Will Russia Be Devastated by Climate Change? (nybooks.com) 141
Thane Gustafson is a longtime specialist on Russian energy — and even before Russia invaded Ukraine, he'd pulled together some startling predictions for his new book. The New York Review of Books looks at Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change:
About two thirds of Russia is covered in permafrost, a mixture of sand and ice that, until recently, remained frozen year-round. As permafrost melts, walls built on it fracture, buildings sink, railways warp, roads buckle, and pipelines break. Anthrax from long-frozen reindeer corpses has thawed and infected modern herds. Sinkholes have opened in the melting ground, swallowing up whole buildings. Ice roads over frozen water, once the only way to travel in some remote regions, are available for ever-shorter periods. The Arctic coast is eroding rapidly, imperiling structures built close to the water.... As burning, dying, clear-cut forests become carbon producers rather than carbon sinks, they make the problem of climate change even worse. The same is true of melting permafrost, which releases methane, another potent greenhouse gas.
In Klimat, Gustafson maintains that Russia's agricultural exports and revenues will continue to increase until the end of this decade, with global warming of one degree Celsius improving Russian agricultural productivity. But in the 2030s and 2040s the rate of increase will diminish, because of harm to Russian crops caused by drought, heat waves, and torrential rain. Some of these difficulties may be counteracted by rising prices, as climate change compromises the world's food supply, but Russia will also hit the limit of its supply of arable land. Two thirds of European Russia, the country's most fertile agricultural area, is already too dry. Thawed permafrost, meanwhile, is sandy and infertile, and will not make good farmland. Russia will require more resources to produce the same amount of food. More aggressive tactics to increase production (e.g., heavy use xof fertilizer) will ultimately cause acidification and erosion....
[T]he long-term future of the Russian oil industry, like that of the Russian economy, looked dismal even before the new sanctions. West Siberia, long the country's primary source of oil, is running low. The extraction of Arctic oil is already well underway, but it is expensive and relies in part on foreign technology that was sanctioned even before the invasion of Ukraine.... As time goes on, Gustafson argues, the Russian oil industry will be more and more dependent on government tax breaks. A dwindling supply will lose value in a global market that is shifting to renewable energy. In Gustafson's account, most of the factors that will determine the future of Russia's oil exports lie outside its control: exhaustion of its most accessible oilfields, increasing difficulty and expense in reaching remaining sources, damage to oil infrastructure caused by climate change, and reduction in demand from the EU and later from Asia. But Russia's choices have had some effect. Its invasion of Ukraine has vastly accelerated the timeline for this squeeze by prompting new sanctions and informal boycotts...
As Russia's income declines, so will its ability to placate its population with cheap household gas and generous welfare policies. This will likely lead to social destabilization, exacerbated by the disruption and suffering caused by climate change and a weakening economy. The Russian war on Ukraine, meanwhile, has resulted in the emigration not only of opposition politicians and journalists but also of professionals, especially younger ones, who have skills marketable elsewhere in the world — for instance, IT specialists, who find it easy to work from safer, freer cities like Bishkek or Tbilisi. The scientists, activists, and businesspeople who might help Russia cope with climate change are also among those likely to emigrate.
Klimat's time horizon of 2050 is short, but Putin's is even shorter: he is now almost seventy years old. After him will come the deluge, the wildfires, the droughts, the collapse.
"Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change..." according to the book's description on the Harvard University Press website.
"Lucid and thought-provoking, Klimat shows how climate change is poised to alter the global order, potentially toppling even great powers from their perches."
In Klimat, Gustafson maintains that Russia's agricultural exports and revenues will continue to increase until the end of this decade, with global warming of one degree Celsius improving Russian agricultural productivity. But in the 2030s and 2040s the rate of increase will diminish, because of harm to Russian crops caused by drought, heat waves, and torrential rain. Some of these difficulties may be counteracted by rising prices, as climate change compromises the world's food supply, but Russia will also hit the limit of its supply of arable land. Two thirds of European Russia, the country's most fertile agricultural area, is already too dry. Thawed permafrost, meanwhile, is sandy and infertile, and will not make good farmland. Russia will require more resources to produce the same amount of food. More aggressive tactics to increase production (e.g., heavy use xof fertilizer) will ultimately cause acidification and erosion....
