nfitz
Superstar
Yes.
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Climate Change & Toronto
- Thread starter TOperson
- Start date
TOperson
Active Member
Agreed. A shame, because it's a topic that merits serious discussion.
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
kristopher:
Climate is always changing - our ability to adapt at it is not unlimited.
AoD
Climate is always changing - our ability to adapt at it is not unlimited.
AoD
RC8
Senior Member
And scientific consensus is that we are making it change at a much faster rate than before.
Check this out and go to 'Mission':
http://theconsensusproject.com/
Nfitz,
3 days with power outages and temperatures over 30C at night would likely cost a lot of lives and is a very real possibility.
Check this out and go to 'Mission':
http://theconsensusproject.com/
Nfitz,
3 days with power outages and temperatures over 30C at night would likely cost a lot of lives and is a very real possibility.
TOperson
Active Member
Thanks for that link.
Re: possibilities, a big scary one is the effect on agriculture. E.g. if a trough or ridge of too cold/hot/wet/dry weather gets stuck in the right place, it could kill off whole crops. Or the plants bloom too early and the bees aren't ready to pollinate them. Since Toronto imports practically all its food, we are at some risk.
Lots to think about.
nfitz
Superstar
I don't think anyone's said otherwise.
A - I don't know why you are addressing me with this.
B - I've been in large cities which are over 30C for many nights in a row, and where air conditioning was uncommon (though it's getting more common now), and there hasn't been a death toll.
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
If it is 30+ all the time, heat-related deaths probably won't be seen as anything out of the ordinary, much less reported.
AoD
AoD
TOperson
Active Member
RC8
Senior Member
Furthermore, places with extreme heat and without standard A/C usually make their buildings so that they remain habitable in that heat. In Toronto most of the housing stock has been built or retrofitted to maximise winter insulation under the assumption that A/C will keep things cool in summer.
And nfitz, kristopher asked if climate wasn't always changing, I'm just elaborating on that.
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
TOperson
Active Member
I wish I had the link handy, but in the aftermath of Sandy someone put together a list of suggestions from ordinary New Yorkers on how to deal with the next Sandy-like event. Quite a few were very simple, and more about social infrastructure rather than physical. E.g. having buddy systems and fire-marshal-type coordinators on each floor in highrises, whose job it is to check on people, work out what they need, know who belongs and who doesn't, etc.
TheTigerMaster
Superstar
Yes. But under normal circumstances it happens very slowly. We're talking 10,000s of years. This gives the ecosystem time to adapt. What makes this unique is that due to out pollution, we've drastically changed the climate in just 40 years or so. That's far too fast for nature to adapt.
AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
Nope, there is evidence that climate can change significantly within the span a few decades. The ecosystem always adapts - the question is whether we, as a civilization of 7+B can adapt fast enough without suffering a collapse, and if we can, what is the cost of that adaptation.
AoD
TOperson
Active Member
Climate may have at times changed within a few decades, but as far as I know, it's not the norm. Did it change by as much as this time around? It's my understanding that the current change is both fast and dramatic. I've also read that as early as the 1930s, ordinary people noticed changes - winters not as cold and so on. An ancient glacier in Iceland started melting around that time. So the current change might be more than a hundred years in the making. It makes sense, given that we started burning big amounts of fossil fuels around 1800.
I've also read that it takes 40-odd years for our CO2 output to detectably change the climate, so the effects of the output from the 1980s onward are still to come. Yikes!
I disagree that the question is whether humans can adapt. It's pretty much a given than many species will not be able to adapt fast enough, so they'll be gone, and the knock-on effects will make life extremely difficult for humans. My money is on the few more-or-less uncontacted indigenous peoples of the world. They might just make it.
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k10ery
Senior Member
And I don't know why I keep coming back here. It's like rubbernecking at a car accident. But I thought I would note that yeah, 30C is the threshold at which heat related mortality happens.
30C is hot if you're old or young.
http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/13178.html