The Air Quality Index in my town is currently 260 (very unhealthy) due to a surge in wildfires in western Canada and the northwest US. There are additional smaller fires not shown on this map at this zoom level.
From the interactive map it looks like the worst air in the world right now.
Lol no, they’ve sunk too much social capital into it.
For a bit I’d walk into discussions about how weather has been insane the last few years and say “yep, the climate is changing” (no mention of cause, even) and there’d just be awkward silence. Now I’m hearing people blame the sun, because I guess they’ve figured out a comeback to their own observations.
Thankfully technology is bailing us out even though we don’t deserve it.
Somehow I get the feeling it’s already to late for that. The Amazon is already in a bad state and they’re discovering the temp at which leaves die and won’t recover is even lower then they expected. AT this moment we’re having to much freak issues that science couldn’t predict (it’s worse then they thought) and as species we’re more concerned on killing ourselves then fixing problems we created.
I think nature is pretty fast solving the main cause of the issues. Nature will survive, I just hope that the next dominant species is a tad more brighter. (and that it will take a few decades more)
The first time I flew over a vast expanse of red dust that was once part of the Amazon, I wept.
I think that’s too pessimistic. There’s no way it’d wipe us all out even if fossil fuels had continued being the only practical tech. Even at double-digit temperature increase Antarctica is quite cool, and we’ve passed through bottlenecks of only a few tens of thousands of people before. Some wartorn agrarian Antarctic civilisation would continue on.
What the shift to renewables means is that we might put the Earth into a new persistent state, but then it will stop and we have an opportunity to either just adapt or try and push it back.
It’s already predicted that we would live as species in the artic circles as that’s the only area still inhabitable with the prospected 3-4C temp rise. (as long as it’s high enough) I’m not sure if I’d want to live to see that happen.
Do you have a link for that, by chance? The 2 C predictions have us living in a wrecked world with almost no coral reefs but with about the same agricultural output, IIRC.
I’m not sure how your Dutch is, but this is the article I found in our paper: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2023/07/19/dichtbevolkte-gebieden-op-aarde-worden-langzamerhand-onleefbaar-a4170109
It is probably behind a paywall. (at least in our country nun subscribers get 4 free articles a month)
Thanks! A machine translation.
That’s very interesting, humans have a measurable preferred average temperature. It doesn’t suggest that it will be impossible to live in India in this scenario, just much less appealing. I already live well outside of our preferred niche towards the cold end, for example.
That’s not to say that it’s a good situation, though. I hope I haven’t come across as suggesting that, but we’re very hard to kill. I think humans are on the same tier of adaptability as small terrestrial invertebrates at this point; if they can survive probably so can we.
Here’s a current temperature map so you can see where 11-15C is. India and Egypt seem to be hot-side outliers to start with, having been extensively populated for a long time, as does West Africa. South Africa and Argentina are noticeable areas that are climatically perfect without having too much going on.
I wonder if we might see agriculture confined to cold seasons in some areas of a hotter Earth.