[T]he long-term future of the Russian oil industry, like that of the Russian economy, looked dismal even before the new sanctions. West Siberia, long the country's primary source of oil, is running low. The extraction of Arctic oil is already well underway, but it is expensive and relies in part on foreign technology that was sanctioned even before the invasion of Ukraine.... As time goes on, Gustafson argues, the Russian oil industry will be more and more dependent on government tax breaks. A dwindling supply will lose value in a global market that is shifting to renewable energy. In Gustafson's account, most of the factors that will determine the future of Russia's oil exports lie outside its control: exhaustion of its most accessible oilfields, increasing difficulty and expense in reaching remaining sources, damage to oil infrastructure caused by climate change, and reduction in demand from the EU and later from Asia. But Russia's choices have had some effect. Its invasion of Ukraine has vastly accelerated the timeline for this squeeze by prompting new sanctions and informal boycotts...
As Russia's income declines, so will its ability to placate its population with cheap household gas and generous welfare policies. This will likely lead to social destabilization, exacerbated by the disruption and suffering caused by climate change and a weakening economy. The Russian war on Ukraine, meanwhile, has resulted in the emigration not only of opposition politicians and journalists but also of professionals, especially younger ones, who have skills marketable elsewhere in the world — for instance, IT specialists, who find it easy to work from safer, freer cities like Bishkek or Tbilisi. The scientists, activists, and businesspeople who might help Russia cope with climate change are also among those likely to emigrate.
Klimat's time horizon of 2050 is short, but Putin's is even shorter: he is now almost seventy years old. After him will come the deluge, the wildfires, the droughts, the collapse.
"Russia will be one of the countries most affected by climate change..." according to the book's description on the Harvard University Press website.
"Lucid and thought-provoking, Klimat shows how climate change is poised to alter the global order, potentially toppling even great powers from their perches."
This is Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of bullshit question is this? Time people got this in their heads, this isn't a Russia issue. This isn't a China issue. This isn't a US issue. This all our issues. If Russia is fucked we are all fucked
We are all in this boat together boys and girls. You may not like the man sitting beside you but guess what? Mother nature doesn't fucking care. We all swim or sink.
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You mean, the world becomes a safer place? The USSR didn't just destabilize, it collapsed, and nothing much happened. A bit more unregulated weapons-grade nuclear material in the world - but none of the terrorist nukes or dirty bombs fear-mongering pundits worried about ever emerged. And Russia was so diminished as a result of losing their empire that they no longer posed nearly so severe a military threat to the world.
MAD kept them from becoming a target, but they had enough problems to deal with at hom
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This is not US invading Iraq. This is US invading France with a single Marine division level of difficulty. For comparison US sent 500000 soldiers to invade Iraq a third rate power while Russia sent 17000
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Except Russia's biggest enemy, at least in the early stages of the invasion, seems to have been their own incompetence and poor logistics. Ukraine has made a surprisingly good showing, but Russia's has been appallingly poor. I've heard that a lot of it likely has to do with rampant corruption in the military - skipping maintenance, selling equipment and supplies, etc. So that the hardware, supplies, and general readiness on the books vastly exceeded the reality.
One of the most compelling explanations I've
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Seems to me it adds quite a bit when it actually explains the problems. Massive corruption at the top is kind of the whole point of an autocracy, and having that corruption extending downwards through well-funded institutions that were mostly unused for decades is hardly surprising.
As for Ukraine - it's really hard to establish anything near as severe a level of corruption when you have a functional democracy - even if everyone is still corrupt, throwing the bums out on a regular basis so that the new guys
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The relevance is obvious, it explains why Russia is having this spasm. Russia is literally doomed. Without reforming the Soviet Union they are 100% going to wind up an also-ran when climate change hits in full.
