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51% of young voters believe humanity could be wiped out within 15 years

82 points by makerofspoons 7y ago

Peckingjay 7y ago
While I believe there might be some possibility that we might see some catastrophic events caused by climate change or human conflicts, I highly doubt that they would completely wipe humanity and/or make Earth wholly unhabitable. I can think of some scenarios that would lead to devastating losses and long-term consequences but I have a hard time picturing a complete extinction happening within 15 years, barring some crazy unlikely scenario like a big meteorite impact.
tempsy 7y ago
The only reasons I can think of is nuclear war and a second black plague
- umanwizard 7y ago
  What about a runaway climate change feedback loop making the earth uninhabitable? Or even more moderate climate change causing a collapse of the food chain?
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    And how likely are either of these?
    - audessuscest 7y ago
      very unlikely
  - jandrese 7y ago
    15 years is probably too extreme for even the most pessimistic climate change scenarios where you get to the point of boiling the oceans. However, these kids will be dealing with the consequences of extreme climate change in their lifetimes. Lots of people are going to die. Some societies will collapse. It's not going to be easy and having the world leaders today range from offering emotional support and no effective policy decisions to outright hostile to the entire concept of climate change is not helpful.
  - abootstrapper 7y ago
    Climate what now? /s For real though I swear half of hacker news must work in oil and gas.
  - blacksmith_tb 7y ago
    Human beings haven't relied on "the food chain" for thousands of years, but it's certainly true that climate change will have a big impact on agriculture, the recent IPCC report on land covers the topic in some depth[1]. Models of runaway change don't suggest humans would be wiped out (though I wouldn't want to live near a coastline...[2]), especially not within 15 years. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Climate_Change_and_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Climate_Chan... 2: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252
  - Aunche 7y ago
    The carbon locked up in fossil fuels and a lot of sedimentary rocks was in the atmosphere at some point. Granted the sun was a bit cooler, but the earth has been drastically warmer in the past and life went on just fine. We have the technology today to grow all of our food in hydroponic greenhouses in Siberia and Canada, but food is so cheap that nobody is bothering to.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    If we put a lot of effort on removing carbon from stable minerals, there is probably enough of it on Earth's crust to make it uninhabitable. But that's a large engineering effort that I don't think humanity is currently able to achieve.
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      Given that the climate is a chaotic system that nobody fully understands, how do you know this for sure?
      - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
        He said "probably" and "I don't think" which seems like enough hedging for me.
      - marcosdumay 7y ago
        Given that all that carbon that we are extracting has already been on the atmosphere once, with some of what is currently in stable mineral, and life didn't end at the time, it's unlikely that now, with a thinner atmosphere and a weaker Sun it will be enough. We have enough of a disaster to deal with, there's no need for fearmongering.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  why would a second black plague wipe out humanity?
  - tempsy 7y ago
    Because people are more fluid than ever. The world would probably need to stop all air travel and cross border travel immediately to contain it.
    - datpuz 7y ago
      Odds are slim that such a plague would kill every last person, even if everyone were to become infected.
      - decebalus1 7y ago
        You don't have to kill every last person in order to kill 'humanity'
        bryanrasmussen 7y ago
        sorry, is this like killing civilization or something? When I hear kill humanity I think after you are done killing humanity then humans will be extinct. So you don't need to kill every last person but enough that there wouldn't be any breeding populations scattered around. Seems pretty unlikely that a virus can manage that.
  - owenmarshall 7y ago
    "The black plague" may not, "a black plague" may. In other words, Y. pestis might still be treatable with modern antibiotics and is well controlled with modern sanitization. But if MERS-CoV and influenza got together, or NDM-1 genes horizontally transferred to group A strep, you could end up with a highly contagious and highly fulminant threat.
- Symmetry 7y ago
  Natural pandemics like the Black Death will seldom wipe out more than half the people in an affected area and never everybody. It's possible that someone might genetically engineer a plague to be dormant but transmissible for a year then suddenly kill its host but even with something like that you're probably going to miss pockets of people as large as were left after the Toba supervolcano 70,000 years ago. Nuclear war probably won't wipe out humanity either. Lots and lots of people would die in the countries involved and a few hundred miles downwind of the fallout but other locations would probably only see increased cancer rates. I say probably because while it looks like fears of nuclear winter were probably oversold there's still a fair chance that they weren't and we'd be looking at 5 years with no plant growth after a nuclear exchange. In which case, hey, there's this charity called ALLFED[1] working on how to feed people in the event of a nuclear winter or meteor impact or supervolcano eruption causes a global years long winter. Things like how to operationalize turning dead trees into edible mushrooms at a huge scale. [1]https://allfed.info https://allfed.info
simonsarris 7y ago
The doomsayer crowd should be ashamed of themselves for promoting this kind of emotional burnout. Even the worst IPCC projections don't speak of anything remotely like humanity being wiped out within 15 years. Panic does not jump start change nearly as much as it seems to jump start despair, bitterness, and contempt for anyone with doubts, which apparently now includes people who do not think we are doomed. These things that are very orthogonal, or in the way of, solving any actual hard problems that lie ahead of us.
- notyourwork 7y ago
  Instead of criticizing another perspective, you should put effort towards convincing people of another view point. Why should someone be ashamed of themselves for having an opinion? Projections are not facts so why are you treating them as such and saying “sorry you’re wrong”?
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    > Why should someone be ashamed of themselves for having an opinion? They should be ashamed for irrational fear-mongering.
