I remember the intro to earth geology class I took 15 years ago at my university, taught by a climate scientist; the professor would take off a week every time there was a shuttle launch because he'd fly down to Florida and be part of the panel of scientists who would give the astronauts lists of things they were interested having photographed from space. I remember him talking about runaway feedback loops. He would explain them and would explain some historical examples of them we can see in geological data. He seemed really concerned about them, not so much because he thought it probable that the ones we know about are going to run away and make the climate uninhabitable for humans, but rather because he thought that there were lots of feedback loops out there hiding in plain sight that we wouldn't learn about until we started observing them actively happening. He basically seemed to think there was no real way to know with any certainty the upper bounds of how bad we can screw up the climate but that we were effectively running a giant experiment with the entire atmosphere and would within a few generations find out, and he thought that was a pretty big deal.

Just further clarification of how little we understand the damage we're doing at an ever increasing rate.

We've achieved a little awareness along with some limited recycling and energy saving, but still use an order of magnitude more than even as recently as the 80s. Oil companies see melting ice caps and think "great! new places to exploit"

I don't see much hope of change until something seriously dramatic happens. Dramatic enough to convince the most dogmatic politician currently thinkng growth is the only thing that matters.

Only then we'll try and fix it. Probably by having to adopt something like a war economy, globally, with all the restrictions and ramifications that would bring.

Here's more on that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_climate_change

James Lovelock (the inventor of the Gaia hypothesis and the discoverer of CFC's in the atmosphere) seems to think only the northern parts of the planet will remain habitable, sustaining a population of a few hundred million - we'll see.

If this is true, Should I move my family to Northern Europe (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland) for the sake of my descendants? I've been thinking about this for a long time.

It's too late to stop the feedback loop. I fear the current migration crisis is nothing compared to what will come.

"Me first" stuff like this won't get you real far IMO.

I went as far as Tromsø, Norway late last year and was shocked that most of their produce comes from the kind of place you might try flee from. Most of the fruit and vegetables I purchased had been shipped from places like Spain and South America. Basically if it becomes so bad these countries start to starve it won't be a priority to send food to the Arctic leaving people in the North vulnerable and, there are a lot of people up there already. You're not just going to move to some little village in Sweden and escape this pending disaster.

These large Northern populations heavily rely on produce and clothing coming from down South.

I did stay with people in Sweden who are kind of self sufficient, but if one looked closely, it was easy to see they still need solar panels, medicine, hunting equipment, cars, fertilizer etc, this is not stuff produced locally.

Best thing one can do for the next generation is change our ways immediately, consume less meat and fish, divest from fossil fuels, demand action from our politicians and stop having so many kids. It's pretty clear a population of 9 billion is going not going to work with current technology and attitudes.

It's easy to see isn't a problem anyone of us can run from, we're all going to have to pay the toll for what some call "endless growth".

If you look at a plot of human population in the last century, it's similar to log-phase bacterial growth. We've had uncontrolled proliferation based on non-renewable resources - especially the capacity of the biosphere to deal with waste CO2 - and we're about to run out. A lot of dieback is reasonable to assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_growth

Growing tomatoes in Norway is going to become easy very soon.

Nope, I don't think there's any scientific consensus that the effects are going to be that extreme (1).

(1) it might be very bad for say a poor farmer, but the typical HN reader will be able to survive it.

...by living off their fat reserves when the farms stop sending food?

I haven't researched climate change effects; but my guess is subsistence farmers will be affected a lot. Even if climate change had equal effects to all income groups, that would affect poor people more (for a poor person losing 1$ has more effect compare to a billionare).

Farms would not stop sending food. People (HN readers are at least in the top income half (1) globally) would pay more money to buy food. Food is an essential commodity and I don't think an apocalypse is going to occur due to climate change.

tl;dr food is going to cost more and HN readers can afford that while poor people might not be able to afford it

(1) I think it's more like top 10%.

Food will cost more overall, since global arable land will reduce. But in some northern areas the growing season could actually lengthen.

I hope that the timescales are such that drastic effects won't happen this century and give humans more time to adjust/come up with technology to mitigate the effects.

2c warming by end of the century would be terrible, 10c disastrous

I think he means it won't happen quickly. If you have resources you'll be able to respond to the changing world.

Sidenote: how do you know I'm male?

I don't of course, sorry. HN has always subconsciously had a masculine tone in my mind. I'm projecting

We can just eat code, right?

Many parts of that area are still rebounding from the mass of the ice sheets and are rising faster than sea level. For those of us in the USA, the Great Lakes region would likely be the best bet.

Iceland could become colder and even less habitable with increased global warming.

Iceland is fairly nice. Maybe you are thinking of Greenland. Greenland is very cold.

No no, I'm Icelandic. It's nice right now but that's thanks to the gulf stream. Global warming is slowing it down and it could end up diverting it, making temperatures plummet to Greenland levels.

I believe they are referring to the Gulf Stream current stopping, which would indeed make much of north-west Europe colder.

What feedback system would that be? Wouldn't methane accelerate warming? From my limited knowledge of English semantics feedback - like in feedback loop - would mean some controlling function?

I'm fairly sure that harwoodleon is referring to positive feedback.

Negative feedback acts to oppose a change (think heating system temperature control). Positive feedback acts to amplify a change, and can result in runaway changes [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback#Examples_and...

Thanks!

Accelerate warming -> more methane released -> accelerate warming -> even more methane released -> ...