09-22-2019, 11:03 AM
Global warming is a reality. The bulk of record-warm months are in recent years. The last below-average months for temperature occurred after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo about a quarter-century ago. The greenhouse effect is real, and its effects are not on the whole to the good. Warming climates imply that climate zones will move. In one expression, Michigan will become like Oklahoma.
Hot tropical locations will become so hot and humid that people will be unable to sweat away waste heat. If the wet-bulb temperature is high-enough (body temperature), then atmospheric moisture will literally condense on people. OK, so we turn up the air-conditioner? The Second Law of Thermodynamics goes into effect: it takes energy to run even a heat pump, and that energy leaves the machinery as... heat. More use of air conditioners means a hotter world even if people successfully cool themselves.
The most immediate effect will be upon agriculture. Don't fool yourself; we have been taking our food supplies for granted. Note well: Battle Creek, Michigan is a center for the production of grain-based breakfast cereals because it is on the borderline between the corn and wheat belts. Although winter may seem a waste in much of America, winter blizzards supply the snow that protects soil moisture and that melts just in time for the germination of grain plants in Dfa climates -- and protects young crops known as winter wheat in the Dakotas and the Prairie Provinces. Turn those blizzards into rainstorms, and (1) erosion accelerates, (2) nutrients leach from the soil, and (3) soil moisture more likely evaporates.
There is no techno-fix for hunger. The worst effects will be the inundation of lowlands that now produce large parts of the world food supply or at least the local food supply. Where do all the peasants of China and Bangladesh go? Inundation of prime farmland (and most of it is in vulnerable lowlands) imply that people must leave, but where do they go? If anything could prompt horrific wars -- then there you have it!
The consequences of such an ecological disaster as global warming would be mass death on scales that would trivialize World War II and the Black Death.
Hot tropical locations will become so hot and humid that people will be unable to sweat away waste heat. If the wet-bulb temperature is high-enough (body temperature), then atmospheric moisture will literally condense on people. OK, so we turn up the air-conditioner? The Second Law of Thermodynamics goes into effect: it takes energy to run even a heat pump, and that energy leaves the machinery as... heat. More use of air conditioners means a hotter world even if people successfully cool themselves.
The most immediate effect will be upon agriculture. Don't fool yourself; we have been taking our food supplies for granted. Note well: Battle Creek, Michigan is a center for the production of grain-based breakfast cereals because it is on the borderline between the corn and wheat belts. Although winter may seem a waste in much of America, winter blizzards supply the snow that protects soil moisture and that melts just in time for the germination of grain plants in Dfa climates -- and protects young crops known as winter wheat in the Dakotas and the Prairie Provinces. Turn those blizzards into rainstorms, and (1) erosion accelerates, (2) nutrients leach from the soil, and (3) soil moisture more likely evaporates.
There is no techno-fix for hunger. The worst effects will be the inundation of lowlands that now produce large parts of the world food supply or at least the local food supply. Where do all the peasants of China and Bangladesh go? Inundation of prime farmland (and most of it is in vulnerable lowlands) imply that people must leave, but where do they go? If anything could prompt horrific wars -- then there you have it!
The consequences of such an ecological disaster as global warming would be mass death on scales that would trivialize World War II and the Black Death.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
