Utopia? Flying jetson cars? Mole people living underground? Everything’s on fire and humanity ends? I’m just curious about anyone’s thoughts in general 😀

  • tikitaki@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    No real way to know. If we assume technology keeps advancing at the exponential rate, we’ll all be in the metaverse or bionic cyborgs or something. 100 years ago we had just finished WW1 where airplanes and tanks were a new technology. We went from telegraphs to near- instantaneous communications across the planet. We went from the old Fords to having self-driving cars. The internet was created and then eventually popularized and now we all have constant access to the internet in our pockets no matter where we go.

    There are some things we can know for certain and others we can guesstimate. For example carbon emissions will have a noticeable impact in 100 years. The temperatures will be higher, there would have been some amount of sea level. Probably not enough to drown Miami but enough to cause serious problems for people all across the world. Our agricultural systems will be put under serious pressure as temperatures change and lower productivity in certain areas (and increase it in others).

    I think the future will be good for countries like Canada / Sweden / Russia because global warming will more or less only help them. A lot of land will become better for agriculture / more habitable. Of course they will probably have to deal with some sort of refugee crisis from the global south.

    That’s of course assuming human society doesn’t totally collapse / change because of nuclear war / some sort of terminator AI.

    • hoi_polloi@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      We’re already on fire everywhere in Canada and it’s not even wildfire season yet. If all the tempofrost melts what will be left will be barren lands wholly unsuitable for agriculture.

    • dogmuffins@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I think the future will be good for countries like Canada / Sweden / Russia because global warming will more or less only help them. A lot of land will become better for agriculture / more habitable. Of course they will probably have to deal with some sort of refugee crisis from the global south.

      I don’t know much about this but I don’t think that this is how global warming works ?

      I think this misunderstanding is why the phrase “climate change” is preferred because “global warming” makes it sound like everywhere will be a few degrees warmer which is not really the case.

      My limited understanding is that the average global temperature may be warmer, but that really just means the ocean surface will be warmer, which creates more severe weather patterns.

      The big problems with climate change seem to be quite nuanced, in a nutshell more severe and less predictable weather patterns. For example here in Western Australia maybe 20% of the state is arable land with predictable rainfall. Suppose next year there’s 50% less rainfall in that 20% of the state (it just rains somewhere else) - that’s a catastrophic problem. 50% of the productivity, 50% of the water flowing into dams for industrial and household use. Suppose the following year there’s 50% more rainfall than usual, falling on arable land where it hasn’t rained for a few years - it washes the dry topsoil away again destroying productivity.

      There was an episode about water scarcity on doomsday watch podcast - fascinating & terrifying. There’s a phrase that stuck with me - if climate change is a shark then water scarcity is the teeth.