The same is true for Canada, Greenland, and Alaska (Score:2)
https://open.canada.ca/data/en... [canada.ca]
https://pulitzercenter.org/pro... [pulitzercenter.org]
https://dggs.alaska.gov/hazard... [alaska.gov]
To quote Wash from Serenity (Score:5, Insightful)
"Do we care? Do we care what happens to Russia?"
In 30 days Russia squandered 30 years of work. On top of which, no one with any sense in the West will do business with the country for years, if not decades, to come. The people will revert back to what existed in the 50s in the country.
Climate change and its attendent effects will certainly exacerbate this condition. Look for charlatans to pop up promoting nonsense cures for the numerous plagues which will sweep over the land from the microbes released from their slumber. Don't be surprised if you hear stories of entire villages wiped out from some new ailment.
The only ones who will have relative safety will be those in the cities where there is some modicum of modern medicine and hygenic conditions. However, with the likes of Vlad and his cabal doing their best to rob the people blind, don't expect much in the way of a concerted effort to minimize the risks. The oligarchs will be too busy continuing with their plundering so they can build their massive mansions which are as cheaply made [bbc.com] as their tanks.
I care about the Russian people (Score:4, Interesting)
I care, but I've got my own problems over here.
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Indeed. Ultimately, this is the fault of the _population_, not the figure-heads they put in place. Not addressing or denying known problem always makes them worse.
That is way too simplistic (Score:2)
It's ridiculous to ignore the power wielded by the ultra wealthy. It's tempting to do though because, like an eldritch or Lovecraftian monster, they're so far beyond our world and they so many horrible things and they're so old and powerful that it's terrifying to think about
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That is why I said "ultimately". Seeing people get ultra wealthy and doing nothing about that starts the problem is at the start of the problem. There is always enough no-decency, no-honor scum that will do whatever it takes to amass wealth and power. A society that fails to stop them has at the very least partial responsibility for the effects from that as there is a direct causality.
Of course, once society has failed and the ultra-wealthy exist, things get more complex. But the root causes of the problem
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Delusional Article (Score:2, Interesting)
The entire summary is filled with nonsense, but this is maybe the worst of it:
A dwindling supply will lose value in a global market that is shifting to renewable energy.
Anyone who says this has no concept of how long it will take to replace traditional uses of oil and gas with renewables, Russia in fact will be profiting for well over a decade from massive oil and gas prices propelled by severe shortages across the globe.
It totally ignores Russias role in fertilizer (which comes from oil/gas) and even uran
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The reason why no sanctions against Russia have worked to date is exactly because these basic facts have been ignored.
The reason why no sanctions against Russia have worked before is that not everyone has been on board. Now, everyone but China is on board, and Russia isn't dumb enough to think getting owned by China later is better than having a big percentage of their people starve now — as great a tragedy as that would be, they've done it before and they'll do it again. China's not going to help them for free.
With a sufficient commitment to austerity (if it's good enough for the EU to recommend it for Greece, it's
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Only 40 countries out of 200 have sanctions on Russia. All of those are either US treaty allies or have US troops stationed on their soil. So they are operating under duress.
It doesn't matter why, only who and what.
Noone besides the US , UK and Poland really cares if Russia takes Ukraine.
Everyone anywhere near the region except China cares.
Western countries are hurting due to high energy prices
Everyone is hurting due to a variety of energy considerations, including that we're still consuming fossil fuels — the source of most of Russia's income.
BLM riots are nothing
True
compared to what will happen when white people start rioting
You mean like at the BLM protests?
over food and energy prices.
Good, let them riot. Let white people destroy their own communities for a change.
Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Russia is fucked. America is fucked. We're all fucked. Some more than others, but nobody's getting out of this unscathed except the older baby boomers who'll die before the shit hits the fan (and they know it, which is why they block any attempt to fix this mess).
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Russia is fucked. America is fucked. We're all fucked. Some more than others, but nobody's getting out of this unscathed except the older baby boomers who'll die before the shit hits the fan (and they know it, which is why they block any attempt to fix this mess).
