Might've gotten away with it if you hadn't included "the environment has never been cleaner".

High standard of living countries have made giant leaps in regulatory enforcement to combat pollution. But then you have the billions of people in "shithole countries" who are working on creating literal rivers of toxic chemicals and plastic, none of which existed a few hundred years ago.

Your first sentence is undeniably true, however. Anyone who argues otherwise is just being willfully ignorant of history.

While i agree that it might not " make the slightest difference to the timeline of humanity's eventual collapse" of how long we endure, I think it will greatly impact what we have to endure and what the costs will be. And by 'we' I mean the next generations.


The way I look at it is like what the situation was in New Orleans before the Dykes all collapsed.

We knew with certain they were on the brink of collapse and that the cost of collapse both in human lives and dollars and destruction would be exponentially greater than the cost of addressing of it proactively.

Despite that there was no level of politician willing to spend 'dollars today' to fix a problem that would have 'impact tomorrow'. So successively Administration after Administration held their nose while ignoring it and hoping beyond hope, it just did not break on their watch.

Our system of governance always make that the +EV bet. Politicians who spend enormous parts of their budgets 'fixing an issue before it becomes a problem' will get very little uplift at the voting box and perhaps criticism for the spending. Instead a politician is far more incentivized to ignore it, and hope, while piling that same money into useless pandering to special interests groups that generate good press.

And so, while I agree with you the ultimate time line for humanity may not be greatly impacted, the quality of life and challenges of life, for successive generations will be great. The scale of disruptions and cost will become unimaginable.

If you see the projections for landmass loss due to Global Warming and Sea rise, you realize this world is in for waves of required mass relocation of populaces on a scale, we have not seen prior. This at a time when countries are most protective of their borders and most intolerant of taking in said refugees. I can see a whole new level of 'land' wars as certain countries feel obligated to get new arable land for their citizens who have no where else to go.

This is a hypothetical I heard teased out some time ago that delves more into my above post.

Imagine a world where now most of Canada's inhabited populace areas are now a few degrees warmer. Ontario more reflects Florida like climate and the colder areas of AB to NFLD more reflect Ontario currently. Much of Canada's north has now emerged from permafrost and we, as a country have gained far more resource rich arable land than we lost at our coasts.

Canada by far has been a net benefactor of Global warming, weather extremes aside.

South of us in the US, they have lost far more land than they have gained. Both Coasts greatly intruded upon and areas in the South and Mid US, like Texas and Florida and AZ are just full on unlivable deserts. Kansas now approximates AZ for climate.


What do you think the US does in a situation like that, while looking at Canada with more land than we can occupy?

Even if Canada opened up fully to mass immigration by the US and others, which arguably we would need to do, to monetize and get value from the land, would the US simply accept that? That Canada would become the new power in the region or would they want to maintain power by taking over.

I know some don't like this type of fantasy projection gaming but I found it interesting in the talk I listened to many years ago.

The insane flooding from last november might cost BC 13 billion. That was one event. Transition costs matter, a lot, and while it might be true in some 100 year time frame where you ignore "weather extremes" entirely then Canada is some net benefactor in terms of arable land, I think the case that we currently have seen net economic benefits is entirely unsupported.

One thing that is alarming is the melting of this permafrost. Much of the infrastructure up north sits on this permafrost and will sink when it melts

Probably look at their own sparsely populated northern states.

Except for the tens of millions who either can't afford to move, or on the other end of the financial spectrum, will stubbornly hold on to their corner of "paradise" and spend more money to keep it comfortable.

Agreed. that comment, was not as clear as it should have been, is specific to only the hypothetical as presented and within that narrow speculation only.

The assumption model I saw, has most of the southern US basically as uninhabitable desert. Most of the mid US as basically as hot as AZ currently is and as dry. So habitable but most people would not see it as desirable. And only the Canada bordering States being generally highly desirable with Canada South and US north, both being more like Florida. For instance they showed all the land North of Edmonton and in Northern Quebec and Ontario as more like Montreal is now. Good summers with still real winters but very livable. And Resource rich. Super resource rich.

They were working off prior global warming period maps and time periods such as when the dinosaurs roamed the planet and Alberta was one of the most populace areas for them.

Though much of that flooding was preventable but the province ignored warnings and dumped the responsibility on municipalities to do the necessary work.

Reality is we are going to have to take more preventable measures

Indeed, the costs of Global warming will be immense, but Canada is one of a handful of countries who are shown to gain more then they lose. Russia and China were high up too on the gain side.

If Canada was to gain that much land mass, and opened up to a peaceful mass immigration of American's and others, you could easily see how Canada would become the US of this hemisphere, as an economic giant. it would be US frontierism all over again with all that economic activity. But more likely, as was posited in that hypothetical, the US would find a reason to annex or take over Canada. They would not just allow themselves to be eroded into irrelevance was the belief.