  - excessive 7y ago
    > Instead of criticizing another perspective, you should put effort towards convincing people of another view point. That just doesn't work. Anytime someone dares express a view contrary to the group, they're shouted down and insulted into the ground. I'm very optimistic about the future of mankind, which is funny to me, considering how cynical I am about interactions with other people.
    - notyourwork 7y ago
      So instead we have a meta conversation about how one group is wrong and one is right?
      - excessive 7y ago
standardUser 7y ago
I've never understood this type of apocalyptic thinking. Humans are the most adaptable and most widespread of the large animals. We are arguable the best at surviving, at least in our 'class'. And while it's true we've come up with some pretty devastating ways to destroy each other and ourselves, that is very different from destroying all of humanity. We've faced plagues and global wars before, but even when huge portions of humanity have died off it's still not even close to all of it. Even trying to devise a way to guarantee that humans go extinct seems like an almost impossible thought exercise. How do you exterminate 7 billion people spread over ~57 million square miles of land?
- 29_29 7y ago
  We are living in very scary times. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/threat-limit-capital-flows-china-pending-impeachment-conflict-dalio/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/threat-limit-capital-flows-ch...
  - thfuran 7y ago
    What about that portends extinction?
- magashna 7y ago
  Maybe it's a good thing. Compared to earlier generation's ignorance or apathy I'd rather people think we need to fix things sooner than later.
- aeternum 7y ago
  How about just one 96km diameter asteroid?
- wgerard 7y ago
  > How do you exterminate 7 billion people spread over ~57 million square miles of land? I mean, just make the earth uninhabitable for humans. There are a few ways to accomplish this; even excluding climate change, nuclear weapons were and continue to be one such specter as the article alludes to. Sure, some people will continue to eke out an existence even then, but it's quite easy to imagine humanity perishing over the course of a few generations after an event like that. Also, when people say things like "humanity being wiped out" they usually don't literally mean "extinction of homo sapiens". They usually mean "quality of life significantly degraded" such that life resembles a Mad Max movie more than what we know today.
excessive 7y ago
Perhaps in another 25 years, after they've seen a few more rounds of "we're all going to die" (from Ebola, H1N1, AIDS, Killer Bees, Zika, etc...), they'll become a bit more suspicious of doom and gloom predictions.
- nguoi 7y ago
  I think I remember a similar statistic about most people during the cold war believing humanity would soon be extinct but I can't find anything about it.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Well, that was when there was a nuclear weapon pointed at every major city.
    - nguoi 7y ago
      There still is. Nuclear disarmament is going backwards.
- wgerard 7y ago
  Most of those "doom and gloom" predictions never came true because of tireless work by people to prevent it from happening. For example, the amount of effort that went into making AIDS more treatable is astronomical. See also: Ozone holes, Y2K, etc.
  - excessive 7y ago
    There's no way for me to win an argument like this. If I dare question how much effort was really spent avoiding any particular apocalypse, I'll just get labelled insensitive, stupid, tone deaf, and/or something worse. I've probably already said too much to avoid that. We can't even talk about talking about disagreement sanely. However, maybe you'll pay attention to all the dire predictions in the next ten years, and maybe ten years after that you'll notice that the world just keeps getting better despite all the people claiming it's worse and will end soon. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
deleted 7y ago
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joefourier 7y ago
There's no way climate change can wipe out the entirety of humanity and make the earth uninhabitable, especially in the next 15 years. Are greenhouse gases supposed to turn Earth into Venus in 15 years? That's the only way I see that it can truly become "uninhabitable", and I don't see how that can happen. Even then, a small percentage can always survive in closed-loop habitats shielded from the outside world, ala Biosphere 2.0.
- rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
  Biosphere 2.0 was a massive failure though. Hardly a reassuring worst case scenario.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Maybe not in 15 years, but climate change can cause enough of the earth to become uninhabitable that civilization crumbles. Wiping out 95% of humanity would almost certainly be enough to cause the downfall of modern society. Your Biosphere future is a highly optimistic one, IMO.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  The nearest humanity has got to a closed-loop habitat, that works on an ongoing basis, were the Soviets in the seventies during their lunar programme. We are far away from one that's viable. It can be the new fusion: "ready in twenty years"... indefinitely.
- british_india 7y ago
  Methane clathrates in the Arctic sea floor. Methane from decomposing formerly-permafrost in Siberia and Canada. Methane.
ralusek 7y ago
The two major problems with the discussion on climate change: 1.) Right-leaning, free-market, anti-authoritarian types need to understand that climate change is a negative third party externality, and there isn't a free market economist that wouldn't agree that the state has a role to play in ameliorating that. Focus on the strategies you think are best suited for that role, such as carbon taxes. 2.) Left-leaning climate advocates need to realistically prioritize objectives according to their tenability and impact. Airplanes contribute 2% of greenhouse emissions, how about we don't start there. Energy production constitutes by far the largest impact, how about we focus energy there, and not to beat a dead horse, but also seriously advocate on behalf of nuclear. They also forget that the other half of the equation, carbon capture, is almost unilaterally popular. Focusing efforts on where the most leeway can be achieved is a much better solution, particularly since carbon capture is capable of handling carbon emissions of states unwilling to regulate their own outputs. They also need to cool it with the catastrophizing. It is a bad strategy. All the opposition has to do is point out how incredibly off-base the predictions were in an An Inconvenient Truth, and they're done. Accurately identify where the feedback loops are that cause enormous leaps forward, and focus on those precise thresholds. Near linear progress in the way we've seen it creeping does not scare people, but that doesn't mean that we can just be wildly inaccurate with the predictions in order to scare people in to action. Lastly, don't shoehorn in other political policies alongside climate propositions. Green New Deal, for example, is first and foremost a bundle of socialist policies using climate activism as a vehicle. If this is truly the greatest threat to humanity, decouple it from adjacent political policy.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  > Energy production constitutes by far the largest impact Globally agriculture and lifestock has an impact as large as the entire electricity production. Eating less meat (no need for full vegan, just less) is probably the easiest and most impactful change we can do. Electricity is also important, but market forces are acutally doing fairly well in that area. The price of solar+storage in on track to drop below natural gas in a decade.