That nicely sums it up. However nobody knows how that "death" thing really works. If reincarnation is the actual model, all those boomers may just be hard at work fucking themselves.
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The thing that best protects someone from the effects of climate change is wealth. When rising sea levels begin to inundate Bangladesh, they have to watch helplessly, but a city like Venice can build a six billion dollar tide gate system; that's only about 1/5 of the province's annual GDP.
When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, it caused 19 billion dollars of damage. Such an event would be financially catastrophic in a cities like Alexandria or Dakar, but it was barely a blip in NYC's economy, which is r
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Note of optimism:
The Hamptons are not a defensible position...
Global warming is good (Score:3, Interesting)
Global warming would be good for Russia, because among the other things mentioned by others, it would keep the Arctic Ocean free of ice all winter, allowing year-round Russian shipping.
But, the best effect of global warming would be what is feared as the worst effect: a large die-off of the world human population. The Earth has way too many people, which is in fact the reason that so much GHG are being released into the atmosphere. World population is simply not sustainable.
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I'm sorry... Yes climate change will impact us all demanding us to change uncomfortably rapidly and adapt to ever changing circumstances...
However, a large dying off of the human population? I still doubt that very much and I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who delivers this argument. It just makes SO little sense to me...
Re:Global warming is good (Score:4, Interesting)
However, a large dying off of the human population? I still doubt that very much and I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who delivers this argument. It just makes SO little sense to me...
Have a look at the impact one little war in Ukraine has on food supply. Now imagine a similar effect, globally, and a lot worse. These are not "arguments". These are projections by actual experts.
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No food, no people. Look at the actual projections for what will happen to agriculture in a 3 degree world. Then explain how you feed 10 billion people.
Re:Global warming is good (Score:4, Interesting)
> It just makes SO little sense to me...
I understand this isn't possible to make come across without a slightly condescending tone (which believe me isn't there), but:
please elaborate...
What I know, and argument with:
- 1st world grain exporter invaded the 4th
- gas prices stopped fertilizer production plants in Europe and North America
- Belarus + russia are big potash exporters. Both are under sanctions, hence no exports.
- There are ongoing massive droughts in various bread baskets of the world.
The numbers coming out of various analysis (UN, various think tanks...) range between 1-3 billion people starving within 5-10 years. That doesn't mean population die off. It only means we'll never reach 10 billion people.
And when I look at various population pyramids, I see population decline coming up pretty much everywhere.
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You do not profit from shipping if you have nothing to ship.
But, the best effect of global warming would be what is feared as the worst effect: a large die-off of the world human population. The Earth has way too many people, which is in fact the reason that so much GHG are being released into the atmosphere. World population is simply not sustainable.
That _is_ going to happen. Whether there will be a civilization to speak of after that or even a human race at all is up for debate.
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But, the best effect of global warming would be what is feared as the worst effect: a large die-off of the world human population.
I couldn't disagree more. Invention requires brain power and there are limits to what education can bring out of average intellects. As population increases, the pool of intelligent people who can actually solve global problems also increases. Unfortunately, average intellects will rarely listen to intelligent people, that is, until they can see the actual crisis at hand. This increases the necessity of having a large pool of intelligent people, to solve problems when they're well past having simple sol
The world's population is absolutely sustainable (Score:2)
We already have the technology to stop using fossil fuels. We also have the technology to scale our population down at an acceptable rate. Although we don't need to because we already produce more than enough food but we throw out 30 or 40% of it because it's not economically viable and profitable enough to feed it to people.
We need a large scale transformation of human technology and we have the tech to do that but right-
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But, the best effect of global warming would be what is feared as the worst effect: a large die-off of the world human population. The Earth has way too many people, which is in fact the reason that so much GHG are being released into the atmosphere. World population is simply not sustainable.
Start with yourself please. One Western person dying saves at least 10 times the CO2 emission compared to someone from Africa dying. If global warming is to be solved by killing people, then it is vastly more efficient to just kill off Europe, US, and Australia.
