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Where Will We Live as the World Burns [1]
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Date: 2022-08-31
Gaia Vince Wed, August 31, 2022 at 3:00 AM I found this story in Yahoo apparently from Time originally. It would seem to be food for thought.
TOPSHOT-SPAIN-WILDFIRE-CLIMATE-WEATHER
A firefighter helicopter drops water to put out a wildfire in the Baixa Limia - Serra do Xures Natural Park near the village of Lobeira, Ourense province, northwestern Spain, on August 25, 2022. Credit - MIGUEL RIOPA- AFP/Getty Images)
While nations rally to reduce their carbon emissions, and try to adapt at-risk places to hotter conditions, there is an elephant in the room: for large portions of the world, local conditions are becoming too extreme and there is no way to adapt. People will have to move to survive.
Over the next fifty years, hotter temperatures combined with more intense humidity are set to make large swathes of the globe lethal to live in. Fleeing the tropics, the coasts, and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes; you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. This migration has already begun—we have all seen the streams of people fleeing drought-hit areas in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where farming and other rural livelihoods have become impossible.
The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent as the planet heats.
We can—and we must—prepare. Developing a radical plan for humanity to survive a far hotter world includes building vast new cities in the more tolerable far north while abandoning huge areas of the unendurable tropics. It involves adapting our food, energy, and infrastructure to a changed environment and demography as billions of people are displaced and seek new homes.
Our best hope lies in cooperating as never before: decoupling the political map from geography. However unrealistic it sounds, we need to look at the world afresh and develop new plans based on geology, geography, and ecology. In other words, identify where the freshwater resources are, where the safe temperatures are, where gets the most solar or wind energy, and then plan population, food and energy production around that. The good news is, there’s plenty of room on Earth. If we allow 20 square meters of space per person—around double the minimum habitable size for a house allowed under the International Residential Code—11 billion people would need 220,000 square kilometers of land to live on. There would be plenty of room to house everyone on earth in a single country—the surface area of Canada alone is 9.9 million square kilometers. Of course, I’m not proposing anything as absurd, but this is something to reflect on when it is claimed that a country is “too full” for more people.
The bad news is that no place on Earth will be unaffected by climate change. Everywhere will undergo some kind of transformation in response to changes in the climate, whether through direct impacts or the indirect result of being part of a globally interconnected biophysical and socioeconomic system. Extreme events are already occurring around the world and will continue to hit “safe” places. Some places, though, will be more easily adaptable to these changes, while others will become entirely uninhabitable fairly quickly. Bear in mind that many places will be uncomfortable if not intolerable by 2050—around the lifespan of most mortgages—we need to start planning where we make our homes now. By 2100 it will be a different planet, so let’s focus on some of the livable options.
Global heating is shifting the geographical position of our species’ temperature niche northwards, and people will follow. The optimum climate for human productivity—the best conditions for both agricultural and nonagricultural output—turns out to be an average temperature of 11°C to 15°C, according to a 2020 study. This global niche is where human populations have concentrated for millennia, including for the entirety of human civilization, so it’s unsurprising that our crops, livestock and other economic practices are ideally adapted to these conditions. The researchers show that, depending on scenarios of population growth and warming, ‘1 to 3 billion people are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 years.’ They add that, ‘in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience mean average temperatures [that are currently found mostly] in the Sahara.’
As a general rule, people will need to move away from the equator, and from coastlines, small islands (which will shrink in size), and arid or desert regions. Rainforests and woodlands are also places to avoid, due to fire risk. Populations are going to shift inland, towards lakes, higher elevations and northern latitudes.
Looking at the globe, it is immediately clear that land is mainly distributed in the north—less than a third of Earth’s land is in the southern hemisphere and most of that is either in the tropics or Antarctica. So the scope for climate migrants to seek refuge in the south is limited. Patagonia is the main option, although it is already suffering from droughts, but agriculture and settlement there will remain possible as the global temperature rises. The main lands of opportunity for migrants, however, are in the north. Temperatures in these safer regions will rise—and will rise faster in higher latitudes than at the equator – but the average absolute temperature will still be far lower than in the tropics. Of course climate disruption brings extreme weather, and nowhere will be spared these increasingly common events—Canada reached temperatures of 50°C in 2021, making British Columbia hotter than the Sahara Desert, and then, a few months later, was hit by deadly floods and landslides that displaced thousands. Fires have blazed across Siberia’s tundra, and melting permafrost is a shifting, unstable ground on which to build infrastructure.
Happily, however, the northern latitudes are already home to wealthier nations that generally have strong institutions and stable governments that are among the best placed to build social and technological resilience to the challenges this century.
Problematically, many of them have also struggled politically with immigration to a far greater extent than have many much poorer countries (poor countries also host by far the greatest numbers of displaced people), and with a migrant “crisis” that is far smaller than the great climate migration we will see over the next 75 years. It may be more possible to shift a political-social mindset in the space of a few years, however, than to return the tropics to habitability. Consider that most of Europe’s nations each rely on tens of thousands of migrant workers just to harvest the crops they grow today. With better agricultural conditions across the north, the need for labour will only increase.
North of the 45°N parallel—which runs through Michigan in North America, France, Croatia, Mongolia, and Xinjiang in China, for instance—will be the twenty-first century’s booming haven: it represents 15 per cent of the planet’s area but holds 29 per cent of its ice free land, and is currently home to a small fraction of the world’s (aging) people. It’s also entering that optimum climate for human productivity with mean average temperatures of around 13°C.
Inland lake systems, like the Great Lakes region of Canada and the U.S., will see a huge influx of migrants—reversing the previous exodus from these areas—as the vast bodies of water should keep the region fairly temperate. Duluth in Minnesota on Lake Superior bills itself as the most climate-proof city in the U.S., although it’s already dealing with fluctuating water levels. Other upper Midwest cities around the lakes, including Minneapolis and Madison, are also likely to be desirable destinations. More southerly Midwestern cities face the threat of extreme heatwaves. The University of Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Initiative researchers concluded that “eight of the top 10 cities facing the highest likelihood of extreme heat in 2040 are located in the Midwest,” including cities from Detroit to Grand Rapids. Further east, locations get riskier quickly, but Buffalo in New York State, and Toronto and Ottawa in Canada look to be safer choices for migrants from the coasts.
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