Thames Alligators, The Brazilian Desert - How To Survive The Coming Century - New Scientist

[hatrack]

ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.

Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world. The good news is that the survival of humankind itself is not at stake: the species could continue if only a couple of hundred individuals remained. But maintaining the current global population of nearly 7 billion, or more, is going to require serious planning.

Four degrees may not sound like much - after all, it is less than a typical temperature change between night and day. It might sound quite pleasant, like moving to Florida from Boston, say, or retiring from the UK to southern Spain. An average warming of the entire globe by 4 °C is a very different matter, however, and would render the planet unrecognisable from anything humans have ever experienced. Indeed, human activity has and will have such a great impact that some have proposed describing the time from the 18th century onward as a new geological era, marked by human activity. "It can be considered the Anthropocene," says Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

A 4 °C rise could easily occur. The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose conclusions are generally accepted as conservative, predicted a rise of anywhere between 2 °C and 6.4 °C this century. And in August 2008, Bob Watson, former chair of the IPCC, warned that the world should work on mitigation and adaptation strategies to "prepare for 4 °C of warming".

EDIT

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126971.700-how-to-survive-the-coming-century.html

[NickB79]

1. Well, that was a fine bedtime story

I think I'll go curl up in the fetal position now.

[happyslug]

2. Alligators on the Thames? Thames river in Ontario maybe, but not England

Alligators exist only in two places on this planet at the present time, the New World and the China. Alligators are NOT sea going (i.e. does NOT go far from shore), so it would be next to impossible for Alligators to get to the Thames River in England (The swim between Iceland and Scotland is even to far for Alligators to swim). Even the Thames River in Ontario is to far north at the temperatures being suggested, more do to Winters would still occur, but be shorter, more severe and further to the north (Do to the lack of sunlight in that part of the world in Winter AND the affect of CO2 in reflecting what light that gets to the poles away from the poles in Winter).

Now Crocodiles are a different ballgame. Sea going Crocodiles can go while out into the ocean (Through mostly form India to Australia). Crocodiles also exist in the Nile River and could work they way around the Mediterranean to Spain and then to the North Sea. Thus Crocodiles in the Thames in England possible, but not gators.

Alligators:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator

Crocodiles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crocodile

[Chulanowa]

3. Actually, it sounds kind of neat...

I mean, not that I want it to happen, but honestly, I'd love a fiction series about it...

[tom_paine]

4. This article lost me with this, seemingly loopy paragraph...

If we allow 20 square metres of space per person - more than double the minimum habitable space allowed per person under English planning regulations - 9 million (sic?) people would need 18,000 square kilometres of land to live on. The area of Canada alone is 9.1 million square kilometres and, combined with all the other high-latitude areas, such as Alaska, Britain, Russia and Scandinavia, there should be plenty of room for everyone, even with the effects of sea-level rise.


:wtf:

20 square meters per person, eh?

Does that include waste desposal? Food production and consumption?

Or is this from some English Apartment House planning comission that has no bearing in the discussion of larger issues such as global ecology and global environment?

In either case, this paragraph goes off the rails with it's lack of consideration for simple mathematics and the simple commonsense of human living.

It may be possible to pack humans in with a total area per person of 20 sq. meters (215.28 sq. ft.), but that would only be in the "empty world" economic view that most ecologists decry, where all that mattered was human habitation and endeavors.

That's off the rails and very unscientific.