Thursday, September 22, 2005

Global Warming to Create Social Unrest?

This is quite a jump according to this report by the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Australian Conservation Foundation. Here is what could come of global warming in the by 2100:

"As stresses increase there is likely to be a shift toward authoritarian governments," the report said.

"At the worst case, large scale state failure and major conflict may generate hundreds of millions of displaced people in the Asia-Pacific region, a widespread collapse of law, and numerous abuses of human rights."

Well at least the authoritarian governments will be done in by the collapse of law and the major conflicts. So global warming may be a bad thing and a good thing at the same time.

The thing that this report doesn't take in is that by 2100 we probably won't be burning too much fossil fuel because we will have used it all up by then. Even the Saudis may start having declining oil pumping rates before too long. Eventually, oil prices will get so high they won't be economically sustainable and people will move on to fuel cell, methane, or even steam power if it becomes a cheaper alternative. There is no way to project global warming to 2100 without taking into consideration all of the things that will have happened in that 100 years time.

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