[HN Gopher] 'Climate Migrants' Are Roiling American Politics
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       'Climate Migrants' Are Roiling American Politics
        
       Author : nradov
       Score  : 5 points
       Date   : 2021-11-27 22:00 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.politico.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.politico.com)
        
       | aurizon wrote:
       | A lot depends on how gradual the onset is, esp in highly agrarian
       | countries - like India. A gradual reduction of crop yields will
       | lead to smaller numbers of people supportable on a given acreage
       | = slow exodus, smaller families, like the decline of the Anasazi
       | in the US Southwest. Perhaps DNA analysis of residual bones along
       | with the Amerindian gene pool will reveal this?
       | 
       | There is a water current called the Gulf Stream - it is part of
       | what is called the Atlantic Conveyor - the Thermohaline
       | circulation driven by thermal AND concentration gradients.
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation
       | 
       | This transfers huge amounts of heat from the Gulf of Mexico to
       | Northern Europe. This makes Northern Europe quite arable,
       | compared to Northern Saskatchewan in Canada which is about the
       | same latitude - with a far colder climate and shorter growing
       | season.
       | 
       | This warm water wends it's way North, cools and eventually falls
       | to the deeps as a cold counter current - see the Wiki.
       | 
       | Some climate scientists fear this current pattern could be
       | getting unstable. If this is disrupted, Europe would see a new
       | ice age, crop yields would drop, many plants would die as the
       | ground freezing zone moved 1000 miles South. This would leave
       | Europe unable to feed itself, save by imports of food. There may
       | be other effects?
        
       | finite_jest wrote:
       | This is only tangentially related to the article, but I think it
       | is quite interesting that how a change of context reveals our
       | biases.
       | 
       | I know people who would usually argue that immigration is
       | inherently good and beneficial to everyone. They tend to be
       | either libertarians or left-wingers. Ordinarily, it would be
       | really hard to convince them otherwise.
       | 
       | However, when it comes to climate change and the possibility of
       | waves of climate refugees, almost all of them seem to agree that
       | there are some downsides.
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-27 23:02 UTC)