[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

We're going to die of heart disease or cancer, just like everyone else. Sure, some people will be tragically taken by weather-related events, but they will still pale in comparison to heart disease and cancer.

It wouldn't be crazy to hear some politician talking incessantly about heart disease and cancer, yet we would probably think them to be crazy.

We don't like to talk about things actually likely to happen to us, because that would require confronting our real vulnerabilities.



The faster the rate of change, the more disruptive it is to the inhabitants. Adaptation is a process that takes time, and when the time frame is accelerated, it puts more pressure on creatures to make the requisite changes.

The problem isn't that the climate changes, it's that it changes quickly relative to geologic time frames.

Still, it doesn't seem that humanity will suffer so much given that these "rapid" changes still take several human generations to manifest problems. As I said, nobody is going to wake up tomorrow with seas being a foot higher.

Seas have risen about a foot over the last 100 years, and people that old don't report how terrible that transition was, or how climate change was the most difficult thing they had to contend with. In the next 100 years seas are predicted to rise about a foot too. Any predictions on what people will be recounting as the most difficult things they have lived through?

I lived through heart disease and think I averted its grip on me. By changing my diet to predominantly vegetables and fruit I think I greatly reduced my risk on colon cancer and other related cancers. But the risk of having to abandon house somewhere in the future is rising every day, and there's little I alone can do about that.

We have to scoop up sand from the bottom of the North Sea and deposit that on our beaches to protect our dunes, by millions of tons of sand per year, replacing a process that nature did for us - but goes too slow to cope with the rising seas. Once in a while bones and artifacts of the people that lived there get scooped up - they lived where there's 15 meter of water now.
There's a recently discovered long section of Roman road nearby my town - at 70 centimeter below current average sea level.
The seas have been steadily and slowly rising over the centuries. It is now rising over 10 times as fast, and that rate is climbing exponentially.