8 ms·

By 2500 earth could be alien to humans

81 points by hhs 5y ago

jollybean 5y ago
Unless we invent Nuclear Energy and do what France did in the 1970's and build a handful of reactors which provided for almost all of their energy needs, which uses a small amount of fuel plentifully found in Australia and Canada and which will last for 1000's of years, and, for which we actually do have feasible ways to store waste.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Just remember not to lie to everyone about the relative safety of your plants.
  - elihu 5y ago
    That's the hard part, though. I think the debate about whether or not to use nuclear is less about whether we can design a safe reactor, and more about whether we can design a human organizational structure to maintain the reactors over their whole lifetime in such a way that people who don't have specialized knowledge can be highly confident that the reactors are being managed in a safe way. The model of having a for-profit company run the plant with a government regulator looking over their shoulder works most of the time, but it breaks down when the regulators become too friendly with the industry they oversee (regulatory capture). Maybe there are other, better models. We don't have the same risk with wind and solar because the damage that can be done with a broken windmill or malfunctioning solar array is much less. The public doesn't have to trust the operators to the same degree.
- erentz 5y ago
  Thought recently seen somewhere but don’t know who to credit: If nuclear power were just discovered yesterday, we’d all be hailing it as the miracle to solve climate change.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    The problem with climate change is it doesn't kill people quick enough for us to take action. Covid on the other hand, we rushed out vaccines and people have generally accepted massive disruption to their lives to tame it. Even with Covid not all governments wanted to react quickly. If we treated climate change like covid, we'd be finding a way to create lots of nuclear reactors around the world really quickly. We might even create a few hundred of them in the middle of Australia and use it to make hydrogen or some other fuel and ship it around.
    - erentz 5y ago
      Yep. The thought experiment does a good job I think of highlighting just how much being linked to nuclear weapons and thus became a target for peace and environmental action has screwed us. Take that history away, drop this gift from the universe in our lap yesterday, and every environmentalist would be on board today.
      - quickthrower2 5y ago
        Yes that and Chernobyl too creates a bad image of nuclear.
consumer451 5y ago
And potentially uninhabitable within ~2500 yrs. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138252/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138252/
thisiscorrect 5y ago
The author apparently expect the Singularity to happen Real Soon Now. I guess our children will be living to 2500. "To fully grasp and plan for climate impacts under any scenario, researchers and policymakers must look well beyond the 2100 benchmark. Unless CO2 emissions drop significantly, global warming by 2500 will make the Amazon barren, the American Midwest tropical, and India too hot to live in, according to a team of international scientists. 'We need to envision the Earth our children and grandchildren may face, and what we can do now to make it just and liveable for them,' says Christopher Lyon, a Postdoctoral Researcher under the supervision of Professor Elena Bennett at McGill University."
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  The election cycle forces politicians to only care 4 years ahead, let alone 100 years, and so impossibly 500 years into the future.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    In Mexico, as in the Confederate States constitution for some reason, there are six year presidential terms, without reelection prospects. Does it greatly alter governance? Xi in China recently abolished presidential term limits.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > In Mexico, as in the Confederate States constitution for some reason, there are six year presidential terms, without reelection prospects. Does it greatly alter governance? It's kind of hard to tell; Mexico has only had a few Presidential terms as something other than a fig-leaf democracy over a one-party corporatist state which freely used the power of the State to assure the dominance of the Party.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    Does the supreme court, currently the closest we have to monarchs, generate better outcomes? Arguably not. I believe it's the institutions of selection that matter more. Who and what are they constituents of and where have we manufactured their incentives to be. For instance let's say you have unborn generations rights such as say the right to a tamer climate, just as a theoretical example. Then you could take people into courts for violating those rights. You could have some kind of trust that can fund candidates based on long term ROIs so if they say, support early childhood education, a great ROI, they can access funds as an instrument of debt (really an issued bond) which will be covered by the yield of their investments into our children's futures. So for instance, there's some agreed upon metric that ever dollar invested in preschool will generate an extra say $100 in lifetime earnings, taxed at ~30%, that dollar will yield a 30x return. So a debt instrument of say $1 funding per dollar invested up to some cap is issued by a trust to future generations to finance candidates who will allocate funds accordingly. The bond will be paid in the future through the increased tax revenue. It can be a convertible note so if the politician fails to act, it can become debt on the books. This makes the pool of money more secure the more candidates dip into it, creating a virtuous cycle and thus institutionalizing it. Candidates who successfully diligently invest in far future payoffs, perhaps well after they're dead, will have access to a large pool of money to win election today. If corporations and other legal fictions have rights, there's really no reason they can't be granted to other concepts as well.
