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Over the last 1+ billion years the Earth has gone through many shocking events. Not just large changes in global temperature through ice-age and warming periods
by seibelj 8y ago
Over the last 1+ billion years the Earth has gone through many shocking events. Not just large changes in global temperature through ice-age and warming periods, but the atmosphere composition, asteroids, super volcanoes, and so on. If the ancient life form is still alive today after all of that, I doubt global warming would cause it to die.
- empath75 8y agoSurvivorship bias. Lots and lots and lots of organisms died out during each of those changes. That things have survived so long is a matter of probability not inevitability.
- seibelj 8y agoMy point was that a 2 degree change in the atmosphere now isn't so extreme for a 1+ billion year old organism as all the other history it has lived through. I'm not trying to brush off the impact of global warming, I'm just placing it in the context of 1+ billion years of Earth history.
- akiselev 8y agoThat's the point? Anything that has survived for a billion years in a form that could still be considered roughly the same organism or a close descendant must have a relatively stable biochemistry and gene pool that is capable of surviving an extreme range of environmental changes - as close as you can get to a holy grail in natural selection. Obviously its survival would not be inevitable; not even stars can survive their own age.
- lkrubner 8y agoYou have the math backwards. If there are events that kill 99% of everything and a million such events occur, then the survivors must be hardy in the face of shock. Global warming won't kill them; they've already been through incidents of far worse warming and cooling.