Liam's write-only LJ

What an interesting day. It's oscillated from sun to heavy rain and back about 4 times now.

I think my Spring forecast of a really hot one was maybe off somewhat. I reckon stormy, instead.

I also reckon we're going to see a lot more weird and short-term unpredictable or unexpected weather. It's going to get a lot worse. As I was just saying in another place, regarding overpopulation, my answer would be...

Sterilize them all - everyone - at puberty, I say. Optional reversal, possibly for a hefty fee which is held in trust, when you can pass a battery of tests demonstrating that you want to breed, are competent to raise them and have the spare money to pay for it.

There are 6,000,000,000 million people in the world. I reckon about a tenth to a hundredth of that would be plenty. It's my way, or war, famine, pestilence and mass die-offs. The end result is much the same.

The older and crabbier I get, the better an idea a revolution seems. However, I reckon invading hordes of starving 3rd world types will make it rather moot. It is sadly looking increasingly like the population explosion in Africa might take care of itself via the extremely unpleasant route of AIDS, leaving the continent relatively depopulated and in a state of chaos. This will probably happen too late to save the macrofauna, too.

Then, as was recently put to me by a white South African of my acquaintance, there could be waves of re-colonisation, as there was centuries ago. He reckons from Europe. Well, maybe. But climate change will alter the picture. There will be a lot more desert in the tropics around the planet: the savannah will turn to desert, the forest to savannah. Northern Europe may be more desirable territory; large swaths of the taiga and boreal forest will become arable land, leading to the destruction of those forests, too. This will all, naturally, make the CO2 problems worse.

I suspect we may see large scale population movements around the world. In America and northern Eurasia, farmers and pastoralists from rural temperate areas moving north into what's now the Arctic; rich urban populations may flee to those tropical areas still habitable and depopulated by disease and war and try to reclaim their old territories from around C17 - C18. Recolonisation of Greenland also looks likely.

Meanwhile, from the former lush equatorial regions, which will be turning into hurricane-torn deserts, there will be massive disorganized emigration, with at least tens of millions dying and hundreds of millions more trying to get north to calmer climes, invading the prosperous countries to the North: from Latin America into North America, from Africa into Europe. China is big enough that it might be able to cope with this internally and thus will be excellently well placed to become the dominant global power of late C21 & C22.

Australia is probably screwed; a lot of it is desert now and they don't really have anywhere to go. However, it's scantly-populated. Military annexation of New Zealand is a possibility, or a more peacable emigration. SE Asia isn't an option; it will be teeming and suffering horrendous problems from flooding and erosion, due to both sea level rises and by then near-total deforestation. Annexation by China seems possible and plausible, for mineral & fossil fuel rights if nothing else.

The middle East is already somewhat screwed and will only get worse. Much of it is sparsely populated, either by extremely poor - who will die - and extremely rich - who will move wherever seems pleasant.

I'm not sure what will happen in the Indian subcontinent. Chaos, yes, massive desertification combined, ironically, with flooding. Again, possible annexation by China, and population migration north into northern Asia - the Balkans, Turkey, Afghanistan and so on, but these areas will be badly damaged too, so movement onwards into Siberia, which will be one hot property by then and fought over by many parties. Russia & the CIS would be well-placed to exploit it, but it's too riven by corruption and factionalism to defend itself coherently.

Human rights? Yes, right. That's going to be such a big issue.

What rather beats me is why anybody wants to bring a child into this mess.