Just like in my post 302 that shows how Politicians would rather hold their nose, cross their fingers and just hope the collapse does not happen on their watch. They simply push the issue down the road knowing a failure is imminent and unavoidable but hope it misses their time in service.


it is frustrating for us as Citizens as there is only one tax payer and instead of spending $X in tax dollars to deal with it proactively we end up spending $1000X, to deal with the disaster, clean up and rebuilding.

But that is the biggest challenge of the way gov't works.

Even if you said 'if you don't fix at $X cost it will cost $1000X the day after you leave service' you would not get any to act. There is no incentivize system for them to act.

Yes but we had the floods happen in Alberta in Flood plain areas and as a government you need to say if you rebuild you will not be covered.

This message has to go to many of the residents in BC that built in areas they could not even get flood insurance

If we keep following "the standard run" predicted by The Limits to Growth, then these sort of things will just be minor inconveniences compared to what is to come in the next 20-30 years...

It's also not going to just be the "successive generations" doing the suffering; a good proportion will be those alive right now!

Juk

India out there shaving decades off the doomclock with just one misplaced cigarette.

Some light digging revealed this to be the fourth landfill fire in under a month in the area. That's rather horrifying.

Kind of reminiscent of a bunch of massive Tire Disposal fires we had decades ago.

Tire disposal was a big problem and quite expensive for the person or company who eventually had to dispose of them. Certain large yards would charge a fee to dispose of them but then just pile them into mountains on plots of land and not deal with them beyond that. Then suddenly as it seemed they were hitting their limits for storage, a massive fire would start and consume them all, and thus the ultimate disposal part was dealt with via incineration. Something that if they tried to do (incinerate) properly would have cost them a lot more (scrubbers, etc) and potentially make the entire model unprofitable, and as such there was always speculation as to the true nature of these "accidents"?

Yes, climate change is a very serious problem nowadays. It's a real treat for each of us, but it's always a question for me, who so much attention is dedicated to climate change. There are many other serious issues, like water and air pollution, deforestation, and so on. Some time ago, we discussed global issues during one of my courses, and it was really shocking for me to find out that in 2019, approximately 9 million acres of rainforests were destroyed. It's a huge number. I also wrote an article for the student newspaper about it. Here is one educational source https://envrexperts.com/free-essays/deforestation which was helpful for me and where I found a lot of new information, and those articles' examples are also very interesting to read. They proved to me once again that forests are the lungs of the planet, and deforestation is, by way of the reasons, why the climate is changing. More actions should be taken because the consequences may be awful.

Its amazing how fast Lake Mead is dropping. I have been following these guys and their two week reports. The lake reached a critical point of below 1500 ft

Its only a matter of time before the damn generates no power Scary

False

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/tops...a95c853bb85f86

Allow me to summarize that opinion piece: "We should blame the policies that shift away from fossil fuels because countries continued to rely too much on fossil fuels".

Nuclear power might become an alternative, but it is done based on paper theory that chose simply to ignore the practical lessons from Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima (and the other disasters which we can't even be bothered to recall anymore). They should not be ignored. They were disasters who could have harmed billions, and that was avoided in part due to sheer luck.

The usual counter-argument is that this won't happen to modern nuclear power plants, which is a silly argument because nuclear power is an industry which suffers from lack of qualified oversight, and is therefore rife with cheap counterfeit parts, fake documentation and shortcuts.

Older, poorer people have a different upside vs downside ratio regarding climate change and the costs to stop it than younger richer ones. It seems like younger, richer ones expect the older poorer ones to adopt their ratio without explaining why they should.

If switching to nuclear power eliminated almost all of the need to make sacrifices that we are presently planning (putting aside that some of those sacrifices are worthwhile for other reasons besides climate change), would it be worth doing, in your opinion, if it meant a 2% chance that the world blows up in 50 years? (But there are no other downsides.) What is the largest percentage that would have you answering "yes"? What do you think would be the median answer?

I don't really have the necessary qualifications to quantify in that manner and I don't even know how useful it would be. If we're talking airlines or car travel I can see it, because the consequences are dramatic, but ultimately relatively harmless for society at large.

But in these cases we're talking events that can cripple entire continents. We know such events have already taken place, but the the worst-case scenarios were avoided in part due to dumb luck.

Hottest day in all the UK nations today

"woo"

our infrastructure is not set up for this

We went to a vineyard in Kent a few weeks ago, and the champagne producers are literally upping sticks. Feels temporary given it'll be just a constant flight north.

And our Tory leaders are such limp fish about it