It's probably much worse than that. (Score:3)
As external revenues dry up and Russia has to become internally sustainable, the infrastructure needed to support that internal economy will simply collapse and beat a headlong retreat away from the Eastern 2/3 of the country. That's before taking into account the chaos of climate change, which will disrupt even the ability of some otherwise stable sub-regions to sustain themselves. Climate change may temporarily improve crop yields in some areas, but it's doubtful the yield improvement would even significantly defray the cost of hardening infrastructure against unfamiliar weather conditions...something they probably will just not do, and as a result, will instead abandon much of the land.
The cost, scale, and disruption of internal displacement is likely high. And, let's remember, these costs will be incurred in an environment where Russia is no longer viable as an energy exporter, so they won't be able to tap into anyone else's excesses to defray any of it.
The loss of its Asian territories to regional dictators aligned with Beijing is likely, and (unfortunately) I doubt they would lose them without a lot of pointless fighting that exacerbates all of the hardships already mentioned. Given what they've been willing to do in Europe in full view of the world, we can also expect much grimmer behavior than mere war also being perpetrated against peoples the Russians traditionally consider "less than", but it would only hasten and solidify the regional break from Russian rule.
I doubt the world would be sympathetic after all the poison (both literal and figurative) and chaos Russia has spewed out in this century, so the scale of foreign aid is unlikely to be significant relative to any of the costs. So, the prognosis is grim: What we think of as Russia ceases to exist in this century, and is replaced by a bitterly impoverished (even by current standards) rump state in Europe dominated by its neighbors (we can expect some of the less ethical among them to go on revanchist land-grab sprees against the weakened rump state), and one or a few low-population countries in its former Eastern territories, some similar to the "-stans" and some more like Mongolia.
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Same applies to the UK, where I live. We used to only have all-rain summers. Since the global warming kicked in we've been gettig 2-3 months of sunny weather every year. B)
You do know that's called a "drought" right? (Score:2)
Re:You do know that's called a "drought" right? (Score:5, Insightful)
and that it's bad for little things, like food production?
Bah, details and facts! The cult of "No Climate Change Is Happening Or If It Is Happening It Is Not Bad! (TM)" does not care about details or facts. They care about painting a rosy picture, no matter how dire things look, so they can continue to make the situation worse for a little bit longer.
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Nuclear is done for and no longer a viable solution. Yes, technically it could have worked, had it not ran into problems and opposition. But by now it's been overtaken, and I don't think it's coming back. It's just too slow to build and not competitive with renewables.
Even if we wanted to build lots of nuclear, and were to ignore that it's awfully expensive, we couldn't build enough of it fast enough because it's big unwieldy tech and there's not exactly a lot of places that specialize in it.
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And today people barely manage to build the things. That's the situation we have. Don't misunderstand, I'm not ideologically opposed to nuclear. I just think its time is past. We're not going back to steam trains, and the future of energy isn't nuclear because even though it was unfairly held back, the competition is too far ahead at this point.
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Intermittency is a problem solvable by brute force. Just build more and interconnect more.
In the end that's what we end up doing -- the brute force of mass applying cheap technology made by the million, rather than highly specialized, rare machines. See for instance modern computing running on loads of consumer hardware, rather than a few huge mainframes.
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You can overbuild solar a million times, and it still will NEVER work at night. The cost and time of construction for what you are proposing is orders of magnitude more expensive and harder to construct than building a nuclear baseload. There are reasons why every pathway in the IPCC 2021 Code Red Report had new nuclear energy.
You know NuScale plans mass production of SMR's which takes advantage of economies of mass production. So new nuclear will have the same advantages.
All antinuclear people are
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Wind blows at night. Also the USA and Europe are big and cover multiple timezones. If you over-generate, you can inefficiently transfer power over large distances and that's still okay, because it's not using up any fuel.
And sure, if NuScale can do mass production, that's neat. But others have mass production now. They're welcome to join whenever they get production going.