zetalyrae 5y ago
Complete absurdity. By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise. Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability. This is like those articles about how "in 30,000 years humans will evolve to look like goblins because smartphone". It's status quo bias with James Burnham/Ray Kurzweil levels of unprincipled extrapolation.
- hhs 5y ago
  It was strange, but the paper [0] concludes: > Our projections and associated approaches to adaptation governance represent an initial attempt and have considerable uncertainty given their extended time horizon. These efforts are meant to highlight the need for more sophisticated climate and Earth system modelling beyond 2100, including a focus on aspects of ecosystem goods and services not considered here. Our work thus provides a framework and baseline for the assessment of longer-term anthropogenic effects on climate and Earth systems, and highlights the critical need for further work in this area. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871
- clajiness 5y ago
  > By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise. Source?
  - zetalyrae 5y ago
    My own intuition and knowledge.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      In 1895 Lord Kelvin stated that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” 1900's gave us first flight on a plane made of wood, by 1960's we had spaceflight and nuclear power. 'Intuition and knowledge' would suggest that today, as another 60 years passed, we should have fusion power and cities on Mars, but the world is still powered by coal and instead we got the iPhone.
mchusma 5y ago
I hope it's radically different in 2500, but not the way this author does. We should be able to have 50-100B people, with billions in space, post scarcity, fusion based economy by then.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Population is almost certainly going to shrink, largely because most people don’t really want to have a ton of kids once they’re given the option to. The more resources people have, the fewer children they tend to have in fact.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "The more resources people have, the fewer children they tend to have in fact." I dispute this, most people want to own a home and be able to provide for their children, and average age of first-time homebuyer in UK has risen to 33
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      That … doesn’t actually refute my point. People have kids in apartments all the time, always have and always will. Anyways, in country after country we see the exact same pattern; the wealthier the country gets and the lower their infant mortality gets, the fewer children they have. The majority of the world is now below replacement rate; even India is down below 2.2 children per woman, and Mexico is now on the cusp of the replacement rate. Overall the only continent still growing is Africa, as it has the vast majority of the countries with high fertility rates. I expect that to change as Africa develops and gets richer. You might say “aha, but people can’t afford as many kids as they want to in the west, because it’s so expensive”. There is some truth to this; there’s a gap between desired fertility and actual fertility in some countries. But in a lot of countries the number of children women reportedly want has fallen. In America it’s gone from 3.5 to 2.5 in the past century. Yes, women are having fewer children than they reportedly want, but not by a lot. Frankly I think that it's much easier to say you want 3 kids than it is to actually decide to have a third. And that’s before we consider that fertility has fallen off a cliff in countries where having a child is cheaper, and where the state generously subsidizes childbirth and child care. Norway is down to 1.6, Denmark is at 1.7, and so is Sweden. If the issue was cost, surely generous state subsidies would drive up fertility, no? I think the simple reality is that as child mortality falls, parents increasingly begin to view children as something to be invested in, rather than an economic source for the household (in poorer countries) or as a default consequence of marriage and sex. This tips the balance over from parents wanting (or getting by default) big families, to instead smaller families that are easier to manage and that allow greater emotional investment per child.
xvector 5y ago
By 2500 we will be alien to us. We'll probably be immortal digital consciousness(es) distributed across the stars.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Or we could become techhno-barbarians suffering from radiation sickness. In fact, we know how to achieve the latter, but not the former.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  > distributed I’d prefer a mainframe.
  - xvector 5y ago
    Why? One cosmic accident and you're toast
    - Koshkin 5y ago
      But would anyone notice?
      - xvector 5y ago
        You probably would, in the moments before your death.
titzer 5y ago
Just as a reminder, 2100 is closer to us than 1940. The future is rushing at us fast. As for the Amazon becoming a barren wasteland, an epiphany moment for me was to realize that the rainforest isn't a rainforest because it just happens to be where it rains a lot, it rains a lot because of the dense biomass of trees that repeatedly pump the rainwater out of the ground, fueling a huge biosphere from which it escapes as vapor, where it condenses again as rain, not far away. The Amazon continually recycles its water. Without that rainforest that rain will just end going underground, into the watertable or into the Amazon river, likely taking the topsoil with it. The evidence that this can happen isn't all that far away. Many regions of Africa have geologic evidence of shifting multiple times from being desert, to being forest, grassland, savannah, rainforest, and back. The cycles might be over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Mankind's release of massive CO2, plus our deforestation habit, might indeed cause a catastrophic cascade of this region in mere centuries.
