The significant improvements in agricultural technology over the last 100 years likely means it wouldn't significantly impact the ability to grow food in countries rich enough to have the ability to geoengineer in this manner, so it might not happen.
It's already started.
I haven't seen this claim made before, do you have any links to read more? I was under the impression that nearly all of the conflict is driven by things like terrible government structures and ideological extremism (e.g. ISIS).
>Climate change isn't just sea levels rising, it's changing climates; some places with desert will green, some green places will turn to desert.
Right, but that's why I pointed out that countries with advanced agriculture technologies wouldn't be impacted nearly as hard and those are the same countries with the means to geo-engineer.
Try this [0] Mother Jones piece on "Bread Prices, A Measure of Political Stability", or one from the Conversation [1].
There was a BBC documentary of 10 years ago. I can't remember the title so haven't found a web link.
[0] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/climate-change-f...
[1] http://theconversation.com/food-security-how-drought-and-ris...
Here you go. Tl;dr: Syria had a longterm drought before the conflict started, leading to rising food prices and about one million Syrians without livelihood by 2011.
https://climateandsecurity.org/2012/02/29/syria-climate-chan...
Essentially a portion of agriculture failed due to drought and a lot of the population fled to the central city, setting off fighting.
You are correct there's a world food surplus so mostly countries with large farming populations would be impacted.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/a-major-contributor...
"Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought"
>Abstract
>Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest. We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend. Precipitation changes in Syria are linked to rising mean sea-level pressure in the Eastern Mediterranean, which also shows a long-term trend. There has been also a long-term warming trend in the Eastern Mediterranean, adding to the drawdown of soil moisture. No natural cause is apparent for these trends, whereas the observed drying and warming are consistent with model studies of the response to increases in greenhouse gases. Furthermore, model studies show an increasingly drier and hotter future mean climate for the Eastern Mediterranean. Analyses of observations and model simulations indicate that a drought of the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought, which is implicated in the current conflict, has become more than twice as likely as a consequence of human interference in the climate system.
> As described here, water and climatic conditions have played a direct role in the deterioration of Syria’s economic conditions.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00059....
Climate change is discovered by scientists.
People with fossil fuel money create fake science and propagate it through the corrupt media, and the people lap it up because they want to believe it (some reason that it would lead to a big government, hence the science can't be true). They're blocking all action for 30 years. They also constantly harass the scientists.
Climate change causes famine around the Mediterranean. Revolutions, civil wars and some tens of millions refugees and illegal immigrants result.
These flow to neighboring countries and even a little to Europe, causing political problems there.
There's potential for much bigger problems. Usually the people responsible are very much not the people suffering the consequences.
Start with Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq; you don't even have to go back 100 years.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=89683&src=...
Try and geo engineer against 50+ degrees C for weeks.
Plants die at these temperatures and we don't have technology to counter that. At current rate, we've got maybe a couple of years left before heatwaves kill off all vegetation in many parts of the world with all the dire consequences for humans and animals living there.
--
Unfortunately, it will take total collapse for people to understand that we have an impossible lifestyle - meaning a wrong philosophy about life, nature and each other.
It's not about what we need to do, it's about what we need to stop doing.
And I think that's the impossible task, because that means dismantling our current 'economy' and rebuilding it on new principles, new mathematics, etc.
Actually, we do. Much of that heat is generated because of barren land. The barren land is so because of the regulations that aim to preserve as much of the outback as it is. You say there isn't technology, but one of the possible measures was available for thousands of years. Just plant massively on that land. There are desert plants that resist well enough in that kind of environment and will reduce the amount of heating.
Before starting on me with the dangerous consequences this may cause, just let me assure you that I'm well aware of the recurrent mass fires that occur in much of the continental Aussie and many other problems. I only wish to stress that there is something that can be tried out in the face of the kind of problems you pointed out to. Although I agree that human intervention carries significant aport in the global warming, I think though it merely accelerated a natural process that would have happened anyway. So maybe we don't have to stop doing something (fear-based, self-limiting approach) but try instead to understand and use these natural changes of our world (curiosity-based, exploratory approach). Let's embrace change, or at least give it a chance.
However, I haven't see anything in particular related to, effectively, terraforming most of Australia.
Do you have any citations about the how that might work, and what impact it might have?
The developing of arid lands into something productive (without requiring massive or on-going inputs of energy, nutrients, water, etc) is a common theme among a lot of the big names in Permaculture - you could review some of Geoff Lawton's publications on the work he's been doing in Jordan[2]
FWIW, my experience trying to grow productive trees in areas of Australia with (annual) 3 metre evaporation rates and average 600mm rainfall (with some multi-year droughts) and frequent 45C weeks through the summer period -- the single biggest requirement for success is native animal exclusion while trying to get pioneer trees established.
[1] https://holmgren.com.au/product/treeless-plains/?v=3a1ed7090...
[2] http://permaculturenews.org/2013/11/19/rough-ready-real-nove...