I wrote many replies to different people during open thread 261, as part of it I read up on many of the relevant papers and relevant IPCC reports and discovered lots interesting things, one thing of interest here would be the Special Report on Climate Change and Land, which from what I can tell didn't mention Zhang and Cai (It mentioned a paper by Zhang from 2011 but that's a different paper), It did however mention Zabel and Ramankutty and took it for granted they were true and didn't mention a better estimate.
"The gradual and planetary changes that can cause land degradation/improvement have been studied by global integrated models and Earth observation technologies. Studies of global land suitability for agriculture suggest that climate change will increase the area suitable for agriculture by 2100 in the Northern high latitudes by 16% (Ramankutty et al. 2002) or 5.6 million km2 (Zabel et al. 2014), while tropical regions will experience a loss (Ramankutty et al. 2002; Zabel et al. 2014). "
As I said at the time "despite the fact both papers found massive net positives (world wide) the IPCC still found a way to phrase it in such a way as to leave open the the possibility that the papers suggest the net effect is negative that is they fail to explicitly mention the fact that the losses in the cited papers with respects to tropical regions were found to be much smaller than the gains to northern regions. (I should also add if you were to read it in context it sounds much worse). They then proceed to explain all the various mechanisms responsible for a loss of land with virtually no mention of the various mechanisms by which land would increase." There is a lot more interesting things in the comments to that thread and I go much more into detail.
Something you might also find interesting is the joint research centre world atlas of desertification (which is mentioned in the special report), similar to the IPCC they seem to go out of their way to emphasize the negative effects without outright lying, which sometimes leads to funny graphs and statements where they say something like "Between 1999 and 2013, approximately 20.4% of the Earth’s vegetated land surface showed persistent declining trends in land productivity" which raises the obvious question of what happened to the other 80 percent, there are lots of examples of this and its also important to note that "changes of above-ground biomass and is conceptually different from, and not necessarily related to, agricultural production or income per unit area" but its nevertheless a fun read.
“I came across a figure of a hundred feet of shift for every foot of sea level rise in a book discussing the situation on the U.S”
I said before this sounds remarkably flat. And it can only be true at high tide, and spring tide at that. The difference between spring and normal high tide is often greater than a foot. It’s a metre where I live - yes that’s mixing imperial and metric but about 3 feet.
Anyway even a road that skirts a beach is a few feet above the beach proper, and houses abetting the beach aren’t at sea level either but a few feet above it.
True, and most of the affected populations are in coastal cities which can adapt as Amsterdam and other cities have to being below sea level. Cities like Tokyo also reclaim land, with at least 15% (250 km2) of Tokyo bay being made habitable in the last 300 years.
"The amount of land lost equals the length of coastline times the amount by which it shifts in."
Not necessarily, if you are computing the amount it shifts just from current elevations. Quite a bit of coastal land is in the form of river deltas, which are quite flat, and would appear to be lost by this criterion. But since silt from the river is deposited in the delta region, land that would apparently be lost may just come back (or never really go away) from this silt deposition.
OK, thanks. I misunderstood: I thought you were saying that no effects of increased wealth had been taken into account. If only the negative effects have been taken into account and you're trying to rebalance things, fair enough. Any change to the status quo is likely to have positive and negative aspects to it, except in extreme cases.
A change that wiped out humanity, for example, would have no positive aspect for humans that I can think of, although it might be viewed quite positively by some surviving terrestrial creatures, or by visitors from other solar systems.
I appreciate your thoughtful approach to these questions, and weighing both pros and cons. I had some questions you may have thought about, but I don't believe I've seen your take on them.
