You know what is really scary?

As I write this many of the historic and storied rivers in Europe are drying up. The Rhine, the Danube, the Loire and others are all reporting historically low water levels. I have a colleague who had to cancel her river cruise on the Danube in 2020 because of this thing call COVID-19. You may remember it. It was the talk of the town for a little while. She finally rescheduled for this Fall but now it might be canceled again or at least greatly reduced in duration and sites to see because of the low water levels of that river.

As I mentioned in my previous post one of the myths of climate change is the impacts would be felt in the lower latitudes first, because they are already the warmest latitudes in the world. Since most of the Third World is located in the Equatorial Region there were grand predictions of mass migrations from that region to the North and South temperate zones because it was believed that their climates would change for the better, increasing the size of the temperate zones as it warmed at the higher latitudes.

They were wrong. Less than a decade ago the average temperatures in the North began to increase dramatically, reducing sea ice in the Arctic to nearly zero, and causing the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica to melt at a prodigious rate, threatening the world with rising sea levels and changing ocean currents.

Now the impacts of climate change are being increasingly felt in the "temperate" latitudes. Prolonged droughts in the most agriculturally productive land on the planet are occurring everywhere. California, the great plains, the farm lands of Europe, the rice fields of Asia are all showing the impacts of these droughts and there appears to be no end in sight. We are already seeing the impacts of that with higher food prices, which were already increasing before the war in Ukraine and the latest round of punishing weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

So what is going to happen in the next decade or so? It was believed the impacts of climate change would start at the Equator and head towards the polls. Instead, it would appear they started at the polls and are moving towards the Equator. So it is very possible that the impacts predicted for the Equatorial Region are still going to happen, making an already very hot place even hotter, which could very well trigger the mass migrations that were predicted. Of course, those mass migrations are going to be people moving to the so called temperate zones, which will have been living with the impacts of climate change for almost two decades at that point.

That is the scary part. We may not be wrong in predicting the the Equatorial Region will become almost uninhabitable we we may only be wrong about the timing and about the fact that the so called temperate zones of the planet would be a suitable refuge for them.

The climate is a fickle thing so it could change again and the original predictions could come true. However, it is a little disconcerting to realize that it might not happen and we are heading for world that is much warmer and dryer everywhere. That is a recipe for disaster.