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Over generation costs money and explodes costs. Often times you have to pay people to take your excess electricity. There was an analysis from Princeton that said we would need to building up our electrical infrastructure significantly in order to take advantage of dispersed renewables. In fact a nuclear baseload would be cheaper(and that does not even count storage).
Just remember Germany spent 500 billion euros on renewables and failed to decarbonize. Failed. If they spent the same on nuclear energy t
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Only the Democrats made it official policy to oppose nuclear fission. That changed on paper, likely because
It's because Biden is pro-nuclear. He has Dupont in his district, donating to his campaign for years. He has complete faith in the ability of scientists to manage problems (as do most people in Wilmington).
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Only the Democrats made it official policy to oppose nuclear fission. That changed on paper, likely because
It's because Biden is pro-nuclear. He has Dupont in his district, donating to his campaign for years. He has complete faith in the ability of scientists to manage problems (as do most people in Wilmington).
One of the 1st things that Biden did was to cancel all new nuclear projects in the US. Not sure how you think he is pro-nuclear. If he is getting funds from pro-nuclear folks, we are getting ripped off.
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Just wait until the gulf stream stops or slows. You will be getting arctic winters then.
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I'd be fine with that. I'm originally from a country when it's normal to get -20 Celsius in Winter and I kind of miss that nice winter-summer distinction here, you know?
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Be a bit chilly in most UK housing. I hear you can't afford heat now.
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They say we'll face overpopulation at some point in the next half of the century. Perhaps this is the answer. x)
That's now how "things" work (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, temperatures are rising, but Those temperatures aren't enough to melt Siberia.
What we're seeing is that the water cycle is getting fucked up by rising temperatures. This is causing global droughts. This in turn means less food production, which needs to be countered by a WWII style global response. We're not doing that, because it would interfere with rich people's yacht money.
That means poorer countries are going to have severe food shortages. Russia was already right on the edge of being one of those poorer countries. Vladdy Boy's little "Special Military Operation" has destroyed his economy for the next 20 years. Meanwhile he's dying of liver cancer and probably won't make it through 2022. When he drops there's gonna be a civil war to see who the next dictator is since he doesn't have an heir.
So yeah, Russia is *fucked*. They're not gonna have the cash to just buy their way out of the droughts and food shortages that are coming. And they're gonna get hit by the same severe weather conditions everybody else is (again, climate change isn't going to suddenly make Siberia a fun place to be, we're talking a few degrees here). All while they're fighting a civil war.
Good times.
Re:That's now how "things" work (Score:5, Interesting)
Global warming is the planet-wide cause - climate change is the more complicated regional effect.
And the warming is uneven, concentrated mostly near the poles. The average temperature of the planet has only increased by (almost) 1C - however most of Northern Asia, including Russia, has already been seeing average temperatures 4C above normal for years.
That is in fact dramatic enough to melt vast amounts of marginal permafrost, even before you consider the more complicated effects of climate change.
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it's not "global warming" it's climate change.
Its global warming. Climate change is a term Republican strategist Frank Luntz came up with to help Bush win an election.
In this case it backfired (Score:3)
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Re:The opposite will happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Hahahahah, such fantasy! Such vision! Such ignorance as to actual reality! Have you somehow missed, for example, that permafrost is mostly sand and water and _nothing_ will grow there? Have you missed that it will turn into swamp? The human capacity for delusion is truly fascination.
Or that a 1-2% temperature shift (Score:2)
The warming isn't enough to make cold places habitable, it's just enough to fuck up the water cycle and cause massive droughts.
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isn't going to make Siberia a hot spot for tourism?
Turning it into a sandy swamp that has just enough biomass to stink to high heaven?
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Have you somehow missed, for example, that permafrost is mostly sand and water and _nothing_ will grow there? ... untill you add a little fertlizer.
Sand and water, eh? Sounds like hydroponic gardening by the square mile, with no need to actually build infrastructure to contain it and hold it up, over a substantial fraction of a continent.
