Questions tagged [climate-change]
For questions about planetary climate change.
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How Could an Organism Evolve "Unintentionally" into a Cyborg?
Let's say there is an ecosystem with lots of familiar organisms. Bacteria, plants, fungi, metazoans.
Then a great deal of high-tech waste is introduced into that ecosystem. First, is there any way ...
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Can climate change make humans require oxygen masks to breathe?
I'm making a story where criminals are exiled to an uninhabitable, dying, resourceless Earth.
The prisoners must wear oxygen masks/protective suits in order to breathe on Earth's now heavilly polluted ...
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How does the pending climate catastrophe play out with a sudden population reduction? [closed]
In the real world, we are facing a dire situation with global warming becoming worse by the year and nothing being done about it. The projected models predict several degrees Celsius warming by mid-...
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What if a portal is opened from The Surface of Lake Superior to The Surface of Kraken Mare on Titan?
Both ends of the Portal are 60 meters in diameter, and are halfway submerged into the lakes at each end. Each end of the portal is located at the point of the lake farthest from shore.
Assume that the ...
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How would the UK be affected if 90% of the world’s population died from a virus? How long would it take before it would impact climate change? [closed]
The idea I'm currently working with would be the world overpopulated, things a bit further in the future in terms of the effects of climate change than now, being hit with a global virus that kills ...
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What should the Australian government do in the event of a sudden greening of the Outback? [closed]
Sometime in an alternate 2005, a handwavium science event creates a situation where excessive rainfall occurs throughout much of Australia. This event, now referred to as "the great rainfall"...
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Which marine organisms would survive this longer Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum?
56 million years ago, Earth underwent the greatest rise in temperature in the last 100 million years. In just 20 to 50 millennia, the global temperature had risen by five to eight degrees Celsius (...
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How realistic would for Canada to become richer and wealthier than the United States because of climate change and global warming?
I believe that global warming could make Canada one of the most fertile land areas for agriculture and one of the countries with the most stable climates. So would be realistic that climate change ...
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Refugee actions due to climate change + water crisis in Bangladesh
A backstory for a science fiction novel I am writing involves mapping out some of the devastating consequences of climate change and a simultaneous water crisis in Bangladesh. I'm curious about your ...
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What Size and Likelihood Of An ET Impact Would Destroy A Small County Sized Region But Not Our Species?
Motivation
The question is inspired by the astronomy journal preprint released publicly today, entitled: From impact refugees to deterritorialized states: foresighting extreme legal-policy cases in ...
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Altantropa vs Climate Change/raising sea levels?
Atlantropa was a geoengineering project to build a series of dams across the mediterranean sea to slowly drain it creating new land, satisfying the energy requirements of europe and even merging the ...
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What if all life disappeared from the earth?
What if all life (plants, animals, bacteria, fungi, and everything from the smallest cell to the largest whale) disappeared instantly?
And here I don't mean things related to the disappearance of ...
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Where would the first large Antarctic colony be?
With the world average temperature rising, and polar ice decreasing, it has been speculated that in the 2100s people may start to colonize Antarctica.
Where in Antarctica would people likely colonize ...
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What is the habitability of an Earth- like habitable planet that do not have any cloud covering?
Let's say I imagined a world that is as habitable as Earth and has the same oxygen levels, land to ocean ratio and similar average temperature. However it has no clouds at all. How different its ...
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How quickly would the earth recover from climate change if humans were to disappear [closed]
To give an example, how long would all humans have to leave the earth for a large part of the biodiversity and the original atmosphere to be restored, the oceans to recover, the fish population to ...
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How do I explain a big flooding event that happened while still having a cold planet?
On the planet I’m making, there was a big flood that happened and raised the sea level by 30 meters.
I want the planet to have a cold climate, so I can’t simply explain the flood by saying it was ...
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How Quickly Would the Pioneers of this Seeded Jurassic World Alter the Climate?
Sometime last month, I have compiled a comprehensive list of all the prehistoric creatures featured in the bulk of the Jurassic Park franchise--in the five established films, in the upcoming Dominion ...
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World wide electricity network [closed]
What if the UN, backed up by all nations would by a huge land from some country, lets say Russia and build there lots of nuclear power plants to power up the entire world?
There will be world wide ...
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If the Earth is completely covered by mirrors, how quickly does it freeze?
Suppose all areas of the Earth is suddenly covered in indestructible mirrors (assume they reflect 70% of solar energy that would hit the land/ocean), how quickly will the increase in albedo cause the ...
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Nesting abilities of migratory interdimensional creature
I'm waving hands a fair bit here, and I am doing that because I believe that it is internally coherent, so if you accept these things, you shouldn't need the story to suggest answers. I'm including as ...
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Consequences of heat redistribution on the climate of a planet
There are three types of magic system in the world I'm building. One of them, Sundancing(tentative name), can manipulate thermal energy. So they are able to take energy from an enviorment, cooling it ...
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What would happen if we built a huge cofferdam around Hawaii and drained the water?
I had an idea for a sci-fantasy story set in a far future where there are primitive human settlements at the base of Mauna Kea who are unaware that they're actually dwelling on the sea floor of the ...
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How plausible is this volcanic eruption event? Dark Age without total extinction of Stone/Bronze/Iron Age people?
At the end of the desert's westward Great River (think the Nile in Egypt) there is a volcanic island called Harek-Set. Its black mountain is a hotspot volcano which produces obsidian and makes the ...
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Can one nation purposefully, inconspicuously, cause global warming?
The People's Dominion of North Kadana is an arctic isolationist dictatorship, with lots of territory but it is all barren frozen tundra. Their plan: heat up the world by a few degrees, making their ...
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Would solar energy have been viable during the extinction of the dinosaurs?
