Monsoons have been a dud so far. Our well nearly dried up, and we were planning to shift should water run out. The municipal water supply is useless. The irony: my state (Kerala) receives around 3000+ mm rainfall per year on average, and suffered from devastating floods last year.
I feel sad when Indians wank about military technology and "national security" issues due to Pakistan and China. The single greatest national security threat for India is Indians' abject incompetence in governing themselves. I fear that we will pay a very heavy price for this.
Depending on the definition of "modern". If you mean third generation tanks, then the US has almost twice as many. 7970 vs 4791. Russia has 15755 but I'm not sure how many qualify as third generation. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_main_battle_tanks_by_c...
A lot of Russia's armor consists of dated T-72s, a small number of which are being upgraded, but those upgrades are basically "Add a thermal sight, make the turrent turn a little faster, add some ERA brickes". Armata is really a unicorn, T-80s got pulled out of service, and they rely on T-90 variants just like India.
Whether or not M1A2s are equal or inferior to a tricked-out T-90 is a long, long debate.
There is also China, but I personally don't think much of their new tanks.
> Whether or not M1A2s are equal or inferior to a tricked-out T-90 is a long, long debate.
That's an interesting way to put it! From my basic reading I'd consider the M1A2 to have an edge over the T-90MS. If you look at the bigger picture (logistics and total cost of a war), then the T-90MS might have an edge.
Yea, my statement was too biased to make without evidence, so props for calling me on it. If we ever have a news article on tanks on here, we can debate it out =)
It's very likely an all actual war between India and Pakistan would be decided before a single tank could cross the border. Pakistan has had nuclear weapons for over 20 years at this point.
I understand the feeling, but it's actually an irrelevant question, much as you still get a speeding ticket even when some other guy was going faster.
If you see comments that should be moderated but weren't, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing all the comments here. You can let us know about it by flagging it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.
Pakistan is nowhere near strong enough to defeat India in a conventional war. India would almost certainly lose a conventional war with China. All 3 nations have nukes. Doing anything more than maintaining that equilibrium is a waste of resources.
It's difficult to predict considering that Pak has vowed to use tactical nukes on any invading Indian force. But yes, that's the agreed upon conclusion[1].
Maintaing the equilibrium is obviously good for peace. But there are reports of India and Pakistan beefing up nukes.
"The single greatest national security threat for India is Indians' abject incompetence in governing themselves."
Why don't you learn from your Northerly neighbors (China) on how to run government? One thing I find in my travels to India, is how much abject contempt you guys have towards the Chinese way of doing things. Unbelievable - considering the cultures are very similar (Buddhist thought has historical played a major roles in both cultures), similar population sizes, etc..
No, let's follow a political system that has had no organic roots/development in the country and pretend all are literate folks who are capable of holding a debate on what policies are good for their country, while the politicians take out everyone to the cleaners.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. You probably have a good point there but snarky frustration is not the way to present it, and you made things much worse with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20215080.
There is a huge deal difference between relatively homogenous China (90+% Han) and linguistically and ethnically diverse India. Heck, English is even a unifying language there. Not to mention way different geographies (very fertile/tropical India and very mountainous/temperate China) and political (including colonial) histories.
Perhaps India could learn a few lessons from China, but the role model approach wouldn’t work.
We are unable to have a national language, because many people disagree.
> Buddhist thought has historical played a major roles in both cultures
Buddhism was born in India, but never spread across country in any considerable amount, other countries took up on it.
The place where Buddha was born and enlightened is in modern day Bihar, you rarely find any Buddhist there.
India is very diverse, we have 22 official languages (~1000 unofficial), and for many languages writing scripts change, within 100 to 200km dialects and languages keep changing.
Food keeps changing, climate keeps changing. People's behaviour keep changing. Dressing style, music, dance,... keeps changing. Nothing stays the same.
Government have recently released a educational draft, indicating children should be tri-lingual (native language, Hindi, English) and many people straight out opposed it, indicating they don't accept Hindi, as in near future there language may go out of existence.
The main problem is we cannot communicate properly, with each other from other places.
India is in no way similar to China, except for huge population numbers.
Despite being colonized for ~800 years(600 years under Muslim rulers, 200 years under British), culture haven't changed, think how stubborn people are.
We are a mess in it's own way, but we somehow survive and flourish slowly.
A good modern day example would be, Indian election.
Indian media and left tried there best to spread anti-modi movement (~5 years), no media channel have expected modi to win majority in 2019, but it came to be quite opposite.
Even now, all media channels are doing some analysis, how did this happen.
There is an old saying ( loosely translated),
If you are having a discussion with 5 chinese and 5 Indians about a problem. All Chinese come up with one solution, Indians come up with atleast 6 different ideas.
Claiming that we were colonised by muslims is not correct. Unlike the british, they did not rob india of it's treasure and take it away. You may not like it that it happened, but claiming that it was colonization is ridiculous.
> 1) the primary object of his invasion was to plunder India's wealth. India, at that time, was known for its wealth, particularly its gold and precious diamonds.
That might actually be untrue. While India through out its history was ruled by countless small kingdoms, most of them were part of invisible empires and connected through marriage, alliance or principle.
There were very few genocidal wars or wars of total annihilation. This strangely was a common problem not only in China but in Europe where loosing a war would mean total annihilation. This only came to an end in India with the Islamic invasion - whose strategy like in Persia or Mesopotamia consisted of raid, loot, murder and flee. When they found themselves more permanent rule it was mostly about conversion, taking slaves, destruction/defacement or appropriation(repurposing) of non-islamic buildings.
It is like saying the Soviet was united and the EU was never. The Soviet was held together by force, the EU is held together by consent.
Democracy, for all its faults, has worked for us. Over the decades, India has improved on factors like life expectancy and literacy. Not saying that we're there but we're definitely getting there. I'm not sure if we'd even remain a single country if we were to have a Communist government(or some other form of dictatorship.)
However, I do feel that we can learn a lot from Chinese people and culture.
While the other country is still figuring out potties, water supplies, electricity, etc. but no the democracy, freedom of speech, etc. is more important even if y'll can't read/write.
You reach the top of Maslow's hierarchy by climbing it from the bottom step-by-step, not by magically teleporting to the top like what western liberals would claim to.
That's because most literate Indians(thanks to media, text,.. bias) have zero confidence(in some cases hatred) in traditional Indian/Chinese methods of life. They will die hunting for modern scientific solutions these problems but never even once look back to their history for answers.
How much time does the US spend arguing over relatively minor (in the grand scheme of things) issues like immigration, Presidential dignity, and campus political correctness?
All the while, even the DNC refuses to hold a climate change debate to figure out how candidates are approaching the biggest existential threat we face now.
Unfortunately humanity isn't good at facing long term issues that require serious sacrifice and collective action.
> Unfortunately humanity isn't good at facing long term issues
On the contrary, long term issues are not likely to be a huge problem, if you factor investment, innovation and technical improvements. It's not like the world is static and nothing is going to happen in the coming 50 years.
Let me remind you at that in the early 20th century everyone was seriously worried that humanity might starve to death once we reach 1 billion people. And we are now more than 7, and no starvation is in sight. That was a long term problem that basically disappeared completely.
You can sweep the issue of climate change under the rug with claims of innovation and technology solving everything.
I presume, though, that you're opposed to e.g. a heavy carbon tax. You can use that same line to sweep the downsides of it under the rug--after all, a carbon tax will drive innovation toward green tech.
It's a kind of technological nihilism that says that technology will fix everything. In the real world, we have to consider concrete costs and benefits.
In the long term, we are far poorer if we don't address climate change.
Exactly. There's a lack of seriousness in those who:
* hold that technology will fix everything, but
* oppose a carbon tax, which would give a market incentive to technology aimed at fixing this
It's not even consistent with market principles. We have the income tax, a massive distortion in the economy. We could replace much of this with a carbon tax.
A carbon tax that replaces income tax, dollar for dollar, is almost a pure win.
To the extent that carbon use is absolutely necessary (read: inelastic), the tax will be passed on transparently. It'd be theoretically efficient in the same sense a land tax is efficient.
To the extent that carbon use isn't necessary (read: elastic), it'd drive people to substitute it for something else.
Even efficiency of implementation is trivial compared to income tax. The government knows where companies are extracting fossil fuels, and it knows which companies are extracting fossil fuels, and fossil fuel extraction requires large amounts of hard-to-move capital.
Policy-wise it's as pure an economic win as we can imagine in this world of ours, as we'd be moving away from distortionary income taxation.
You mean like Iran, that haven't invaded any country in 200 years, is surrounded by the US, a country that invades other places every decade, sometime lying about WMD and against the UN ?
Threats are rarely the reasons we attack people. Politics and resources are more likely.
Asking with India is fighting Paskistan is like a drunk asking a friend why smoking those bad, bad cigarets.
In fact, it would be interesting to create maps of resources which are useful for today's society vs military presence of major powers near these resource centers.
It would be revealing, but I would fear for the safety of the author of such an article.
Yup. That narrative helped, in a backhanded way, the current party to win the election. Embarrasingly convenient issue to stoke to win these things when one runs out of towns to rename :)
Basically I think our civilization is default dead.
As Paul Graham put it in another context:
"Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that."
People aren't used to thinking of civilization in these terms. We make retirement plans etc divorced from the projections of change to come. If we rationally considered priorities, you'd see much more popular support for actions designed to address the problem, such as increasing carbon taxes, cutting other taxes, and making an international framework to get other countries to do the same.
There's a scene in 12 Monkeys where the protagonist is in a mental hospital in the past, before a virus takes out the civilization. The psychologist asks if he came back to "help" them. The protagonist looks confused and says "how can I help you? You're all dead".
We have such a flurry of concern and activity aimed at the present. I can't help but have a similar feeling when I observe people making plans and not accounting for the predicted future, even if they claim to "believe" in climate change.
If people truly believed in it, you'd see much different political priorities. Right now effective action tends to be unpopular. Income taxes (taxing a good thing) have much more political support than carbon taxes (taxing a bad thing). I find the situation baffling.
More from Paul Graham's article:
"There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes."
We assume it will be easy to solve problems in the future, with future technology. Or that we will have surplus resources in the future, when worsening conditions cut crop yields, cut water, increase civil strife, and when the global population is larger and total emissions are higher.
Yes, the absolutely correct group to take ideas from as far as our semi-long term survival goes is VCs (and the surrounding ecosystem), the same group that made "move fast and break things" the mantra for a decade. Nothing bad ever came out of that!
This is pure ad hominem. Do you have nothing to contribute?
You're saying:
1. I don't like vc's, because a startup founder said "move fast and break things"
2. Paul Graham didn't fund that founder, but he was a vc
3. Ergo, every idea paul graham has is bad
4. Ergo, this specific essay is bad
5. So, anything that mentions this essay's ideas is wrong
6. Your post is wrong
Do you disagree with the concept of default dead? Are you arguing that it's impossible to be in such a state as a civilization? If you have an actual critique I'd be interested to hear it.
The ideal things to be broken are the structures that currently prevent collective long term survival. While not all VC's focus on this, I think PG does. After all, what is the alternative?
I believe the chemical engineering field developed that mantra at least 100 years ago! Although it was more like "this magic chemical will fix everything!"
My main problem with applying the "default dead" concept is that in the long run, absolutely everything is default dead.
I think PG's concept is really about defining horizons, risks, and resources, and making sure the math adds up. That concept makes sense to me in a startup, but I find it hard to fit something as big as human civilization into that particular framework.
Human activity is essentially extractive, and even if we solve global warming, I think we're ticking the clock on how long Earth can support this kind of society.
The only viable policy we have available is to wait for better future tech to solve the problem.
That's not a call for doing nothing, anything that improves the specific tech that can solve the problem is worth doing, but anything that detracts from it should be avoided.
So, carbon tax is great. Subsidizing renewables is iffy (has to be done right). Any proposition that slow things down is actively harmful. Saving energy is neutral.
I understand the pessimism. I think that course of action can be justified. I am still saving for retirement but I can't really justify it beyond some very early markers that we are going to decarbonize and save what we can.
Just because you haven't wrapped your head around complexity or how good outcomes are produced, doesn't mean only bad things can happen.
The internet does a great job of keeping people feed with problems way above their pay grade for no good reason.
If Paul Graham had taken a course in Education or Pedagogy, his article would have an elaborate note on who should really be reading them. The conclusions you reach are very different once you have experience and done the prereqs.
It's like dropping off your second grader, in a tenth grade classroom for a month. What conclusions about the world is the second grader going to draw at the end of it?
I didn't say no good things will happen. I said we're default dead, if no good things happen.
Ideally, we'd shift incentives so that companies have more of an economic reward to producing the good things. Currently we actually subsidize fossil fuels in many countries.
If you have a critique that isn't ad hominem I'd be interested to hear it.
India is not our Civilization. I'm presuming you're either in America or Europe, or heavily influenced by their culture.
India's chief problem is overpopulation. There are simply too many people to provide water to. The country needs an urgent population program encouraging poorer families to have one or zero children. The same things are working in Bangladesh.