- cjensen 5y ago
  That's an incorrect understanding of rainforests, and has me scratching my head at the article. It rains because of Hadley cells. Hadley cells don't disappear with global warming, so it will still rain a lot in the tropics. Why on Earth would it be "barren?" A few degrees of temperature doesn't matter to plants: as long as there is sunlight and tons of water, they should be fine. Now if Hadley cells widen or shift northward, that could be a problem for the US. But no matter what happens, Hadley cells still have to rise near the equator.
  - lkrubner 5y ago
    No, you're putting too much emphasis on Hadley cells. The air patterns are only one part of a very much more complex cycle. As the poster above you noted, for any given amount of water, the amount going into the air in a particular place is influenced by the density of plants. Plants pull water from underground and help evaporate it in one particular place. The evaporated air can then condense and become rain again. Therefore, very dense masses of plants can increase the rate with which water is pulled from the ground and then evaporate and then condenses into rain and then returns to the ground, starting the cycle over again. Remove the trees and you still have Hadley cells, but you won't have a rainforest anymore, if the density of the plants falls below some threshold -- you won't have as much rain, even though the Hadley cell is still there -- you might have the same amount of water, but the speed at which it evaporates, and therefore becomes rain, will be lessened.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
The resource that is most valuable for us on Earth is not oil or water or gold or rare earth metals. It is the human brain and human potential. I would argue that we have developed this more than we ever have before in human history. We have access to more knowledge than we ever have had before. We can communicate more than we have ever had before. More children get good nutrition and so can develop normally than we ever have before. Women, especially, with the advent of safe, reliable birth control, as well as low infant and maternal mortality are encouraged by society to develop intellectually more than they ever have before. If you look at the past, it was said that humans would exponentially grow in population. Turns out birth control and female education and empowerment radically altered that trajectory and we will actually have a stable population soon. People were predicting wide spread famine, but the green agricultural revolution enabled us to produce more food than we have ever been able to. The most important thing is not to be consumed by doom and gloom but rather embrace that human potential is our most powerful resource and seek that every human on earth will be given the resources and opportunity to fully develop into all that they can be.
- gerbilly 5y ago
  >It is the human brain and human potential. No. Just no. The most valuable thing is the ecosystem, of which we are just one small, temporary, and insignificant part. It’s exactly this kind of hubris and overconfidence that is leading us to the next extinction event and to our own doom. Humans may be good at solving short term problems, but one of the biggest limits on our potential is to collectively act to avert long term threats. Every civilization from the Egyptians to the Romans thought they had it all figured out in their prime. The Egyptians literally moved mountains, and they are gone. If we wanted to today, we probably couldn’t rebuild the great pyramid, even with modern machinery. It would be too expensive! Our technologies have always created more problems than they have alleviated even if you restrict the cost benefit only to the human sphere. The record only becomes worse when you factor in the rest of the world.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Projectiboga 5y ago
This guy says we are just beginning runaway warming. There will be many interconnected feedbacks and our carbin levels are increasing hundreds of times faster than ever in the geologic record. The 5 bigger climate shifts all happened over about a dozen years once the runaway happens. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-temperature-rise-of-more-than-18-degrees-celsius-by-2026.html?m=1 https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-temperature-rise-...
newbie789 5y ago
“Everything will be radically different in 500 years to an extent that might strain our imaginations” seems about right. I’d go so far as to wager that if you time traveled back to 1521 and brought somebody to the present, they’d find it to be alien as well. Of course to verify my thesis I’d have to teach my 1521 passenger the current meaning of “alien” and the rules about my intended interpretation of my blog post to make my point clear to them.
- itisit 5y ago
  Take someone from 1521 and have them watch Pixar movies as they fly into Tokyo and then have them order delivery pizza via a smartphone as they wait in a taxi at a traffic light at Shibuya Crossing on their way to a high-rise hotel. I think that would be an alien experience.
SquibblesRedux 5y ago
What evidence exists that we (humans) can make accurate predictions for the states of complex systems decades or centuries in the future? It seems like "things will be different" and "there will be catastrophes" are always solid bets, but modeling complex systems -- especially systems with many unknown variables -- always involves probability distributions. Unwarranted confidence always leaves me skeptical, suspecting ulterior motives. I would much prefer to hear about progress toward adaptability. Bad things will happen, no matter what. Let's plan to deal with the bad things so we can minimize future suffering.
sysihyk 5y ago
Don't waste your time, this is all about climate hoax and cabron tax, thus bogus.