- jkingsbery 7y ago
  Thank you for making the Internet a more rational place today.
danschumann 7y ago
Everyone has probably always thought this way... then they live for 15 years and see that nothing much has changed. I do think that 'adulthood' is hitting people harder and harder. Our kid phase is kiddier and kiddier, and when your parents no longer take care of you, and you're staring at working for 20-40 years until you can experience that endless summer vacation (retirement), you could feel desperate.
lacker 7y ago
I find this headline to be misleading. I'm sure humanity could be wiped out within 15 years. There is some non-zero chance that a gamma-ray burst in the Milky Way wipes out life on Earth. But really these people are saying it is likely. Over the next 10-15 years, 29% of all voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that the earth will become uninhabitable and humanity will be wiped out. I don't think 29% of voters actually believe this. I think that nowadays, people frequently answer polls according to the emotional stance they would like to support, rather than the side of it they view to be factually correct.
- mjw1007 7y ago
  I'm not sure it's a matter of emotional stance. It could just be that many people view the opportunity to answer a poll as a means to an end, and don't feel any obligation to be truthful. In that case for some proportion of the respondents the poll question is equivalent to "would you like to take the opportunity to ask people to take climate change more seriously?". (This is probably particularly true in cases where the response option includes some vague undefined term like "somewhat likely", so that it's hard for selecting that option to be an outright lie.)
- non-entity 7y ago
  Also, a lot of polls seem to lead users with extreme. Offhand, I'm not sure of the legitimacy of this site or its polls (it's very self promotional, with my attention immediately drawn to this guy's book), but I'm sure many people have seen screenshots of campaign email polls where, say, you're asked if you support Candidate Y and your choices are: - Yes I support candidate Y - No, I support commies, nazis, etc. Not saying that's what this poll is, but like I noted this website does not seem overly trustworthy. Also doesn't 29% mean 29% of this site's audience who replied to the poll as opposed of all voters
martythemaniak 7y ago
I was reading an interview with Naomi Klein not long ago on the subject of "eco anxiety" amongst the young, and had a funny thought: Her work reminded me of the pre-reformation Catholic church. The practice of selling indulgences was the target of Martin Luther's theses, that is the church would preach Original Sin, fire-and-brimstone, etc, the offer convenient ways to purchase your way out of this terribleness. Authors like her preach a doomsday fire-and-brimstone of their own and very conveniently offer absolution by buying her books, implementing her views as laws (see Leap Manifesto in Canada) etc. I mean, I'm a pretty firm believer in taking a strong course towards a carbon-free future, but I don't think whipping up such a fear frenzy will turn out well.
- verdverm 7y ago
  Would carbon neutral be sufficient? It's going to be pretty hard to be carbon free considering it's fundamental role as an atom in chemistry. Consider the benefits to the cause of carbon nano materials
- dawg- 7y ago
  Environmentalism is the ultimate Original Sin for the 21st century. All humans are guilty of the original sin of consuming resources.
austincheney 7y ago
Weird. If I were to really feel that way I would forget any career, education, and public service aspirations and move to an idealistic mountainside community working off the land. I would build things for my immediate use and enjoy the scenery with beautiful natural landscapes and no road rage traffic. If people really believe humanity will be wiped out in 15 years and yet still concern themselves with their checking accounts and sense of fashion I would really wonder if there is some kind of mental health illness at play.
- frogpelt 7y ago
  Simply change the question; "Do you think you will still be alive in 15 years?" You would probably get a different answer.
KoftaBob 7y ago
This nonsensical hyperbole only weakens the push to mitigate climate change and go green. Turning the movement into a doomsday cult only strengthens climate change deniers arguments.
KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago
Says a poll by someone selling a book about how we are too scared of the future. Don't believe this data at all.
henryw 7y ago
51% seems very extreme. Is Silicon Valley living in a bubble? On a side note, Foster City will be flooded with just a 1M [1] rise in sea level 20 years out [2]. 1. https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#13/37.5341/-122.3201?show=satellite&projections=0-K14_RCP85-SLR&level=1&unit=feet&pois=hide https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#13/37.5341/-122.3201?show=sa... 2. https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/state/california.us?comparisonType=county&forecastName=Basic&forecastType=NOAA2017_int_p50&level=3&unit=ft https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/state/california.us?co...
- thfuran 7y ago
  > Is Silicon Valley living in a bubble? Is that a joke?
- fooker 7y ago
  It will take far longer than 20 years for 1m rise in sea level. Even in the very unlikely scenario that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere quadruple, it will take about 250 years. Why panic instead of coming up with feasible solutions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise#/media/File:Projected_change_in_global_sea_level_rise_if_atmospheric_carbon_dioxide_concentrations_were_to_either_quadruple_or_double_(NOAA_GFDL).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise#/media/File:Pro...
  - yread 7y ago
    That's not true. This graph is "Thermal expansion only" so it doesn't count melting the glaciers at all! According to the worst case predictions from the article it can take ~50 years for 1m rise.