The world is a very big place and there's more than enough space and resources for everyone. Overpopulation is not and never has been a serious problem.
The only issues are in engineering and government to ensure citizens are actually provided what they need, which in this case is limited by decades of corruption and poor decision making. India is more than capable of handling the issue, it just needs better leadership to cast off some of the anchors it has been carrying for far too long.
Overpopulation is 100% a big problem and then some.
The overcrowded cesspits that we whimsically call 'cities' in India are founts for all kinds of shit like the water table drying up, widespread water-borne and air-pollution diseases, anti-microbial resistance, shitty healthcare in overworked hospitals in general etc. These things are ALL made orders of magnitude worse to deal with just because our population is through the roof.
Not to mention the "smaller" quality of life factors. Enjoyable walk in nature? Hah! It's impossible to walk for even two minutes in Delhi and not see another person. Never-do-wells loiter the streets all day. No possibility of orderly queuing, just this huge, irritating, wearisome crowd wherever you look and wherever you turn. The metro. The park. The roads. The neighbourhood. Even the fucking hill stations that you seek to escape to. No solitude.
In an ideal world, these thing may manageable while still fostering a large population. But an ideal world this isn't.
> "...more than enough space and resources for everyone"
That's going to be a hell-to-the-no from me dawg. I hate the fact that we fucking breed like Rabbits.
Again, this is all about proper civil engineering and city planning. There is nothing inherently impossible about supporting billions of people and there are wide swaths of India with barely anyone at all.
The earth is a gigantic place. Every single human would fit into a cubic mile. The amount of freshwater that every single living creature drinks is only a sphere of a few miles in diameter, which itself is less than 1% of the freshwater on the planet.
The capabilities are vast, we are not limited by numbers but only by the weaker parts of human nature.
Your first statement speaks to the larger "disrupt everything!" naivete found in spades on Hacker News, and I imagine, by extension, in Silicon Valley.
Sure, wave a wand, and POOF! No more greenhouse gases. Wave a wand, and POOF! No more single-use plastics. Wave a wand, and POOF! No more dead bodies in the Ganga.
That's not the world we inhabit. The world we inhabit moves at a glacial pace, and I sincerely doubt India moves at ALL.
The fact that humans can all fit into a small cube says nothing. Or at least, says far less than the fact that in India, the cities are in squalor and resemble garbage dumps much more than they resemble thriving metropolises. And that's NOT hyperbole.
What, exactly, has improved in our cities that leads you to your optimism? The fact that Delhi is the least polluted city in the world? Oh, wait. Or does your heart glow with joy while taking long walks along the banks of the Ganga, breathing in the smells of nature?
Hypothetically, anything can be done. In reality, the only part of your argument that matters is the rather poignant last statement. Optimism is for other people. A large order of deep-fried cynicism for me please.
The original comment was blaming overpopulation, but that's simply not an issue as I've explained. There are very dense cities that look and work fine because of proper planning and infrastructure. India can do this once it gets over the corruption and outdated politics but it will take time, but again has nothing to do with population size.
I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make but optimism has nothing to do with the discussion.
it's telling that the overpopulation people always worry about poor people having too many kids. rich people have a far larger ecological footprint and consume far more of any given resource.
Don't poor people usually have more kid in developing countries as that's basically the retirement plan? That's how I read parent's post, I'm assuming wealthy citizens have closer to western levels of offspring also in India.
Its a cultural issue. There are a lot of poor countries in Europe and East Asia. Why don't they have a lot of children?
Why do women from Africa and the Middle East, who are given permanent refuge and full material support, still have such high numbers of children?
Dare I say it: I think its also an IQ issue. Deciding to focus and invest in just one or two children takes planning and forethought. For whatever reason (environmental, genetic) some people do not have those capabilities.
We've banned this account for using HN for ideological and racial battle. Doing this will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
Democratic Republic of the Congo: 81m, Articles: 0
Iceland produces as much science as Pakistan, a country 656x bigger.
Pakistan CO2 output: 1t per person.
Iceland CO2 output 12t per person.
USA: 15t per person
Yes, the average Westerner probably uses 10x the resources of the average person in the 3rd world. But the scientific outputs are hundreds of times bigger.
We should be saying to countries like India, Pakistan, Congo: you are destroying your environment, for the sake of what? What are you contributing to humanity to justify your use of limited resources?
As the population in poor countries increase, their challenges will only worsen. Countries like Pakistan and India have taken advantage of science and technology developed in the West to reach their current populations. Given that we are using the Earth's resources so much more productively, we have a right to instruct the rest of the world how to manage itself.
> If people truly believed in it, you'd see much different political priorities.
A common critique I've also heard in religious contexts. I think both Jordan Peterson and Nassim Taleb have made comments on it. What people "believe" and what they believe can be very different. Belief is hard.
> while 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record in the past 140 years since the world began to keep a track on temperatures, NASA expects 2019 to be still hotter.
On a side note, I always wondered if Americans would be more aggressive trying to prevent global warming if these projections were in Fahrenheit, not Celsius.
This may sound really simple and dumb, but I think you’re actually on to something. Americans read all of these stories about 1° warming and have NO idea what it means. In fact, since so much global policy-making involves American multinationals, maybe it should be a rule that all climate increases/decreases are written in the context of Fahrenheit, so Americans better understand what scientists are estimating, regardless of whether it is pro- or anti-climate-science.
I don't think it would matter. One (or four) degree(s) is a similar change in either scale. I think the larger issue is the disconnect between global average temperature and local weather systems. I think people read "4 degrees warmer" and think that all of their weather forecasts are going to be 4 degrees higher than they used to be. It seems like a small change when viewed like that, but of course that's not what is going to happen at all.
I’m concerned about climate change. I know about the flooding, glaciers and ice melting, coastal areas and islands filling up with water. I understand some of the natural ecosystem of the world would be messed up with some animals dying out as well. But I have no concept of how much of the latter will be done or how much it’ll effect things.
However as I don’t know too much, why would 4 C increase result in a lot of South Asia being uninhabitable and making most of America into hostile land. The other link said most of it would be desert land. And that Siberia and north west Antarctica would be green inhabitable. Wouldn’t part’s of Siberia and any part of Antarctica still be crazy cold and awful places to be?
I guess I’m a “dummy” because I also don’t get how global weather increase will mess and change things so much outside of what I acknowledged in my first paragraph. Though again I’m all for fixing up our behavior wrt environment and controlling climate change.
I don't know why you were downvoted, I think it's a good question. My understanding is that this is a 4 degree difference in the average temperature. Meaning there might be times of the year that don't change much at all but other seasons get dramatically hotter. That affects rainfall distribution, the speed that snow melts (and wether snow ever falls in the first place), etc.
My guess is that "uninhabitable" in this context refers to specific critical periods that are deadly short of water or deadly hot which last long enough to make building/maintaining cities in those places a losing (i.e. prohibitively expensive) proposition
Maybe people thought I was against believing in man made climate change? I remember a year ago I posed a similar question amongst a liberal crowd (of which I’m one as well) and someone took it upon himself to be sure I believed there is no man made climate change. I’m pretty sure he just didn’t know anything either and enjoyed being offended.
That’s not what’s happening here exactly but perhaps some people thought I wasn’t being genuine.
Thanks! Yes that’s a big difference if it’s average and some seasons might not change much. That would be a big difference.
Uninhabitable explanation makes sense too. Thanks.
Here's one example: increasing average temperatures raises the incidence of extreme heat waves. There is an upper limit of temperature+humidity above which humans cannot survive. Under business-as-usual rates of CO2 emissions, those conditions will start to happen, and India is one of the earlier areas to see it.
Absolutely, 'one degree' has an intuitive sense of 'negligible' in my experience of going outside. The actual danger of a warming world is in the energy moving around us, pushing water inland and forcing higher wind gusts etc etc.
So if you want to impress large numbers upon the public, maybe Joules or Watts of excess energy would be good.
Poking around a random Quora post it looks like the equivalent for 1*C of warming would be on the order of a billion TeraJoules.
A billion TJ, or the ocean's total warming is 436 ×10^21 J since 1871[1] is a bit like billion pounds to most of the public - most of whom disliked maths - huge, but utterly meaningless. Why else is every media story associating things with the size of a football field, the area of 63 Wales, or length equivalent to the height of the Empire State or 23 double decker buses? And I always wondered why double decker buses when they're the same length as a single decker... Must be a British thing. :)
Guardian reported the ocean warming since 1871 study as "...equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years" (1.5x the power of Hiroshima), which seemed a bit hyperbolic. Except the same article then asked the author of the study[1]:
“I try not to make this type of calculation, simply because I find it worrisome,” said Prof Laure Zanna, at the University of Oxford, who led the new research. “We usually try to compare the heating to [human] energy use, to make it less scary.”
At which point I think Guardian might have been on to something in their choice of visualisation...
1° doesn't mean anything for those who are used to those units either, when it comes to global warming. A day that's 1° hotter or colder is not that much hotter or colder. You go by the effects scientists say it has on the environment, not by whether it feels as a lot or a little.
This is unreasonably rosy. Acidification of the ocean and ecological breakdown from overly rapid environmental change appears likely to cause a catastrophic failure of the food chain. Rapid change is necessary. The status quo is not OK.
I've always wondered what I, as an individual, could do to help. I work full time, and I have a chronic illness which makes it difficult to physically contribute. I am a software engineer, so I do have technical skills to contribute if there were problems that needed technical solutions, but I simply don't know where to look.
Nothing. We're far past the point of no return at this point. Minimizing the disastrous consequences of climate change requires a coordinated worldwide effort. In principle, the only thing you can do that might make a difference is get active politically. In practice, given the level of dysfunction exhibited in global politics right now, I'm extremely pessimistic that there's any hope of doing anything on that level either.
"It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope."
Well you're doing as much as you can right now it seems. Methink the solution is mostly of social nature. Are your neighbors nature friendly ? Talk with them, do more things without waste, do more things locally. There's a guy in Florida who turns neighborhoods in semi-gardens. People gather around and plant some stuff.
Big factors like industrial pollution, transport, long distance shipment are 1) too heavy to move (you need political power, and political power is also heavy to move) 2) but they do depend on people spending their money for their product.
I have the feeling that it will make (and it does already) people a lot happier[0], and since having to do locally you can't rely on economies of scale so people will have things to do instead. It won't be fancy or pretty but plausibly more meaningful to work with and for your surroundings, even if it means no more white collar position in a shiny tower.
There are online places to discuss, reddit has many (r/collapse, r/guerrillagardening), some people also make discord groups. You might take a peek.
There is no chance your individual actions will have any impact. Our only hope is drastic, large scale policy changes at the national and international level.
The rise of ISIS was not due to climate change, it was a group that arose from AQI, which itself had it origins from Jordanian Jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who, in the 1990s ran jihadist paramilitary camps in Afghanistan. ISIS wasn’t driven by crop failure “due to climate change.” It was essentially a war due to Sunnis not liking Sh’ites — a conflict that has been ongoing for literally centuries. And, in this specific case was due to a power vacuum in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the roots of that conflict are as old as the 1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran.
Attributing ISIS to climate change is about the same as blaming social media for ISIS; arguably social media’s existence actually helped ISIS propagate more than any causes attributed to climate change. ISIS and it’s origins are exceptionally complicated as are most conflicts in that region. To trivialize it by claiming it was because of climate change is to reveal a profound misunderstanding of the history of that region.
We can discuss climate change and it’s causes and effects, but it weakens credibility when almost everything gets blamed on it. It’s getting to the point where when one used to say this bad thing happened because “it’s God’s will,” but now people say, “climate change.” It’s taking on religion-levels of influence to where actual causation gets ignored in favor of attributing everything to CO2. Every storm, every war, every bad thing that happens has a least some people trying to use those events to justify their belief systems. Sometimes weather is just weather, war is just war. If we ended all CO2 emissions tomorrow, the Middle East would still be a cauldron, wars would still happen, crops would still fail from time to time, hurricanes would still destroy things, tornados would still happen. Climate is an important issue, but let’s not turn it into a religion.
> As described here, water and climatic conditions have played a direct role in the deterioration of Syria’s economic conditions. There is a long history of conflicts over water in these regions because of the natural water scarcity, the early development of irrigated agriculture, and complex religious and ethnic diversity. In recent years, there has been an increase in incidences of water-related violence around the world at the subnational level attributable to the role that water plays in development disputes and economic activities.
It might be psychologically satisfying to blame Mother Nature for a particular problem that is the direct result of recent USA military and diplomatic policy, but it seems sort of silly. Millions of people who are still alive right now witnessed the intentional destruction of Iraq's government and civil society, the deliberate transfer of weapons and matériel to nascent anti-civil-society groups, and the intentional weakening of Syria's government and civil society through sanctions and military attacks. We don't have to learn about this; we saw it happen in real time. The Middle East hasn't had rain forests at any time in recorded history.
