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“All humans are going to die because the temperature gets too hot for our biology” is fallacious. Do you think we’ll gain 30C and Siberia will become unlivable?

“All humans are going to die because the temperature gets too hot for our biology” is fallacious. Do you think we’ll gain 30C and Siberia will become unlivable? Does everyone die when the summer temperature is 30C higher than winter? We are literally planning Martian colonies, do you think we can’t figure out how to survive on Earth? The issue is the effects of moderate temperature increases, rising sea levels, changing farming, etc. so it’s a mass disruption to our civilization (migration, resource wars, etc.) Not that we’ll literally be too hot and can’t somehow survive that as a species. Humans live in Australian Outback and Alaska. We are adaptable, but the growing pains are not pleasant, hence the problem to civilization.

jbay808 7y ago
There are a lot of periods in Earth's own geological history that humans would not have survived. There are also a lot of other rocks in our solar system that humans would not survive on. Whether or not we can survive climate change depends on the bounds of how much change happens and how quickly, especially in terms of feedback mechanisms (clathrate gun, H2S from an anaerobic sea, etc).
- minblaster 7y ago
  There was a temperature in recent times (hundreds of millions of years) where humans would not have survived, anywhere on Earth? Yet giant dinosaurs with the wrong ratio of mass to surface area did? Really, when? How much hotter was it in the past? I’m not saying we shouldn’t fix the issue. I’m saying the argument that the average temperature will be unlivable is bad. It’s like saying bullets kill people because of the lead content, not the process of getting injected. The process of climate change will impact us most, not the impact of the temperature on our biology.
  - jbay808 7y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_ext... We do have to be careful playing with the chemistry of the atmosphere of the only habitable planet we have.
    - minblaster 7y ago
      You do realize the chemistry of the atmosphere has changed far more than a few ppm of carbon, right? Like oxygen varying from 15% to 35%? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Sauerstoffgehalt-1000mj2.png/1280px-Sauerstoffgehalt-1000mj2.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Sa... The argument that extra CO2 or a few degrees C will be unlivable for humans is laughable. The changes to our civilization from this is not (farming, weather patterns, mass migrations).
      - jbay808 7y ago
        Yes, and that history of chemical changes is punctuated by global mass extinction events! Just saying, it's not like there's a law of nature that keeps Earth habitable for humans. We should be aware of that. I think you're shifting the goalposts -- earlier you seemed quite confident that there wasn't a period within hundreds of millions of years that wouldn't have been habitable by humans. Have I changed your mind about that? I don't think anyone who worries about climate change as an existential threat is thinking of sea level rise, a few degrees C and a few hundred ppm of carbon doing us in. Those could make life quote difficult at most. But it's the feedbacks that might run away from there, which are very hard to bound. How quickly might a few hundred ppm become a few thousand, if methane hydrates start to off-gas? Etc. How confident can you be that it won't happen, when the Earth has carried itself away before?
        minblaster 7y ago
        Sorry, not convinced that the earth has been uninhabitable for humans in the past few hundred million years. What conditions made it uninhabitable everywhere on the planet? Earlier posters made it seem like the problem with climate change was that earth was moving out of a narrow temperature band that supported human life. We live in the arctic, jungles, deserts, ice ages, mountaintops. We will be fine. The problem is the transition’s impact on our existing civilization (sea level change, new weather patterns), not the final temperature. Let me put it this way: if we discovered earth 100 years in the future, even with our current climate change rate, we would rejoice about how easily it could be colonized (vs Mars, the moon, etc). The climate will get hotter, and it’ll still be quite livable in places. This is the equivalent of people who think earth is in the “just right” orbit, if it were 10 feet off in either direction the planet would freeze or burn. And yet the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun varies by millions of miles, and we don’t light on fire when climbing a ladder. We don’t die because someone left the AC 5 degrees too hot or cold.

jbay808 7y ago

There are a lot of periods in Earth's own geological history that humans would not have survived. There are also a lot of other rocks in our solar system that humans would not survive on. Whether or not we can survive climate change depends on the bounds of how much change happens and how quickly, especially in terms of feedback mechanisms (clathrate gun, H2S from an anaerobic sea, etc).

minblaster 7y ago
There was a temperature in recent times (hundreds of millions of years) where humans would not have survived, anywhere on Earth? Yet giant dinosaurs with the wrong ratio of mass to surface area did? Really, when? How much hotter was it in the past? I’m not saying we shouldn’t fix the issue. I’m saying the argument that the average temperature will be unlivable is bad. It’s like saying bullets kill people because of the lead content, not the process of getting injected. The process of climate change will impact us most, not the impact of the temperature on our biology.
- jbay808 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_ext... We do have to be careful playing with the chemistry of the atmosphere of the only habitable planet we have.
  - minblaster 7y ago
    You do realize the chemistry of the atmosphere has changed far more than a few ppm of carbon, right? Like oxygen varying from 15% to 35%? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Sauerstoffgehalt-1000mj2.png/1280px-Sauerstoffgehalt-1000mj2.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Sa... The argument that extra CO2 or a few degrees C will be unlivable for humans is laughable. The changes to our civilization from this is not (farming, weather patterns, mass migrations).
    - jbay808 7y ago
      Yes, and that history of chemical changes is punctuated by global mass extinction events! Just saying, it's not like there's a law of nature that keeps Earth habitable for humans. We should be aware of that. I think you're shifting the goalposts -- earlier you seemed quite confident that there wasn't a period within hundreds of millions of years that wouldn't have been habitable by humans. Have I changed your mind about that? I don't think anyone who worries about climate change as an existential threat is thinking of sea level rise, a few degrees C and a few hundred ppm of carbon doing us in. Those could make life quote difficult at most. But it's the feedbacks that might run away from there, which are very hard to bound. How quickly might a few hundred ppm become a few thousand, if methane hydrates start to off-gas? Etc. How confident can you be that it won't happen, when the Earth has carried itself away before?
      - minblaster 7y ago
        Sorry, not convinced that the earth has been uninhabitable for humans in the past few hundred million years. What conditions made it uninhabitable everywhere on the planet? Earlier posters made it seem like the problem with climate change was that earth was moving out of a narrow temperature band that supported human life. We live in the arctic, jungles, deserts, ice ages, mountaintops. We will be fine. The problem is the transition’s impact on our existing civilization (sea level change, new weather patterns), not the final temperature. Let me put it this way: if we discovered earth 100 years in the future, even with our current climate change rate, we would rejoice about how easily it could be colonized (vs Mars, the moon, etc). The climate will get hotter, and it’ll still be quite livable in places. This is the equivalent of people who think earth is in the “just right” orbit, if it were 10 feet off in either direction the planet would freeze or burn. And yet the elliptical orbit of the earth around the sun varies by millions of miles, and we don’t light on fire when climbing a ladder. We don’t die because someone left the AC 5 degrees too hot or cold.