I've been imagining a world where several coincidental factors drastically reduce the temperature of the world, leading to global cooling. Lots of snow may be involved, but I imagine there would be ...
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What will Glacier Bay National Park look like in 2000 years?
I am working on a story that takes place roughly 2000 years after a worst-case-scenario climate apocalypse. It revolves around a society located in present-day Glacier Bay National Park on the Alaska/...
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Could we build a global renewable energy grid? [duplicate]
I’m trying to build a post-fossil fuel world for my eco thriller. So in my head it works like this: Fossil fuel is outlawed internationally amd renewable energy is mandated; each country has a ...
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Time estimate for converting desert to savanna/forest
I'm building a world in whose history climactic changes causes a region of desert to start seeing regular rain. This causes the native culture of the desert people to also change along with it, ...
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Could the vaporization of all the oceans push away most of the air in the atmostphere?
You may remember my question here, part of which assumed that all humans would die in one way very quickly, with minimal destruction to the planet.
This question will ask about the way humans would ...
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How long would it take for earth to dry up?
At current global warming rates, the sea levels are rising because the ice caps are melting. But once the ice caps are all melted, the sea would stay the same.
In my world, humanity's money revolves ...
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How much of the sun's light would have to be blocked for the Earth to become uninhabitable?
For context: I'm writing a story where the main antagonist is an empire that builds Dyson swarms around every star they can get their hands on. The protagonist lives on a planet around one such star, ...
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How could strange energies cause massive droughts within a localized region?
The scenario:
Background
Let me begin by explaining the surreal parts of this scenario: essentially there is an archipelago of islands just south of Australia that have existed under the world's noses....
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Best location for mass desertification?
I would like to know the best potential mass desertified location for my story set in the near future. (50-60 years.) This includes land or water, eg a dried up lake or area of farmland, or both.
By ...
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Would a permanent rain be possible?
Would there any scientifical explanation to a permanent rain (at least 2 years) everywhere on Earth ? Climate-change ?
My best explanation at this point is accelerated ice cap melting. There must be ...
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Could you actually make a green space program?
Is it plausible to build and maintain a space program without adding to climate change?
While obviously there are larger problems in the near term with respect to climate change, I'm thinking about a ...
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What impact would a magical curse that saps the life from plants have on bodies of water?
I have a region in my homebrew D&D setting that used to be grassland/fertile farmland, and the breadbasket of the elven empire, until some wizards did a collective magical ritual that permanently ...
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Enhanced Rock Weathering in the Sahel Region of Africa [closed]
A recent Guardian article "Spreading rock dust on fields could remove vast amounts of CO2 from air" has gotten some attention in the nongovernmental and UN organizations working in the Sahel ...
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In a world where sea levels fell dramatically, what effect would that have on life at the local level? (more in the body)
Assuming the levels fell at a noticeable rate year-on-year, how long would it take the tides to be a significant (200m or so) distance from where they used to be? How long until the new land would be ...
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Could a new impact basin be responsible for desiccating an entire planet?
Situation: A planet similar in size to the Earth has a Eurasia+ sized continent at its South Pole. It is hit by a huge asteroid near its South Pole. This would produce a very large crater/basin. ...
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We are in 2200 and global warming hits us very bad. Can we create a winter? [closed]
Let's assume a society similar to ours, a few hundreds of years in the future. We managed to trigger a snowball effect on global warming with our fossil fuel use. Earth is very hot. The technology is ...
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When earth is filled to the brim with plant-life, can it cause a hyperoxic environment?
Say humans found a way to exponentially increase the capability of plants to grow. Is it possible for it to cause an environment that can cause oxygen toxicity in humans?
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What average global temperature would optimize Earth for human habitability?
The year is 2100. While climate change has wrought serious damage to the biosphere, humanity has at last managed to become carbon neutral, and has even developed technology that can be used to reduce ...
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What could cause massive global sea level rise? [duplicate]
I'm thinking of creating a world in which sea levels have risen by around 200 metres, leading the Earth's surface to look something like this, minus the ice:
Obviously, a 200 metre rise is enormous, ...
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Is it possible to have a greenhouse effect this strong and still have an atmosphere breathable by humans?
An Earth mass terran planet is orbiting a sun-like star at 2AU. I understand the limit for CO2 greenhouse effects is 1.67AU for whatever reason (giving a conventional habitable zone limit), but ...
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Could an enormous structure be used to attract rain by acting as an artificial mountain?
If it were possible to build a giant geodesic dome tens of miles in diameter, what effect would it have on nearby weather?
If built in an arid climate like the Sahara or Australia, would it be ...
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In an Earth with massively spiked CO2 content, how might survivors set about reducing that content?
Some cataclysmic event has transpired on planet Earth in the not-too-distant-future, and the outside air is now thick with CO2, causing all of the problems that come with it. Human beings can no ...
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Post- Nuclear Holocaust. Radioactive wastelands vs eco-system and chances of human survivability?
I'm attempting to flesh out the history to a sci-fi novel I'm currently writing, which is set in the future.
Several hundred years prior to the beginning of the story, lack of resources lead to ...
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What would Earth look like at the beginning of 22nd century if temperatures rose by 30 degrees Celsius?
The beginning of 22nd century. Temperatures on the globe rose by 30 degrees Celsius over decades, because humanity was unwilling to stop greenhouse gas emissions. How would the surface of Earth look ...
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Need a North American location with a large city and whitewater river for post-apocalyptic fiction
My story has several key locations that I would like to ground in a real place in North America. It takes place 50-60 years in the future after 97% of humanity has been wiped out. I'm having a hell of ...
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What would happen if ocean currents suddenly stopped (or changed)?
I'm thinking about a device (in a story I'm writing) that could control ocean currents, and I'm wondering how it could be weaponized. For example, if an ocean current was suddenly stopped, what might ...
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