onto climate change so as to absolve themselves of being responsible for their current water crisis.
So it's not really delusion, but irresponsibility and selfishness.
I’m only putting 2-3% of the global climate change as directly attributable to Iran. And their explicit attempts at preventing progress in stopping it.
That, plus decades of mismanagement and corruption...
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.
>>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.
You should study a bit of physical geography and glacialology.
Not all ‘ice ages’ are the same.
A true ice age as you discuss is due to the distance we are from the sun. Unfortunately, we are in the opposite and the compounding effects of human induced greenhouse effect will doom us. It’s a bit like nature/nuture.
There is stuff we can control. How we handle our species and our home, the earth.
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'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.
If the Earth's atmosphere gradually disappeared over the next 10-50 years would that be okay because humans live in the ISS?
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.
Survivable is a strong word. We can survive for a long time huddled around breeder reactors. IMO the better question is how many of the affected people would try to migrate to better areas and how much firepower they bring with them when they’re not welcome.
You'd need to pull habitations up by a couple meters each year for a few decades if that one km of ice sheet builds up gradually :D Probably survivable, but inside yurts instead of fully furnished flats with amenities.
This completely overstates the problem, is not supported by the evidence, and is exactly the kind of alarmism that undermines genuine climate science.
An AMOC slowdown or even collapse does not trigger an ice age. Full glacial periods are driven by orbital forcing, not ocean circulation alone.
The evidence points to regional cooling of a few degrees in parts of Western and Northern Europe, not rendering everything north of France uninhabitable.
Past ice sheets advanced over millennia under much colder global conditions than today, not on human timescales.
Even severe AMOC scenarios would be major and costly disruptions, not close to Europe being wiped off the map.
Any source for this? Every source I can find speaks for three to eight degrees colder in longer winters. That's still very much survivable, most of Germany rarely gets in the negative double digits as of now.
So did global temperature was higher during last ice age? Or is that only two related to Europe and more local dynamics?
Some say it was a factor in Syria as well:
https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-paved-the-way-to-wa...
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"?
> Climate changes took decades to manifest effects.
*centuries, it was first predicted in the 19th century when Britain was burning increasingly massive amounts of coal.
Yeah, this short sighted leadership looks like a systematic problem in western society to me.
I'm puzzled why you think it isn't.
Do you mean how it is verboten to suggest that mass migration would cause conflicts or be at all problematic?
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.
In California wildfires, how do you separate climate related effects from the effects the invasive gumtree problem?
Gumtree forests tend to need more frequent low intensity burns to clear fuel build up, which Australian Aboriginals used to manage.
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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.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanda_Devi_Plutonium_Mission
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 entire world would notice a nuke going off. Like we did with North Korea’s nuclear tests.
> 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.
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What notes did you check?
Meteorologists, however, also add that there have been heavy snowfalls during some winters in recent years, but these have been isolated, extreme events rather than the evenly distributed precipitation of past winters.
Anecdotal but this is not dissimilar to how Japan has been lately with snowfall in the northern regions. It was once 30cm a night, almost every night during winter, fairly stable and predictable weather, we're still getting a lot of snow most winters, but it seems to happen in these major storm events now. Not consistent manageable snowfall, but more like a snow bomb goes off once a week, it gets warm, quite a lot of melt occurs and then boom, hit again. It's actually. taking some getting used too and requires adaption. It's a small thing but it makes it quite hard to plan for, and it makes life generally quite stressful. Also due to the rapid warming and cooling ice is a bit more of an issue now, like more injures from people getting hammered on icy / slick roads and paths.
It’s the same in the Cascades. In a couple decades we’ll probably need a bunch of dams to have water capacity for the summer, because the snowpack melts so fast.
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!
For someone who loves winter, it's really sad news, but it's likely true.
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?
Not quite. Chinese rivers are fed by the eastern tibetan plateau while South Asia is fed by the western glaciers by the tallest mountains.
Bangladesh would be at risk because the Bramhaphtra sees upstream fresh water use by China. But China's use of Bramhaputra water is mostly energy related, not for drinking water or irrigation.