This line of argument is so ridiculous that one is tempted to speculate you're trolling us to make real warming enthusiasts look worse...
Pessimistic outlook maybe, but on seeing that I tend to think it misses a sub-head. If that proportion of the population needs to relocate and that much is abandoned, something like:
What the world will look like 4°C warmer
For the 5% of humanity that survived World Wars 3, 4, 5, and 6.
I really need convincing that a world government wouldn't be extremely inefficient. I believe this would be the most disappointing utopia ever tried with a guarantee for regular civil wars.
I get that unity is required for dealing with global life threatening disasters waiting to happen, but it would just suck so badly if you think closer about it.
My observation is that humans' ability to effectively self-govern maxes out around 100 million, maybe even closer to 70 million.
If you look at the world happiness report/index, the top 50 countries are all under 100 million (exceptions: US, Mexico) and not especially large landmass (exceptions: US, Australia).
Growing up watching Star Trek I always thought the idea of some benevolent global government running in a post scarcity future was the goal we should all be shooting for but in retrospect it looks about as flawed as traditional communist command economies.
What's going on around the Great Lakes on that map? It looks like most of Michigan has been swallowed by them, significantly more land loss than I would think a 2m rise in water levels would cause. https://i.imgur.com/tdX7vyr.png
Yes. The map is sensationalist trash. Not to say that global warming won't impact the lakes: The far more likely outcome is depletion, as water diversions considered unthinkable become politically feasible, both within and without the basin. A map like that might as well show the Colorado River shores expanding with sea rise, it would make as much sense (for non-Americans, the Colorado is so heavily diverted to southwestern farms and municipalities that its riverbed is dry, or a trickle, most of the year).
Of course it won't help the narrative when the Lakes right now are near record highs due to lower levels of evaporation and more rain in the autumn months of the past few years (according to Army Corps of Engineers' data that started records in 1918, anyway). These fluctuations aren't uncommon. Last time they were this high was the mid-80s.
But you're right about the political ramifications of where the Great Lakes Compact line gets drawn. Waukesha, WI is one place that comes to mind where their own water supply became inadequate (mostly due to radium levels) and they requested to have access to Lake Michigan's water. My understanding is within a few years, they'll have the infrastructure in place and be able to legally draw from it.
It doesn't take a deep imagination to think of what a few dozen new such situations will do to Michigan let alone the other Lakes.
Yes, the Waukesha diversion shows that if a community is patient and wealthy enough, the lakes are for sale. At the risk that we share sources, https://www.amazon.com/Great-Lakes-Water-Wars/dp/159726637X is great and has a chapter on Waukesha.
Lake Ontario has had record high water levels in 2017 and again in 2019, maybe they think that will get much, MUCH worse? But given the rest of the map, I think it's just bad science.
The flooded areas are surprising. I always thought Japan would be the first place to go. Look at Brazil, why is it so flooded compared to everywhere else?
The key point is how fast the temperature changes. Over several thousands of years that change can be tolerated by the ecosystem (animals and plants evolve over several hundreds of generations and can survive). We already increased the temperature of 1. something degrees Celsius in perhaps a 100 of years and the trend in accelerating. That's way too fast for natural selection to make a difference.
So, yeah, Eocene was super warm, but the flora and fauna was well adapted to survive in those conditions.
How a map at +4 or +6 degrees may or may not look is pretty far from "grade school", and definitely requires sources. I agree that the map in the parent comment doesn't meet my standards for scientific accuracy, due to lack of sources, but that doesn't mean I'd discount it. It's not exactly implausible, extrapolating from current desertification. Seems like the map is from a book (https://www.paragkhanna.com/home/2016/3/9/the-world-4-degree...), so presumably that book would contain explanations. Your Smithsonian map is quite bad, too: It contains no legend, an no explanations at all, although based on the coloring it would seem that there's less desertification than in the parent comment map. But then, it also looks like due to continental drift, the majority of landmass was on the Southern hemisphere. I think it's pretty silly to draw too many conclusions about desertification in the next century from a picture of the earth 170 million years ago, with a completely different distribution of land mass and weather patterns.
I posted a map. During the Jurassic, the world was much warmer, greener, and Pangea was already broken up, although the continents weren't in their current positions. They did span from pole to pole however.
The point is that the map posted by OP is junk and not based on any science, just alarmist rhetoric.
And I'm just starting to learn about the fact that the placement of landmasses massively influences the global climate. We're looking at a very different system here.
Anyhow, we know from the geologic record of fossils that the world, at it's hottest, had vegetation in most regions. It wasn't 80% desert like the OP I responded to.
I don’t know anything about how the world would change. But me being skeptical of everything being ruined with 4 degree increase doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know much science.
Thanks for link. The topic interests me and I’d like to know more.
Is this a joke? Dunno, grade school? Corroborated by a multitude of sources, some of which are on Wikipedia, and should be general knowledge. Did you not learn about this in grade school?
It’s not a joke. What are you talking about? 56 million years ago (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the last time temperatures were six degrees higher? Or, back when earth was a molten rock of lava? That’s completely irrelevant to this discussion. Temperatures haven’t been higher than a degree since the last ice age (see the excellent relevant xkcd: https://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-change-xkcd-comi...). Rapid anthropogenic global warming does not bode well for human civilization. That doesn’t mean life on earth or humans as a species will be wiped out, but you can’t say “earth was hotter when the dinosaurs were around, so, no problem”
Didn't say no problem, only that the map of the original post I replied to is shit. Which it is. There's no reason to believe everything south of Siberia and Canada will be a desert.
Climate science is based on past CO2 levels and uses the fossil record of foliage to estimate temperatures. Not even the most dire predictions claim the earth will be mostly desert in 100 years. There will be flooding and some desertification, but many regions will also become greener.
Even NASA has observed that the earth is greener today than 40 years ago.
Some things are common enough knowledge that asking for a source is disingenuous. Everyone should know the earth was once warmer and went through various cooling periods.
It's like asking for a source to prove the sky is blue or that the earth is round...
This community claims to be one of educated professionals, yet somehow there's comments questioning things that are literally common knowledge and if somehow they don't know, can't spend 2 seconds to google it? Instead write "Source?". It's intellectually lazy as hell.
The problem with things that "everyone knows" is they are often hyper simplified abstractions that form useful models but are not appropriate to discussions of anything specific or for shaping policy. Everyone "knows" Pluto is farther than Neptune (except when it isn't[0]), traits are passed via dna (except when they aren't[1]), sex matches with gender (except it doesn't[2]).
Sure the earth was warmer in the past, it was also colder, it was also a molten hellscape. Trying to relate a grade schooler's understanding of geologic time to specific climate models seems to be far more intellectually lazy than asking for a source so people can put your very vague claims into context.
>Some things are common enough knowledge that asking for a source is disingenuous.
Yes. But then we invented science and "common knowledge" was proven ignorant time and time again.
>It's like asking for a source to prove the sky is blue or that the earth is round...
Hardly. I can't look out my window and see what the temperature was thousands of years ago.
>This community claims to be one of educated professionals
You're claiming that, not 'the community.'
What is intellectually lazy is not providing information that verifies your claims, and instead preferring to debate the social circumstances of an internet discussion. You're not obligated to provide a source. You don't have to do it. But don't think you're somehow more intellectually honest or hardworking because you refuse to.
If 2 seconds of googling solves this problem, then you should have probably just done that rather than arguing about whether you should need to.
As an aside, the reason we know that CO2 affects earth's temperature is the same reason we know what kind of vegetation existed during that same time period. Because of observations in the fossil record.
My office building has recently adopted water harvesting (which is an ancient practice in many parts of India).
Mumbai receives a LOT of rain, and I’m glad that we’re able to divert some of it to the ground water table.
Seeing this succeed, I’m pushing the same for my building too, I’m surprised to see a lot of my neighbours have problems with the same (cause of wastage of a common terrace), I should send them this article.
I heard things are critical in southern India, apparently restaurants are closed, our offshore guys are working from home, using starbucks for toilets etc... is this true?
I'm here in Chennai, and things are bad, but it's hard to tell how bad. So much of the water is trucked anyways - Chennai doesn't have a well developed unified water system.
As a foreigner who has visited several times, here's what I've noticed:
- lots more people on the street with those iconic plastic water containers. Lots more water trucks on the road.
- water quality is BAD. Even in upper-class highrise condos, the water has much more odor and color. In this building, salinity is way up too. There's a reverse-osmosis plant here, but it's only on for several hours a day because RO systems waste so much water.
- haven't seen many restaurant closures, but I'm sure they're happening.
- a lot of hotels targeting westerners have advanced filtration and reverse-osmosis plants, seem to still be operating. Some pools are drained.
- water pressure in some neighborhoods is so low that it's only a trickle at the tap. News says some people are using pumps to pull of the metro system, making things worse.
Overall, it seems like bad expensive water is still out there if you can afford it and want to pay.
Not sure there's any easy way for a society (as in building society) to do that. There's a huge water tanker on our terrace with a big surface area to capture rain water, it goes through some filtration processes and is utilised by the building for all general purposes. When there is extra water in the tank, it's diverted to the ground water via something opposite of a boring connection. I know that we often have extra water in the tank (it is rainy even as I type this) and it is diverted underground, so in my book that's a success cause something is better than nothing.
Climate change and weather patterns change coupled with over a billion people in a country (roughly) the size of Argentina is bound to have water problems as per capita consumption grows with wealth.
You still have to deal with the residuals from desalination. About 1/3 of the salt water is useable. The other 2/3s is a brine that can not be used. Not to mention what are you going to do with all of that salt and biological material you just pulled out? You aren't going to be able to sell it.
The water distribution on Earth is 97.5% salt water and 2.5% fresh water [0]. Out of those 2.5%, more than 2/3 of the water is trapped in glaciers and ice caps. So overall we have about 0.8% of the Earth's water available for consumption.
So our actual consumption is far below even those 0.8%. But our problem with fresh water isn't necessarily that it's not enough but that it's very unevenly distributed and we tend to be very wasteful.
This being said how much desalination do we have to do until the brine (now 30% more saline than regular salt water) is significantly affecting the overall salinity of the oceans? Desalinating 0.2% of the ocean's water would give humans a 25% more fresh fresh water and the increase in salinity would be marginal.
Does anyone know if an increase that looks as minute as this (0.1% increase is salinity?) is actually a real danger to ocean life and/or currents?
I think the problem with brine salinity is that it’s dumped in concentrated areas which might be teeming with sea life. If they evaporated it and dumped huge salt blocks in ocean deserts it could have less impact on marine life.
I imagine this isn't a hard problem to solve, there are no major technical limitations to doing something like this and might not even drive the cost up that much.
There are other aspects of desalination that seem far more critical, like the ones related to efficiency and the scale of the required infrastructure.
"Arable" is a misleading word. It is not a quality of land so much as a quality of the people who live there. India's very problem is that so much wild land has been converted to intensive agricultural use. There is no slack. In Argentina cattle live on the pampas. In India there are no grasslands left so they live in the street.
Why are you attributing water deficit with climate change? Increasing atmospheric water vapor leads to larger storms, floods, and overabundance of ground water.
India's problem is overconsumption and population excess. Until India is able to reduce their population by 50% or more, their water shortages will continue to worsen. A sizeable decrease in their population will also reduce their power consumption needs, so they'll be able to close their coal power plants instead of opening dozens more.
It's more complicated than that. Climate change doesn't lead to global increased atmospheric water vapor and the water cycle is very complicated on a global scale. Climate change leads to floods and storms... and droughts and wildfires. Some areas could see greatly increase groundwater recharge while others will see greatly reduced recharge. Even if the global net effect were to increase water, there would still be extreme examples of local droughts causing extreme water stress.
In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge. The southeast of the US is going to have some very serious water issues for the next generation, albeit not as soon as India.
In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge.
Where are you getting this? It certainly doesn't agree with figures published by the government. [0] The aquifers that are dropping are dropping because of massive well pumping. The wildfires are because we've stockpiled understory fuel while building homes in fire-prone forests. Overstating the case for global warming will convince some people, but others will only grow more skeptical.
>Surface and groundwater supplies in some regions are already stressed by increasing demand as well as declining runoff and groundwater recharge. In some regions, particularly the southern U.S. and the Caribbean and Pacific islands, climate change is increasing the likelihood of water shortages and competition for water. Water quality is diminishing in many areas, particularly due to increasing sediment and contaminant concentrations after heavy downpours.
I find that people's skepticism regarding climate change has almost nothing to do with data and evidence and nearly everything to do with their personal politics, to the extent that I draw a causative link between right-leaning politics and "climate skepticism".
You made a specific claim about rainfall. That claim contradicted my experience over the last several years. I searched for "USA drought", and a very simple government site confirmed there is no drought underway in USA. (EDIT: there certainly will be a drought in future, just as there will be floods and hurricanes and comfortable sunny days with light breezes.) I'm not sure what this most recent link is supposed to prove, but I'm not going to wade through it. I only consider specifics when it comes to weather/climate.
