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.
Thankfully the earth is a self-stabilizing system. Unfortunately it takes a few million years for the natural carbon cycle to reach equilibrium from a swing out point such as this.
Yeah, and it will stabilize to a climate that isn’t very habitable for anything that currently lives here, maybe nothing will be here but simple called organisms, we really don’t know how bad it will be.
Please reread my comment. It will stabilize it will just take an epoch. We will be very dead and extinct before that happens planet will be fine though It’s been through far worse. I for one am excited to see what survives the next great dying.
My field is not climate change Nor am I an climate historian, but if I remember correctly take something like 25 to 35 million years give or take for the current excess carbon to be sequestered naturally
Sorry to be an ass but the stupid “the Earth will be fine” nonsense needs to end. Nobody thinks we’re going to “kill” all the rocks, and earth’s core, and the mantle and mountains lol. We’re talking about our fucking habitat and ecosystem we need to survive.
We and many/most other species cannot survive/adapt fast enough to a fast and catastrophic change to our habitat, which we absolutely objectively are causing. Just because we could possibly survive this because of our ingenuity and intelligence is completely irrelevant. I don’t want our greatest challenge as a species to be figuring out how to survive a dystopian apocalyptic scenario because of extreme greed and selfishness. I’d prefer our species challenges to be things like star trek warp drives and replicators and holodecks and other cool stuff instead, but no we gotta keep making sure billionaires make even more money.
We’re talking about our fucking habitat and ecosystem we need to survive.
Are we though? I see so much “The earth is gonna die!” and “Life is doomed!” everywhere, but as this guy correctly points out, the planet will be fine.
In fact, humans will endure too. It’s just our current civilisation that’s in danger, that’s all.
But people do like to hyperbolise all over the place haha, and people start to believe it. It’s important to make the distinction.
Well dolphins are already being cooked to death in shallow rivers and most of the crabs are gone. Are they fine?
The planet and the concept of organic life will likely be fine but a massive extinction of most life really isn’t “fine” it’s horrific and should be a wake up call at the concept of that amount of loss of life and diversity.
Whatever remains even if humans are part of it would be so vastly different it’s hard to even begin to predict the appearance of it. It’s like saying don’t worry the dinosaurs survived their apocalypse cause that chicken you ate for dinner shared an ancestor.
Best case scenario is a mostly dead planet where we stay in large concrete bunkers all day and eat the phytoplankton blooms on the surface of the ocean that killed most interior life for protein and substance while we hide from the sun… Yay. What a life. And that’s saying no one struggles while drowning and throws bombs around.
I know hope is how people get through all this and you just got to keep it to move forward but like we need to realistically look at the future in order to not just be blinded by a false hope because it’s easier and what is needed to be sold to people so they keep consuming without looking at where it’s leading us.
There isn’t hyperbole in the horrors that happen because we couldn’t get our shit together.
Is it actually self-stabilizing though? Or I guess it depends what you mean by that. AFAIK the earth has been in many different stages lasting for long times, changing from one to the other due to various factors. But it’s unlikely earth will return to a pre-industrial state, even after millions of years, especially if we keep emitting CO2, I believe.
But if you just mean that a new plateau will be reached eventually, then sure, a mass extinction will still happen though.
If the earth enters a state where most of the water is locked up in glaciers (‘snowball earth’), then it is unlikely that it will be able to exit it. Similarly, if it becomes too hot, it is again unlikely that it will return to what it is now. The earth can handle small disturbances in CO2 / temp, but a sufficiently large swing can lock us into one of the extreme situations.
True, however there were extinctions caused by far larger increases in CO2 than we have today and it didn’t happen. So at this moment it does not seem likely that we will achieve it this time.
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