Originally posted by thestonesfan
Not everyone is convinced it would be a problem, even if the average global temp was raised as much as 10-15 degrees a year. The American midwest would get hit the hardest, I'm afraid.
But the Sahara would likely become grassland.
Actually, this is perhaps a great misconception of what the real effects of global warming would be.
The effects would not necessarily be localized or even globalized climate changes or short periods of time (as is demonstrated late in the game). The real immediate effects appear to be more examples of drastic weather events caused by the additional energy of the atmosphere. This is actually a quite logical and experimentally sound assumption. Consider the following thought experiment.
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Take a small balloon full of air at room temperature. Now put in a special microwave that ONLY heats the air itself. You put it in, turn it on for a few seconds, take it out and quickly measure that the air inside the balloon is now ten degrees warmer than it was. You can feel with your hand the warmth coming thru. You have just given the air in this balloon a bit more energy. You may even notice that the balloon is just a bit wider because of the expansion of the air.
Now perform the same experiment with a balloon the size of a full-sized hot air balloon. Take this balloon, put it into the special microwave until it is ten degrees warmer, and take it out again. You will observe the same things: The warmth coming through surface, a modest expansion.
Consider: What would happen if you now took the microwave-induced energy (NOT THE AIR ITSELF!), just the additional energy from the air of large balloon, and put into the air of the smaller balloon. Likely, this sudden concentration of such a larger amount of energy would cause the surface of the smaller balloon to instantly melt, if not vaporize, and allow the air to subsequently 'explode'. This is a great trick for small family gatherings!
Now take a balloon large enough to contain all of the air in the Earth's atmosphere and do the same thing. Put it into the special microwave until it is ten degrees warmer. You would again notice the warmth coming through the surface and a modest expansion.
But if you were to take the microwave induced energy from this earth-sized balloon and put into either of the smaller balloons, you would probably observe (assuming you had some way of surviving this part of the experiment) that most of the air and the balloon itself would be converted into ultra-high energy subatomic particles. An explosion just doesn't quite cover the effect this would have.
Now take newly energized air put it around a planet. You suddenly add in aspects of convection, non-uniform surface flow, non-uniform heating and cooling, mixing, Coriolis, humidity, etc, etc....
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In real life this means not grassland becoming desert or Polar regions becoming grassland. It means more frequent sudden and sharp heat spells, droughts, flooding, cold spells and blizzards, increased number of thunderstorms and severity thereof (tornadoes, flash flooding), more hurricanes. Not only will such events occur more often and more randomly, but they will occur closer together. This is the real danger of Global Warming. Only over very long periods (decades, centuries) of time, would you on average notice the climatic changes over geographic regions.
Now if we were to implement this in the game, I would have more of these random events with various effects. For example:
Blizzard hits Moscow, City shut down, loss of revenues and production for one turn.
Flood hits New Orleans, courthouse washes away.
Typhoon strikes Bombay, population decrease of 2.
As Global Warming persists, increases or decreases, so too do these random events.
