What's going to change in a Earth that's 8c hotter?
- Thread starter Imaus
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Akka
Moody old mage.
I don't think it's possible to really eradicate life at this point. We have extremophiles that can survive on pretty much any sort of insane environment existing on Earth, and some that don't even exist there ^^
I also don't think we could have a Venus-Earth. Earth seems to oscillate between "coold" and "hot" geological periods, with "hot" being warm enough that there is no ice covering even at the poles, and I don't think we would reach such a state with mankind still able and kicking to ruin things even more.
I'm pretty sure we can eradicate ourselves if we try hard at it, but destroying Earth or all life ? Not with our current technology, by far.
Zardnaar
Deity
The planets very resilient at least to anything we can do.
Lord Shadow
Admiral
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I reiterate: it's well within our capabilities to wipe ourselves out and much of complex life on the planet by making it temporarily hostile enough it can't harbour us.
However, that does not mean we could damage or alter the planet in such a way it couldn't recover in a cosmic blink of an eye.
Pollution is nothing, and once it kills us, it'll quickly disappear with us, the source of it. Same with even the harshest nuclear war.
None of this is downplaying the damage we cause: it comes down to the realization that we're hurting ourselves and life on Earth far more than we're hurting Earth itself.
Until we start literally bombing the core or something, the planet itself is perfectly safe from us ants living on its surface.
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Azem.Ocram
King
It is likely we’ll wipe ourselves out but virtually impossible to take out all earth life with us. Extremophiles will survive, some will be mostly unaffected, some will have to adapt. However, with a whole lot of effort, we could turn this around and possibly even make rainforests were there is desert now (I heard that the Amazon was created by the indigenous tribes proto-agriculture).
Funny thing is that I wrote a story (originally a CivBE fanfic) about a robot (Minerva Prime) with the sum of human knowledge (Deep Memory) and advanced mobile fabrication (Crawler + Nanorobotics) sent back in time to prevent the Emancipation victory by Kozlov & Alencar. She interpreted her instructions by preventing the Inflection Point (by building sustainable cities in deserts, such as the Sahara). This had the side effect of turning human civilization into what amounts to The Culture or Rogue Servitors before Rome became an empire.
Funny thing is that I wrote a story (originally a CivBE fanfic) about a robot (Minerva Prime) with the sum of human knowledge (Deep Memory) and advanced mobile fabrication (Crawler + Nanorobotics) sent back in time to prevent the Emancipation victory by Kozlov & Alencar. She interpreted her instructions by preventing the Inflection Point (by building sustainable cities in deserts, such as the Sahara). This had the side effect of turning human civilization into what amounts to The Culture or Rogue Servitors before Rome became an empire.
Another article I've found that might be useful reading:
Keeping global warming within 1.5°C constrains emergence of aridification Chang-Eui Park1 , Su-Jong Jeong1*, Manoj Joshi2 , Timothy J. Osborn2 , Chang-Hoi Ho3 , Shilong Piao4,5,6 , Deliang Chen7 , Junguo Liu1 , Hong Yang8,9 , Hoonyoung Park3 , Baek-Min Kim10 , Song Feng11
"Over a quarter of the world's land could become significantly drier if global warming reaches 2C -- according to new research from an international team including the University of East Anglia.
"Drought severity has been increasing across the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and the eastern coast of Australia over the course of the 20th Century, while semi-arid areas of Mexico, Brazil, southern Africa and Australia have encountered desertification for some time as the world has warmed.
"Prof Tim Osborn from UEA said: "The areas of the world which would most benefit from keeping warming below 1.5C are parts of South East Asia, Southern Europe, Southern Africa, Central America and Southern Australia -- where more than 20 per cent of the world's population live today." - Sciencedaily
And it seems we're slated for way more than 2c....
