Ken, you might be right that nuclear war is MORE dangerous than climate change.
Now that the biggest richest nations are less likely to push that button, North Korea, Iran (soon or sooner) and other counties whose rationality we don't recognize ARE or soon will be willing to, as soon as they feel a need.
After enough crop failures caused by climate changing faster than plants and farmers can adapt (but not faster than plant diseases and pests can adapt) every country with crop failures and nuclear weapons will be very motivated to convince richer nations to take their point of view into account.
For example by threatening, or starting, a nuclear war. Starvation trumps diplomacy.
The DoD figured that out many years ago, and listed among their probablyenear-future military missions having to deal with forced mass migrations caused by crop failures and famines caused by rapid climate change.
Gee, what's happening all around the Middle East and northern Africa? Refugees. And they are "only" fleeing ISIS.
When they are fleeing "we CAN'T grow enough food here", I expect large wars to be among the consequences (along with mass famines and civil unrest with nihilistic groups like ISIS multiplying).
I read that modern high-yield crops are optimized for their exact micro-climate, to the point that potatoes are bred and marketed for bands less than 100 miles wide, North-South. The exact plant pests and diseases change that rapidly, and optimum climate/growth is (I guess) dialed in pretty precisely for some crops.
So even a small change in climate will wreak havoc on commercial crop yields.
MAYBE we could adapt if the changes were gradual or consistent - but we expect chaotic changes until they are so severe that 'something else happens". We can't adapt when we don't know what he climate will be like from year to year.
And good luck convincing consumers to change from wheat to breadfruit or taro or yams. Oh, well, people too conservative to change will first just have to spend most of their income on basic food, then, when conditions become more severe, starve. Or migrate en mass to some country with more food. I.e., war.
We've already seen our winter Hardiness Zones change by a half-zone.
Seattle had the VERY hottest July it EVER recorded.
How unusual is the current drought? Much of California blew past "severe drought" and "extreme drought" a while ago. Now they have to call it "Exceptional Drought".
WA already spent its whole annual budget on fighting forest fires and now the armed forces are helping out.
"In 2015, for the first time in the Forest Service’s 110-year history, those costs will consume more than half the agency’s budget, according to a report released this month. If the trend continues, two-thirds of the Forest Service budget will be spent on fires by 2025."
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
Maybe after global temperatures rise another few degrees, seasonally
excessive rains and cyclonic storms will put any remaining fires out.
How much of the country is having a RECORD drought?
When I had a chance to see an Alaskan glacier, you could stand where it reached just a few years ago, and be UNABLE TO SEE where the glacier has already retreated to.
The MEASURED and unarguable temperature changes and sea-level-changes are already enough to convince 97% of climatologists that climate is changing faster than it has in tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but that the change IS due to human-released CO2 - driving it higher than it has been in 650,000 years.
Expand these images to see the grossly obvious "hockey stick" in the present, where human burning of CO2 has totally altered the balance of the atmosphere.
I think this decade is like the moment between SEEING a flash of lightning and hearing the BOOM. We know something big is coming, but not what.
https://www2.ucar.edu/news/how...
Personally, I was convinced the first time I saw a Keeling Curve, back in the 1980s.
I thought it was obvious (but not proven) then.
I think it's as obvious (now) as a fart in church, and proven as well as anything that complex can be proven.
But not every scientist agreed, until the last few years.
Now it's around 97% agreement among climatologists.
Maybe the other 3% are just stubborn, but based on what I see on television and read, they are paid to lie, by groups with very short-term, short-sighted political agendas that do NOT include passing on a livable planet to our grandchildren. Politicians owned by the Koch brothers, for example.
I understand that not everyone agrees (unless they have scientific training in climatology and are NOT paid to lie). But the last few years of consistently unusual weather (and near-total consensus among experts) convinced
me the rest of the way.
I used to think that there was room for skeptics to disagree, but not lately. The climate measurements (not models or projections, but
measurements) are now too obvious.