metabagel 7y ago
This poll seems suspect. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it, until it's corroborated or we know more about the methodology (which I couldn't find in an admittedly cursory search).
man_in_agharta 7y ago
Just a few days ago I encountered a Patagonia campaign with the banner 'facing extinction' superimposed over a slideshow of somber, adolescent faces. While I'm sure it's well-intentioned, apocalyptic messaging of this sort damages the credibility of actual projections that are genuinely alarming. Conflating 'catastrophic climate change' (ie. more thousand year floods) and 'apocalyptic climate change' (ie. a big flood will kill us all!) muddies the water and lends ammunition to climate deniers. Even nuclear war would likely leave a few stragglers to rebuild some semblance of society that worships a manna-giving snack machine.
DannyB2 7y ago
Maybe humanity won't be wiped out in 15 years. What is the possibility that in 15 years it is too late to turn around climate change? (I don't know the answer.)
WhompingWindows 7y ago
Sorry, this is too vague for me...humanity as a civilization "could be wiped out", well of course we could. If a meteor hits us or we accidentally and/or intentionally set off a bunch of nuclear weapons...yes, we "could" be wiped out. But will climate change, a long-run issue, wipe out humanity in 15? I don't think even pessimistic forecasters are predicting that 2034 will be the end of civilization due to climate.
wolco 7y ago
What happened is a culture of fear around climate change that started with the Al Gore movie. That generation is being told if we don't act immediately you won't have a future. What ends up happening is in 15 years nothing happens and these people get more jaded.
zarro 7y ago
I think its funny how "A majority believes in something" is enough to justify an opinion.
znpy 7y ago
If this helps with handling the climate emergency I am okay with that. A lot of people believe a lot of things some serious some stupid. I don't see why we should be concerned if people believe that a real problem is, in fact, real.
mnm1 7y ago
That's absurd. People have been living in harsh conditions (120°F desert weather, <32°F freezing temps for big chunks of the year) for millennia and likely hundreds of thousands of years with none of the technology we currently enjoy. There are more people now than ever before. I can't even see an all out nuclear war combined worth +6°C average temperature increase leading to extinction. Some people somewhere will survive. Maybe many or even most might die in such a scenario but to wipe out humanity, I don't think that possibility currently exists.
fallingfrog 7y ago
15 years? Very odd. I mean the decisions we make now are very important but if humanity gets wiped out it will be sometime in the 75-150 year timescale.
wongarsu 7y ago
The only scenarios I can come up with for making earth uninhabitable or wiping out humanity within 15 years are biological warfare or freak astronomic events (giant meteor impact, being hit by a supernova etc). Maybe a pole shift. None of these seem likely (well, the pole shift might be happening right now, but we likely have a millenia left to figure that one out). I can imagine that we have set the feedback cycles in motion that will make Florida uninhabitable. But I fail to imagine how we might make Germany uninhabitable within 150 years (small coast completely covered by costal defenses, most of the country over 200m above sea level, well equiped for snow so a local ice age could be managed, fairly far north so warming isn't a major threat to agriculture). Even if we managed to make that uninhabitable we could just move to Siberia.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Not biological warfare, just wars, humanity is still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. And ebola-level threats can rise on their own without warfare.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    However we are fairly good at containing ebola-level threats. Sure, the ebola outbreak of 2014 shut down three countries and required a big international effort to clean up, but in the end only 11300 people died. Killing humanity would require a lot worse. All out nuclear war would be pretty bad and might end humanity, but US and Russia have a well practised routine of interference and proxy wars that gives aggression a less deadly outlet, and the other potential match-ups like India-Pakistan or Israel-Iran would be very localized.
socialist_coder 7y ago
Ok, I guess I'll be the first to bring up red meat production. Our love affair with eating meat (specifically red meat) has 3 pretty bad side effects: * greenhouse effect (something like 18% of the total greenhouse effect is from farm animal produced methane). * uses a ton of fresh water (hundreds of times more water used to product beef than vegetables). * uses up valuable farm land to grow animal feed crops (something like 33% of all arable land on Earth). So, lets pass some fucking taxes on red meat, eh?
SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago
Climate change won't be what directly kills humanity. The global thermonuclear war started by the political/economic disruption due to climate change will.
- vixen99 7y ago
  According to some reports the number of near Earth objects is now of the order of 2000 per year and several of those have been undetected until only a few days prior to nearest approach. I'd factor in this eventual inevitability as well. One day some large object will be on course that will spell the end for us. Time to gear up in preparation given that our present defensive resources are pitiful.
nec4b 7y ago
Young people are constantly bombarded with the climate change hysteria and their grasp of time is usually less accurate than that of an older person.
RHSman2 7y ago
There are some good words being written for and against. But words are stupid compared to methane being released from the permafrost which intensifies the green house effect by 3 times that of carbon dioxide. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And it’s unbelievably fucking sad. In 15 years we’ll have a good idea of how truly screwed we are. But it’s ok. Elon will send us to Mars.
carapace 7y ago
The uniformity and prevalence of the head-in-the-sand responses here on this thread are exactly the thing you would expect to see right before people start to panic. In a way this is very hopeful.
eqdw 7y ago
Unless "could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, there is no conceivable way this is true. Young peoples' actions do not support the idea that they believe this. You'd see a lot more people doing insane things to cross items off of their bucket lists if this was true. Instead you see these young people going about their lives as if nothing is any different.
Grue3 7y ago
Young people are wrong about something: news at eleven. I can see how people who didn't live through any war, or catastrophic event in their entire life would believe that.

