5 ms·

Probably no matter what happens, unless the cobalt bombs go off, a few million people will survive, here and there. The most likely final outcome of full-flowe

by ncmncm 4y ago

Probably no matter what happens, unless the cobalt bombs go off, a few million people will survive, here and there. The most likely final outcome of full-flowered climate catastrophe is global thermonuclear war. Before that happens, we will probably have two billion people starve. After, another five billion. The ocean will cease to be a reliable source of protein, and whatever sea life survives acidification will be fished out at an increasingly frantic pace.

junofan 4y ago
Mass murder will begin well before 7 billion starve. We can slash global emissions using weapons without affecting our lives too much. I’m surprised this isn’t discussed more.
- cammikebrown 4y ago
  “Our” lives? I assume you mean rich Westerners? If you’re getting bombed, it’s gonna affect your life quite a bit.
  - junofan 4y ago
    Yep. The ones with the weapons.
    - deepdriver 4y ago
      Which includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and probably Iran and Japan soon. Any one country could reach for the nukes first, or any small group could attempt a Sum of All Fears scenario.
    - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
      I mean China is one of the countries with weapons and probably the most likely place you would want to decrease emissions if you were in the West and didn't want to decrease your own. So there's no way that would go well.
deepdriver 4y ago
In the hydrogen sulfide upwell scenario, the survival of humanity in any quantity seems unlikely. I'm just a layman, hopefully experts can tell me why this won't happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event#Hydrogen_sulfide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin... >The Permian–Triassic extinction event, also known as the End-Permian Extinction and colloquially as the Great Dying, formed the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, approximately 251.9 million years ago. It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with the extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. >Possible causes supported by strong evidence appear to describe a sequence of catastrophes, each worse than the last: the Siberian Traps eruptions were bad enough alone, but because they occurred near coal beds and the continental shelf, they also triggered very large releases of carbon dioxide and methane. The resultant global warming may have caused perhaps the most severe anoxic event in the oceans' history: according to this theory, the oceans became so anoxic, anaerobic sulfur-reducing organisms dominated the chemistry of the oceans and caused massive emissions of toxic hydrogen sulfide. According to this hypothesis which is well-supported by the archaeological evidence, it took Earth's atmosphere between hundreds of thousands to millions of years to return to conditions capable of supporting much life. That's a long time for biodomes, bunkers, and orbital stations not to break in irreparable ways.
- adrianN 4y ago
  A sufficient number of humans for repopulation can survive for a very long time in underground caves powered by breeder reactors.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    thank god we have all that set up then.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      We don't know that nobody does. We don't even know that the US doesn't. Putin could have one, and China, Israel, England, and France seem likely. Japan and India are possible. North Korea? Iceland, if they could afford to dig one, wouldn't need the nuke. Peru might have inherited one from deep time. Egypt, likewise. Turkey has lots of underground cities already dug that mainly only need wiring.
bigiain 4y ago
> Probably no matter what happens, unless the cobalt bombs go off, a few million people will survive, here and there. Arguably that’d at least be a “human society extinction” event. I find cities of less than about 5 million people uninteresting in terms of having enough of the entertainment and eating out options I enjoy. A planet with a few million people scattered here and there would be incapable of much more than early industrial revolution technology I suspect. I can imagine people building steam engines, but making transistors is beyond that capability of pretty much everyone I know. Perhaps a few million people would get by scavenging electronics left behind by the 5 billion dead, but they’re not going to be running semiconductor fabs and buying new cpu or ram chips. And they’re not going to be mining rare elements and smelting alloys like modern metallurgy. I’m not sure what small and distantly distributed bands/villages of humans trying to find habitable places with productively farmable land would look like, but it doesn’t sound fun to me… I’m old, and _maybe_ I could justify my existence in post climate apocalypse society by being “that guy” who gets other people to carefully remove the wiring harness and everything plugged into it from every abandoned car they come across, and re purposing engine management and entertainment system components into useful computing devices and electrical gadgets, or perhaps by building carburettors and magneto ignition systems to make efi vehicles run on home grown biofuel. But I’d say I’m Rob ably way more likely be killed (and eaten?) as an old person with no useful contribution to the clan.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  We can see what happens when a big civilization collapses by looking at the Amazonian tribes. Their ancestors were extremely sophisticated, but they forgot it all, except a few gems like making curare and ayahuasca, and detoxifying cassava.
  - bigiain 4y ago
    Right, so as an old person, I should be brushing up my shaman credentials and ethnobotany knowledge…

by ncmncm 4y ago

junofan 4y ago

Mass murder will begin well before 7 billion starve. We can slash global emissions using weapons without affecting our lives too much. I’m surprised this isn’t discussed more.