81 points by hhs 5y ago

Unless we invent Nuclear Energy and do what France did in the 1970's and build a handful of reactors which provided for almost all of their energy needs, which uses a small amount of fuel plentifully found in Australia and Canada and which will last for 1000's of years, and, for which we actually do have feasible ways to store waste.

dboreham 5y ago
Just remember not to lie to everyone about the relative safety of your plants.
- elihu 5y ago
  That's the hard part, though. I think the debate about whether or not to use nuclear is less about whether we can design a safe reactor, and more about whether we can design a human organizational structure to maintain the reactors over their whole lifetime in such a way that people who don't have specialized knowledge can be highly confident that the reactors are being managed in a safe way. The model of having a for-profit company run the plant with a government regulator looking over their shoulder works most of the time, but it breaks down when the regulators become too friendly with the industry they oversee (regulatory capture). Maybe there are other, better models. We don't have the same risk with wind and solar because the damage that can be done with a broken windmill or malfunctioning solar array is much less. The public doesn't have to trust the operators to the same degree.
erentz 5y ago
Thought recently seen somewhere but don’t know who to credit: If nuclear power were just discovered yesterday, we’d all be hailing it as the miracle to solve climate change.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  The problem with climate change is it doesn't kill people quick enough for us to take action. Covid on the other hand, we rushed out vaccines and people have generally accepted massive disruption to their lives to tame it. Even with Covid not all governments wanted to react quickly. If we treated climate change like covid, we'd be finding a way to create lots of nuclear reactors around the world really quickly. We might even create a few hundred of them in the middle of Australia and use it to make hydrogen or some other fuel and ship it around.
  - erentz 5y ago
    Yep. The thought experiment does a good job I think of highlighting just how much being linked to nuclear weapons and thus became a target for peace and environmental action has screwed us. Take that history away, drop this gift from the universe in our lap yesterday, and every environmentalist would be on board today.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      Yes that and Chernobyl too creates a bad image of nuclear.