82 points by makerofspoons 7y ago

While I believe there might be some possibility that we might see some catastrophic events caused by climate change or human conflicts, I highly doubt that they would completely wipe humanity and/or make Earth wholly unhabitable. I can think of some scenarios that would lead to devastating losses and long-term consequences but I have a hard time picturing a complete extinction happening within 15 years, barring some crazy unlikely scenario like a big meteorite impact.

tempsy 7y ago

The only reasons I can think of is nuclear war and a second black plague

umanwizard 7y ago
What about a runaway climate change feedback loop making the earth uninhabitable? Or even more moderate climate change causing a collapse of the food chain?
- mieseratte 7y ago
  And how likely are either of these?
  - audessuscest 7y ago
    very unlikely
- jandrese 7y ago
  15 years is probably too extreme for even the most pessimistic climate change scenarios where you get to the point of boiling the oceans. However, these kids will be dealing with the consequences of extreme climate change in their lifetimes. Lots of people are going to die. Some societies will collapse. It's not going to be easy and having the world leaders today range from offering emotional support and no effective policy decisions to outright hostile to the entire concept of climate change is not helpful.
- abootstrapper 7y ago
  Climate what now? /s For real though I swear half of hacker news must work in oil and gas.
- blacksmith_tb 7y ago
  Human beings haven't relied on "the food chain" for thousands of years, but it's certainly true that climate change will have a big impact on agriculture, the recent IPCC report on land covers the topic in some depth[1]. Models of runaway change don't suggest humans would be wiped out (though I wouldn't want to live near a coastline...[2]), especially not within 15 years. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Climate_Change_and_Land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Climate_Chan... 2: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252
- Aunche 7y ago
  The carbon locked up in fossil fuels and a lot of sedimentary rocks was in the atmosphere at some point. Granted the sun was a bit cooler, but the earth has been drastically warmer in the past and life went on just fine. We have the technology today to grow all of our food in hydroponic greenhouses in Siberia and Canada, but food is so cheap that nobody is bothering to.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  If we put a lot of effort on removing carbon from stable minerals, there is probably enough of it on Earth's crust to make it uninhabitable. But that's a large engineering effort that I don't think humanity is currently able to achieve.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Given that the climate is a chaotic system that nobody fully understands, how do you know this for sure?
    - amanaplanacanal 7y ago
      He said "probably" and "I don't think" which seems like enough hedging for me.
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      Given that all that carbon that we are extracting has already been on the atmosphere once, with some of what is currently in stable mineral, and life didn't end at the time, it's unlikely that now, with a thinner atmosphere and a weaker Sun it will be enough. We have enough of a disaster to deal with, there's no need for fearmongering.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
why would a second black plague wipe out humanity?
- tempsy 7y ago
  Because people are more fluid than ever. The world would probably need to stop all air travel and cross border travel immediately to contain it.
  - datpuz 7y ago
    Odds are slim that such a plague would kill every last person, even if everyone were to become infected.
    - decebalus1 7y ago
      You don't have to kill every last person in order to kill 'humanity'
      - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
        sorry, is this like killing civilization or something? When I hear kill humanity I think after you are done killing humanity then humans will be extinct. So you don't need to kill every last person but enough that there wouldn't be any breeding populations scattered around. Seems pretty unlikely that a virus can manage that.
- owenmarshall 7y ago
  "The black plague" may not, "a black plague" may. In other words, Y. pestis might still be treatable with modern antibiotics and is well controlled with modern sanitization. But if MERS-CoV and influenza got together, or NDM-1 genes horizontally transferred to group A strep, you could end up with a highly contagious and highly fulminant threat.
Symmetry 7y ago
Natural pandemics like the Black Death will seldom wipe out more than half the people in an affected area and never everybody. It's possible that someone might genetically engineer a plague to be dormant but transmissible for a year then suddenly kill its host but even with something like that you're probably going to miss pockets of people as large as were left after the Toba supervolcano 70,000 years ago. Nuclear war probably won't wipe out humanity either. Lots and lots of people would die in the countries involved and a few hundred miles downwind of the fallout but other locations would probably only see increased cancer rates. I say probably because while it looks like fears of nuclear winter were probably oversold there's still a fair chance that they weren't and we'd be looking at 5 years with no plant growth after a nuclear exchange. In which case, hey, there's this charity called ALLFED[1] working on how to feed people in the event of a nuclear winter or meteor impact or supervolcano eruption causes a global years long winter. Things like how to operationalize turning dead trees into edible mushrooms at a huge scale. [1]https://allfed.info https://allfed.info

simonsarris 7y ago

The doomsayer crowd should be ashamed of themselves for promoting this kind of emotional burnout. Even the worst IPCC projections don't speak of anything remotely like humanity being wiped out within 15 years. Panic does not jump start change nearly as much as it seems to jump start despair, bitterness, and contempt for anyone with doubts, which apparently now includes people who do not think we are doomed. These things that are very orthogonal, or in the way of, solving any actual hard problems that lie ahead of us.

notyourwork 7y ago
Instead of criticizing another perspective, you should put effort towards convincing people of another view point. Why should someone be ashamed of themselves for having an opinion? Projections are not facts so why are you treating them as such and saying “sorry you’re wrong”?
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > Why should someone be ashamed of themselves for having an opinion? They should be ashamed for irrational fear-mongering.
- excessive 7y ago
  > Instead of criticizing another perspective, you should put effort towards convincing people of another view point. That just doesn't work. Anytime someone dares express a view contrary to the group, they're shouted down and insulted into the ground. I'm very optimistic about the future of mankind, which is funny to me, considering how cynical I am about interactions with other people.
  - notyourwork 7y ago
    So instead we have a meta conversation about how one group is wrong and one is right?
    - excessive 7y ago

standardUser 7y ago

I've never understood this type of apocalyptic thinking. Humans are the most adaptable and most widespread of the large animals. We are arguable the best at surviving, at least in our 'class'. And while it's true we've come up with some pretty devastating ways to destroy each other and ourselves, that is very different from destroying all of humanity. We've faced plagues and global wars before, but even when huge portions of humanity have died off it's still not even close to all of it. Even trying to devise a way to guarantee that humans go extinct seems like an almost impossible thought exercise. How do you exterminate 7 billion people spread over ~57 million square miles of land?

