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It is not just a bomb that can blow the arctic. It can destroy all human civilization. And at this point, we may have lost any ability to do anything. Edit: Do

• mr_overalls 9y ago
  The sad thing is that scientists have understood the risks of global warming for decades, and yet our civilization (maybe I'm just speaking for the US here) seems impotent to effectively coordinate a response to this slow-motion threat. It could be our own Great Filter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
  • hanniabu 9y ago
    and yet our governments
    • dredmorbius 9y ago
      This isn't solely the purview of governments, there are other institutions involved, including many corporations, and the specific individuals behind them. Arguably the financial world, various inter-national rivalries, media, public opinion, religions, and more. On the one hand, if it succeeds in offing some element of, take your pick: modernity, liberal democracy, advanced civilisation, humanity, life on earth, terrifying as all get out. On the other, a maddeningly fascinating systems dysfunction at work. Though on the whole, I'd prefer the tuition bill for this course were lower.
    • GuB-42 9y ago
      In all countries that matter, governments are elected. And they do what they need to do to be elected for the next term. Assuming they really swept global warming under the rug, they did it because accounting for it was unpopular. We prefer to vote for a candidate that won't reduce our comfort rather than one who decides to tackle a problem most people don't really understand. We are the ones to blame, governments just gave us what we wanted.
      • craftyguy 9y ago
        > In all countries that matter, governments are elected. Well, except China, and Russia, two very large industrial nations that certainly matter in terms of global impact. You're kidding yourself if you believe those governments are elected. > We are the ones to blame, governments just gave us what we wanted. No, governments are giving their sponsors what they want. The electorate is led to believe they want it too.
      • sbov 9y ago
        The one with the most money usually wins. Until that is fixed the popularity of views seems meaningless.
  • cryptoz 9y ago
    > decades More than a century, in some cases. Capitalism needs additional constraints or it will end all civilization. Simply, the cost of creating greenhouse gasses has never been priced in to the market since Exxon and the likes have lobbied hard for decades to not let the truth gain any traction. They should all be in jail and there should be no profits in destroying ecosystems. Otherwise there seems no hope.
    • nerdponx 9y ago
      In a socialized system you'd have the same thing, except perpetuated by bureaucrats instead of businessmen. If anything, capitalism has an advantage in that it's at least theoretically possible to mitigate the effect of greed on politics. Throwing all your eggs into the government basket gives you no such recourse.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • bad-joke 9y ago
        The Volkswagen emissions scandal demonstrated that mitigating effects will be circumvented given the presence of a profit motive. Rather than construct an elaborate and exploitable maze of incentives, perhaps it would be simpler to remove the profit motive.
        • nerdponx 9y ago
          That's my point. Capitalism or socialism, greed is greed. There is always a profit motive.
      • michaelmrose 9y ago
        The general population controls so little of the economic might that this just isn't true. We could pool our votes to change the course of politics. If we pooled our dollars nobody would care.
        • 9y ago
  • jjoonathan 9y ago
    Are there credible models that suggest Earth will turn into Venus or something? It would take a hell of a lot more to end humanity than it would take to "merely" hurt/kill the most vulnerable segments of our population (which is what I thought the stakes were).
    • cryptoz 9y ago
      > Are there credible models that suggest Earth will turn into Venus or something? Yes, the model is called Venus. > (which is what I thought the stakes were). You were misinformed. The stakes are significantly higher than that.
      • jjoonathan 9y ago
        Venus is a shit model for Earth. Try again.
      • matte_black 9y ago
        I’m sorry, but it has long been shown Earth cannot simply turn into Venus given the current climate models.
    • skrowl 9y ago
      There is definitely no shortage of doomsday climate models. CREDIBLE models is a different story. Look back at ones from 20+ years ago to see what they predicted would be happening by now. It's pretty funny actually.
      • jjoonathan 9y ago
        The models from 20 years ago overshot by several confidence intervals because they underestimated mixing the deep ocean. "The barrel is bigger than we expected" doesn't make the rising water in the barrel any less concerning, but it's not the triumph of foresight that you seem to imply.
        • Banthum 9y ago
  • trs80 9y ago
    Science isn't perfectly absolved after all many of us including computer "scientists" work closely with industry that affects global warming.
  • pacala 9y ago
    US emissions have plateaued two decades ago [0]. Emissions are growing unchecked elsewhere, a combination of population explosion and rapid industrialization. [0] http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/03/31/chinese-co2-emissions-really-peaked/ http://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/03/31/chinese-co2-emis...
    • evanlivingston 9y ago
      I'm curious if the various ways American's and America spends it's money and consumes its good is factored into U.S. emissions. Does the carbon it takes to produce an iphone and then ship it here count? What about all the fuel/power used by military bases abroad? Does our purchasing of Foreign cars count?
