WH now actually at war with certain cities

[User.45]

"Tropical" is creeping northward (or southward in that other, forgotten hemisphere). It is not entirely clear what that will ultimately mean. Deserts are likely, I think, to become desertier, marginal areas may trend toward desertification, and places that can stay in the path of wet may become junglier.

It's an interesting thing. Desertification isn't only a function of sunny hours per year thing. Small vegetation, like grass can trap dew, and stabilize the microclimate. So if there's a good local ecosystem that can maintain grassland, higher temps don't convert land to desert. But it's true the other way around. If that ecosystem is messed up, desertification becomes a positive feedback loop that is hard to break. My understanding is that parts of Australia kinda became desert-like because of this.

 

[User.45]

The big surprise in reduced arability of land all over the planet is going to be from the effect of millions of abandoned oil and gas wells, from which it has always been easier and waaaaay cheaper to walk away, rather than to treat properly by plugging with special muds and a welded cap.

Gas Companies Are Abandoning Their Wells, Leaving Them to Leak Methane Forever

Just one orphaned site in California could have emitted more than 30 tons of methane. There are millions more like it

www.bloomberg.com

Sure there are laws about measuring emissions and doing cleanups of capped but leaking wells, but by time you find out who dug that ol' well in your north 40 acres, five companies have bought and sold it, or been bought or sold themselves, or just moved on or plain gone bust.

Meanwhile such wells continue to emit methane. They also corrode over time, deep underground --we're talking a couple miles, not 30 feet-- and so will eventually corrupt and pollute groundwater aquifers. That's water on which farming will increasingly depend in areas where both oil and gas drilling and agriculture currently overlap, as climate change continues to take its toll.

Even when idled wells are plugged properly, the treatment is only good for 50-100 years per some estimates, because of all the pressure and heat that the earth itself exerts on materials a couple miles down from the surface. And the real kicker is that in the USA at least there's no law requiring emissions measurement once an idled well has been plugged and sealed.

But hey I'm sure in 50-100 years we'll have found a habitable planet we can all hop on over to. And oil and gas execs figure they'll be dead before then anyway, so this quarter's profits are still the main thing to focus on. That and making sure legislators don't get focused on any of this stuff.

Those oil execs have kids too. I guess they are saving money so they'll be well off no matter what. This is the issue with capitalism, BTW. It has a huge amplifier effect. Innovations happen quickly and scale up even quicker and with that byproducts accumulate much quicker too. So having markets to accumulate human knowledge to fund good ideas is great, but if corporations can get away with pushing the cost generated by the byproducts to society as a whole it's also a dead end.

This always reminds me of bacterial growth curve. You put a few bacteria in a petri dish, they start proliferating exponentially until the resources and space become limited and the growth stops. I consider market growth similar (I might be wrong, but the beauty of having a background in biology is understanding systems that share a lot of similarities with markets). The issue is that our system collapses if growth slows. Like, um, this year from COVID. So we either need a system that works with slow growth, or we need to start either cleaning up our byproducts and integrate that knowledge into the market, or start expanding that petri dish (ie. what you said about space colonization).

One of the most fascinating things in the universe are self-organizing criticalities. Like when that one single grain of sand makes the whole sand dune collapse, or when all those electric potentials finally engage the neuron to give off an action potential (a digital 1). From a deregulation stand point, I see the government's responsibility to 1) make sure to keep corporations from falsifying data, or interfering with research 2) perform as a neutral overseer and funder climate/environmental research, 3) ensure that valid scientific data is disseminated to the public; the rest would be the public's responsibility to integrate climate/environmental research knowledge into the markets. Companies like Coca Cola are one of the major polluters, they also are responsible for trillions worth of healthcare expenditures. If they'd be held responsible, they'd clean up their act in a matter of a very few years, IMHO. Maybe this is naive, but if it takes more than this, we are absolutely fucked.