Keeping global warming within 1.5°C constrains emergence of aridification Chang-Eui Park1 , Su-Jong Jeong1*, Manoj Joshi2 , Timothy J. Osborn2 , Chang-Hoi Ho3 , Shilong Piao4,5,6 , Deliang Chen7 , Junguo Liu1 , Hong Yang8,9 , Hoonyoung Park3 , Baek-Min Kim10 , Song Feng11
"Over a quarter of the world's land could become significantly drier if global warming reaches 2C -- according to new research from an international team including the University of East Anglia.
"Drought severity has been increasing across the Mediterranean, southern Africa, and the eastern coast of Australia over the course of the 20th Century, while semi-arid areas of Mexico, Brazil, southern Africa and Australia have encountered desertification for some time as the world has warmed.
"Prof Tim Osborn from UEA said: "The areas of the world which would most benefit from keeping warming below 1.5C are parts of South East Asia, Southern Europe, Southern Africa, Central America and Southern Australia -- where more than 20 per cent of the world's population live today." - Sciencedaily
And it seems we're slated for way more than 2c....
Manfred Belheim
Moaner Lisa
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Does it really give much solace to think "well if we do wipe ourselves out and 90% of all other species, some life will still survive"? I mean it's kind of nice that it will, and I hope the cockroaches and bacteria have a lovely time without us, but still.
Socrates99
Bottoms up!
I just want to point out that most climate deniers, at least in the US, don't believe an earth without people ever existed and when people are gone it will be because of an end times/rapture scenario.
In my mind I do kind of take solace in the fact that the earth has gone through cycles where it's heated and cooled. Where its been both friendly and unfriendly to life and we're here. That means life will come back and maybe another intelligent species will evolve. I just wish we weren't cheating hundreds of future generations out of the existence they could have.
Nope. My existence is human. I am anthropocentric. If Humanity is crippled, or destroyed, that is the greatest tragedy. Oh, sure, we will one day not be, nor our descendants, but one takes that as one takes their own death: it'll happen, as a concrete fact - we won't be around in a billion years, or even a million or so - but one should do their best to make sure it happens as far off and away as possible. Until then, carpe diem.
Zardnaar
Deity
Short if screwing up the atmosphere I think we'll make it. Might be on a tribal level but we can exist and adapt to every conceivable climate.
I don't think global warming will turn earth into Venus, there's not enough nukes for extinction level event and no virus has a 100% kill rate.
Killing 99% of the human population still leaves 70 million. Apparently at one point there were a few thousand of us.
Nuclear winter won't blanket the earth in darkness, you can still grow crops in certain parts if the world, fallout won't be severe enough worldwide to kill everyone.
Short term a few people could survive growing food under ground or whatever if a dinosaur asteroid hit. We know some plant life survived along with some species.
The IPCC has made a new report that'll I'll try get my hands on. An overview here has some revelations.
"in a worst case high-emissions scenario, sea level would increase by 3 feet by 2100 and by 12 feet by 2300." (Let's face it, we're not meeting the Paris Climate Agreement).
'...and to a loss closer to 70% in a worst-case scenario. In that high-emissions scenario, thawing permafrost could lead to a “release of tens to hundreds of billions of tons of permafrost carbon as CO2 and methane to the atmosphere by 2100 with the potential to exacerbate climate change.” For comparison, humans currently release about 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, so this feedback could be equivalent to adding decades’ worth of human carbon emissions into the atmosphere if fossil fuel use continues unabated.'
"in a worst case high-emissions scenario, sea level would increase by 3 feet by 2100 and by 12 feet by 2300." (Let's face it, we're not meeting the Paris Climate Agreement).
'...and to a loss closer to 70% in a worst-case scenario. In that high-emissions scenario, thawing permafrost could lead to a “release of tens to hundreds of billions of tons of permafrost carbon as CO2 and methane to the atmosphere by 2100 with the potential to exacerbate climate change.” For comparison, humans currently release about 10 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, so this feedback could be equivalent to adding decades’ worth of human carbon emissions into the atmosphere if fossil fuel use continues unabated.'
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