Let me get this straight, you asked me to source my claim that climate change will affect america, so I use an official government report titled "National Climate Assessment" which details the effects on America, and you're rejecting this canonical source?
Your reply is "I'm not reading this, I did a fast google search instead?"
Oof owie, my intellectualism.
I shouldn't have to spoon feed you after I gave you an extremely high quality source.
But whatever:
"Climate changes pose challenges for an already parched region that is expected to get hotter and, in its southern half, significantly drier. Increased heat and changes to rain and snowpack will send ripple effects throughout the region’s critical agriculture sector, affecting the lives and economies of 56 million people – a population that is expected to increase 68% by 2050, to 94 million. Severe and sustained drought will stress water sources, already over-utilized in many areas, forcing increasing competition among farmers, energy producers, urban dwellers, and plant and animal life for the region’s most precious resource."
>Theobald, D. M., W. R. Travis, M. A. Drummond, and E. S. Gordon, 2013: Ch. 3: The Changing Southwest. Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwest United States: A Report Prepared for the National Climate Assessment, G. Garfin, A. Jardine, R. Merideth, M. Black, and S. LeRoy, Eds., Island Press, 37-55 http://swccar.org/sites/all/themes/files/SW-NCA-color-FINALw...
Oh, now we're talking about the Southwest? I would have sworn that the topic was the Southeast? I've lived in both areas, and I would classify them as having different climates. Sorry, is that too specific?
Haha you really do represent the ideal climate "skeptic"
* reject evidence for non-sense reasons
* over reliant on public search engines for quick, contextless answers
* pedantry rather than discussion
* a complete and total inability to find any meaningful evidence for yourself
For the record, my original comment in this thread has always been about the Southwest, but since you're behaving as such an anti-intellectual bad actor, I'll continue spoon feeding you the data that you're clearly too lazy to even try to understand
"Freshwater supplies from rivers, streams, and groundwater sources near the coast are at risk from accelerated saltwater intrusion due to higher sea levels. Porous aquifers in some areas make them particularly vulnerable to saltwater intrusion., For example, officials in the city of Hallandale Beach, Florida, have already abandoned six of their eight drinking water wells."
>Obeysekera, J., M. Irizarry, J. Park, J. Barnes, and T. Dessalegne, 2011: Climate change and its implications for water resources management in south Florida. Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, 25, 495-516, doi:10.1007/s00477-010-0418-8.
>Berry, L., F. Bloetscher, H. N. Hammer, M. Koch-Rose, D. Mitsova-Boneva, J. Restrepo, T. Root, and R. Teegavarapu, 2011: Florida Water Management and Adaptation in the Face of Climate Change. 68 pp., Florida Climate Change Task Force
That's just one way that climate change is negatively affecting groundwater in the US south east and how freshwater is becoming more scarce in America due directly to climate change
Have any more ignorance-fueling pedantry to use to avoid discussing the topic at hand?
Maybe you'll try reading a source? Nah, you'll just Google search it!
Next time maybe just don't say something trivially verifiably false about recent rain totals in USA? Look I understand the world is ending. As excited as people get about trivial bullshit, doesn't it seem strange that despite their professed beliefs they've all done absolutely nothing about the end of the world? Maybe that conundrum could inform your future discussion board evangelism...
They've been pumping the Ogallala since the 1940s. Western Kansas and Nebraska are not naturally green areas. That they don't have enough water for the type of agriculture they practice is not the sign of a drought.
> Climate change doesn't lead to global increased atmospheric water vapor and the water cycle is very complicated on a global scale.
It also doesn't lead to groundwater depletion and the absence of well water. That's more or less independent of climate change. Well water is a semi-renewable resource. In other words, there's only a certain fraction of rain that will filter down to where the wells are pulling it from. If wells pull more than that the water table gradually drops until the wells run dry.
That's what is happening in India (and in a lot of other places.). They've drilled too many wells and depleted the ground water. Fixing climate change isn't going to help with that problem.
In India, a 22 per cent deficit has been recorded in pre-monsoon showers in the months of March, April and May — the second lowest in the past 65 years — and with monsoons delayed by a fortnight or so, daily temperatures have been sizzling.
In other words the once reliable monsoons are no longer that reliable.
From what I have read one of the reasons for this is the warming of the Indian Ocean, with that warming then resulting in changes to the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD).
That dipole has a big influence on climate, not only in India but across the whole region and as it changes so does the climate.
Assuming equal total rainfall, larger storms reduce the total usable water. Storm water mostly just runs away and flows into the ocean without doing anything useful.
Of course in reality it's much more complicated since rainfall doesn't stay constant, and the changes in wind patterns and ocean currents have hard to predict consequences. But I think it's safe to say that rainfall will change, and at least for some regions it will make things worse.
I think he is onto something. Unbound population growth combined with rapidly increasing standards of living can only lead to larger carbon foot print by the nation as well as larger water consumption. I think controlling population to some degree (I don't know what that degree is) would be enormously beneficial to the environment.
A lot of water is stored in glaciers and mountains when it is cold and released in the spring and summer. If that water is no longer stored in the mountains, rivers will start to dry up in the summer.
Obviously total population contributes to depletion; increased per capita use exacerbates that, but change in weather patterns due to changes in climate adds uncertainty and exacerbates floods and droughts, neither of which is helpful in combating water shortages (floods don’t have time to percolate back into aquifers).
People are so comfortable pumping the environment air, water and soil with fertilizers, pestisides, antibiotics, plastic, smoke and toxic waste. We have wiped out large areas of forests, over produce and waste food. Why is that we have suddenly become so sensitive when we want to connect waterways. Yes there can be ecological imbalances, but is a very small price to pay compared to all the horrors that we commit.
I cannot comment about other cities, Bengaluru it was a known issues. Primarily big builders who launch their projects dig up multiple borewell and pump out the groundwater. When government realized that ground water levels were getting depleted they did make rainwater harvesting mandatory. Yet it is either shoddily implemented or never implemented.
Most of the apartment complexes water supplies are provided by tankers. Local politicians have stake in these tanker services, so it is in their best interest to make sure local populace is dependent on the these tankers and not on government connections which is heavily backlogged.
Few societies, residents do get together invest their own money to get proper water harvesting, but that is far and few to even make a noticeable difference. Builders most of them flat out refuse to build robust water harvesting systems.
> If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem.
This is simply not as emotive an issue for elections as banning cow-slaughter or defending India from the evil Muslims.
Not to mention that Indian political discourse is basically a shit-show of politicians trading 3rd grade level insults with one another, a bit like monkeys flinging excrement at each other.
Paani Foundation - if you are looking for a heartwarming story of a village in India that overcame water scarcity through rain water harvesting (and a good organization to donate to)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSGF1KQ1UQ
If you feel depressed after reading this, watch how one person initiated the clean up of an entire beach in Mumbai which was covered with 5 feet of filth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0ka45g4Fyc
Can someone please enlighten us about the traditional water conservation or restoration methods he alludes to? I'm super curious because apparently they have enough merit that Texas A&M is looking into them. Thanks!
So no more water in a country saturated with pollution, full of 1.7 billion of people with huge social tensions, bad relationships at borders and the atomic bomb.
This idea is bad in so many ways. It's gross hatred due to mass propaganda. First rule for sustainable water management is having local water supply used locally. We need better water management at individual city/village level like reviving lakes have a good ground water recharge etc.. Diverting rivers and desalination ideas are going to have huge ecological cost even if we forget about the economical possibility of them.
Monsoons have been a dud so far. Our well nearly dried up, and we were planning to shift should water run out. The municipal water supply is useless. The irony: my state (Kerala) receives around 3000+ mm rainfall per year on average, and suffered from devastating floods last year.
I feel sad when Indians wank about military technology and "national security" issues due to Pakistan and China. The single greatest national security threat for India is Indians' abject incompetence in governing themselves. I fear that we will pay a very heavy price for this.
You guys have enough T-90s to roll Pakistan three times over. One of the largest modern tank forces in the world if not THE largest.
Depending on the definition of "modern". If you mean third generation tanks, then the US has almost twice as many. 7970 vs 4791. Russia has 15755 but I'm not sure how many qualify as third generation. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_main_battle_tanks_by_c...
A lot of Russia's armor consists of dated T-72s, a small number of which are being upgraded, but those upgrades are basically "Add a thermal sight, make the turrent turn a little faster, add some ERA brickes". Armata is really a unicorn, T-80s got pulled out of service, and they rely on T-90 variants just like India.
Whether or not M1A2s are equal or inferior to a tricked-out T-90 is a long, long debate.
There is also China, but I personally don't think much of their new tanks.
> Whether or not M1A2s are equal or inferior to a tricked-out T-90 is a long, long debate.
That's an interesting way to put it! From my basic reading I'd consider the M1A2 to have an edge over the T-90MS. If you look at the bigger picture (logistics and total cost of a war), then the T-90MS might have an edge.
Yea, my statement was too biased to make without evidence, so props for calling me on it. If we ever have a news article on tanks on here, we can debate it out =)
It's very likely an all actual war between India and Pakistan would be decided before a single tank could cross the border. Pakistan has had nuclear weapons for over 20 years at this point.
The border is quite long. If there are multiple fronts, a small force could penetrate the border.
Yeah.. All India has are brainwashed terrorists who cross over into the neighboring country and use their flesh as boom fuel.
Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here. Please don't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Did you make this comment to OP first ?
I understand the feeling, but it's actually an irrelevant question, much as you still get a speeding ticket even when some other guy was going faster.
If you see comments that should be moderated but weren't, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing all the comments here. You can let us know about it by flagging it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.
Pakistan will use nukes if they feel like they're losing a conventional war.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_doctrine_of_Pakistan
I fail to see how does the first part of your statement about climate issues connect with the second part of the statement about security/Pakistan.
It seems that you just wanted to make a point.
For the municipal water issue what has the state government/city done over the years?
You raise a good point. But national security has its place, especially when two nuclear-armed neighbors have invaded you in the past.
We can build-up national security and enhance focus on internal problems at the same time.
For example, there have been talks of cooperation with Israel on the water-shortage issue:
https://www.timesnownews.com/india/article/israel-comes-forw...
Pakistan is nowhere near strong enough to defeat India in a conventional war. India would almost certainly lose a conventional war with China. All 3 nations have nukes. Doing anything more than maintaining that equilibrium is a waste of resources.
It's difficult to predict considering that Pak has vowed to use tactical nukes on any invading Indian force. But yes, that's the agreed upon conclusion[1].
Maintaing the equilibrium is obviously good for peace. But there are reports of India and Pakistan beefing up nukes.
1. https://wap.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/fewer-...
> Pak has vowed to use tactical nukes on any invading Indian force.
True. But in a nuclear conflict there are no winners.
"The single greatest national security threat for India is Indians' abject incompetence in governing themselves."
Why don't you learn from your Northerly neighbors (China) on how to run government? One thing I find in my travels to India, is how much abject contempt you guys have towards the Chinese way of doing things. Unbelievable - considering the cultures are very similar (Buddhist thought has historical played a major roles in both cultures), similar population sizes, etc..
No, let's follow a political system that has had no organic roots/development in the country and pretend all are literate folks who are capable of holding a debate on what policies are good for their country, while the politicians take out everyone to the cleaners.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. You probably have a good point there but snarky frustration is not the way to present it, and you made things much worse with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20215080.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is a huge deal difference between relatively homogenous China (90+% Han) and linguistically and ethnically diverse India. Heck, English is even a unifying language there. Not to mention way different geographies (very fertile/tropical India and very mountainous/temperate China) and political (including colonial) histories.
Perhaps India could learn a few lessons from China, but the role model approach wouldn’t work.
We are unable to have a national language, because many people disagree.
> Buddhist thought has historical played a major roles in both cultures
Buddhism was born in India, but never spread across country in any considerable amount, other countries took up on it. The place where Buddha was born and enlightened is in modern day Bihar, you rarely find any Buddhist there.
India is very diverse, we have 22 official languages (~1000 unofficial), and for many languages writing scripts change, within 100 to 200km dialects and languages keep changing. Food keeps changing, climate keeps changing. People's behaviour keep changing. Dressing style, music, dance,... keeps changing. Nothing stays the same.
Government have recently released a educational draft, indicating children should be tri-lingual (native language, Hindi, English) and many people straight out opposed it, indicating they don't accept Hindi, as in near future there language may go out of existence.
The main problem is we cannot communicate properly, with each other from other places.
India is in no way similar to China, except for huge population numbers.
Despite being colonized for ~800 years(600 years under Muslim rulers, 200 years under British), culture haven't changed, think how stubborn people are.
We are a mess in it's own way, but we somehow survive and flourish slowly.
A good modern day example would be, Indian election.
Indian media and left tried there best to spread anti-modi movement (~5 years), no media channel have expected modi to win majority in 2019, but it came to be quite opposite.
Even now, all media channels are doing some analysis, how did this happen.
There is an old saying ( loosely translated), If you are having a discussion with 5 chinese and 5 Indians about a problem. All Chinese come up with one solution, Indians come up with atleast 6 different ideas.