consumer451 5y ago

And potentially uninhabitable within ~2500 yrs. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138252/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138252/

thisiscorrect 5y ago

The author apparently expect the Singularity to happen Real Soon Now. I guess our children will be living to 2500. "To fully grasp and plan for climate impacts under any scenario, researchers and policymakers must look well beyond the 2100 benchmark. Unless CO2 emissions drop significantly, global warming by 2500 will make the Amazon barren, the American Midwest tropical, and India too hot to live in, according to a team of international scientists. 'We need to envision the Earth our children and grandchildren may face, and what we can do now to make it just and liveable for them,' says Christopher Lyon, a Postdoctoral Researcher under the supervision of Professor Elena Bennett at McGill University."

alfiedotwtf 5y ago
The election cycle forces politicians to only care 4 years ahead, let alone 100 years, and so impossibly 500 years into the future.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  In Mexico, as in the Confederate States constitution for some reason, there are six year presidential terms, without reelection prospects. Does it greatly alter governance? Xi in China recently abolished presidential term limits.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > In Mexico, as in the Confederate States constitution for some reason, there are six year presidential terms, without reelection prospects. Does it greatly alter governance? It's kind of hard to tell; Mexico has only had a few Presidential terms as something other than a fig-leaf democracy over a one-party corporatist state which freely used the power of the State to assure the dominance of the Party.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  Does the supreme court, currently the closest we have to monarchs, generate better outcomes? Arguably not. I believe it's the institutions of selection that matter more. Who and what are they constituents of and where have we manufactured their incentives to be. For instance let's say you have unborn generations rights such as say the right to a tamer climate, just as a theoretical example. Then you could take people into courts for violating those rights. You could have some kind of trust that can fund candidates based on long term ROIs so if they say, support early childhood education, a great ROI, they can access funds as an instrument of debt (really an issued bond) which will be covered by the yield of their investments into our children's futures. So for instance, there's some agreed upon metric that ever dollar invested in preschool will generate an extra say $100 in lifetime earnings, taxed at ~30%, that dollar will yield a 30x return. So a debt instrument of say $1 funding per dollar invested up to some cap is issued by a trust to future generations to finance candidates who will allocate funds accordingly. The bond will be paid in the future through the increased tax revenue. It can be a convertible note so if the politician fails to act, it can become debt on the books. This makes the pool of money more secure the more candidates dip into it, creating a virtuous cycle and thus institutionalizing it. Candidates who successfully diligently invest in far future payoffs, perhaps well after they're dead, will have access to a large pool of money to win election today. If corporations and other legal fictions have rights, there's really no reason they can't be granted to other concepts as well.

zetalyrae 5y ago

Complete absurdity. By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise. Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability. This is like those articles about how "in 30,000 years humans will evolve to look like goblins because smartphone". It's status quo bias with James Burnham/Ray Kurzweil levels of unprincipled extrapolation.

hhs 5y ago
It was strange, but the paper [0] concludes: > Our projections and associated approaches to adaptation governance represent an initial attempt and have considerable uncertainty given their extended time horizon. These efforts are meant to highlight the need for more sophisticated climate and Earth system modelling beyond 2100, including a focus on aspects of ecosystem goods and services not considered here. Our work thus provides a framework and baseline for the assessment of longer-term anthropogenic effects on climate and Earth systems, and highlights the critical need for further work in this area. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871
clajiness 5y ago
> By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise. Source?
- zetalyrae 5y ago
  My own intuition and knowledge.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    In 1895 Lord Kelvin stated that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” 1900's gave us first flight on a plane made of wood, by 1960's we had spaceflight and nuclear power. 'Intuition and knowledge' would suggest that today, as another 60 years passed, we should have fusion power and cities on Mars, but the world is still powered by coal and instead we got the iPhone.