29_29 7y ago
We are living in very scary times. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/threat-limit-capital-flows-china-pending-impeachment-conflict-dalio/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/threat-limit-capital-flows-ch...
- thfuran 7y ago
  What about that portends extinction?
magashna 7y ago
Maybe it's a good thing. Compared to earlier generation's ignorance or apathy I'd rather people think we need to fix things sooner than later.
aeternum 7y ago
How about just one 96km diameter asteroid?
wgerard 7y ago
> How do you exterminate 7 billion people spread over ~57 million square miles of land? I mean, just make the earth uninhabitable for humans. There are a few ways to accomplish this; even excluding climate change, nuclear weapons were and continue to be one such specter as the article alludes to. Sure, some people will continue to eke out an existence even then, but it's quite easy to imagine humanity perishing over the course of a few generations after an event like that. Also, when people say things like "humanity being wiped out" they usually don't literally mean "extinction of homo sapiens". They usually mean "quality of life significantly degraded" such that life resembles a Mad Max movie more than what we know today.

excessive 7y ago

Perhaps in another 25 years, after they've seen a few more rounds of "we're all going to die" (from Ebola, H1N1, AIDS, Killer Bees, Zika, etc...), they'll become a bit more suspicious of doom and gloom predictions.

nguoi 7y ago
I think I remember a similar statistic about most people during the cold war believing humanity would soon be extinct but I can't find anything about it.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Well, that was when there was a nuclear weapon pointed at every major city.
  - nguoi 7y ago
    There still is. Nuclear disarmament is going backwards.
wgerard 7y ago
Most of those "doom and gloom" predictions never came true because of tireless work by people to prevent it from happening. For example, the amount of effort that went into making AIDS more treatable is astronomical. See also: Ozone holes, Y2K, etc.
- excessive 7y ago
  There's no way for me to win an argument like this. If I dare question how much effort was really spent avoiding any particular apocalypse, I'll just get labelled insensitive, stupid, tone deaf, and/or something worse. I've probably already said too much to avoid that. We can't even talk about talking about disagreement sanely. However, maybe you'll pay attention to all the dire predictions in the next ten years, and maybe ten years after that you'll notice that the world just keeps getting better despite all the people claiming it's worse and will end soon. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

deleted 7y ago

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joefourier 7y ago

There's no way climate change can wipe out the entirety of humanity and make the earth uninhabitable, especially in the next 15 years. Are greenhouse gases supposed to turn Earth into Venus in 15 years? That's the only way I see that it can truly become "uninhabitable", and I don't see how that can happen. Even then, a small percentage can always survive in closed-loop habitats shielded from the outside world, ala Biosphere 2.0.

rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
Biosphere 2.0 was a massive failure though. Hardly a reassuring worst case scenario.
pmiller2 7y ago
Maybe not in 15 years, but climate change can cause enough of the earth to become uninhabitable that civilization crumbles. Wiping out 95% of humanity would almost certainly be enough to cause the downfall of modern society. Your Biosphere future is a highly optimistic one, IMO.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
The nearest humanity has got to a closed-loop habitat, that works on an ongoing basis, were the Soviets in the seventies during their lunar programme. We are far away from one that's viable. It can be the new fusion: "ready in twenty years"... indefinitely.
british_india 7y ago
Methane clathrates in the Arctic sea floor. Methane from decomposing formerly-permafrost in Siberia and Canada. Methane.

ralusek 7y ago

The two major problems with the discussion on climate change: 1.) Right-leaning, free-market, anti-authoritarian types need to understand that climate change is a negative third party externality, and there isn't a free market economist that wouldn't agree that the state has a role to play in ameliorating that. Focus on the strategies you think are best suited for that role, such as carbon taxes. 2.) Left-leaning climate advocates need to realistically prioritize objectives according to their tenability and impact. Airplanes contribute 2% of greenhouse emissions, how about we don't start there. Energy production constitutes by far the largest impact, how about we focus energy there, and not to beat a dead horse, but also seriously advocate on behalf of nuclear. They also forget that the other half of the equation, carbon capture, is almost unilaterally popular. Focusing efforts on where the most leeway can be achieved is a much better solution, particularly since carbon capture is capable of handling carbon emissions of states unwilling to regulate their own outputs. They also need to cool it with the catastrophizing. It is a bad strategy. All the opposition has to do is point out how incredibly off-base the predictions were in an An Inconvenient Truth, and they're done. Accurately identify where the feedback loops are that cause enormous leaps forward, and focus on those precise thresholds. Near linear progress in the way we've seen it creeping does not scare people, but that doesn't mean that we can just be wildly inaccurate with the predictions in order to scare people in to action. Lastly, don't shoehorn in other political policies alongside climate propositions. Green New Deal, for example, is first and foremost a bundle of socialist policies using climate activism as a vehicle. If this is truly the greatest threat to humanity, decouple it from adjacent political policy.

