this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Or in the worst case, all life on Earth won't be ok.
No, life in general would be fine. It will be (already is) a mass extinction but earth had a couple of those and life will bounce back.
The worst case scenario is turning Earth into a planet with a climate like Venus's.
A planet that proves the existence of runaway greenhouse effects btw.
It is theoretically possible that life exists there, but multicellular life is considered unlikely, and we'll probably never get to take surface samples, given it's been measured at 464 Celsius.
We probably can't fuck up the planet that badly, but toss in a nuclear exchange to greenhouse effects and an unfortunate volcanic eruption or two?
You say that as it’s not a big deal.
Do you really want to see a world without dolphins, pandas, tigers, anacondas..?
I don't think he's saying it's not a big deal for us, but for the planet.
I know, but that’s a very detached and unemotional take… Sure “life” will keep existing. But not the life we know. That we love. That we grew up loving so much.
I understand not everyone feels exactly like me. But I was absurdly fascinated by biology books and wildlife documentaries and would read and watch them religiously as a child.
Thinking of all of that just dying and ending truly breaks my heart. Almost more than anything.
Just not as much as the thought of humanity disappearing. But I know most people share that sadness.
I also don't think the person is unemotional, it's more about having the correct idea of what's actually going to happen if we don't do anything. I also think ecology needs more rationality, otherwise we get people closing nuclear plants to restart coal plants.
You do know that the most well informed people (like active researchers in the field) are often the most pessimistic right? Like you hear on the media that “oh no we’re gonna pass 2º! I guess I won’t be able to ski as much”. But you go to a climate science conference and it’s “yeah… now that we can add more parameters and feedback loops into our models the chance of total extinction by 2100 is 99.99%. On the bright side, half of us expected it to be 100%. So kudos”.
We'd be dead as well, so wouldn't see them anyway.
Also, the world is pretty cool without dinonsaurs. It will still be pretty cool with what ever comes after what we currently have.
I can’t explain how knowing all the animals you grew up loving will die forever is sad. If you don’t feel it you don’t I guess.
Well, I could imagine it if I wanted to make myself sad. But I, personally, will be dead long before even the last Panda. So it's really just a hypothetical.
It would be a shame for my anaconda if we ain't got buns, hon.
The question is on a scale of the extinction event at the end of the last ice age to the End Permian Extinction Event aka the Great Dying how bad do we want it
Or, if instead of reducing emissions, we try to geo-engineer our way out of global warming, screw it up, and create a real snowball Earth.
As opposed to geo-engineering our way into global warming like we have been?
"Oh no, don't try anything! We might be too successful."
Warming is bad, so cooling has to be good. Is that your logic?
No, I'm just pointing out the fallacy in your comment that carbon emissions aren't geo-engineering or that reducing carbon emissions isn't either. Also that any actually geo-engineered solution, as per your definition, is going to be far less effective than the literal centuries of concerted effort to destroy the environment.
I even think humanity will survive fine as many icy places will become habitable and we're good at adapting to extreme climates. Overall it's rather our current civilisations with the bad but also the good in them that are the most endangered.
If we manage to keep the warming to levels seen in previous warming periods, humanity might come out better on average in the long run, but the planet is heating faster than it did in those other periods and we haven't demonstrated any ability to control ourselves. We'd have to stop generating CO2 pretty soon to avoid surpassing the last great warming period.
I guess people didn't understand my point. If we don't curb our carbon emissions, we're certainly going to have a climate that we never lived and it will kill a lot of people. But it's not unlimited, at some point we will not be able emit more carbon, because there's no more or we lost the ability to do so. So while fewer than today, there will probably still be habitable places like Nothern Canada and Russia. I think humanity would be able to survive there, although much smaller and the centuries of disasters would have destroyed our civilisations as we know them.
People probably thought I'm denying the urgency to do an ecological transition, but I'm not. I'm trying to comment on what would actually happen, similarly to previous comment saying that the planet itself is not going to die.
You're making an assumption that the feedback loops are all well understood. They might be, or maybe there will be some runaway effect, some source of carbon or other greenhouse gas that's completely unknown, gets released, and boils the oceans.
Yes I am, like everyone in this thread is.