      • lozenge 9y ago
        Under most measures it isn't counted. What you are looking for is called consumption-based emissions accounting and unsurprisingly it shows US emissions are still going up. Moving to consumption based accounting aligns closely with the generally accepted best economic solution for reducing emissions - a global carbon tax, which would be pushed onto developing countries as a requirement when they want to export to developed countries. Incidentally, the US military has been exempt from all climate agreements since Kyoto, and so are international flights.
    • vkou 9y ago
      Emission growth has stopped, but what we need to do is hit net zero. We are no closer to that today then we were 20 years ago. There isn't even a vague plan for the United States to get there.
      • lozenge 9y ago
        I don't know why you're downvoted. The RCPs that show us respecting the goal of the 2C limit all show emissions need to shrink globally and reach zero around 2050 or even earlier. The fact emissions have stopped growing is not really much progress. It is like we are cruising to disaster rather than accelerating towards it.
  • ioioio8908 9y ago
    Let's not kid ourselves either; Ycombinator and the startup fetish culture, and gadget fetishism, help fuel our approach to the edge. The more neoliberalism continues to induce dopamine addiction, under some ridiculous premise everyone wants to be a celebrity, startup wunderkind, or hoodie wearing, macbook carrying hipster, the sooner the env is gonna fly right off the edge. The global economy cannot keep fueling itself on disposable consumerism
  • sologoub 9y ago
    US and EU are doing a lot about reducing their output of CO2, but unfortunately that’s completely dwarfed by new output elsewhere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_... Without global actors taking full responsibility, we are basically screwed.
    • mgbmtl 9y ago
      I agree, but the US (and Canada, Australia, etc), still pollute twice more per capita than China. There's still a lot we can do. The EU, however, has lower per capita emissions than China. And that's ignoring that most manufactured goods we consume are made in China.
    • graeme 9y ago
      It's like whack a mole. The economy is a global system, and so is the atmosphere. Shifting production of carbon between the parts isn't per se useful. We can no more blame other countries for increasing CO2 output than we can blame a grocery store down the block from opening when another closes (or, refuses to cater to new demand, to make a better analogy). We'll only stop if we come up with an unambiguously better alternative, or something forces us. A acute problem is that if we stopped using carbon, people would die. (And the economy would contract, of course, but death is a stronger motivator). We're above our carrying capacity without carbon use. But if we keep using it, we die, later. I think the most no brainer approach is to push for a global carbon tax to prod development of renewables. Income taxes could be cut to offset, so at a low level this wouldn't hurt a country. This seems not very popular however, and no one has pushed for an international agreement on this point, instead pushing for whack a mole emissions reductions in single countries. My most optimistic scenario is we do figure out an unambiguously better alternative, switch to it, and then also figure out some way to use the energy to suck carbon from the atmosphere (which has its own challenges).
  • mirimir 9y ago
    It's all about discount rate for stuff in the future. If you spend money to mitigate future damage, that's money that you can't invest productively. So basically, in economic terms, the distant future is worthless.
• knodi123 9y ago
  "all human civilization"? Isn't that a bit hyperbolic? destructive, sure. It would certainly lead to a lot of death, and a lot of hardship. Human civilization will certainly be changed- perhaps significantly. But I haven't see any evidence that it will cease to exist.
  • notsofastbuddy 9y ago
    No. There's a pretty clear path: rising temperatures->food supply disruption->regional war->nuclear war->there are maybe a few people left in bunkers.
    • sgt101 9y ago
      I agree but I think the chain can shorten to nuclear war->there are maybe a few people left in bunkers. If we were to get rid of the nuclear option then both your chain and my chain would not be viable. Nukes before greenhouses?
    • jjoonathan 9y ago
      There's a pretty substantial gap between "poor people starving" and "people with nukes care," but it's still plausible enough to be chilling, that's for sure.
    • dogma1138 9y ago
      The people with nukes would be the last to starve. Also for anyone to go nuclear there would have to be a strategic goal for that Russia nuking the US won’t really help their food shortage and vice versa.
  • ProAm 9y ago
    99.9% of all creatures to exist on earth are now extinct. [1] We're not special. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction
    • stickfigure 9y ago
      We're not special With big brains and tools, humans can live in a much broader set of environmental conditions than any other species. While it doesn't make us extinction-proof, it makes us pretty hardy. It is hard to imagine what would destroy all the ecological niches that humans could survive in. I would bet on the humans.
• matte_black 9y ago
  There is something we can do. We can enjoy what we have here and now, for as long as it lasts, for as long as we can.