Thank you.
Claiming that we were colonised by muslims is not correct. Unlike the british, they did not rob india of it's treasure and take it away. You may not like it that it happened, but claiming that it was colonization is ridiculous.
> 1) the primary object of his invasion was to plunder India's wealth. India, at that time, was known for its wealth, particularly its gold and precious diamonds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaign_of_Ahmad_Shah_...
>Why don't you learn from your Northerly neighbors (China) on how to run government?
Ah yes humans really do thrive under totalitarian dictatorships
> considering the cultures are very similar
India is far more multicultural (multiple religions, multiple ethnicities, multiple languages) than China.
Easy rule of thumb for the last 2 millennia of history: China has spent most of its time unified, while India hasn't.
That might actually be untrue. While India through out its history was ruled by countless small kingdoms, most of them were part of invisible empires and connected through marriage, alliance or principle.
There were very few genocidal wars or wars of total annihilation. This strangely was a common problem not only in China but in Europe where loosing a war would mean total annihilation. This only came to an end in India with the Islamic invasion - whose strategy like in Persia or Mesopotamia consisted of raid, loot, murder and flee. When they found themselves more permanent rule it was mostly about conversion, taking slaves, destruction/defacement or appropriation(repurposing) of non-islamic buildings.
It is like saying the Soviet was united and the EU was never. The Soviet was held together by force, the EU is held together by consent.
Democracy, for all its faults, has worked for us. Over the decades, India has improved on factors like life expectancy and literacy. Not saying that we're there but we're definitely getting there. I'm not sure if we'd even remain a single country if we were to have a Communist government(or some other form of dictatorship.)
However, I do feel that we can learn a lot from Chinese people and culture.
Was that sarcasm?
One can only hope
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/chinas-long-road-to-p...
While the other country is still figuring out potties, water supplies, electricity, etc. but no the democracy, freedom of speech, etc. is more important even if y'll can't read/write. You reach the top of Maslow's hierarchy by climbing it from the bottom step-by-step, not by magically teleporting to the top like what western liberals would claim to.
I'm sure that's why all my Chinese colleagues have been desperate to stay in the US.
That's because most literate Indians(thanks to media, text,.. bias) have zero confidence(in some cases hatred) in traditional Indian/Chinese methods of life. They will die hunting for modern scientific solutions these problems but never even once look back to their history for answers.
You can easily generalize the sentiment. Most countries are distracted by useless debates while the environment is ignored.
Does India spend a lot of time and resources on Pakistan stuff? PK is so puny compared to India.
How much time does the US spend arguing over relatively minor (in the grand scheme of things) issues like immigration, Presidential dignity, and campus political correctness?
All the while, even the DNC refuses to hold a climate change debate to figure out how candidates are approaching the biggest existential threat we face now.
Unfortunately humanity isn't good at facing long term issues that require serious sacrifice and collective action.
And the RNC considers it a conspiracy.
Not a conspiracy, just the DNC being the DNC - not really interested in actually solving crises, since crises are their platform.
> Unfortunately humanity isn't good at facing long term issues
On the contrary, long term issues are not likely to be a huge problem, if you factor investment, innovation and technical improvements. It's not like the world is static and nothing is going to happen in the coming 50 years.
Let me remind you at that in the early 20th century everyone was seriously worried that humanity might starve to death once we reach 1 billion people. And we are now more than 7, and no starvation is in sight. That was a long term problem that basically disappeared completely.
We solved that problem by using fossil energy to fertilize and mechanize agriculture, and non renewable fossil aquifers to irrigate.
It's not obvious the problem is solved, it may only be delayed.
You can sweep the issue of climate change under the rug with claims of innovation and technology solving everything.
I presume, though, that you're opposed to e.g. a heavy carbon tax. You can use that same line to sweep the downsides of it under the rug--after all, a carbon tax will drive innovation toward green tech.
It's a kind of technological nihilism that says that technology will fix everything. In the real world, we have to consider concrete costs and benefits.
In the long term, we are far poorer if we don't address climate change.
Exactly. There's a lack of seriousness in those who:
* hold that technology will fix everything, but
* oppose a carbon tax, which would give a market incentive to technology aimed at fixing this
It's not even consistent with market principles. We have the income tax, a massive distortion in the economy. We could replace much of this with a carbon tax.
A carbon tax that replaces income tax, dollar for dollar, is almost a pure win.
To the extent that carbon use is absolutely necessary (read: inelastic), the tax will be passed on transparently. It'd be theoretically efficient in the same sense a land tax is efficient.
To the extent that carbon use isn't necessary (read: elastic), it'd drive people to substitute it for something else.
Even efficiency of implementation is trivial compared to income tax. The government knows where companies are extracting fossil fuels, and it knows which companies are extracting fossil fuels, and fossil fuel extraction requires large amounts of hard-to-move capital.
Policy-wise it's as pure an economic win as we can imagine in this world of ours, as we'd be moving away from distortionary income taxation.
You mean like Iran, that haven't invaded any country in 200 years, is surrounded by the US, a country that invades other places every decade, sometime lying about WMD and against the UN ?
Threats are rarely the reasons we attack people. Politics and resources are more likely.
Asking with India is fighting Paskistan is like a drunk asking a friend why smoking those bad, bad cigarets.
In fact, it would be interesting to create maps of resources which are useful for today's society vs military presence of major powers near these resource centers.
It would be revealing, but I would fear for the safety of the author of such an article.
Why isn't the US equally interested in spreading freedom and democracy in every single country on this map? https://planetrulers.com/current-dictators/
Yup. That narrative helped, in a backhanded way, the current party to win the election. Embarrasingly convenient issue to stoke to win these things when one runs out of towns to rename :)
tbf, its less about being actually worried about Pakistan (we are a little) but its more about gaining public support and hence votes due to it.
Basically I think our civilization is default dead.
As Paul Graham put it in another context:
"Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that."
People aren't used to thinking of civilization in these terms. We make retirement plans etc divorced from the projections of change to come. If we rationally considered priorities, you'd see much more popular support for actions designed to address the problem, such as increasing carbon taxes, cutting other taxes, and making an international framework to get other countries to do the same.
There's a scene in 12 Monkeys where the protagonist is in a mental hospital in the past, before a virus takes out the civilization. The psychologist asks if he came back to "help" them. The protagonist looks confused and says "how can I help you? You're all dead".
We have such a flurry of concern and activity aimed at the present. I can't help but have a similar feeling when I observe people making plans and not accounting for the predicted future, even if they claim to "believe" in climate change.
If people truly believed in it, you'd see much different political priorities. Right now effective action tends to be unpopular. Income taxes (taxing a good thing) have much more political support than carbon taxes (taxing a bad thing). I find the situation baffling.
More from Paul Graham's article:
"There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead: they assume it will be easy to raise more money. But that assumption is often false, and worse still, the more you depend on it, the falser it becomes."
We assume it will be easy to solve problems in the future, with future technology. Or that we will have surplus resources in the future, when worsening conditions cut crop yields, cut water, increase civil strife, and when the global population is larger and total emissions are higher.
http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html
Yes, the absolutely correct group to take ideas from as far as our semi-long term survival goes is VCs (and the surrounding ecosystem), the same group that made "move fast and break things" the mantra for a decade. Nothing bad ever came out of that!
This is pure ad hominem. Do you have nothing to contribute?
You're saying:
1. I don't like vc's, because a startup founder said "move fast and break things"
2. Paul Graham didn't fund that founder, but he was a vc
3. Ergo, every idea paul graham has is bad
4. Ergo, this specific essay is bad
5. So, anything that mentions this essay's ideas is wrong
6. Your post is wrong
Do you disagree with the concept of default dead? Are you arguing that it's impossible to be in such a state as a civilization? If you have an actual critique I'd be interested to hear it.
The ideal things to be broken are the structures that currently prevent collective long term survival. While not all VC's focus on this, I think PG does. After all, what is the alternative?
I believe the chemical engineering field developed that mantra at least 100 years ago! Although it was more like "this magic chemical will fix everything!"
My main problem with applying the "default dead" concept is that in the long run, absolutely everything is default dead.
I think PG's concept is really about defining horizons, risks, and resources, and making sure the math adds up. That concept makes sense to me in a startup, but I find it hard to fit something as big as human civilization into that particular framework.
Human activity is essentially extractive, and even if we solve global warming, I think we're ticking the clock on how long Earth can support this kind of society.
The only viable policy we have available is to wait for better future tech to solve the problem.
That's not a call for doing nothing, anything that improves the specific tech that can solve the problem is worth doing, but anything that detracts from it should be avoided.
So, carbon tax is great. Subsidizing renewables is iffy (has to be done right). Any proposition that slow things down is actively harmful. Saving energy is neutral.
Yup, I think carbon taxes are the one thing we can actively do. This will create a market incentive to find and use other power sources.
It might not work, but we should at least try.
Some millennials are considering the collapse of civilization as a factor in their retirement plans: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-to-get-young-people-to...
I understand the pessimism. I think that course of action can be justified. I am still saving for retirement but I can't really justify it beyond some very early markers that we are going to decarbonize and save what we can.
You are connecting the wrong dots my friend.
Just because you haven't wrapped your head around complexity or how good outcomes are produced, doesn't mean only bad things can happen.
The internet does a great job of keeping people feed with problems way above their pay grade for no good reason.
If Paul Graham had taken a course in Education or Pedagogy, his article would have an elaborate note on who should really be reading them. The conclusions you reach are very different once you have experience and done the prereqs.
It's like dropping off your second grader, in a tenth grade classroom for a month. What conclusions about the world is the second grader going to draw at the end of it?
I didn't say no good things will happen. I said we're default dead, if no good things happen.
Ideally, we'd shift incentives so that companies have more of an economic reward to producing the good things. Currently we actually subsidize fossil fuels in many countries.
If you have a critique that isn't ad hominem I'd be interested to hear it.
Healthier to keep focus/learn/talk about on how good things happen.
India is not our Civilization. I'm presuming you're either in America or Europe, or heavily influenced by their culture.
India's chief problem is overpopulation. There are simply too many people to provide water to. The country needs an urgent population program encouraging poorer families to have one or zero children. The same things are working in Bangladesh.
The world is a very big place and there's more than enough space and resources for everyone. Overpopulation is not and never has been a serious problem.
The only issues are in engineering and government to ensure citizens are actually provided what they need, which in this case is limited by decades of corruption and poor decision making. India is more than capable of handling the issue, it just needs better leadership to cast off some of the anchors it has been carrying for far too long.
Overpopulation is 100% a big problem and then some.
The overcrowded cesspits that we whimsically call 'cities' in India are founts for all kinds of shit like the water table drying up, widespread water-borne and air-pollution diseases, anti-microbial resistance, shitty healthcare in overworked hospitals in general etc. These things are ALL made orders of magnitude worse to deal with just because our population is through the roof.
Not to mention the "smaller" quality of life factors. Enjoyable walk in nature? Hah! It's impossible to walk for even two minutes in Delhi and not see another person. Never-do-wells loiter the streets all day. No possibility of orderly queuing, just this huge, irritating, wearisome crowd wherever you look and wherever you turn. The metro. The park. The roads. The neighbourhood. Even the fucking hill stations that you seek to escape to. No solitude.
In an ideal world, these thing may manageable while still fostering a large population. But an ideal world this isn't.
> "...more than enough space and resources for everyone"
That's going to be a hell-to-the-no from me dawg. I hate the fact that we fucking breed like Rabbits.
Again, this is all about proper civil engineering and city planning. There is nothing inherently impossible about supporting billions of people and there are wide swaths of India with barely anyone at all.
The earth is a gigantic place. Every single human would fit into a cubic mile. The amount of freshwater that every single living creature drinks is only a sphere of a few miles in diameter, which itself is less than 1% of the freshwater on the planet.
The capabilities are vast, we are not limited by numbers but only by the weaker parts of human nature.
Your first statement speaks to the larger "disrupt everything!" naivete found in spades on Hacker News, and I imagine, by extension, in Silicon Valley.
Sure, wave a wand, and POOF! No more greenhouse gases. Wave a wand, and POOF! No more single-use plastics. Wave a wand, and POOF! No more dead bodies in the Ganga.
That's not the world we inhabit. The world we inhabit moves at a glacial pace, and I sincerely doubt India moves at ALL.
The fact that humans can all fit into a small cube says nothing. Or at least, says far less than the fact that in India, the cities are in squalor and resemble garbage dumps much more than they resemble thriving metropolises. And that's NOT hyperbole.
What, exactly, has improved in our cities that leads you to your optimism? The fact that Delhi is the least polluted city in the world? Oh, wait. Or does your heart glow with joy while taking long walks along the banks of the Ganga, breathing in the smells of nature?
Hypothetically, anything can be done. In reality, the only part of your argument that matters is the rather poignant last statement. Optimism is for other people. A large order of deep-fried cynicism for me please.
