
Saving Scotland’s Heritage from the Rising Seas - petethomas
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/25/climate/scotland-orkney-islands-sea-level.html
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hprotagonist
Relatedly, the english channel is full of neolithic towns buried in silt
underwater.

The british isles used to be isthmuses, and then the seas rose.

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dan-robertson
How many other sites on Orkney were revealed by storms and eroded away
centuries ago?

On the other end of the U.K. there is already the archeological site of
doggerland which today is underneath a patch of sea known as digger bank.

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eksemplar
If we truly have 17 years to stop our own extinction from happening in 80,
then we honestly don’t need to save them, because there’ll be no one to save
them for.

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kbenson
Extinction? I don't think most people are arguing that we'll face extinction.
Just that it will be really bad, and really destabilizing, and might lead to a
lot of deaths for any number of reasons (destabilization might lead to wars,
poverty, overcrowding, famine, etc).

Truthfully, that's probably bad enough that the point of your statement still
holds.

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eksemplar
As I understand it we’ve been ignoring the issue for so long, that we’ve begun
talking extinction because all the gases in the permafrost and antics will
make it hard to breathe.

But hopefully I’ev misunderstood something.

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RugnirViking
I went to a cross european political seminar on this and other global warming
effects and generally the answer is that while it might get pretty bad, we are
on target for 4 or so degrees of warming if we stopped all our existing
climate control measures. However, the effects at this level of warming are
very much unknowns and things like the permafrost releasing a terrible
exponential effect are theorised possibilities but very much untestable
hypothesis. However, we tend to assume this won't happen, for various reasons.
It's more of an unlikely worst-case scenario.

I like to think of it as similar to the people who theorised that CERN could
produce a black hole or that atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons could
cause the entire atmosphere to ignite. They were broadly plausable if a little
far fetched, but ultimately the only way to be sure was to test it.

One of the important things to remember is that we have made significant
progress towards the 'hole in the ozone layer' to the point where you dont
hear about it much anymore because its actually getting better - that is, the
hole is closing up. Its possible that a mixure of good science and public
policy could deal with this problem as well, although it is closely tied with
politics. Especially the fact that the largest polluter in the planet (China)
is on track to increase its pollution exponentially. If we can deal with this
problem, much of our estimates will be revised down a lot.

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point78
Population needs to be controlled. Just wait until India, China, Nigeria, etc
all start wasting resources like middle class western world.

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dan-robertson
Why population and not wastefulness?

Note that a good way to naturally control populations seems to be to develop a
western style middle class and watch as birth rates fall.

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usrusr
Because wastefulness is linear, growth is exponential. Growth will eventually
stop, one way or the other.

There is only so much wastefulness to be cut down. We would still be hitting
carrying capacity limits even if we all lived like eco-monks.