Once the temperature is up where you don't have to HEAT it to get it to growing temperature, little things like "there is a dearth of nutrients" are susceptible to inexpen
Russian Fertilizer exports (Score:2)
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Strange, I thought it contained a lot of organic matter--about half of all organic matter in all soils, if the wikipedia article on permafrost is to be believed. And one of the worries about it thawing was that it would release all those organics into the ecosystem. I guess we don't have to worry about that after all!
Or maybe you were thinking of permafrost on Mars.
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Yes, what a conundrum - they will have land in Europe that has great soil, but is now too dry to grow crops, and huge tracts of permafrost coming into a growing climate, but its all sandy and won't grow crops.
How will they ever solve these problems?? Doesn't take a rocket scientist. Assuming that no one will come up with any solution - that everything will be left just as it is - is the true delusion.
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Based on what data? What do you conceive of as the limiting factor in Siberian population?
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No, no it won't. You see, it takes tens to hundreds of thousands of years for an area that size to acquire new fauna and flora, as the old ones would have died off. And in those tens of thousands of years? Less and less food.
Worse, the only way to control climate change is to mine fewer resources and use less fossil fuel, requiring the entire Russian economy to change. And the Russians have shown, through the failure of Glasnost, that they don't have the necessary resources to make that change.
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"it takes tens to hundreds of thousands of years for an area that size to acquire new fauna and flora": Let me bring you up to date. Somewhere in the past ten thousand years, we invented agriculture. Part of agriculture is *artificially* putting new flora (and sometimes fauna) in places where that flora didn't previously exist. And in the past couple hundred years, we invented these things called "tractors", that can speed up that planting, not to mention the harvesting.
Now you can complain about monocul
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we still don't even consider it to be habitable for another several tens of thousands of years.
Perhaps we should be using data to make that determination instead of using a guess from a physicist made in the 1950s. The animals there seem to be doing just fine which is a pleasant surprise to everyone who doesn't make anti-nuclear propaganda. There are people who have been living near the containment zone since 1987 and they also seem to be doing fine (also a surprise). Yet we still act as if the claims from people working without any data are set in stone and ignore the data we have gathered since
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The data I've seen is that there is a steady stream of replacement animals moving into the area to replace the ones there which aren't breeding.
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TFA begs to differ:
In Klimat, Gustafson maintains that Russia's agricultural exports and revenues will continue to increase until the end of this decade, with global warming of one degree Celsius improving Russian agricultural productivity. But in the 2030s and 2040s the rate of increase will diminish, because of harm to Russian crops caused by drought, heat waves, and torrential rain. Some of these difficulties may be counteracted by rising prices, as climate change compromises the world's food supply, but
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Just like the American West, eh:
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu... [unl.edu]
This is now a 22 year old drought. Yep, the inhabitants should be happy their parched ground is becoming more inhabitable.
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So even worse as the boreal forests etc haven't evolved to deal with fire.
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How so? Muskeg isn't too habitable and hard to build infrastructure on it. Perhaps read the summary.
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No, enough of it is, large areas of boreal forest that has been burning up too. Likely areas of glacial scoured bedrock as well.
Re:The opposite will happen (Score:5, Insightful)
"Exactly. The effects of 'climate change' over the millennia have been both positive and negative. Mankind has always moved around and/or successfully adapted in situ."
Yes, during times before we invented flags.
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Congratulations! You just dodged the entire topic at hand, instead hand-waving it away by dismissing everyone who might disagree with you as being someone who is representative of "paycheck to paycheck" thinking.
Without even defending your position saliently once.
At least Thane Gustafson made a limp-wristed attempt to explain why Russia may wish to fight climate change/global warming (sorry, Thane: they aren't listening to you). The only valid point he makes is that future petroleum market demand will shri
Re:What if we don't? (Score:5, Insightful)
Humanity did NOT ever become close to extinction in its history. Possibly in its pre-history, but during its history (and well before), humanity was far too broadly scattered, on all continents except Antarctica, for any event to wipe it out.
