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Earth

The Great Climate Migration Has Begun (nytimes.com) 235

Today, 1% of the world is a barely livable hot zone. By 2070, that portion could go up to 19%. Billions of people call this land home. Where will they go?
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The Great Climate Migration Has Begun

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  • Antarctica (Score:2, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 )

    Should be balmy by then. It's a whole continent the size of the USA and mexico combined. And then there's also Canada/Greenland. So yeah plenty of land.

  • by laupark ( 668153 ) on Friday July 24, 2020 @11:57AM (#60326629)
    Good job MsMash, another nothing article no one can get to promoting the division of Slashdot users
    • by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Friday July 24, 2020 @12:04PM (#60326651)
      Entirely agree with your post - But from Slashdot's perspective (copying Facebook/Reddit); Negative engagement is still engagement, and short term higher ad revenue.

      I've stopped a a few years visiting Slashdot on a daily basis; probably around the time they dropped the 'News for Nerds'-tagline, and right about the time they started promoting intentionally false headlines, and non-tech related posts to the front page.

      To this day, I've still not been able to find a site which replicates the intelligent discussions that took place here end nineties/start of the millennium: Any suggestions?
      • To this day, I've still not been able to find a site which replicates the intelligent discussions that took place here end nineties/start of the millennium: Any suggestions?

        1) The discussions were likely not as intelligent as you remember. You're now older and wiser.

        2) I've had decent luck replacing slashdot with very selective hand picked Reddit groups. In fact, I will likely remove Slashdot from my bookmarks soon. I almost did it last week. Not much to come here for anymore.

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday July 24, 2020 @12:16PM (#60326731)
        I've seen some click bait, but nothing I'd call "intentionally false". The site is chock full of non-tech articles now. That's because the /. demo is aging, and we don't just play with tech all day.

        As for a site that replicates the 90s, you won't find it. The 90s was an economic and tech boom time. The 2020s is a dystopia where the economy has collapsed 3 times in the last 20 years and we've got Federal Police walking our streets and teargassing mayors.

        You're not going to find that kind of cheerful optimism and sense of fun anywhere. Times are Grim.
    • Seems ok to me, though there was a lot of scrolling down to get to the article, which in the end was tl;dr.

      Also I don't think it mentioned the expansion of areas that used to be too cold to live in. but maybe it did as tl;dr.
    • Turn of javascript, get past the paywall. Even before NYT went overtly batshit crazy, I wasn't going to start paying money for something everyone else could get around in two clicks. I don't voluntarily subsidize shoddy workmanship.
    • Broke right wingers? Never thought I'd see it, but the right wing that thought they were super pro-business and pro-freedom realized they have zero skills and money making ability after all. Seems the left wing has money and now the right wing has become bitter about wealth.

    • It is really a sad state, that Science creates such a division.

      Heck I can't even say the world is round without it seeming like I am making some political statement.

  • It was originally recommended in on of those weekly readers or whatever in grade school in the 80s. It was about a family that had migrated to the national capital of the United States - Houston - to escape the encroaching ice-age. The book dealt with illegal immigration - they mentioned the fact Mexico was fed up with all the Americans border hopping into their nation. The family the book focused on was fed up with Houston, as a Houston resident I can see why, so they decided to turn-tail and flee back north and grow crops during the very short growing season and try to live ruggedly in the cold territory of, I don't really recall, it's been a very long time, but I'm pretty sure it was considered a southern state.

    I can't recall the name of the book anymore, but I would so love to read that junior fiction novel on global cooling from the late 70's / early 80's again.

    • If you really want to find that story, try Abebooks Booksleuth. They are amazing at finding stories with the barest amount of information.
      http://forums.abebooks.com/abesleuthcom

    • The history of Texas-Mexico-US relations is not simple. Santa Anna was a vicious dictator, and his claims of the area of Mexican sovereignty are dubious at best.
  • By the time we reach 2070 the country will match its name.
  • by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Friday July 24, 2020 @12:18PM (#60326741) Journal
    The real problem will be the wars that will break out over migration.
    That, and the wars that will break out over resources, land you can live on and farm on, and so on.
    Remember, we still have between all nuclear nations enough nuclear weapons to make the Earth an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland.
    • There's enough iron on Earth to put an arrowhead through the heart of every living human. So what?
      • That one requires the cooperation of billions of people. Given that only a small percent of people are suitably deranged it isn't feasible.

    • Automation means we're already going to have a job shortage. Now you're talking about millions of "other" folk showing up in "caravans".