The original comment was blaming overpopulation, but that's simply not an issue as I've explained. There are very dense cities that look and work fine because of proper planning and infrastructure. India can do this once it gets over the corruption and outdated politics but it will take time, but again has nothing to do with population size.
I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make but optimism has nothing to do with the discussion.
it's telling that the overpopulation people always worry about poor people having too many kids. rich people have a far larger ecological footprint and consume far more of any given resource.
Don't poor people usually have more kid in developing countries as that's basically the retirement plan? That's how I read parent's post, I'm assuming wealthy citizens have closer to western levels of offspring also in India.
Its a cultural issue. There are a lot of poor countries in Europe and East Asia. Why don't they have a lot of children?
Why do women from Africa and the Middle East, who are given permanent refuge and full material support, still have such high numbers of children?
Dare I say it: I think its also an IQ issue. Deciding to focus and invest in just one or two children takes planning and forethought. For whatever reason (environmental, genetic) some people do not have those capabilities.
We've banned this account for using HN for ideological and racial battle. Doing this will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Americans, Europeans, East Asians are the most scientifically productive people on the planet.
https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/glo...
Estonia: population 1.3m, Articles: 15.8
Slovenia: 2m, Articles 38
USA: 327m, Articles: 19,838
Japan: 126m, Articles 3,033
Iceland: 0.3m, Articles 26
India: 1,339m Articles 951
Pakistan: 197m, Articles: 27
Democratic Republic of the Congo: 81m, Articles: 0
Iceland produces as much science as Pakistan, a country 656x bigger.
Pakistan CO2 output: 1t per person.
Iceland CO2 output 12t per person.
USA: 15t per person
Yes, the average Westerner probably uses 10x the resources of the average person in the 3rd world. But the scientific outputs are hundreds of times bigger.
We should be saying to countries like India, Pakistan, Congo: you are destroying your environment, for the sake of what? What are you contributing to humanity to justify your use of limited resources?
As the population in poor countries increase, their challenges will only worsen. Countries like Pakistan and India have taken advantage of science and technology developed in the West to reach their current populations. Given that we are using the Earth's resources so much more productively, we have a right to instruct the rest of the world how to manage itself.
> If people truly believed in it, you'd see much different political priorities.
A common critique I've also heard in religious contexts. I think both Jordan Peterson and Nassim Taleb have made comments on it. What people "believe" and what they believe can be very different. Belief is hard.
> while 2018 was the fourth hottest year on record in the past 140 years since the world began to keep a track on temperatures, NASA expects 2019 to be still hotter.
In this context, here's an interesting map on what the world will look like 4 degrees warmer: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/what-the-world-will-look-l... - apparently, much of the Indian subcontinent will be uninhabitable...
On a side note, I always wondered if Americans would be more aggressive trying to prevent global warming if these projections were in Fahrenheit, not Celsius.
This may sound really simple and dumb, but I think you’re actually on to something. Americans read all of these stories about 1° warming and have NO idea what it means. In fact, since so much global policy-making involves American multinationals, maybe it should be a rule that all climate increases/decreases are written in the context of Fahrenheit, so Americans better understand what scientists are estimating, regardless of whether it is pro- or anti-climate-science.
I don't think it would matter. One (or four) degree(s) is a similar change in either scale. I think the larger issue is the disconnect between global average temperature and local weather systems. I think people read "4 degrees warmer" and think that all of their weather forecasts are going to be 4 degrees higher than they used to be. It seems like a small change when viewed like that, but of course that's not what is going to happen at all.
I’m concerned about climate change. I know about the flooding, glaciers and ice melting, coastal areas and islands filling up with water. I understand some of the natural ecosystem of the world would be messed up with some animals dying out as well. But I have no concept of how much of the latter will be done or how much it’ll effect things.
However as I don’t know too much, why would 4 C increase result in a lot of South Asia being uninhabitable and making most of America into hostile land. The other link said most of it would be desert land. And that Siberia and north west Antarctica would be green inhabitable. Wouldn’t part’s of Siberia and any part of Antarctica still be crazy cold and awful places to be?
I guess I’m a “dummy” because I also don’t get how global weather increase will mess and change things so much outside of what I acknowledged in my first paragraph. Though again I’m all for fixing up our behavior wrt environment and controlling climate change.
I don't know why you were downvoted, I think it's a good question. My understanding is that this is a 4 degree difference in the average temperature. Meaning there might be times of the year that don't change much at all but other seasons get dramatically hotter. That affects rainfall distribution, the speed that snow melts (and wether snow ever falls in the first place), etc.
My guess is that "uninhabitable" in this context refers to specific critical periods that are deadly short of water or deadly hot which last long enough to make building/maintaining cities in those places a losing (i.e. prohibitively expensive) proposition
Maybe people thought I was against believing in man made climate change? I remember a year ago I posed a similar question amongst a liberal crowd (of which I’m one as well) and someone took it upon himself to be sure I believed there is no man made climate change. I’m pretty sure he just didn’t know anything either and enjoyed being offended.
That’s not what’s happening here exactly but perhaps some people thought I wasn’t being genuine.
Thanks! Yes that’s a big difference if it’s average and some seasons might not change much. That would be a big difference.
Uninhabitable explanation makes sense too. Thanks.
Here's one example: increasing average temperatures raises the incidence of extreme heat waves. There is an upper limit of temperature+humidity above which humans cannot survive. Under business-as-usual rates of CO2 emissions, those conditions will start to happen, and India is one of the earlier areas to see it.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/02/climate-...
Absolutely, 'one degree' has an intuitive sense of 'negligible' in my experience of going outside. The actual danger of a warming world is in the energy moving around us, pushing water inland and forcing higher wind gusts etc etc.
So if you want to impress large numbers upon the public, maybe Joules or Watts of excess energy would be good.
Poking around a random Quora post it looks like the equivalent for 1*C of warming would be on the order of a billion TeraJoules.
A billion TJ, or the ocean's total warming is 436 ×10^21 J since 1871[1] is a bit like billion pounds to most of the public - most of whom disliked maths - huge, but utterly meaningless. Why else is every media story associating things with the size of a football field, the area of 63 Wales, or length equivalent to the height of the Empire State or 23 double decker buses? And I always wondered why double decker buses when they're the same length as a single decker... Must be a British thing. :)
Guardian reported the ocean warming since 1871 study as "...equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years" (1.5x the power of Hiroshima), which seemed a bit hyperbolic. Except the same article then asked the author of the study[1]:
“I try not to make this type of calculation, simply because I find it worrisome,” said Prof Laure Zanna, at the University of Oxford, who led the new research. “We usually try to compare the heating to [human] energy use, to make it less scary.”
At which point I think Guardian might have been on to something in their choice of visualisation...
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/4/1126
1° doesn't mean anything for those who are used to those units either, when it comes to global warming. A day that's 1° hotter or colder is not that much hotter or colder. You go by the effects scientists say it has on the environment, not by whether it feels as a lot or a little.
> maybe it should be a rule that all climate increases/decreases are written in the context of Fahrenheit
Nah, the rest of the world is fine with using SI units and understanding them. No need to dilute it down by using different systems.
Nah, Americans (as in, the people in power) would only care if their homes were affected.
This is unreasonably rosy. Acidification of the ocean and ecological breakdown from overly rapid environmental change appears likely to cause a catastrophic failure of the food chain. Rapid change is necessary. The status quo is not OK.
I've always wondered what I, as an individual, could do to help. I work full time, and I have a chronic illness which makes it difficult to physically contribute. I am a software engineer, so I do have technical skills to contribute if there were problems that needed technical solutions, but I simply don't know where to look.
Nothing. We're far past the point of no return at this point. Minimizing the disastrous consequences of climate change requires a coordinated worldwide effort. In principle, the only thing you can do that might make a difference is get active politically. In practice, given the level of dysfunction exhibited in global politics right now, I'm extremely pessimistic that there's any hope of doing anything on that level either.
Seems like for the next 50 years, politics will be about passing the buck to the next guy in the office.
"It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope."
Well you're doing as much as you can right now it seems. Methink the solution is mostly of social nature. Are your neighbors nature friendly ? Talk with them, do more things without waste, do more things locally. There's a guy in Florida who turns neighborhoods in semi-gardens. People gather around and plant some stuff.
Big factors like industrial pollution, transport, long distance shipment are 1) too heavy to move (you need political power, and political power is also heavy to move) 2) but they do depend on people spending their money for their product.
I dream of a smooth swap (https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Flh4.googleu...) where people allocate more to simple and local life. Forcing the economy to curb accordingly.
I have the feeling that it will make (and it does already) people a lot happier[0], and since having to do locally you can't rely on economies of scale so people will have things to do instead. It won't be fancy or pretty but plausibly more meaningful to work with and for your surroundings, even if it means no more white collar position in a shiny tower.
There are online places to discuss, reddit has many (r/collapse, r/guerrillagardening), some people also make discord groups. You might take a peek.
Get in the face of your political representatives:
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/
https://rebellion.earth/
There is no chance your individual actions will have any impact. Our only hope is drastic, large scale policy changes at the national and international level.
We do have one problem that could do with a technical solution:
If we managed to invent a carbon removal technique scalable and cheap enough to deploy on a massive scale, we'd still be able to prevent the worst.
The problem is, currently there is no money in it, so the efforts are not the size they should be. We'd need a war economy on all fronts here.
Rosy or not, we need to plan when it happens. The only if we don't know is how bad it will exactly be.
And don't forget, that a very valid answer is "food chain collapses, causing mass starvation and death".
It's happening. What's the plan?
The rise of ISIS was driven by crop failure due to climate change. The temperature in India reached 123 degrees already this year.
The rise of ISIS was not due to climate change, it was a group that arose from AQI, which itself had it origins from Jordanian Jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who, in the 1990s ran jihadist paramilitary camps in Afghanistan. ISIS wasn’t driven by crop failure “due to climate change.” It was essentially a war due to Sunnis not liking Sh’ites — a conflict that has been ongoing for literally centuries. And, in this specific case was due to a power vacuum in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the roots of that conflict are as old as the 1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran.
Attributing ISIS to climate change is about the same as blaming social media for ISIS; arguably social media’s existence actually helped ISIS propagate more than any causes attributed to climate change. ISIS and it’s origins are exceptionally complicated as are most conflicts in that region. To trivialize it by claiming it was because of climate change is to reveal a profound misunderstanding of the history of that region.
We can discuss climate change and it’s causes and effects, but it weakens credibility when almost everything gets blamed on it. It’s getting to the point where when one used to say this bad thing happened because “it’s God’s will,” but now people say, “climate change.” It’s taking on religion-levels of influence to where actual causation gets ignored in favor of attributing everything to CO2. Every storm, every war, every bad thing that happens has a least some people trying to use those events to justify their belief systems. Sometimes weather is just weather, war is just war. If we ended all CO2 emissions tomorrow, the Middle East would still be a cauldron, wars would still happen, crops would still fail from time to time, hurricanes would still destroy things, tornados would still happen. Climate is an important issue, but let’s not turn it into a religion.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/11/climate-change-d...
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/06/world/climate-change-terroris...
> As described here, water and climatic conditions have played a direct role in the deterioration of Syria’s economic conditions. There is a long history of conflicts over water in these regions because of the natural water scarcity, the early development of irrigated agriculture, and complex religious and ethnic diversity. In recent years, there has been an increase in incidences of water-related violence around the world at the subnational level attributable to the role that water plays in development disputes and economic activities.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-0005...
It might be psychologically satisfying to blame Mother Nature for a particular problem that is the direct result of recent USA military and diplomatic policy, but it seems sort of silly. Millions of people who are still alive right now witnessed the intentional destruction of Iraq's government and civil society, the deliberate transfer of weapons and matériel to nascent anti-civil-society groups, and the intentional weakening of Syria's government and civil society through sanctions and military attacks. We don't have to learn about this; we saw it happen in real time. The Middle East hasn't had rain forests at any time in recorded history.
This line of argument is so ridiculous that one is tempted to speculate you're trolling us to make real warming enthusiasts look worse...
Pessimistic outlook maybe, but on seeing that I tend to think it misses a sub-head. If that proportion of the population needs to relocate and that much is abandoned, something like:
What the world will look like 4°C warmer
For the 5% of humanity that survived World Wars 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Maybe there'll be world government by then...
> Maybe there'll be world government by then...
I really need convincing that a world government wouldn't be extremely inefficient. I believe this would be the most disappointing utopia ever tried with a guarantee for regular civil wars.
I get that unity is required for dealing with global life threatening disasters waiting to happen, but it would just suck so badly if you think closer about it.
Just my take to add to the pessimism.
My observation is that humans' ability to effectively self-govern maxes out around 100 million, maybe even closer to 70 million.
If you look at the world happiness report/index, the top 50 countries are all under 100 million (exceptions: US, Mexico) and not especially large landmass (exceptions: US, Australia).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
Growing up watching Star Trek I always thought the idea of some benevolent global government running in a post scarcity future was the goal we should all be shooting for but in retrospect it looks about as flawed as traditional communist command economies.
