Mad Max's World - Earth's population culled to 500,000

By Daily Kos poster Dark Syde:
New data and models on the vanishing northern cryosphere may be even worse than previously reported by the BBC --Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years. Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that previous projections had underestimated the processes now driving ice loss.
By Daily Kos Poster Meteor Blades:
Yeah, yeah, I know that gloom-and-doom doesn't inspire people to act - it demoralizes them. But I'm going to inject James Lovelock into the conversation anyway. (Among other things, he's the first guy who banged the gong about chlorofluorocarbons gobbling up protective ozone - for which he was duly excoriated by industry and right-wingers). Here's what he told Rolling Stone two months ago:
By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. "The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia," Lovelock says. "How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable." With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes -- Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin. Read entire story here.
More on the Environment, Desperate times, desperate scientists
Fed up with politicians and the media, scientists are pleading to the world to wake up to the imminent threats of global warming. By Joseph Romm at Salon.