wongarsu 7y ago
> Energy production constitutes by far the largest impact Globally agriculture and lifestock has an impact as large as the entire electricity production. Eating less meat (no need for full vegan, just less) is probably the easiest and most impactful change we can do. Electricity is also important, but market forces are acutally doing fairly well in that area. The price of solar+storage in on track to drop below natural gas in a decade.
jkingsbery 7y ago
Thank you for making the Internet a more rational place today.

danschumann 7y ago

Everyone has probably always thought this way... then they live for 15 years and see that nothing much has changed. I do think that 'adulthood' is hitting people harder and harder. Our kid phase is kiddier and kiddier, and when your parents no longer take care of you, and you're staring at working for 20-40 years until you can experience that endless summer vacation (retirement), you could feel desperate.

lacker 7y ago

I find this headline to be misleading. I'm sure humanity could be wiped out within 15 years. There is some non-zero chance that a gamma-ray burst in the Milky Way wipes out life on Earth. But really these people are saying it is likely. Over the next 10-15 years, 29% of all voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that the earth will become uninhabitable and humanity will be wiped out. I don't think 29% of voters actually believe this. I think that nowadays, people frequently answer polls according to the emotional stance they would like to support, rather than the side of it they view to be factually correct.

mjw1007 7y ago
I'm not sure it's a matter of emotional stance. It could just be that many people view the opportunity to answer a poll as a means to an end, and don't feel any obligation to be truthful. In that case for some proportion of the respondents the poll question is equivalent to "would you like to take the opportunity to ask people to take climate change more seriously?". (This is probably particularly true in cases where the response option includes some vague undefined term like "somewhat likely", so that it's hard for selecting that option to be an outright lie.)
non-entity 7y ago
Also, a lot of polls seem to lead users with extreme. Offhand, I'm not sure of the legitimacy of this site or its polls (it's very self promotional, with my attention immediately drawn to this guy's book), but I'm sure many people have seen screenshots of campaign email polls where, say, you're asked if you support Candidate Y and your choices are: - Yes I support candidate Y - No, I support commies, nazis, etc. Not saying that's what this poll is, but like I noted this website does not seem overly trustworthy. Also doesn't 29% mean 29% of this site's audience who replied to the poll as opposed of all voters

martythemaniak 7y ago

I was reading an interview with Naomi Klein not long ago on the subject of "eco anxiety" amongst the young, and had a funny thought: Her work reminded me of the pre-reformation Catholic church. The practice of selling indulgences was the target of Martin Luther's theses, that is the church would preach Original Sin, fire-and-brimstone, etc, the offer convenient ways to purchase your way out of this terribleness. Authors like her preach a doomsday fire-and-brimstone of their own and very conveniently offer absolution by buying her books, implementing her views as laws (see Leap Manifesto in Canada) etc. I mean, I'm a pretty firm believer in taking a strong course towards a carbon-free future, but I don't think whipping up such a fear frenzy will turn out well.

verdverm 7y ago
Would carbon neutral be sufficient? It's going to be pretty hard to be carbon free considering it's fundamental role as an atom in chemistry. Consider the benefits to the cause of carbon nano materials
dawg- 7y ago
Environmentalism is the ultimate Original Sin for the 21st century. All humans are guilty of the original sin of consuming resources.

austincheney 7y ago

Weird. If I were to really feel that way I would forget any career, education, and public service aspirations and move to an idealistic mountainside community working off the land. I would build things for my immediate use and enjoy the scenery with beautiful natural landscapes and no road rage traffic. If people really believe humanity will be wiped out in 15 years and yet still concern themselves with their checking accounts and sense of fashion I would really wonder if there is some kind of mental health illness at play.

frogpelt 7y ago
Simply change the question; "Do you think you will still be alive in 15 years?" You would probably get a different answer.

KoftaBob 7y ago

This nonsensical hyperbole only weakens the push to mitigate climate change and go green. Turning the movement into a doomsday cult only strengthens climate change deniers arguments.

KaoruAoiShiho 7y ago

Says a poll by someone selling a book about how we are too scared of the future. Don't believe this data at all.

henryw 7y ago

51% seems very extreme. Is Silicon Valley living in a bubble? On a side note, Foster City will be flooded with just a 1M [1] rise in sea level 20 years out [2]. 1. https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#13/37.5341/-122.3201?show=satellite&projections=0-K14_RCP85-SLR&level=1&unit=feet&pois=hide https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#13/37.5341/-122.3201?show=sa... 2. https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/state/california.us?comparisonType=county&forecastName=Basic&forecastType=NOAA2017_int_p50&level=3&unit=ft https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/state/california.us?co...

thfuran 7y ago
> Is Silicon Valley living in a bubble? Is that a joke?
fooker 7y ago
It will take far longer than 20 years for 1m rise in sea level. Even in the very unlikely scenario that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere quadruple, it will take about 250 years. Why panic instead of coming up with feasible solutions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise#/media/File:Projected_change_in_global_sea_level_rise_if_atmospheric_carbon_dioxide_concentrations_were_to_either_quadruple_or_double_(NOAA_GFDL).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise#/media/File:Pro...
- yread 7y ago
  That's not true. This graph is "Thermal expansion only" so it doesn't count melting the glaciers at all! According to the worst case predictions from the article it can take ~50 years for 1m rise.

metabagel 7y ago

This poll seems suspect. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it, until it's corroborated or we know more about the methodology (which I couldn't find in an admittedly cursory search).

man_in_agharta 7y ago

Just a few days ago I encountered a Patagonia campaign with the banner 'facing extinction' superimposed over a slideshow of somber, adolescent faces. While I'm sure it's well-intentioned, apocalyptic messaging of this sort damages the credibility of actual projections that are genuinely alarming. Conflating 'catastrophic climate change' (ie. more thousand year floods) and 'apocalyptic climate change' (ie. a big flood will kill us all!) muddies the water and lends ammunition to climate deniers. Even nuclear war would likely leave a few stragglers to rebuild some semblance of society that worships a manna-giving snack machine.