Do you think there's a concern about where (almost entirely Canada and Russia) this new usable land might be found? Obviously right now Russia gaining at the expense of other parts of the world isn't exactly politically useful. Both Canada and the parts of Russia who would gain the most, also have the least number of people. I didn't try to do the math, but there may very well be significantly more people actually living in that 24,000 km2 than the 10 million km2 of newly livable lands. People can express interests, while empty tundra cannot. This is certainly not insurmountable, but it does present a variety of political issues. Even the interests that do exist in say, Canada, care about preserving nature and older ways of living, which would also be negatively affected even while the areas become far more hospitable to just about everything else we would want to do there.
Are there good estimates on how much, if any, of the world might become desert? Do people currently live there? That seems like a much better proxy for problematic heat than anything else. Again with the Sahara, like the tundra, habitable land where nobody lives is only a long term benefit, if at all. Significant parts of India turning into desert would be quite a problem, even if it's over 80 years.
I have not seen an estimate of increases or decreases in the amount of desert. The IPCC report mentions that some projections show climate change greening the Sahara and Sahel, so it could go either way. A higher temperature means more water vapor in the air which might mean more rain and less desert.
The large gains are Russia, Canada, the US (Alaska) and Scandinavia. I have no idea what Russia will be like, politically speaking, seventy years from now.
Almost nobody lives in the areas responsible for the increase since I chose them to be areas cold enough so nobody lives in them. More live in the areas just south of that, which will go from barely warm enough for human habitation to something better.
Over time, populations shift. At present, 280 million people live in countries they were not born in.
In terms of land becoming useable in the Eastern hemisphere, raw temperature is unlikely to be as significant as permafrost; this is a big reason Siberia and the Russian Far East aren't already a second Europe (another is mountains). My understanding is that while permafrost-melting is a plausible consequence of global temperature rising, this in itself would release a lot of CO2 so it'd be necessary to account for a temperature rise of that magnitude necessarily causing a larger temperature rise.
In North America this isn't much of a problem, but as I understand it population density there is more limited by the Canadian shield (there's something similar in Siberia as well) and a shortage of Canadians to justify bringing the prairies into denser habitation.
I think melting permafrost generates more methane than CO2 which is a stronger greenhouse forcing but with a shorter lifespan. I wonder how much of that would be balanced by CO2 consumed and locked up in the increased vegetation which would grow in these regions.
I didn't put it in any substack post. It's just a bit of Twain I like to quote. It goes with his explanation about how he and a professor reconstructed the Brontosaurus skeleton for the Museum in NY "— six bones and seventeen tons of plaster of Paris, and if we had more plaster of Paris it would be longer" (from memory so not verbatim)
So, some land will go but more land will come. This is encouraging. The obvious problem I see is that the land that goes will include people's homes and jobs, and it may not be feasible for them to migrate en masse to the newly available land, probably far away and belonging to a different country.
If I am right about not much loss from land getting too hot we are talking about a very small loss of land distributed over the world, coastlines shifting in by a few hundred feet, so no need for migration en masse. And it is happening over most of a century, during which a lot of houses will be torn down and rebuilt, a lot of jobs will move, for other reasons.
I could be wrong about that, as I hope I made clear, in which case some of the currently hottest areas might empty out. But we are still talking about a long enough time for quite a lot of migration to happen. Currently about 280,000,000 people live in a different country than they were born in.
Maybe. There can be various reasons why a place becomes inhabitable. I think some places may become too hot; I was reading a while ago about some people in India in danger of death from excessive heat. Then there's flooding in some places, drought in other places, hurricanes, etc. Overall, I suppose humanity can adjust, but the adjustment may be painful or at least costly for many individuals.
I agree that there is a general disadvantage to change, since we are currently optimized against our current environment. How large the cost is depends on how fast the change happens. In human terms, climate change is slow. By the time farmers would want to change their crop variety because of climate change they would have changed it two or three times for other reasons.
I have seen claims about India, but I would want to check whether there are places already that hot where people live. I find it striking that there is no substantial area at present that is too hot for people to live, and it seems an odd coincidence that the hottest places would be habitable but a few degrees more would make wide areas not.