  • grinsekatze 9y ago
    Completely agree. It’s all natural cycles, transformations ... but accepting this is not really easy as long as one fears death. There is so much eternal beauty that we are part of and that we could focus on instead of wars and Desasters.
    • matte_black 9y ago
      Personally, I think dying by something as unique as climate change would be a spectacular way to go. Think of all the other mundane ways people die everyday: disease, a bullet, or even just tripping off a sidewalk wrong and hitting your head on the curb. Is that really any better of a fate?
      • Retra 9y ago
        I don't know why you think dead people care how they got that way. I've never met one that did.
  • thrillgore 9y ago
    As long as I have a guarantee we can preserve our culture, I can care less about my future. Even if we lose our species, we should leave something behind that indicates we mattered.
    • matte_black 9y ago
      If our species doesn't survive, then we likely didn't matter to anyone. The human race will have only existed for nothing more than a blink of the universe's eye.
    • cr0sh 9y ago
      I think we have - between the Pioneer and Voyager probes, plus the various probes on Mars and Earth's moon.
• maxxxxx 9y ago
  " It can destroy all human civilization." I think saying stuff like this should be avoided. There is almost no chance that civilization will be destroyed. There will be major problems but the world won't go under. By making up total doom scenarios credibility of climate change proponents goes down a lot in my view.
  • rexaliquid 9y ago
    Our systems of civil society are fairly robust, but at some point those major problems become greater than our ability to cope. Unfortunately, "almost no chance" and "no chance" are not the same thing.
    • maxxxxx 9y ago
      It just seems highly unlikely to me. Even if 90% of the world becomes uninhabitable there is still plenty of space left for a lot of people. You can lose 90% or even 99% of world population and will still have a lot of people left. Not saying this is a good thing but I just don't believe civilization will get totally wiped out. Emphasis is on "totally".
      • rexaliquid 9y ago
        I think you are equating "human civilization" with "humanity". I agree that some people are likely to survive a catastrophe, but I don't think that what we think of as civilization is likely to survive a 90% or 99% population reduction. Or as lifeformed put it elsewhere: "Destroying all civilization doesn't mean destroying all humans, but just the structures that hold society together. A runaway heating scenario may be a pretty effective way of doing that - all crops die, wars for food, nukes get used."
        • maxxxxx 9y ago
          Let's say temps rise by 10 degrees and sea levels rise a lot. I would think there will still be a lot of areas that will be inhabitable. I don't think that the atmosphere will become unbreathable. I think you can have a pretty sophisticated civilization with 100 million or even 10 million people. Again, I am not saying these things are OK. We should worry about displacing millions of people and probably wars but civilization dying seems overblown and damaging to the argument that we should be doing something.
• legohead 9y ago
  I don't get their test case. They took it to the lab, and thawed it up to room temperature? That's not going to happen. It's going to get warmer, maybe just warm enough for the bacteria to thaw, and then immediately die. Did they do any realistic tests?
  • robotsonic 9y ago
    At first, I agreed, but then realized there's two issues with the argument I can think of: 1) to get to the warmer temperatures, you need to pass through the room temperature stage first. Things might change quickly, but not THAT quickly, meaning whatever is lurking in the soil can cause havoc/mutate/etc. before hitting it's upper temperature limits. 2) The areas where permafrost is generally found see summer temperatures generally at or below 'room temperature' now. I do agree, that their tests could have been more thorough and included future scenario temperatures, but may underestimate the problem by not allowing mutation time.
  • sulam 9y ago
    How warm do you really think things are going to get? There's no support for temperatures going up more than 20C. Bacteria will do just fine.
    • GlennS 9y ago
      I think you've misunderstood the comment you were replying to. I think they mean that the bacteria will not reach room temperature (20℃), but will get just warm enough to thaw out (1℃ or 2℃). The reason they could die is probably not heat, but lack of anything to eat.
• DaniFong 9y ago
  No no, we've still got this. We can do it.
• golemiprague 9y ago
  All those things can and did happen from various other reasons. I don't see why I should be worried about those things just because some human actions might lead to it. They might not, it might happen by nature with no relation to people, I refuse to worry about it, it is stupid.
• Flozzin 9y ago
  Does anyone have any good resources on why humans do this. Some christians love to talk about the book of revelations. There's a huge segment of the population in the US that loves the idea of a zombie apocalypse. What is the human fascination with the world ending? Directly to corpMav's post. Settle down buddy. 8 and 9 won't happen unlesss the earth get's hit by an asteroid of epic proportions or is finally consumed by an ever expanding sun. And 6 and 7 are also extremely unlikely, to a point of being laughable.