Maybe the effect is countered by the relative autonomy of US states and perhaps money does indeed make happy:
https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/articles/news-and...
But nevertheless I think that distributed and subsidiary governance is at least less less efficient.
That said, I would instantly exchange my government for the united federation of planets.
Man Russia has it sweet.
Also Africa and Australia has a head start, they know how to live in deserts.. but maybe this one will be lunar void of life.
Sarcasm aside I wonder:
- Will humanity find wisdom and courage in doing what's simple and right (degrowth, relocalized, green first)
- Will humanity will pile head on to fix the problem through gigantism (let's be mad: fusion powered geo engineering)
What's going on around the Great Lakes on that map? It looks like most of Michigan has been swallowed by them, significantly more land loss than I would think a 2m rise in water levels would cause. https://i.imgur.com/tdX7vyr.png
Aren't the Great Lakes somewhat higher than sea level? (At least until Niagara erodes all the up - which will be 50K years or so).
Edit: Lake Michigan is at 176m - which is quite a bit higher than the level seas would reach if all ice melts (which I think is about 90m).
Yes. The map is sensationalist trash. Not to say that global warming won't impact the lakes: The far more likely outcome is depletion, as water diversions considered unthinkable become politically feasible, both within and without the basin. A map like that might as well show the Colorado River shores expanding with sea rise, it would make as much sense (for non-Americans, the Colorado is so heavily diverted to southwestern farms and municipalities that its riverbed is dry, or a trickle, most of the year).
Of course it won't help the narrative when the Lakes right now are near record highs due to lower levels of evaporation and more rain in the autumn months of the past few years (according to Army Corps of Engineers' data that started records in 1918, anyway). These fluctuations aren't uncommon. Last time they were this high was the mid-80s.
But you're right about the political ramifications of where the Great Lakes Compact line gets drawn. Waukesha, WI is one place that comes to mind where their own water supply became inadequate (mostly due to radium levels) and they requested to have access to Lake Michigan's water. My understanding is within a few years, they'll have the infrastructure in place and be able to legally draw from it.
It doesn't take a deep imagination to think of what a few dozen new such situations will do to Michigan let alone the other Lakes.
Yes, the Waukesha diversion shows that if a community is patient and wealthy enough, the lakes are for sale. At the risk that we share sources, https://www.amazon.com/Great-Lakes-Water-Wars/dp/159726637X is great and has a chapter on Waukesha.
Lake Ontario has had record high water levels in 2017 and again in 2019, maybe they think that will get much, MUCH worse? But given the rest of the map, I think it's just bad science.
The flooded areas are surprising. I always thought Japan would be the first place to go. Look at Brazil, why is it so flooded compared to everywhere else?
The earth was once 6 degrees warmer according to the geologic record. From what we know, it looked nothing like that map.
Edit - here, for people who can't do their own homework: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/travel-through...
And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
The key point is how fast the temperature changes. Over several thousands of years that change can be tolerated by the ecosystem (animals and plants evolve over several hundreds of generations and can survive). We already increased the temperature of 1. something degrees Celsius in perhaps a 100 of years and the trend in accelerating. That's way too fast for natural selection to make a difference.
So, yeah, Eocene was super warm, but the flora and fauna was well adapted to survive in those conditions.
Also, if you don't believe me, look better in the article you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m... (pay attention to the non uniform time axis...)
Not saying there won't be ill effects. But the alarmist idea that the world will be 80% desert isn't based on any science.
How a map at +4 or +6 degrees may or may not look is pretty far from "grade school", and definitely requires sources. I agree that the map in the parent comment doesn't meet my standards for scientific accuracy, due to lack of sources, but that doesn't mean I'd discount it. It's not exactly implausible, extrapolating from current desertification. Seems like the map is from a book (https://www.paragkhanna.com/home/2016/3/9/the-world-4-degree...), so presumably that book would contain explanations. Your Smithsonian map is quite bad, too: It contains no legend, an no explanations at all, although based on the coloring it would seem that there's less desertification than in the parent comment map. But then, it also looks like due to continental drift, the majority of landmass was on the Southern hemisphere. I think it's pretty silly to draw too many conclusions about desertification in the next century from a picture of the earth 170 million years ago, with a completely different distribution of land mass and weather patterns.
How many people lived on earth at that time? And how interwoven was everything they did on a global scale?
> From what we know, it looked nothing like that map.
Yes, because at that point it was a map of pangea.
I posted a map. During the Jurassic, the world was much warmer, greener, and Pangea was already broken up, although the continents weren't in their current positions. They did span from pole to pole however.
The point is that the map posted by OP is junk and not based on any science, just alarmist rhetoric.
And I'm just starting to learn about the fact that the placement of landmasses massively influences the global climate. We're looking at a very different system here.
Do we have map estimates of what it looked like at that time?
Sure. This is pretty basic, but here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/travel-through...
Anyhow, we know from the geologic record of fossils that the world, at it's hottest, had vegetation in most regions. It wasn't 80% desert like the OP I responded to.
I don’t know anything about how the world would change. But me being skeptical of everything being ruined with 4 degree increase doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know much science.
Thanks for link. The topic interests me and I’d like to know more.
Source?
Is this a joke? Dunno, grade school? Corroborated by a multitude of sources, some of which are on Wikipedia, and should be general knowledge. Did you not learn about this in grade school?
It’s not a joke. What are you talking about? 56 million years ago (Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the last time temperatures were six degrees higher? Or, back when earth was a molten rock of lava? That’s completely irrelevant to this discussion. Temperatures haven’t been higher than a degree since the last ice age (see the excellent relevant xkcd: https://www.climatecentral.org/news/climate-change-xkcd-comi...). Rapid anthropogenic global warming does not bode well for human civilization. That doesn’t mean life on earth or humans as a species will be wiped out, but you can’t say “earth was hotter when the dinosaurs were around, so, no problem”
Didn't say no problem, only that the map of the original post I replied to is shit. Which it is. There's no reason to believe everything south of Siberia and Canada will be a desert.
Climate science is based on past CO2 levels and uses the fossil record of foliage to estimate temperatures. Not even the most dire predictions claim the earth will be mostly desert in 100 years. There will be flooding and some desertification, but many regions will also become greener.
Even NASA has observed that the earth is greener today than 40 years ago.
Is "taught in grade school" your standard of proof?
Some things are common enough knowledge that asking for a source is disingenuous. Everyone should know the earth was once warmer and went through various cooling periods.
It's like asking for a source to prove the sky is blue or that the earth is round...
This community claims to be one of educated professionals, yet somehow there's comments questioning things that are literally common knowledge and if somehow they don't know, can't spend 2 seconds to google it? Instead write "Source?". It's intellectually lazy as hell.
The problem with things that "everyone knows" is they are often hyper simplified abstractions that form useful models but are not appropriate to discussions of anything specific or for shaping policy. Everyone "knows" Pluto is farther than Neptune (except when it isn't[0]), traits are passed via dna (except when they aren't[1]), sex matches with gender (except it doesn't[2]).
Sure the earth was warmer in the past, it was also colder, it was also a molten hellscape. Trying to relate a grade schooler's understanding of geologic time to specific climate models seems to be far more intellectually lazy than asking for a source so people can put your very vague claims into context.
[0]https://curiosity.com/topics/pluto-and-neptune-swap-places-e... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction
>Some things are common enough knowledge that asking for a source is disingenuous.
Yes. But then we invented science and "common knowledge" was proven ignorant time and time again.
>It's like asking for a source to prove the sky is blue or that the earth is round...
Hardly. I can't look out my window and see what the temperature was thousands of years ago.
>This community claims to be one of educated professionals
You're claiming that, not 'the community.'
What is intellectually lazy is not providing information that verifies your claims, and instead preferring to debate the social circumstances of an internet discussion. You're not obligated to provide a source. You don't have to do it. But don't think you're somehow more intellectually honest or hardworking because you refuse to.
If 2 seconds of googling solves this problem, then you should have probably just done that rather than arguing about whether you should need to.
I googled it for the intellectually lazy.
As an aside, the reason we know that CO2 affects earth's temperature is the same reason we know what kind of vegetation existed during that same time period. Because of observations in the fossil record.
My office building has recently adopted water harvesting (which is an ancient practice in many parts of India).
Mumbai receives a LOT of rain, and I’m glad that we’re able to divert some of it to the ground water table.
Seeing this succeed, I’m pushing the same for my building too, I’m surprised to see a lot of my neighbours have problems with the same (cause of wastage of a common terrace), I should send them this article.
I heard things are critical in southern India, apparently restaurants are closed, our offshore guys are working from home, using starbucks for toilets etc... is this true?
I'm here in Chennai, and things are bad, but it's hard to tell how bad. So much of the water is trucked anyways - Chennai doesn't have a well developed unified water system.
As a foreigner who has visited several times, here's what I've noticed:
- lots more people on the street with those iconic plastic water containers. Lots more water trucks on the road.
- water quality is BAD. Even in upper-class highrise condos, the water has much more odor and color. In this building, salinity is way up too. There's a reverse-osmosis plant here, but it's only on for several hours a day because RO systems waste so much water.
- haven't seen many restaurant closures, but I'm sure they're happening.
- a lot of hotels targeting westerners have advanced filtration and reverse-osmosis plants, seem to still be operating. Some pools are drained.
- water pressure in some neighborhoods is so low that it's only a trickle at the tap. News says some people are using pumps to pull of the metro system, making things worse.
Overall, it seems like bad expensive water is still out there if you can afford it and want to pay.
Yes, if your offshore guys are from Chennai.
Must be true, but I would expect a bit of exaggeration there.
Just curious (and ignorant): How do you assess the success of water harvesting? Do you measure the water table levels periodically?
Not sure there's any easy way for a society (as in building society) to do that. There's a huge water tanker on our terrace with a big surface area to capture rain water, it goes through some filtration processes and is utilised by the building for all general purposes. When there is extra water in the tank, it's diverted to the ground water via something opposite of a boring connection. I know that we often have extra water in the tank (it is rainy even as I type this) and it is diverted underground, so in my book that's a success cause something is better than nothing.
Climate change and weather patterns change coupled with over a billion people in a country (roughly) the size of Argentina is bound to have water problems as per capita consumption grows with wealth.
Conservation + Desalination is the only way here.
Desalination just makes global warming worse.
Not if we use nukes or solar to power it.
("nukes" commonly refers to nuclear weapons, not power plants)
You still have to deal with the residuals from desalination. About 1/3 of the salt water is useable. The other 2/3s is a brine that can not be used. Not to mention what are you going to do with all of that salt and biological material you just pulled out? You aren't going to be able to sell it.
The water distribution on Earth is 97.5% salt water and 2.5% fresh water [0]. Out of those 2.5%, more than 2/3 of the water is trapped in glaciers and ice caps. So overall we have about 0.8% of the Earth's water available for consumption.
So our actual consumption is far below even those 0.8%. But our problem with fresh water isn't necessarily that it's not enough but that it's very unevenly distributed and we tend to be very wasteful.
This being said how much desalination do we have to do until the brine (now 30% more saline than regular salt water) is significantly affecting the overall salinity of the oceans? Desalinating 0.2% of the ocean's water would give humans a 25% more fresh fresh water and the increase in salinity would be marginal.
Does anyone know if an increase that looks as minute as this (0.1% increase is salinity?) is actually a real danger to ocean life and/or currents?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_distribution_on_Earth
I think the problem with brine salinity is that it’s dumped in concentrated areas which might be teeming with sea life. If they evaporated it and dumped huge salt blocks in ocean deserts it could have less impact on marine life.
I imagine this isn't a hard problem to solve, there are no major technical limitations to doing something like this and might not even drive the cost up that much.
There are other aspects of desalination that seem far more critical, like the ones related to efficiency and the scale of the required infrastructure.
You'd think it would be profitable to turn that brine into sea salt starter
Typically, it's diluted and pumped back into the ocean.
Diluted with what?
More ocean.
Some care is involved in doing this so as not to wreck nearby ecosystems, but the ocean as a whole is big enough to absorb a brine flow.
Argentina what? How are the two comparable?
Argentina 2 766 890 km² India 3 287 263 km²
They are roughly comparable in area - though India is a bit bigger.
I would suspect India also has a lot more arable land.
"Arable" is a misleading word. It is not a quality of land so much as a quality of the people who live there. India's very problem is that so much wild land has been converted to intensive agricultural use. There is no slack. In Argentina cattle live on the pampas. In India there are no grasslands left so they live in the street.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
Why are you attributing water deficit with climate change? Increasing atmospheric water vapor leads to larger storms, floods, and overabundance of ground water.
India's problem is overconsumption and population excess. Until India is able to reduce their population by 50% or more, their water shortages will continue to worsen. A sizeable decrease in their population will also reduce their power consumption needs, so they'll be able to close their coal power plants instead of opening dozens more.
