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Originally Posted by BananaStand
Why? Why is it a serious problem to deal with? Isn't a slightly warmer climate more suitable for human life anyway? Longer growing seasons, people leave their house more, etc etc etc.
I guess there will be less real estate at sea level, but people can move.
Because it's not the humans (with our ability to climate control the inside of buildings, i.e. our own environments) which are threatened by the rapid change.
In general, I don't see the direct impact on humans as a real problem. We live in literally every climate on Earth from tropical rain forests to the icy desert of Antarctica. Climate doesn't slow us down in that regard.
The changes will be in mass extinction of oceanic life and migration / extinction of many land-based flora and fauna.
Eventually, survivors will adapt and speciate into new animals, but that is a slow process, and the expected extinctions will take hundreds of thousands of years to recover from, in terms of biological mass and diversity.
Originally Posted by BananaStand
Also, in regards to dealing with this serious problem..
A) What good is done if America passes all kinds of strict regulations on businesses designed to lessen their CC impact, but at the same time Russia, China, Mexico, and other industrialized nations do nothing? Wouldn't that just put US companies at a disadvantage for no reason? What purpose is served by that?
Whatever good would be, if you aren't considering it along with the bad, then your conclusions will be biased.
... for no reason? Whatever the answer(s) is/are to your first question provide the reason.
Whether or not action is taken, there will be severe outcomes. No decisions made on this scale would "just" do anything. They will have vast and nuanced consequences, some of which will be dramatic for at least some people. Nothing which happens will be "for no reason" when we're talking national policies.
The purposes served would be many and varied, some pleasant, and some not so much.
(I feel like you are the student who comes to my office telling me they don't understand the homework, and when I ask them to show me what they have so far, they say, "I don't have anything." Well... come back when you know what you're confused about. I'll gladly explain to you what you don't understand, but if you're not even trying to understand, well... I can't learn for you.)
Originally Posted by BananaStand
B) I read somewhere that at the current rate of population growth, by the year 2600, there will be so many humans on earth that we would all have to stand upright, shoulder to shoulder, in order to all fit on land. Isn't it more likely that one of the other many, many, many, many consequences of overpopulation will force these 'intrusive changes to Earth culture', long before climate change does?
There are countless examples of human societies which go through booms and leveling off periods.
There are 0 examples of human populations experiencing unmitigated exponential growth.
Exponential growth happens when the resources are rich for the current population. When the population grows to consume the resources, then the growth rate slows or stops, sometimes bouncing up and down in cycles (think grasshopper / locust swarms). FYI Grasshoppers and locusts are the same species. When the resources are rich enough, the population changes form. Individuals dramatically increase in size and the population booms exponentially. Eventually, the swarm exhausts the resources in its immediate area and has to move. Sooner or later, the resources run out and the population experiences a dramatic reduction in numbers, and the newborn insects will not morph into the large size of locusts.
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Exponential growth is not the only expected behavior for a population over "long" time frames.
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