Do you think we are going to see in our lifespan the catastrophes created by climate change,?

Question

and if so , how are you think they are goin to be.

Answer 1

Actually we are already seeing some effects. They have been increasing exactly according to the warnings I gave during my presentations at a UNESCO conference several years ago.

The antartic ice is melting, permafrost in the artic is melting and causing several kinds of damage, including damage to buildings and things that were built on it thinking it would remain frozen and stable, such as the Alaskan pipeline.

Sea levels are rising, have risen, and are projected to rise a lot more and more quickly. This will mean lost land around coastal areas, quite a lot of land in some places.

Storms are stronger, droughts are longer and worse, and the weather fluctuates more chaotically due to the extra energy in the atmospheric system.

Crops are getting harder to grow, driving up costs to the consumer.

Various species are dying out or having a harder time. This also disrupts the highly complicated web of species that go into setting up the living conditions for most of the species of creatures we consume as food, such as fish.

Things are getting harder for the insects that polinate the crops too.

Conditions are changing in favor of many new diseases forming and spreading, new germs, viruses and funguses adapted or adapting to changing conditions.

Some harmful insect species are on the rise as well, such as some of the worst varieties of mosquitos.

Also keep in mind that major food sources such as corn will not reproduce properly with as little as 5 degree change in average temperature conditions, so the changes we are seeing could very easily lead to global famine of an unprecedented scale and severity.

Any farmer will tell you that it is getting harder and harder to get the crops to just grow right.

So the changes are here, I have noticed them myself in the course of my life in just a few decades. We no longer have the kind of spring and summer weather we had when I was a kid and we see records being made and broken far often than can be explained by looking at historic measurements or any reasonable statistical deviations from that data.

If you want a good book that explains many of the long term factors facing us you should look for "The Little Ice Age." by Brian Fagan. It is very well done and goes into great detail while presenting references you can check for yourself.

Answer 2

I guess it depends which catastrophes you had in mind. The media likes to go overboard when it comes to climate change and images of tidal waves, rapidly rising sea levels and mass destruction are the musings of an over active imagination.

There will undoubtedly be significant changes but by and large these are the result of events unfolding over many years.

I've created a website which looks at global warming and climate change, one of the pages examines the future implications. There's no doomsday scenarios just best projections based on the available data - http://profend.com/global-warming/pages/future.html

Answer 3

There will be no catastorphes, there will be change, but it will be at too slow a rate to be classified as catastrophic. Since global warming has been going on for some time now, so have these changes.

Answer 4

There will be more intense and more frequent hurricanes, tornado's, floods, cyclones, wind storms, hail, and intense thunderstorms, the seasons could start and stop at different times every year destabilizing growing seasons and agriculture could collapse some years causing widespread famine in the first and developing world and worsening it in the third world which would lead to economic depressions, political revolutions and if it got bad enough the collapse of civilization itself.

Answer 5

A slow change of a few degrees in temperature over a hundred years is unlikely to create any catastrophes.

So, no.

Think about it ... local temperature can vary by 30 degrees F in a day, and 100 degrees F over the course of a year.

A rise of a few degrees F temperature increase over a hundred years won't create any more catastrophes then what we see from normal temperature changes.

Answer 6

If you're old or we do something about it, no.

Otherwise a "few degrees" will cause massive coastal flooding with resultant cost. And serious damage to agriculture, which is already starting:

http://www.nasw.org/users/nbazilchuk/Articles/gwmaples.htm

The costs of all that will be enormous.

But poor countries already struggling to feed themselves will have the worst of it. There a lot of people (not all) will die of starvation.

We need to reduce it so we can all cope with it.

The IPCC is scheduled to put out a report on this next week.

http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-04-02T002755Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-292865-4.xml&archived=False

Answer 7

No