Not plants and bacteria, many of them can survive off sunlight and minerals broken down from stones, such as lichen. Although I guess lichen is a combination of plants, bacteria and fungi
plants and bacteria would struggle without animals and fungi as well, everything depends on like literally the entire earth’s ecosystems to survive to some degree.
like fungi recycle dead things into an absurd amount of nutrients, without them trees especially would barely break down and just stick around until very very eventually they turn into coal.
like fungi recycle dead things into an absurd amount of nutrients, without them trees especially would barely break down and just stick around until very very eventually they turn into coal.
this is just such a cool thing to think about, there was a time when there were just dead trees everywhere in forests, like just laying there being logs or whatever, just piles and piles of dead trees and that’s where coal comes from.
The people mining and dying and polluting the planet just digging out piles of dead trees.
I considered looking at R once. As a data scientist and an experienced Python user, maybe I’ll see something useful. Then I learned that R uses <- for variable assignment and = for equality evaluation, and I stopped learning because I would make that mistake if I learned to switch back and forth for the rest of my life.
The PETM wasn’t so bad, and neither was the Cretaceous hothouse Earth. Paleontology gives me the perspective needed to know that we’re not all going to die even in the worst-case scenario.
Bunkers? Burn? The air will still be breathable and the temperature will still be within the livable range. Global warming is a big problem, but it isn’t going to turn the planet into an uninhabitable wasteland, just as it didn’t during the multiple times in the past when it happened naturally.
We’re already seeing an increase in natural disasters, with various areas experiencing floods, draughts or wildfires that didn’t use to have them.
This alone leads to political conflicts in those areas, but also leads to mass emigrations, ultimately causing the political egoists right in unaffected areas being strengthened, which could at its worst lead to another Nazi uprising, world war etc…
I do also think that humanity as a whole will survive (that is, if we don’t obliterate the ecosystems sustaining our lives, like e.g. pollinators). But our current life style of 8 billion people across all areas of Earth may not be sustainable anymore, which does mean the more privileged will be fine, others not.
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