mchusma 5y ago

I hope it's radically different in 2500, but not the way this author does. We should be able to have 50-100B people, with billions in space, post scarcity, fusion based economy by then.

ashtonkem 5y ago
Population is almost certainly going to shrink, largely because most people don’t really want to have a ton of kids once they’re given the option to. The more resources people have, the fewer children they tend to have in fact.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "The more resources people have, the fewer children they tend to have in fact." I dispute this, most people want to own a home and be able to provide for their children, and average age of first-time homebuyer in UK has risen to 33
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    That … doesn’t actually refute my point. People have kids in apartments all the time, always have and always will. Anyways, in country after country we see the exact same pattern; the wealthier the country gets and the lower their infant mortality gets, the fewer children they have. The majority of the world is now below replacement rate; even India is down below 2.2 children per woman, and Mexico is now on the cusp of the replacement rate. Overall the only continent still growing is Africa, as it has the vast majority of the countries with high fertility rates. I expect that to change as Africa develops and gets richer. You might say “aha, but people can’t afford as many kids as they want to in the west, because it’s so expensive”. There is some truth to this; there’s a gap between desired fertility and actual fertility in some countries. But in a lot of countries the number of children women reportedly want has fallen. In America it’s gone from 3.5 to 2.5 in the past century. Yes, women are having fewer children than they reportedly want, but not by a lot. Frankly I think that it's much easier to say you want 3 kids than it is to actually decide to have a third. And that’s before we consider that fertility has fallen off a cliff in countries where having a child is cheaper, and where the state generously subsidizes childbirth and child care. Norway is down to 1.6, Denmark is at 1.7, and so is Sweden. If the issue was cost, surely generous state subsidies would drive up fertility, no? I think the simple reality is that as child mortality falls, parents increasingly begin to view children as something to be invested in, rather than an economic source for the household (in poorer countries) or as a default consequence of marriage and sex. This tips the balance over from parents wanting (or getting by default) big families, to instead smaller families that are easier to manage and that allow greater emotional investment per child.

xvector 5y ago

By 2500 we will be alien to us. We'll probably be immortal digital consciousness(es) distributed across the stars.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
Or we could become techhno-barbarians suffering from radiation sickness. In fact, we know how to achieve the latter, but not the former.
Koshkin 5y ago
> distributed I’d prefer a mainframe.
- xvector 5y ago
  Why? One cosmic accident and you're toast
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    But would anyone notice?
    - xvector 5y ago
      You probably would, in the moments before your death.

titzer 5y ago

Just as a reminder, 2100 is closer to us than 1940. The future is rushing at us fast. As for the Amazon becoming a barren wasteland, an epiphany moment for me was to realize that the rainforest isn't a rainforest because it just happens to be where it rains a lot, it rains a lot because of the dense biomass of trees that repeatedly pump the rainwater out of the ground, fueling a huge biosphere from which it escapes as vapor, where it condenses again as rain, not far away. The Amazon continually recycles its water. Without that rainforest that rain will just end going underground, into the watertable or into the Amazon river, likely taking the topsoil with it. The evidence that this can happen isn't all that far away. Many regions of Africa have geologic evidence of shifting multiple times from being desert, to being forest, grassland, savannah, rainforest, and back. The cycles might be over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Mankind's release of massive CO2, plus our deforestation habit, might indeed cause a catastrophic cascade of this region in mere centuries.