If decreasing population trends continue then this problem will solve itself.
IIRC the Himalayas are still being pushed up, as the indian plate pushes against Eurasia. That makes me wonder if the loss of ice will result in taller mountains, with less ice to grind the upwelling rock.
The ice grinding primarily happens at the base of glaciers, in valleys.
Above the bergschrund (the head of the glacier), erosion in high mountains is accelerated by freeze-thaw cycles. Temps above freezing obviously contribute to this. But even well below freezing ambient temps, exposed dark rock in sunlight can absorb enough energy to cause local thawing, which results in rockfall.
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?
No, the lack of snow and ice has greatly increased the rockfall hazard. It’s way easier to climb the highest mountains on snow and ice than on crumbling rock.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DM5sYghMr2g/
A lot of mountaineering is contingent upon the decomposing chossy rock being solidified by ice.
I can't speak to the Himalayas, but I can speak to southwest Colorado:
climbing a 70 degree snow face is fun, climbing the pile of shit underneath it with crampons is (to me) terrifying.
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.
I’m disappointed at the lack of before/after photos in that article. My ape brain would love them.
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This is inflammatory, dismissive, and hardly constructive for discussion. Flame wars are discouraged by the rules.
All said, you're comment worked. I'm angry now. Good job.
Check out his other comments ... wow.
Where "you guys" is apparently anyone who knows anything at all about the subject.
When in Congress, Al Gore worked hard to turn the government owned and run network into something that the entire population can use. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...) I suggest that you take advantage of the incredible resource known as the Internet (and the WWW layered on top of it) to learn something about climate change and its underlying cause, anthropogenic global warming. See for instance https://skepticalscience.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...
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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.
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.
I'm a communist ;) The party in power is CPI-M and the BJP hates them. Good!
Yeah, at the end of the day they need to go to Bangalore or Gulf to work. So, who cares which party is in power in Kerala ;)
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.
Clearly you haven't experienced socialism or Fabian socialism which is barely disguised communism.
This state is one of two in India which have been run by communists for decades.
Kerala has alternated between a left-wing coalition(the Left Democratic Front - LDF) and a centrist to centre-right coalition(the United Democratic Front - UDF) for a long time. The current major communist party in Kerala, though ideologically Marxist-Leninist, is practically a social democratic one in its policies and actions.
Some years ago I was planning to set up subsidiary development centres in tier 2 cities, including Trivandrum.
My team - mostly from Kerala - came to me en masse and told me not to, and this was long before Nokku Kooli became a well known thing.
Don't know or care whether it was during UDF/LDF or whatever rule.
A couple of years ago a major clothes manufacturer, founded in that state, packed up and left.
A parallel from WB: Tata's moved their automobile factory to Gujarat, which has since then shipped over a million cars.
I have a hard time believing that your team who were mostly from Kerala asked you not to set up a development centre there, as IT is pretty immune to militant trade unionism. A lot of companies have development centres in Trivandrum, some were set up more than twenty years ago.
I don't disagree that Kerala was known for being rather unfriendly to big industries, but things are changing. The Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry ranked Kerala at the top in 2024 for "Ease of Doing Business Reforms".
https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2024/Sep/06/e...
As for the clothes manufacturer, I believe you are talking about Kitex. They didn't go anywhere and their factories are still there in Kerala. They did set up a new factory recently in Telengana though, which, along with the rest of the company, is going through a rough phase now because of Trump's tariffs.
Believe whatever you want, it's a free country.
I think I was a bit hasty in expressing disbelief about your experience. Your team asked you not to set up a development centre in Kerala probably because it was not really known for being industry-friendly at the time. Apologies.
Worse. I experienced true undisguised communism.
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...
Oops. I assumed it was about Trumpism. :)
While it's clear the parent poster was talking about another country, I'll add in the context of your reply: The current US administration is pushing low-carbon pro-nuclear energy which for one plant replaces hundreds of wind turbines.
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?
