Pirate's Cove

Would this be the class of scientists who aren’t shady and the ones who fraudulently obtain documents? That would be Peter Gleick, who authors this piece on climamoonbattery

The climate crisis will create two classes: those who can flee, and those who cannot

A few years ago, after I gave a talk on water and climate change, I had an Arizona rancher come up and ask me if there would be enough water in the future for their livestock or if they should sell out and move north. This week, I received an email from a retiring doctor, who, acknowledging both their privileged economic situation and the personal nature of the decision, nevertheless asked if it “would it be more advantageous/safe to consider moving to coastal Oregon or Washington, rather than staying in southern California” because of rising seas, extreme heat and the growing threat of wildfires. At an Independence Day party this weekend, a couple asked me if they should move from Colorado to Michigan because of growing drought and water shortages in the western US.

I get these questions regularly and am both encouraged and dismayed by them. Encouraged because it suggests that the message about climate risks is finally getting out and people are beginning to reflect on the personal implications of those risks. Dismayed by the realization that the climate crisis is going to produce two classes of refugees: those with the freedom and financial resources to try, for a while at least, to flee from growing threats in advance, and those who will be left behind to suffer the consequences in the form of illness, death and destruction.

Worldwide, nearly 700 million people now live in low-lying coastal zones vulnerable to sea-level rise and coastal storms. That number could reach a billion by 2050. Island nations like the Maldives, Seychelles, Kiribati and others could be completely wiped out by rising seas and storms. Even a rise of only a meter (39in), almost certainly unavoidable now, will displace millions of people in Florida and along the Gulf coast, causing trillions of dollars in damages and property loss.

Weird how so many big shot Warmists continue to move near the coasts, eh? 39 inches is, of course, over 3 feet of sea rise, which Gleick is alluding to happening in 30 years, when we haven’t had that in over 150 years of the Modern Warm Period. This is what they call “science”.

How bad will it get? I don’t know because I don’t know how long our politicians will dither before finally dealing with the climate crisis. I don’t know because there are natural factors that could slightly slow or, more likely, massively speed up, the rate of change, causing cascading and accelerating disasters faster than we can adapt. But we know enough now to invest in reducing the emissions of climate-changing gases and to begin to adapt to those impacts we can no longer avoid. These changes are coming and the costs, especially to those left behind, will be beyond anything our disaster management systems have had to deal with in the past.

Doooooooom! Wankers.

Read: Bummer: ‘Climate Change’ Will Create Two Classes Of People »

Other than being optimistic on enabling Government authoritarianism, are they optimistic on anything? Or, is it primarily doom and gloom?

Why the left cannot afford to be optimistic about climate change

Two reports released this month communicated in stark terms that whatever we may once have hoped about the future, even as recently as 18 months ago, it will not now live up to its promise. The Committee on Climate Change’s report on the accelerating impact of global heating laid out in exhaustive detail the range and extent of the threats to Britain’s economy and society from worsening climate change, already noting “billions in economic losses and thousands of heat-related deaths during events such as the 2018 heatwave”. It makes an urgent call to ramp up adaptation to the changing climate, and criticises the government for leaving adaptation “under-resourced, underfunded and often ignored”. (snip)

The environment we inhabit is changing more rapidly than humanity has experienced since the foundation of the first cities. Adaptation to those changes is becoming essential, and either that adaptation will be fair, building on principles of social and economic justice, or it will – by default – reproduce and exacerbate the worst features of capitalist society. The Covid pandemic, notoriously, has seen the super-rich become richer across the globe as millions have died. Socially just adaptation would start to address these vast inequalities.

So, capitalism bad. So are rich people. Except those rich people who pay homage to the Cult of Climastrology (and build vacation homes at the seashore)

But while a scheme like retrofitting homes seems win-win, much of what we need to do to adapt to climate change will involve changing how we live, and here there will be costs and trade-offs. Working from home, for example, is broadly popular with those who have the option to do it. But many jobs obviously can’t be performed remotely, and if our city centres are drained of office workers, the jobs needed to serve them will disappear. And with reports of companies attempting to expand workplace monitoring into their workers’ homes, there is an urgent need to put in place clear controls and regulations over the conditions of home-working, in the same way they apply in the workplace.

So, they just want you to stay home and work, like during COVID lockdown. Sure, that might cause problems for some other people’s jobs, but, it’s a small price to pay

These are all questions about adaptation, and Covid has made them unavoidable. But most versions of the Green New Deal proposed so far, including Labour’s in 2019, have severely underplayed the necessity of adaptation. More recently, calls for a Zero Covid strategy have tended to radically underestimate the immense costs of the kind of restrictions on society that, for example, strict border controls and regular lockdowns create, and minimise the extreme improbability of ever eliminating Covid globally. This is another version of avoiding the question of adaptation.

Who forces all this adaptation to the doomsday cult’s beliefs?

If the left tries to base itself on optimism, it will find it is grossly out of step with the times we live in. We can achieve near-miracles with science and technology: the spectacularly rapid introduction of highly effective Covid vaccines over the last year is evidence of that. But the social system we live in – global capitalism – means we cannot distribute the vaccine fairly and quickly worldwide, and so we are dooming ourselves to life with Covid as new variants emerge among unvaccinated populations.

Oh, please, these are miserable people who only think of the negative. That’s their world.

Read: The Climate Cult Cannot Afford To Be Optimistic On Climate Emergency Doom Or Something »