cjensen 5y ago
That's an incorrect understanding of rainforests, and has me scratching my head at the article. It rains because of Hadley cells. Hadley cells don't disappear with global warming, so it will still rain a lot in the tropics. Why on Earth would it be "barren?" A few degrees of temperature doesn't matter to plants: as long as there is sunlight and tons of water, they should be fine. Now if Hadley cells widen or shift northward, that could be a problem for the US. But no matter what happens, Hadley cells still have to rise near the equator.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  No, you're putting too much emphasis on Hadley cells. The air patterns are only one part of a very much more complex cycle. As the poster above you noted, for any given amount of water, the amount going into the air in a particular place is influenced by the density of plants. Plants pull water from underground and help evaporate it in one particular place. The evaporated air can then condense and become rain again. Therefore, very dense masses of plants can increase the rate with which water is pulled from the ground and then evaporate and then condenses into rain and then returns to the ground, starting the cycle over again. Remove the trees and you still have Hadley cells, but you won't have a rainforest anymore, if the density of the plants falls below some threshold -- you won't have as much rain, even though the Hadley cell is still there -- you might have the same amount of water, but the speed at which it evaporates, and therefore becomes rain, will be lessened.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

The resource that is most valuable for us on Earth is not oil or water or gold or rare earth metals. It is the human brain and human potential. I would argue that we have developed this more than we ever have before in human history. We have access to more knowledge than we ever have had before. We can communicate more than we have ever had before. More children get good nutrition and so can develop normally than we ever have before. Women, especially, with the advent of safe, reliable birth control, as well as low infant and maternal mortality are encouraged by society to develop intellectually more than they ever have before. If you look at the past, it was said that humans would exponentially grow in population. Turns out birth control and female education and empowerment radically altered that trajectory and we will actually have a stable population soon. People were predicting wide spread famine, but the green agricultural revolution enabled us to produce more food than we have ever been able to. The most important thing is not to be consumed by doom and gloom but rather embrace that human potential is our most powerful resource and seek that every human on earth will be given the resources and opportunity to fully develop into all that they can be.

gerbilly 5y ago
>It is the human brain and human potential. No. Just no. The most valuable thing is the ecosystem, of which we are just one small, temporary, and insignificant part. It’s exactly this kind of hubris and overconfidence that is leading us to the next extinction event and to our own doom. Humans may be good at solving short term problems, but one of the biggest limits on our potential is to collectively act to avert long term threats. Every civilization from the Egyptians to the Romans thought they had it all figured out in their prime. The Egyptians literally moved mountains, and they are gone. If we wanted to today, we probably couldn’t rebuild the great pyramid, even with modern machinery. It would be too expensive! Our technologies have always created more problems than they have alleviated even if you restrict the cost benefit only to the human sphere. The record only becomes worse when you factor in the rest of the world.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Projectiboga 5y ago

This guy says we are just beginning runaway warming. There will be many interconnected feedbacks and our carbin levels are increasing hundreds of times faster than ever in the geologic record. The 5 bigger climate shifts all happened over about a dozen years once the runaway happens. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-temperature-rise-of-more-than-18-degrees-celsius-by-2026.html?m=1 https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-temperature-rise-...

newbie789 5y ago

“Everything will be radically different in 500 years to an extent that might strain our imaginations” seems about right. I’d go so far as to wager that if you time traveled back to 1521 and brought somebody to the present, they’d find it to be alien as well. Of course to verify my thesis I’d have to teach my 1521 passenger the current meaning of “alien” and the rules about my intended interpretation of my blog post to make my point clear to them.

itisit 5y ago
Take someone from 1521 and have them watch Pixar movies as they fly into Tokyo and then have them order delivery pizza via a smartphone as they wait in a taxi at a traffic light at Shibuya Crossing on their way to a high-rise hotel. I think that would be an alien experience.

SquibblesRedux 5y ago

What evidence exists that we (humans) can make accurate predictions for the states of complex systems decades or centuries in the future? It seems like "things will be different" and "there will be catastrophes" are always solid bets, but modeling complex systems -- especially systems with many unknown variables -- always involves probability distributions. Unwarranted confidence always leaves me skeptical, suspecting ulterior motives. I would much prefer to hear about progress toward adaptability. Bad things will happen, no matter what. Let's plan to deal with the bad things so we can minimize future suffering.

sysihyk 5y ago

Don't waste your time, this is all about climate hoax and cabron tax, thus bogus.