cammikebrown 4y ago
“Our” lives? I assume you mean rich Westerners? If you’re getting bombed, it’s gonna affect your life quite a bit.
- junofan 4y ago
  Yep. The ones with the weapons.
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    Which includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and probably Iran and Japan soon. Any one country could reach for the nukes first, or any small group could attempt a Sum of All Fears scenario.
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    I mean China is one of the countries with weapons and probably the most likely place you would want to decrease emissions if you were in the West and didn't want to decrease your own. So there's no way that would go well.

deepdriver 4y ago

In the hydrogen sulfide upwell scenario, the survival of humanity in any quantity seems unlikely. I'm just a layman, hopefully experts can tell me why this won't happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event#Hydrogen_sulfide_emissions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin... >The Permian–Triassic extinction event, also known as the End-Permian Extinction and colloquially as the Great Dying, formed the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, approximately 251.9 million years ago. It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with the extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. >Possible causes supported by strong evidence appear to describe a sequence of catastrophes, each worse than the last: the Siberian Traps eruptions were bad enough alone, but because they occurred near coal beds and the continental shelf, they also triggered very large releases of carbon dioxide and methane. The resultant global warming may have caused perhaps the most severe anoxic event in the oceans' history: according to this theory, the oceans became so anoxic, anaerobic sulfur-reducing organisms dominated the chemistry of the oceans and caused massive emissions of toxic hydrogen sulfide. According to this hypothesis which is well-supported by the archaeological evidence, it took Earth's atmosphere between hundreds of thousands to millions of years to return to conditions capable of supporting much life. That's a long time for biodomes, bunkers, and orbital stations not to break in irreparable ways.

adrianN 4y ago
A sufficient number of humans for repopulation can survive for a very long time in underground caves powered by breeder reactors.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  thank god we have all that set up then.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    We don't know that nobody does. We don't even know that the US doesn't. Putin could have one, and China, Israel, England, and France seem likely. Japan and India are possible. North Korea? Iceland, if they could afford to dig one, wouldn't need the nuke. Peru might have inherited one from deep time. Egypt, likewise. Turkey has lots of underground cities already dug that mainly only need wiring.

bigiain 4y ago

> Probably no matter what happens, unless the cobalt bombs go off, a few million people will survive, here and there. Arguably that’d at least be a “human society extinction” event. I find cities of less than about 5 million people uninteresting in terms of having enough of the entertainment and eating out options I enjoy. A planet with a few million people scattered here and there would be incapable of much more than early industrial revolution technology I suspect. I can imagine people building steam engines, but making transistors is beyond that capability of pretty much everyone I know. Perhaps a few million people would get by scavenging electronics left behind by the 5 billion dead, but they’re not going to be running semiconductor fabs and buying new cpu or ram chips. And they’re not going to be mining rare elements and smelting alloys like modern metallurgy. I’m not sure what small and distantly distributed bands/villages of humans trying to find habitable places with productively farmable land would look like, but it doesn’t sound fun to me… I’m old, and _maybe_ I could justify my existence in post climate apocalypse society by being “that guy” who gets other people to carefully remove the wiring harness and everything plugged into it from every abandoned car they come across, and re purposing engine management and entertainment system components into useful computing devices and electrical gadgets, or perhaps by building carburettors and magneto ignition systems to make efi vehicles run on home grown biofuel. But I’d say I’m Rob ably way more likely be killed (and eaten?) as an old person with no useful contribution to the clan.

ncmncm 4y ago
We can see what happens when a big civilization collapses by looking at the Amazonian tribes. Their ancestors were extremely sophisticated, but they forgot it all, except a few gems like making curare and ayahuasca, and detoxifying cassava.
- bigiain 4y ago
  Right, so as an old person, I should be brushing up my shaman credentials and ethnobotany knowledge…