It's more complicated than that. Climate change doesn't lead to global increased atmospheric water vapor and the water cycle is very complicated on a global scale. Climate change leads to floods and storms... and droughts and wildfires. Some areas could see greatly increase groundwater recharge while others will see greatly reduced recharge. Even if the global net effect were to increase water, there would still be extreme examples of local droughts causing extreme water stress.
In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge. The southeast of the US is going to have some very serious water issues for the next generation, albeit not as soon as India.
In the U.S. for example climate change is leading to decreased rainfall meaning less runoff and less groundwater recharge.
Where are you getting this? It certainly doesn't agree with figures published by the government. [0] The aquifers that are dropping are dropping because of massive well pumping. The wildfires are because we've stockpiled understory fuel while building homes in fire-prone forests. Overstating the case for global warming will convince some people, but others will only grow more skeptical.
[0] https://www.drought.gov/drought/data-maps-tools/current-cond...
https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/...
>Surface and groundwater supplies in some regions are already stressed by increasing demand as well as declining runoff and groundwater recharge. In some regions, particularly the southern U.S. and the Caribbean and Pacific islands, climate change is increasing the likelihood of water shortages and competition for water. Water quality is diminishing in many areas, particularly due to increasing sediment and contaminant concentrations after heavy downpours.
I find that people's skepticism regarding climate change has almost nothing to do with data and evidence and nearly everything to do with their personal politics, to the extent that I draw a causative link between right-leaning politics and "climate skepticism".
You made a specific claim about rainfall. That claim contradicted my experience over the last several years. I searched for "USA drought", and a very simple government site confirmed there is no drought underway in USA. (EDIT: there certainly will be a drought in future, just as there will be floods and hurricanes and comfortable sunny days with light breezes.) I'm not sure what this most recent link is supposed to prove, but I'm not going to wade through it. I only consider specifics when it comes to weather/climate.
Let me get this straight, you asked me to source my claim that climate change will affect america, so I use an official government report titled "National Climate Assessment" which details the effects on America, and you're rejecting this canonical source?
Your reply is "I'm not reading this, I did a fast google search instead?"
Oof owie, my intellectualism.
I shouldn't have to spoon feed you after I gave you an extremely high quality source.
But whatever:
"Climate changes pose challenges for an already parched region that is expected to get hotter and, in its southern half, significantly drier. Increased heat and changes to rain and snowpack will send ripple effects throughout the region’s critical agriculture sector, affecting the lives and economies of 56 million people – a population that is expected to increase 68% by 2050, to 94 million. Severe and sustained drought will stress water sources, already over-utilized in many areas, forcing increasing competition among farmers, energy producers, urban dwellers, and plant and animal life for the region’s most precious resource."
>Theobald, D. M., W. R. Travis, M. A. Drummond, and E. S. Gordon, 2013: Ch. 3: The Changing Southwest. Assessment of Climate Change in the Southwest United States: A Report Prepared for the National Climate Assessment, G. Garfin, A. Jardine, R. Merideth, M. Black, and S. LeRoy, Eds., Island Press, 37-55 http://swccar.org/sites/all/themes/files/SW-NCA-color-FINALw...
Oh, now we're talking about the Southwest? I would have sworn that the topic was the Southeast? I've lived in both areas, and I would classify them as having different climates. Sorry, is that too specific?
Haha you really do represent the ideal climate "skeptic"
* reject evidence for non-sense reasons
* over reliant on public search engines for quick, contextless answers
* pedantry rather than discussion
* a complete and total inability to find any meaningful evidence for yourself
For the record, my original comment in this thread has always been about the Southwest, but since you're behaving as such an anti-intellectual bad actor, I'll continue spoon feeding you the data that you're clearly too lazy to even try to understand
"Freshwater supplies from rivers, streams, and groundwater sources near the coast are at risk from accelerated saltwater intrusion due to higher sea levels. Porous aquifers in some areas make them particularly vulnerable to saltwater intrusion., For example, officials in the city of Hallandale Beach, Florida, have already abandoned six of their eight drinking water wells."
>Obeysekera, J., M. Irizarry, J. Park, J. Barnes, and T. Dessalegne, 2011: Climate change and its implications for water resources management in south Florida. Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, 25, 495-516, doi:10.1007/s00477-010-0418-8.
>Berry, L., F. Bloetscher, H. N. Hammer, M. Koch-Rose, D. Mitsova-Boneva, J. Restrepo, T. Root, and R. Teegavarapu, 2011: Florida Water Management and Adaptation in the Face of Climate Change. 68 pp., Florida Climate Change Task Force
That's just one way that climate change is negatively affecting groundwater in the US south east and how freshwater is becoming more scarce in America due directly to climate change
Have any more ignorance-fueling pedantry to use to avoid discussing the topic at hand?
Maybe you'll try reading a source? Nah, you'll just Google search it!
Next time maybe just don't say something trivially verifiably false about recent rain totals in USA? Look I understand the world is ending. As excited as people get about trivial bullshit, doesn't it seem strange that despite their professed beliefs they've all done absolutely nothing about the end of the world? Maybe that conundrum could inform your future discussion board evangelism...
If it rains less, you dig more wells. Why do you think drought and pumping are independent?
They've been pumping the Ogallala since the 1940s. Western Kansas and Nebraska are not naturally green areas. That they don't have enough water for the type of agriculture they practice is not the sign of a drought.
> Climate change doesn't lead to global increased atmospheric water vapor and the water cycle is very complicated on a global scale.
It also doesn't lead to groundwater depletion and the absence of well water. That's more or less independent of climate change. Well water is a semi-renewable resource. In other words, there's only a certain fraction of rain that will filter down to where the wells are pulling it from. If wells pull more than that the water table gradually drops until the wells run dry.
That's what is happening in India (and in a lot of other places.). They've drilled too many wells and depleted the ground water. Fixing climate change isn't going to help with that problem.
From the article:
In India, a 22 per cent deficit has been recorded in pre-monsoon showers in the months of March, April and May — the second lowest in the past 65 years — and with monsoons delayed by a fortnight or so, daily temperatures have been sizzling.
In other words the once reliable monsoons are no longer that reliable.
From what I have read one of the reasons for this is the warming of the Indian Ocean, with that warming then resulting in changes to the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD).
That dipole has a big influence on climate, not only in India but across the whole region and as it changes so does the climate.
Assuming equal total rainfall, larger storms reduce the total usable water. Storm water mostly just runs away and flows into the ocean without doing anything useful.
Of course in reality it's much more complicated since rainfall doesn't stay constant, and the changes in wind patterns and ocean currents have hard to predict consequences. But I think it's safe to say that rainfall will change, and at least for some regions it will make things worse.
> Until India is able to reduce their population by 50% or more, their water shortages will continue to worsen.
you seem to be getting into full blown thanos mode here, probably you have seen this work somewhere before? can you please share?
I think he is onto something. Unbound population growth combined with rapidly increasing standards of living can only lead to larger carbon foot print by the nation as well as larger water consumption. I think controlling population to some degree (I don't know what that degree is) would be enormously beneficial to the environment.
> Unbound population growth
India's fertility rate is at or below the global average and has been falling for decades. [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
It’s not unbound:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1040621
The more reasonable standard of living, healthcare and food more people get access to, the faster we’ll reach a balance.
If only there was a name for it...
A lot of water is stored in glaciers and mountains when it is cold and released in the spring and summer. If that water is no longer stored in the mountains, rivers will start to dry up in the summer.
Obviously total population contributes to depletion; increased per capita use exacerbates that, but change in weather patterns due to changes in climate adds uncertainty and exacerbates floods and droughts, neither of which is helpful in combating water shortages (floods don’t have time to percolate back into aquifers).
Looks like all the climatologists in here downvoted you.
Last year there was “Rally for Rivers” aimed at addressing some of the problems India faces - https://www.google.com/amp/s/relay.nationalgeographic.com/pr...
And, fortunately, it looks like it is getting some traction: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/sadhguru-bri...
Didn't NASA report recently that earth is greener than 20 years ago due to China and India?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19228922
Please don't just stop at the title. From the article:
> 82% of the greening seen in India – comes from intensive cultivation of food crops.
And then:
> For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change.
What this new article says is that groundwater is depleted.
Yup. But let's not let science get in the way of alarming headlines...
I have no knowledge of the situation but couldn't the 2 be related? As in more (green) trees pulling more water out of the ground?
Then again I would imagine the water pulled out comes back rather fast in the form of a tropical storm.
Read the article. It isn’t as simple as the headline. It’s not good to assume a headline answers all and is the only thing that needs to be known?l.
I read the article. It's mainly about reviving traditional methods of conserving water. The headline is far more alarming.
Versus news like this: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/02/one-third-of-world-s-...
"You have ebola but at least your flu is gone." "So I'm going to be all right?!"
Recently, government of India, started to look into this problem, some part's of India get too much of rain, and others live in drought.
They are trying to link up all Indian water bodies.
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/a-wish-list-on-water-fro...
Which will fuck up river ecologies :(
People are so comfortable pumping the environment air, water and soil with fertilizers, pestisides, antibiotics, plastic, smoke and toxic waste. We have wiped out large areas of forests, over produce and waste food. Why is that we have suddenly become so sensitive when we want to connect waterways. Yes there can be ecological imbalances, but is a very small price to pay compared to all the horrors that we commit.
Don't worry they have got brains, they will indeed setup a panel and go forward, with good plan.
It's not something like demonetization, to not have any discussion.
> 21 cities — including the four metropolises — Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi — will run out of groundwater by 2020.
Is that a validated statistic? If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem.
I cannot comment about other cities, Bengaluru it was a known issues. Primarily big builders who launch their projects dig up multiple borewell and pump out the groundwater. When government realized that ground water levels were getting depleted they did make rainwater harvesting mandatory. Yet it is either shoddily implemented or never implemented.
Ref: https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com/bangalore/civic/benga...
Most of the apartment complexes water supplies are provided by tankers. Local politicians have stake in these tanker services, so it is in their best interest to make sure local populace is dependent on the these tankers and not on government connections which is heavily backlogged.
Few societies, residents do get together invest their own money to get proper water harvesting, but that is far and few to even make a noticeable difference. Builders most of them flat out refuse to build robust water harvesting systems.
This is really insightful. Thank you. I had no idea so much was dependent on tanker trucks.
> If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem.
This is simply not as emotive an issue for elections as banning cow-slaughter or defending India from the evil Muslims.
Not to mention that Indian political discourse is basically a shit-show of politicians trading 3rd grade level insults with one another, a bit like monkeys flinging excrement at each other.
r/India leaking.. ?
> If so, how is the entire country not panicking about this? That seems like a really serious problem.
Some might be blinded by the space program and how technologically advanced India is/might be in this regard.
No time to look for solid water supply, especially if you're not living where water will become not available.
Climate change and the huge imbalance of men to women in india makes it seem like water wars are inevitable in the region in the next 20-30 years.
I live in India, and I can literally feel the difference.
But, what I'm surprised of is, many plants didn't dry up. And they are in good condition.
Paani Foundation - if you are looking for a heartwarming story of a village in India that overcame water scarcity through rain water harvesting (and a good organization to donate to) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSGF1KQ1UQ
If you feel depressed after reading this, watch how one person initiated the clean up of an entire beach in Mumbai which was covered with 5 feet of filth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0ka45g4Fyc
California is drying up too. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/depleting-the-water/ Our planet's groundwater is being pumped out much faster than it can be replenished.
What happened to desalination? The oceans are ripe for desalination!
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-hot-efficiency-solar-desalinat...
One can do it even by focusing sunlight, why can’t they do it at industrial scale? I think Israel started to.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...
They used to import icebergs. (It’s a good example of Cunningham’s law.)
Can someone please enlighten us about the traditional water conservation or restoration methods he alludes to? I'm super curious because apparently they have enough merit that Texas A&M is looking into them. Thanks!
My guess is things like this: https://www.thebetterindia.com/61757/traditional-water-conse...
See also this article: https://newsum.in/news/swimmers-can-track-sweat-through-an-u...
So no more water in a country saturated with pollution, full of 1.7 billion of people with huge social tensions, bad relationships at borders and the atomic bomb.
What could go wrong.
awdwad
climate change to the rescue. send them melt water from the poles :D
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
Divert water from all 3 rivers in Kashmir down south into mainland India.
Abrogate the Indus Water Treaty brokered by World Bank.
Divert to Ganges and make it a sewage too?
This idea is bad in so many ways. It's gross hatred due to mass propaganda. First rule for sustainable water management is having local water supply used locally. We need better water management at individual city/village level like reviving lakes have a good ground water recharge etc.. Diverting rivers and desalination ideas are going to have huge ecological cost even if we forget about the economical possibility of them.
It turns out that Pakistanis are humans too, and they need water as well. Besides, there's the little problem of nukes.
Water
The reason Pakistan want Jammu-Kashmir, water security. China took Tibet, for a similar reason.
US wanted Gulf Oil; Invaded Iraq, what other countries after WW-II
Shit insecure bullies do to nurture their ego/fear.
Erm, that makes things worse in Pakistan. You do not want to destabilise an already unstable nuclear power.