And now, there are only a few things that could plausibly wipe out humanity: nuclear war (probably), a highly lethal pandemic which is also highly infectious before it kills you, and an asteroid or comet. Climate change is not one of them, IMO; there will always be habitable regions, and the climate is evidently not something that can fall into catastrophic positive feedback, or else it would have done so at some point in the past four and a half billion years; the chances that it was accidentally teetering on an unstable comfortable peak for all that time seem extraordinarily slim. (It apparently came close to turning into Hoth a few billion years ago.)
So our chances of rolling snake eyes seem slim, although I would be much more worried about nukes, pandemics, and impactors.
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Modern humans actually came pretty close to extinction about 70,000 years ago [google.com], but I guess that counts as pre-history.
These days, there are enough people in enough far-flung corners of the earth, it is hard to see how any single event could wipe us out. That said, I find it extremely plausible that there will be a global civilization collapse and massive population collapse, which may eventually lead to extinction, but thats a different
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Yes, the Toba event (c. 70k years ago) was what I was referring to as a possible pre-historic near extinction event for humans. Although when I looked it up just now, it seems to be more speculative than I realized.
Re:The opposite will happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. The effects of 'climate change' over the millennia have been both positive and negative. Mankind has always moved around and/or successfully adapted in situ.
It has. With a massively smaller population size that strategy can actually be used. Sooo, the last "warm age" was something like 15'000 years ago. Human population at that time was around 5M. It is not difficult for 5M people to cherry-pick the best locations to live in. It is impossible for 8B people to do the same.
Do you even realize how completely stupid your argument is?
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I take it, then, that you're ignoring the Early Medevil Warm, and the earlier warm period between (roughly) 150 BCE and 100 CE that gave the Roman Republic the manpower and food for its rapid expansion?
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It is not relevant. It was something like less than 1C and it was not consistent. The thing that is to come and has already started is different.
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> With a massively smaller population size that strategy can actually be used.
Short term trends do not necessarily predict long term trends and rarely contradict historical trends. Large populations are masses of smaller populations. You're over-generalizing as a crutch to support bad reasoning, to put it simply.
> Do you even realize how completely stupid your argument is?
History acts as a lens to observe human behavior. We literally have data to visualize modern migrations [digg.com]. There is no argument per s
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Technology has moved on a lot in 15,000 years.
As an example we have the technology to get energy from thorium and uranium by nuclear fission. With that we can produce water suitable for drinking and irrigation from the sea. There's no shortage of thorium, and there's enough uranium dissolved as salts in the sea to last us until the sun consumes Earth as it goes red giant.
Russia was building nuclear power reactors while selling fossil fuels to Europe. Russia has enough land, natural resources, and people to cut itself off from world trade and still t
Re:The opposite will happen (Score:4, Informative)
Russians are not big of safety.
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Big ON safety. Duh.
Re:The opposite will happen (Score:5, Interesting)
Except those natural climate shifts have been tens of thousands of times slower, and the manmade climate changes (such as with the Mayan empire and the Khmer empire) resulted in near-total extinction of the humans. Indeed, even now, the original native population has failed utterly to recover.
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Fission is a stop-gap solution. I'd be happy with the globe - the entire globe - producing Gen4 nuclear power stations (Gen3+ at worst) in relatively small numbers, with the intent of burning up the nuclear waste as part of the fuel. However, I'd want to see 10% of the subsidies currently given to fossil fuels go toward nuclear fusion (which is only not here because their funding keeps getting cut in real terms).
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Exactly. The effects of 'climate change' over the millennia have been both positive and negative. Mankind has always moved around and/or successfully adapted in situ.
You've said it yourself: over millennia.
NOT over decades. The pace of climate change caused by humans and our carbon-economy is unprecedented.
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If all you do is dump the waste from a desal plant in the same site constantly, you can locally increase salinity which can make the coastline less-friendly to life. Clearly they need a better disposal plan than "let's just chuck it over here boys".