I just googled for the hottest cities. None of the ten hottest are in India. Two are in the U.S. That seems to be going by average temperature. In a list of five Indian cities with maximum temperature shown the highest was 41°C, about 106°F. The all time high for Las Vegas is 117°F. For Riverside, CA it's 118°. Of course, that's only looking at temperature, not humidity, which would also be relevant.
Looking it up, I see that heat waves are said to cause deaths in India in most years—more than two thousand deaths in 2015, although that's a small proportion of the population. Comparing with the USA, I'm guessing that some Indians may not have access to air conditioning.
My guess is that the overwhelming majority of Indians don't have air conditioning — a quick google finds that 12% do. One of my criticisms of the _Nature_ article on the cost of carbon, which I have mentioned here before, is that their figure for temperature-related mortality ignores the effect of income, even though their economic model has GNP per capita tripling by the end of this century, up an order of magnitude by 2300.
So we can imagine that in the future all Indians will be able to afford air conditioners. And, if they all buy and use air conditioners, I wonder what effect that will have on the planet as a whole.
It's great to think of everyone getting richer and being able to afford a good standard of living. Unfortunately, the richer they get, the more electricity they're going to use, the more pollution they're going to cause, and so on. Unless someone finds a technological fix for all the side-effects.
As far as I know, air conditioners don't actually erase heat, they just move it from inside the house to outside the house, adding a little extra heat in the process.
Humidity is a factor in heat deaths, which maybe why desert areas in North America, Midden East and Africa are less affected than India. The lack of access to air conditioning is also a factor which is why Americans are less affected by heatwave fatalities than Europe.
I wrote many replies to different people during open thread 261, as part of it I read up on many of the relevant papers and relevant IPCC reports and discovered lots interesting things, one thing of interest here would be the Special Report on Climate Change and Land, which from what I can tell didn't mention Zhang and Cai (It mentioned a paper by Zhang from 2011 but that's a different paper), It did however mention Zabel and Ramankutty and took it for granted they were true and didn't mention a better estimate.
"The gradual and planetary changes that can cause land degradation/improvement have been studied by global integrated models and Earth observation technologies. Studies of global land suitability for agriculture suggest that climate change will increase the area suitable for agriculture by 2100 in the Northern high latitudes by 16% (Ramankutty et al. 2002) or 5.6 million km2 (Zabel et al. 2014), while tropical regions will experience a loss (Ramankutty et al. 2002; Zabel et al. 2014). "
As I said at the time "despite the fact both papers found massive net positives (world wide) the IPCC still found a way to phrase it in such a way as to leave open the the possibility that the papers suggest the net effect is negative that is they fail to explicitly mention the fact that the losses in the cited papers with respects to tropical regions were found to be much smaller than the gains to northern regions. (I should also add if you were to read it in context it sounds much worse). They then proceed to explain all the various mechanisms responsible for a loss of land with virtually no mention of the various mechanisms by which land would increase." There is a lot more interesting things in the comments to that thread and I go much more into detail.
Something you might also find interesting is the joint research centre world atlas of desertification (which is mentioned in the special report), similar to the IPCC they seem to go out of their way to emphasize the negative effects without outright lying, which sometimes leads to funny graphs and statements where they say something like "Between 1999 and 2013, approximately 20.4% of the Earth’s vegetated land surface showed persistent declining trends in land productivity" which raises the obvious question of what happened to the other 80 percent, there are lots of examples of this and its also important to note that "changes of above-ground biomass and is conceptually different from, and not necessarily related to, agricultural production or income per unit area" but its nevertheless a fun read.
“I came across a figure of a hundred feet of shift for every foot of sea level rise in a book discussing the situation on the U.S”
I said before this sounds remarkably flat. And it can only be true at high tide, and spring tide at that. The difference between spring and normal high tide is often greater than a foot. It’s a metre where I live - yes that’s mixing imperial and metric but about 3 feet.
