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Regarding CO2 and climate. It so happens that I’ve spent a part of my career working directly with climate related data. Think glacier extent, sea ice extent, sea surface temperature, etc. To me anthropogenic climate change is just a fact.

Plants will be fine, but humans and especially human civilisation are finicky things. Healthy humans start dropping like flies in wet bulb temperature of 35 Celsius. Currently that’s pretty rare, but it’s going to become more and more prevalent during this century.

On top of that add water stress, drought, and rising sea level, and you easily get to around a quarter of humanity living in areas that are going to become increasingly inhospitable. This won’t be a huge problem for, say, the United States. Americans can just move more inland and more north. Also, rich societies can find technological solutions to keep living in inhospitable environments.

The rest? The rest will try to move. This will lead to conflict and the fall of any semblance of international order. Because the places where these people will move to will become increasingly hostile to the newcomers as their numbers soar.

macrominutes 2y ago

Cold kills roughly 20 times more people every year than heat does.

Humans do fine in the heat, they don’t do well at all in the cold. The dropping like flies claim is not backed up by any evidence. It’s not rare because the earth isn’t hot, it’s rare because humans sweat lol.

Sea levels have not risen at all in the past 200 years and they are certainly not rising at anything close to unmanageable levels if they are rising at all.

I work with this data on a regular basis in my day job as well so the argument from authority doesn’t really work on me.

The catastrophism around anthropogenic climate change is completely unjustified.

Lastly C02 tends to lag temperature changes when you look at the last 800,000 years of ice core data so it’s clearly not the primary driver of global temperature swings.

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Discussion

Janis 2y ago

You do know why wet bulb temperature of 35 becomes dangerous, right?

Because sweating stops working as a heat management mechanism due to physics.

macrominutes 2y ago

Yes I am, and yet humans still find ways to cool off in hot areas.

We have been living in every climate of the world for at least 15,000 years. Likely much longer, and even with all of our modern inventions. Cold still kills 20 times more people than heat does.

It’s much easier to escape the heat in some shade than it is to escape the cold when you have no source of heat.

There is no data to date that shows that the earth warming by a degree or two over the next century will lead to far more deaths from heat.