Cymric wrote:
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It's nice and well to be arguing on high moral grounds, but once you've got a hungry population to feed,
Hmmmmmm, yes - it may sound like low moral now, but I`ve always been asking myself what the benefit of "saving those poor people from starvation this year" is.
I mean - we save them from starvation this year. And next year we most likely have to save them from starvation again.
And in a few years we are likely to save them
plus their children (and their grandchildren and so on).
In the course of the years this will become an insolvable task for the rich and industrialised nations.
In my book it is necessary to extirpate the real causes, which are:
* egoism
* throw-away mentality ("Oh - the ash tray is full - I need a new car!)
* polluting production processes for energy and goods
* polluting traffic systems (cars & lorries , planes, ships)
Cymric wrote:
Clean fresh water will become a problem much, much earlier on.
You might be right with that...
Cymric wrote:
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To be honest, I'm not really sure I care much about increased temperatures,
Well, I do.
If the tempreatur reaches 35-40 °C in the shadow during the day, the night temperatures kepp me away from sleeping.
Last year we had such a situation. I was hoping a shower with cold water could cool me down so I could sleep - but there only came warm water from the tab!
Nearly drove me crazy - I`m certainly
not built for such temperatures!
:crazy:
Cymric wrote:
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Here in the Netherlands, a change of a few degrees isn't that impressive or destabilising, and that goes for much of Europe at this lattitude. Sea level change is something else, because you can't live---at least not in the current fashion---on water.
...
I'm sure the Netherlands has the know-how to fend off a raise of something like 5 m (at great cost, and severe economic decline, no doubt, but still),
Well, it might turn out to be more cost efficiant to heap up the land instead of increasing the dykes endlessly and wasting enormous amounts of energy for pumping down the ground water...
Cymric wrote:
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We are fortunate that we have hundreds of years of experience in living near sea-level and so are a bit more resilient...
Yeah, but don`t forget that if the climate has warmed up that much to melt enough ice to rise the sea level that much, the frozen Methane in the steep face of the underwater plateau in front of Norway might melt as well.
According to the scientists this might cause an Tsunami with several hundret meters of height in Norway, Denmark, North Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Scotland and even on the other side of the atlantic ocean New York could easily be destroyed by such an event.
In such a scenario there simply would be no Netherlands afterwards - and Cologne (where I live) is said to be a seaport then...
But I`d vote for helping the Dutch then and to them in (provided they bring all their coffee shops with them)...
Cymric wrote:
... no, the question becomes 'how can we make our societies more adaptable and flexible to cope with a dynamic planet?'. And that is a question which is not yet widely heard over the ruckus.
I`m afraid the rising temperatures will rise more health/physical problems than a social ones...