      They'll be used by fascists and dictators the same way they have for millennial. The citizens will be whipped up into a froth of hate and fear and instead of solving the problems that caused them to show up in the first place at best they'll be kept at the border to starve while the citizenry on the other side of the wall allows themselves to be brutally oppressed for "
  • The tense is suggesting that this is happening now. People aren't migrating because of AGW, even the summary says it's a future predicted event.
    • You'll see in the article mention of climate-driven migrations already underway in Central America and the Middle East. It's not the major focus, so it might have been easy to miss.

  • Hundreds of millions of people will not just sit and wait to die of famine or heat stroke. There will be an accommodation, or there will be war. Is this what we want?

    If we're not going to fix the climate, the only other option to avoid catastrophe is to invest hugely in infrastructure: energy production, high density agriculture, whole new cities. This is not going to be simply waved away by a magical invisible hand.

  • YECH!!!

    I get it. Sometimes media outlets think they need to address readership as if we're all 12 years old, but could we at least get one without the animations, graphics, and giant font? Some of us actually value forming our understanding of the world using our brains instead of our hearts. We don't need facts "marketed" to us.

    I barely got through any of the article, but I'm pretty sure it can be summarized as such:

    Climate change is having a noticeable affect on the populations who already live in areas o

  • So if so much land will become unlivable because it is so hot, why do you not offer the figures for how much land was unlivable because it was too cold will now be usable, or farmable where it was not before?

    • So if so much land will become unlivable because it is so hot, why do you not offer the figures for how much land was unlivable because it was too cold will now be usable, or farmable where it was not before?

      Moving north or south to the poles where this is only a few hours of daylight most of the year isn't going to be somewhere people want to live, and certainly isn't going to be suited for farming.

  • Rhetorical questions are not news summaries.
  • I think it's too kind to describe Florida in such terms. I for one think it's time to build more transportation infrastructure in central and northern Manitoba.
    • I live in west central Florida. I told some northern European net.friends what the temperature and "feels like" temperature was. One of them said she would melt. Another asked how I don't die doing anything outside. I'm in training for living in the hot zone.
      • Any time I go to Florida I find myself in far worse physical condition than I was in prior to leaving home to go there. My new metric for a "successful" Florida vacation is coming home alive.

        My understanding from people I know who live in Florida is that residents there avoid dying in the heat by just staying inside as much as possible. That sounds like an awful way to live if you ask me.
    • by ahodgson ( 74077 )

      Yeah I'm sure millions of migrants will line up for -35C winters and mosquito-filled summers.

  • People will migrate to live near a Frigidaire factory.
  • Could we build cities and dwellings underground that stay cool against all the heat?

    • by ahodgson ( 74077 )

      For the mole people? Who would want to live underground?

      We have air conditioning. It works fine. The major problem will be lack of food due to rainfall and temperature changes affecting crop production.

      • I dunno, I don't think i'd have a problem living underground.

        AC just seems so inefficient. It takes so much energy to run which just seems to make the problem worse unless we have eliminated coal power and such.

  • It's moments of mindless idiotic catastrophism that one has to ask if people who ask questions this stupid have ever had even half-decent education. Anyone who passed a world geography class in school knows that there's a massive amount of effectively human-free landmass that is effectively unsuitable for human habitat because it's too cold. Canada and Russia are mostly empty of humans because of this.

    All while equatorial land mass is tiny in comparison. And one of the main features of global warming so far

    • by ahodgson ( 74077 ) on Friday July 24, 2020 @03:05PM (#60327457)

      I don't know about Russia, but most of the parts of Canada that are empty are empty for several reasons, not just the cold. For starters, most of it was scraped clean by the glaciers and has almost no soil. Even if it warms up, you won't be growing crops on it.

      The same glaciers carved out about a billion small lakes and ponds, which makes it hard to build roads or cities, but does make a wonderful breeding ground for mosquitos. So the 4 months a year that aren't freeze-your-face-off-cold are mosquito and fly infested joyfulness.

      We get hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year but virtually all of them settle in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Not that big empty North.

      So yeah, good luck with that.

  • by cygnusvis ( 6168614 ) on Friday July 24, 2020 @03:12PM (#60327493)
    In 2070 weâ(TM)ll still have ten years until doom, just like now, and in the 90s and 00s and 80s and 70s.....
  • In related news, I no longer believe anything or disbelieve anything. I am no longer afraid of ice ages, nuclear bombs, HIV from vaginal sex with non-drug users, virus's, global warming, shoe bombs, deadly tooth paste, murder wasps, killer bees, sharknadoes, Qanons, Epstein Island, race wars, sexual harrassment and 5g. I am still afraid of spiders so if the news could just go on nonstop about spiders for 3 months I think they might be able to cure me.
    It's like Daredevil once said, "A man without Facebook is

"The most important thing in a man is not what he knows, but what he is." -- Narciso Yepes

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