DannyB2 7y ago

Maybe humanity won't be wiped out in 15 years. What is the possibility that in 15 years it is too late to turn around climate change? (I don't know the answer.)

WhompingWindows 7y ago

Sorry, this is too vague for me...humanity as a civilization "could be wiped out", well of course we could. If a meteor hits us or we accidentally and/or intentionally set off a bunch of nuclear weapons...yes, we "could" be wiped out. But will climate change, a long-run issue, wipe out humanity in 15? I don't think even pessimistic forecasters are predicting that 2034 will be the end of civilization due to climate.

wolco 7y ago

What happened is a culture of fear around climate change that started with the Al Gore movie. That generation is being told if we don't act immediately you won't have a future. What ends up happening is in 15 years nothing happens and these people get more jaded.

zarro 7y ago

I think its funny how "A majority believes in something" is enough to justify an opinion.

znpy 7y ago

If this helps with handling the climate emergency I am okay with that. A lot of people believe a lot of things some serious some stupid. I don't see why we should be concerned if people believe that a real problem is, in fact, real.

mnm1 7y ago

That's absurd. People have been living in harsh conditions (120°F desert weather, <32°F freezing temps for big chunks of the year) for millennia and likely hundreds of thousands of years with none of the technology we currently enjoy. There are more people now than ever before. I can't even see an all out nuclear war combined worth +6°C average temperature increase leading to extinction. Some people somewhere will survive. Maybe many or even most might die in such a scenario but to wipe out humanity, I don't think that possibility currently exists.

fallingfrog 7y ago

15 years? Very odd. I mean the decisions we make now are very important but if humanity gets wiped out it will be sometime in the 75-150 year timescale.

wongarsu 7y ago

The only scenarios I can come up with for making earth uninhabitable or wiping out humanity within 15 years are biological warfare or freak astronomic events (giant meteor impact, being hit by a supernova etc). Maybe a pole shift. None of these seem likely (well, the pole shift might be happening right now, but we likely have a millenia left to figure that one out). I can imagine that we have set the feedback cycles in motion that will make Florida uninhabitable. But I fail to imagine how we might make Germany uninhabitable within 150 years (small coast completely covered by costal defenses, most of the country over 200m above sea level, well equiped for snow so a local ice age could be managed, fairly far north so warming isn't a major threat to agriculture). Even if we managed to make that uninhabitable we could just move to Siberia.

zzzcpan 7y ago
Not biological warfare, just wars, humanity is still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. And ebola-level threats can rise on their own without warfare.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  However we are fairly good at containing ebola-level threats. Sure, the ebola outbreak of 2014 shut down three countries and required a big international effort to clean up, but in the end only 11300 people died. Killing humanity would require a lot worse. All out nuclear war would be pretty bad and might end humanity, but US and Russia have a well practised routine of interference and proxy wars that gives aggression a less deadly outlet, and the other potential match-ups like India-Pakistan or Israel-Iran would be very localized.

socialist_coder 7y ago

Ok, I guess I'll be the first to bring up red meat production. Our love affair with eating meat (specifically red meat) has 3 pretty bad side effects: * greenhouse effect (something like 18% of the total greenhouse effect is from farm animal produced methane). * uses a ton of fresh water (hundreds of times more water used to product beef than vegetables). * uses up valuable farm land to grow animal feed crops (something like 33% of all arable land on Earth). So, lets pass some fucking taxes on red meat, eh?

SAI_Peregrinus 7y ago

Climate change won't be what directly kills humanity. The global thermonuclear war started by the political/economic disruption due to climate change will.

vixen99 7y ago
According to some reports the number of near Earth objects is now of the order of 2000 per year and several of those have been undetected until only a few days prior to nearest approach. I'd factor in this eventual inevitability as well. One day some large object will be on course that will spell the end for us. Time to gear up in preparation given that our present defensive resources are pitiful.

nec4b 7y ago

Young people are constantly bombarded with the climate change hysteria and their grasp of time is usually less accurate than that of an older person.

RHSman2 7y ago

There are some good words being written for and against. But words are stupid compared to methane being released from the permafrost which intensifies the green house effect by 3 times that of carbon dioxide. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And it’s unbelievably fucking sad. In 15 years we’ll have a good idea of how truly screwed we are. But it’s ok. Elon will send us to Mars.

carapace 7y ago

The uniformity and prevalence of the head-in-the-sand responses here on this thread are exactly the thing you would expect to see right before people start to panic. In a way this is very hopeful.

eqdw 7y ago

Unless "could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, there is no conceivable way this is true. Young peoples' actions do not support the idea that they believe this. You'd see a lot more people doing insane things to cross items off of their bucket lists if this was true. Instead you see these young people going about their lives as if nothing is any different.

Grue3 7y ago

Young people are wrong about something: news at eleven. I can see how people who didn't live through any war, or catastrophic event in their entire life would believe that.