Questions tagged [climate-change]
For questions about planetary climate change.
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Societies After A Sudden 'Ice Age'
About 300 years ago, my world underwent massive climate change. It suddenly shifted from something we'd consider normal/livable to a climate similar to that of the last glacial maximum. (Side note: I ...
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What would happen if the Panama Isthmus was turned into an island chain?
I understand that the Panama Isthmus is necessary for the Gulf Stream, but what would happen if instead of a solid land bridge, like shown below, it was radically changed into a series of islands ...
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What would a city look like that adapted to sporadic tsunami-like flash floods?
In a near future where super-cell storms drop massive amounts of water (300 l/m²) in the blink of an eye, cities - built upon the cities of old - have adapted to these tsunami-like flash floods. But ...
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How far can climate change go while still having enough of a biosphere to maintain a breathable atmosphere?
I’m running a one-shot campaign and I want it to be in a future where climate change has continued unabated but not so far that people can’t breathe on the surface.
Realistically, how hot can it get ...
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How the sky will change with stratospheric aerosol injections?
The world I am designing has successfully survived the event of the almost complete depletion of natural oil reserves. By "successfully" I mean that cities are densely populated, the stock ...
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Florida during climate change: what does it look like?
Edited again!
My character lives in a future where some folks have moved under the sea, and sea levels have risen. There are scenes where she comes up to the dry land, and I need to describe the city ...
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How to keep critters out of my flooded skyscrapers?
Overall setting -- "loosely future Earth," say a hundred years from now, with plausible levels of realism (doesn't have to be perfect, but should feel familiar and match intuition). Climate ...
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What global warming level would be needed to keep the dew point of some place above the temperature of the lungs for at least 1 month per year?
Title might be a bit hard to understand but let me explain : when the dew point is above humans temperature (37℃) the water condenses in the lungs which are at a lower temperature than the air which ...
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What will the 2050's earth atmosphere will look like? [closed]
I'm currently developing a project where i have to design a pair of shoes that will resist all or most of the weather conditions in 2050. Due to climate change, shoes or materials used will change, i'...
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How can a planet remain in algae bloom over millions of years?
I've been developing a planet for an original scifi setting and I'm not sure if it's scientifically plausible. Said planet is in a state of global algae infestation across all major oceans, resulting ...
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What planetary orbit and geology would speed up an ice age?
I have a first-contact scenario where I would like an ice age to be occurring rapidly. All the things that could change to make a fast ice age more credible: orbital period (403.42 local days), length ...
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To what extent can fauna/flora migrate northward from Central America as the climate warms over time?
My story takes place thousands of years in the Earth's future after a climate apocalypse. It centers around Alaska and western Canada, but the climate in that region has transformed to more closely ...
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How many gigatons of CO2 will my "cyanobacteria bioreactor" pull out of the atmosphere per year?
So, as CO2 levels continue to rocket in the atmosphere, its effects prove to be devastating for the world. Ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hurricane intensity increases, and lots of unpleasant things ...
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What Gas Would A Dead Kaiju Have To Release To Cause Torrential Rain?
Assume my kaiju has just been blown open by the military, its organs and intestines spilling out.
What gas, either released from its innards or released during decomposition, could ascend and cause ...
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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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