Bombshell: Koch-Funded Study Finds ‘Global Warming Is Real’ (...and the cause is human.)

[NickB79]

38. It's not just the sea rise, it's the destruction of farmland and water supplies

You're right, people will need to abandon low-lying areas near the seas. But we'll also have to abandon areas like the US Southwest as drought makes it impossible to supply enough water for cities, industry and farming. In fact, large portions of the planet near the tropics will likely be uninhabitable due to global warming if the worst-case predictions come true: http://www.350resources.org.uk/2010/10/22/global-warming-up-12%C2%B0c-half-the-world-will-be-uninhabitable/

T IS the late 23rd century. Houston, Tel Aviv, Shanghai and many other once-bustling cities are ghost towns. No one lives in Louisiana or Florida anymore, and vast swathes of Africa, China, Brazil, India and Australia are no-go zones, too. That’s because in all of these places it gets hot and humid enough to kill anyone who cannot find an air-conditioned shelter.

This is the nightmare scenario outlined in a study published earlier this year. If we carry on as we are, it claimed, in as little as a century a few small areas might start to get so hot in summer that no one could survive without air conditioning. Three centuries from now, up to half of the land where people live today would regularly exceed this limit.

“I knew just from basic physics that there would be a point at which heat and humidity would become intolerable, and it didn’t seem that anyone had looked at that from a climate change perspective,” says Steven Sherwood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. “When you look at the data, it becomes pretty clear that it wouldn’t take as much climate change as people seem to think to hit this.”

This is an astounding claim. Scientists have long warned that climate change will have serious consequences: big sea-level rises, floods, droughts, more extreme weather, extinctions and so on. But if Sherwood and co-author Matthew Huber of Purdue University in Indiana are right, huge parts of the planet could effectively become uninhabitable.

Humanity is going to experience a mass die-off over the next century numbering in the billions. We'll be lucky to maintain a population of 1 billion by the end of the 21st century.