Anyway even a road that skirts a beach is a few feet above the beach proper, and houses abetting the beach aren’t at sea level either but a few feet above it.
True, and most of the affected populations are in coastal cities which can adapt as Amsterdam and other cities have to being below sea level. Cities like Tokyo also reclaim land, with at least 15% (250 km2) of Tokyo bay being made habitable in the last 300 years.
Yes I keep seeing future maps where the Netherlands is under water 🤷♂️
"The amount of land lost equals the length of coastline times the amount by which it shifts in."
Not necessarily, if you are computing the amount it shifts just from current elevations. Quite a bit of coastal land is in the form of river deltas, which are quite flat, and would appear to be lost by this criterion. But since silt from the river is deposited in the delta region, land that would apparently be lost may just come back (or never really go away) from this silt deposition.
OK, thanks. I misunderstood: I thought you were saying that no effects of increased wealth had been taken into account. If only the negative effects have been taken into account and you're trying to rebalance things, fair enough. Any change to the status quo is likely to have positive and negative aspects to it, except in extreme cases.
A change that wiped out humanity, for example, would have no positive aspect for humans that I can think of, although it might be viewed quite positively by some surviving terrestrial creatures, or by visitors from other solar systems.
I appreciate your thoughtful approach to these questions, and weighing both pros and cons. I had some questions you may have thought about, but I don't believe I've seen your take on them.
Do you think there's a concern about where (almost entirely Canada and Russia) this new usable land might be found? Obviously right now Russia gaining at the expense of other parts of the world isn't exactly politically useful. Both Canada and the parts of Russia who would gain the most, also have the least number of people. I didn't try to do the math, but there may very well be significantly more people actually living in that 24,000 km2 than the 10 million km2 of newly livable lands. People can express interests, while empty tundra cannot. This is certainly not insurmountable, but it does present a variety of political issues. Even the interests that do exist in say, Canada, care about preserving nature and older ways of living, which would also be negatively affected even while the areas become far more hospitable to just about everything else we would want to do there.
Are there good estimates on how much, if any, of the world might become desert? Do people currently live there? That seems like a much better proxy for problematic heat than anything else. Again with the Sahara, like the tundra, habitable land where nobody lives is only a long term benefit, if at all. Significant parts of India turning into desert would be quite a problem, even if it's over 80 years.
I have not seen an estimate of increases or decreases in the amount of desert. The IPCC report mentions that some projections show climate change greening the Sahara and Sahel, so it could go either way. A higher temperature means more water vapor in the air which might mean more rain and less desert.
The large gains are Russia, Canada, the US (Alaska) and Scandinavia. I have no idea what Russia will be like, politically speaking, seventy years from now.
Almost nobody lives in the areas responsible for the increase since I chose them to be areas cold enough so nobody lives in them. More live in the areas just south of that, which will go from barely warm enough for human habitation to something better.
Over time, populations shift. At present, 280 million people live in countries they were not born in.
In terms of land becoming useable in the Eastern hemisphere, raw temperature is unlikely to be as significant as permafrost; this is a big reason Siberia and the Russian Far East aren't already a second Europe (another is mountains). My understanding is that while permafrost-melting is a plausible consequence of global temperature rising, this in itself would release a lot of CO2 so it'd be necessary to account for a temperature rise of that magnitude necessarily causing a larger temperature rise.
In North America this isn't much of a problem, but as I understand it population density there is more limited by the Canadian shield (there's something similar in Siberia as well) and a shortage of Canadians to justify bringing the prairies into denser habitation.
I think melting permafrost generates more methane than CO2 which is a stronger greenhouse forcing but with a shorter lifespan. I wonder how much of that would be balanced by CO2 consumed and locked up in the increased vegetation which would grow in these regions.
I'm assuming that the IPCC projections I am using already account for any effects they expect from permafrost melting.
You know the Mark Twain quote about suppositions, in Life on the Mississippi: such a trifle of fact
I connect that quote with his description of the changing length of the Mississippi, which I thought was from one of the essays.
