Reply #34: Here's another aspect of climate change risk

[GliderGuider]

The immediate reaction of the public (and people like Jim Lovelock) to the phrase "Climate Change" is to imagine a hot planet with rising sea levels. While that might ultimately come about, long before that happens we'll be hit by the real medium term concern - climate chaos. The world won't get gradually and uniformly warmer, and the big problem won't be rising oceans. The big problem will be changes in rainfall patterns. These changes could includes shifts in the rainy and dry areas of the planet, but are more likely to manifest as a sort of concentration effect. Dry areas get dryer, drought-prone areas turn to deserts; wet areas get wetter and flood-prone. Periodic rains like monsoons lose their regularity and start to come early, late or not at all; when they do come they may drop little rain or may drop a whole year's worth in a couple of weeks. These effects are already being seen in Europe, Australia, Africa and the American south-east. A climate like that would make industrial agriculture difficult to impossible, and even indigenous smallhold farmers would be knocked from pillar to post by not being able to plan their crops or their planting/harvesting cycles.