World 'gravely' unprepared for effects of climate crisis - report

[muriel_volestrangler]

The report has been produced by the Global Commission on Adaptation (GCA), convened by 18 nations including the UK. It has contributions from the former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, environment ministers from China, India and Canada, the heads of the World Bank and the UN climate and environment divisions, and others.

Among the most urgent actions recommended are early-warning systems of impending disasters, developing crops that can withstand droughts and restoring mangrove swamps to protect coastlines, while other measures include painting roofs of homes white to reduce heatwave temperatures.
...
The report says severe effects are now inevitable and estimates that unless precautions are taken, 100 million more people could be driven into poverty by 2030. It says the number of people short of water each year will jump by 1.4 billion to 5 billion, causing unprecedented competition for water, fuelling conflict and migration. On the coasts, rising sea levels and storms will drive hundreds of millions from their homes, with costs of $1tn (£810bn) a year by 2050.

Patrick Verkooijen, the chief executive of the Global Center on Adaptation, said: “What we truly see is the risk of a climate apartheid, where the wealthy pay to escape and the rest are left to suffer. That is a very profound moral injustice.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/10/climate-crisis-world-readiness-effects-gravely-insufficient-report

[democratisphere]

1. The wealthiest do not care about the masses.

As long as they save their own asses, the rest of US do not matter. Eventually the wealthiest will also succumb to the effects of global warming and climate change. No one will get a pass on the mass extinction.
.

[Ghost Dog]

2. There is no reason why the wealthiest, as a class,

should necessarily succumb, unless they play their cards spectacularly badly.

[CrispyQ]

3. IMO, they haven't shown much skill at playing cards.

The rich have been the driving force for policies that got us here. Visiting your million dollar bunker for the weekend once every few months isn't the same as living in one. I think they are in denial how hot the planet already is - how much change is already baked into the system, regardless of a massive die off of humans or not.

[democratisphere]

5. There are some things all the money in the world can't buy.

Evading mass extinction is one of them.

[defacto7]

4. ... costs of $1tn a year by 2050

Numbers in the trillions of dollars are nonsensical when speaking of hundreds of millions of people driven from their homes in the next 20 years. The cost in life and to civilization dwarfs reason let alone petty measurments using monitary value.
100,000,000 more impoverished in 10 years, water shortages for 5,000,000,000 people, these are numbers at a scale we cannot quantify but only imagine in our nightmares. A trillion what?