People who hold this viewpoint interest me because you always seem to display a certain confidence that because the changing climate is "just part of a natural cycle" it's going to be fine. Not all changes on earth have been "just fine" and quite the contrary.
Look at a chart and you will see just how quickly the climate is changing and how we've done almost nothing to improve the situation, then why do you think it's "ok" because its "natural"? Are you nor alarmed about the mysterious force making the earth hotter? Isn't that alarming to you that we're just going along with a hotter and hotter planet? At what stage does this natural cycle stop?
Clearly, thanks to science, we know it's because of human activity, and I guess you could argue that is "natural", like our behavior is part of nature, but to pretend it's just some unknown warming force that's making the climate change seems much more disturbing to me than actually know why it's happening and addressing the issue?
> certain confidence that because the changing climate is "just part of a natural cycle" it's going to be fine
What nonsense.
That’s rarely the opinion of those who hold that view.
If climate change has any non-human causes, then to what extent are we humans able to have an affect on those non-human causes?
> 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?
From the parent post who he was talking about...it does say "natural climate shift" and mention adaption. I think the point is that some people are way too sure sure that we can just adapt to a rapidly shifting climate even if we don't understand the mechanism behind the warming.
Most natural shifts are explainable by science, so why is the trend of the last 75 years, unexplainable yet people are fine with it and just make assumptions we can adapt if we don't understand what's driving the warming?
I do see this view a lot on podcasts like Joe Rogan (which has one of the largest audiences in the world) and it does seem to maintain the idea that climate change is a natural thing and because of that it will be fine. It's not really a fringe idea even though it's a completely baseless idea IMO.
If it is man-made, blame your science, not people who is interested in path forward, instead of wailing about what happened, as if someone else did that. Western world is mostly responsible, and they are the ones who keep blaming some imaginary agent and shouting in online forums.
Let's talk about per capita energy usage and garbage dumping. Your businesses are cramming you homes, offices and roads with the stuff that you don't need. Basically, businesses are like high pressure pumps that circulate garbage through homes.
> What nonsense.
What rudeness.
> That’s rarely the opinion of those who hold that view.
I've tracked climate science deniers for decades and that simply isn't true.
> If climate change has any non-human causes, then to what extent are we humans able to have an affect on those non-human causes?
Of course climate change has some non-human causes, but most of them aren't the ones that we humans are able to have an effect on, so the question is off base. It's the human causes that we humans are able to have an extensive effect on, obviously.
Your question can possibly be read as implying that the causes are either non-human or they are human, rather than there being both types of factors ... if that's the case then it reflects an extraordinary lack of knowledge about the subject.
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.
If we are past the point of no return decades back, what are the current goal of talking about it now? Our social and economic structures, and life styles are also well past the point of no return. Energy and resource consumption is at vulgarity levels. We bring a 10 ton machine from 10 miles, to sweep a floor of 10 square foot area. That's us. The expectations are set, supply chains are set, global domination goals are set. Science is only a force to drive us towards these directions. That's our choice made.
You asked whether there anything humans should do about it other than adapting to it, and the answer is yes. And we may be past the point of returning to some baseline (it's interesting that you took one person's opinion that we are as if it were an established fact) but that doesn't mean that we can't possibly hold the line at some higher level.
> Energy and resource consumption is at vulgarity levels.
That sounds like a very good reason to be talking about it.
> Science is only a force to drive us towards these directions.
This is not at all true. And given your original very uninformed question about "natural cycles" vs. human causes (which is quite the false dichotomy), I don't think you're any sort of authority on science.
> This is not at all true.
What else, other than science, has enabled climate change through uncontrolled exploitation of resources and nature? I resisted myself not to comment on your authority on science.
What else has enabled global trade and business motives that led to everything that caused the climate change?
> What else, other than science, has enabled climate change through uncontrolled exploitation of resources and nature?
You're changing the subject and attacking a strawman. That's not at all what I said is not true. And you're cherry picking, focusing entirely on negatives and ignoring all positives of science, which is how you come up with "only a force to drive us towards these directions". Science is also giving us wind, solar, and geothermal power, EVs, etc.
I won't respond further.
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/