I also want to note that I would categorize this post as "Expert says", in my heuristic for news classification, rather than Prophecy Of Doom. https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/whats-fit-to-print
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2010/09/01/mark-twain-misusing-numbers
Definitely life on the Mississippi. Because I've never read his essays.
Sorry if I missed where you connected that quote. It seems like something you would have put in.
I didn't put it in any substack post. It's just a bit of Twain I like to quote. It goes with his explanation about how he and a professor reconstructed the Brontosaurus skeleton for the Museum in NY "— six bones and seventeen tons of plaster of Paris, and if we had more plaster of Paris it would be longer" (from memory so not verbatim)
I happen to also love to quote that Mark Twain line, and as you see, I seized the opportunity.
So, some land will go but more land will come. This is encouraging. The obvious problem I see is that the land that goes will include people's homes and jobs, and it may not be feasible for them to migrate en masse to the newly available land, probably far away and belonging to a different country.
If I am right about not much loss from land getting too hot we are talking about a very small loss of land distributed over the world, coastlines shifting in by a few hundred feet, so no need for migration en masse. And it is happening over most of a century, during which a lot of houses will be torn down and rebuilt, a lot of jobs will move, for other reasons.
I could be wrong about that, as I hope I made clear, in which case some of the currently hottest areas might empty out. But we are still talking about a long enough time for quite a lot of migration to happen. Currently about 280,000,000 people live in a different country than they were born in.
Maybe. There can be various reasons why a place becomes inhabitable. I think some places may become too hot; I was reading a while ago about some people in India in danger of death from excessive heat. Then there's flooding in some places, drought in other places, hurricanes, etc. Overall, I suppose humanity can adjust, but the adjustment may be painful or at least costly for many individuals.
I agree that there is a general disadvantage to change, since we are currently optimized against our current environment. How large the cost is depends on how fast the change happens. In human terms, climate change is slow. By the time farmers would want to change their crop variety because of climate change they would have changed it two or three times for other reasons.
I have seen claims about India, but I would want to check whether there are places already that hot where people live. I find it striking that there is no substantial area at present that is too hot for people to live, and it seems an odd coincidence that the hottest places would be habitable but a few degrees more would make wide areas not.
I just googled for the hottest cities. None of the ten hottest are in India. Two are in the U.S. That seems to be going by average temperature. In a list of five Indian cities with maximum temperature shown the highest was 41°C, about 106°F. The all time high for Las Vegas is 117°F. For Riverside, CA it's 118°. Of course, that's only looking at temperature, not humidity, which would also be relevant.
Looking it up, I see that heat waves are said to cause deaths in India in most years—more than two thousand deaths in 2015, although that's a small proportion of the population. Comparing with the USA, I'm guessing that some Indians may not have access to air conditioning.
My guess is that the overwhelming majority of Indians don't have air conditioning — a quick google finds that 12% do. One of my criticisms of the _Nature_ article on the cost of carbon, which I have mentioned here before, is that their figure for temperature-related mortality ignores the effect of income, even though their economic model has GNP per capita tripling by the end of this century, up an order of magnitude by 2300.
So we can imagine that in the future all Indians will be able to afford air conditioners. And, if they all buy and use air conditioners, I wonder what effect that will have on the planet as a whole.
It's great to think of everyone getting richer and being able to afford a good standard of living. Unfortunately, the richer they get, the more electricity they're going to use, the more pollution they're going to cause, and so on. Unless someone finds a technological fix for all the side-effects.
As far as I know, air conditioners don't actually erase heat, they just move it from inside the house to outside the house, adding a little extra heat in the process.
Humidity is a factor in heat deaths, which maybe why desert areas in North America, Midden East and Africa are less affected than India. The lack of access to air conditioning is also a factor which is why Americans are less affected by heatwave fatalities than Europe.