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Glad to hear we can carry on as usual without worrying about completely destroying life on the planet.
by dataflow 3y ago
Glad to hear we can carry on as usual without worrying about completely destroying life on the planet.
- szundi 3y agoYes, the planet and life will survive us
- hibernator149 3y agoIn the last couple of years I've been thinking more often about a Venus scenario where life does not survive. We are just hoping that life will find a new equilibrium in the next couple million years like it has in the past. But if temperatures rise too fast, the planet will just get cooked before enough CO2 will be sequestered. The great filter is still in front of us.
- runeofdoom 3y agoI've sometimes wondered if Venus' runaway greenhouse had been caused (presumably unintentionally) by intelligent Venusians in the distant past, how could we find out? What bio- or techno-signatures would we still be able to find? And what possible such signatures would be easiest to look for given the inhospitable conditions?
- kaba0 3y agoI mean, we have bacteria living off of the heat and gases of underwater volcanoes — it is absolutely not realistic to think that life itself will be in jeopardy. It has survived the release of a highly reactive gas that killed off the majority of things (oxygen), a huge meteor that introduced a huge cooldown overnight, etc. Of course, it doesn’t mean that we should not try to stop the impending doom that will kill off an insane amount of species, and render many populous places unlivable for humans, causing famine and wars - but Life itself will never be in any danger.
- hibernator149 3y agoI thought so too at first. But there is no liquid water on Venus. So it is possible for all life on earth to just get boiled off.
- kaba0 3y agoThe Venus is quite a lot closer to the Sun, though. A few degrees C change in the average temperature of the Earth indeed can cause absolute large changes, potentially killing of most more complex life forms, but even that would be very far off from the point where life is infeasible - especially that the bottom of the ocean won’t be reaching anywhere close to temperatures where proteins denaturate.
- Retric 3y agoVenus gets roughly double the sunlight that earth does, also: “Conditions possibly favourable for life on Venus have been identified at its cloud layers, with recent research having found indicative, but not convincing, evidence of life on the planet.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus
- Amezarak 3y agohttps://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte... See, in particular: http://www.climate.gov/media/11332 http://www.climate.gov/media/11332 We have a long, long way to go before Earth could be considered hot by historical standards. The IPCC worst-case warming scenario, where we do absolutely nothing to curtail global warming, puts us back at the midpoint in 2100.
- wolverine876 3y agoFrom the first source: Our 4.54-billion-year-old planet probably experienced its hottest temperatures in its earliest days, when it was still colliding with other rocky debris (planetesimals) careening around the solar system. The heat of these collisions would have kept Earth molten, with top-of-the-atmosphere temperatures upward of 3,600° Fahrenheit. The second source is a chart going back 500 million years. How is that related to IPCC projections and climate change, which are about the environment humans evolved to survive and thrive in - physiologically over 7 million years (when we had the last common ancestor with chimps), culturally and technologically over 10 thousand years.
- Amezarak 3y agoI’m responding to the comments about the extinction of life on Earth, not the extinction of humanity. As you can see on the graph, for most of the last 500 million years the Earth was hotter than it is now, and obviously there was life. I was not referencing the first couple paragraphs of the linked article, since obviously the first few million years of Earth’s existence are irrelevant, and they’re the same source, which tells me you did not actually read the article; please read through next time and respond charitably rather than assuming I’m some kind of crank. I would appreciate it if you read to understand rather than to respond. It’s very frustrating when people replying to you assume you are saying something completely different rather than reading what you said within its context - a Venus scenario wiping out all life. HN commenters should do much better. This isn’t Reddit. Your entire comment is premised on me saying or thinking something I never suggested or implied. It’s true that humanity has survived during hotter and colder periods, but certainly nothing like that depicted on the 500mil graph, and anyway industrial civilization is obviously much more fragile.
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- Roark66 3y agoHumans (on the most basic level) have a much better adaptations to survive hot climate than cold.
- wood_spirit 3y agoPerhaps the plight of humans may be more conditional by the climate’s impact on farming and food supply than on clothing.
- adrianN 3y agoIn a catastrophic climate change scenario Humans generally don't die because of heat, but because other humans throw bombs at them to get at their farmland.
- junofan 3y agoSeems a bit dangerous compared to planting something else and trading.
- tremon 3y agoIn that scenario, humans with barely enough farmland to feed themselves are going to trade food against non-edible crops. Then the traders will be bombed by the humans now starving because their food was taken away, and you have the same situation except more local.
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- wolverine876 3y agoNot all land will grow food. We've invested our food growing capital where it's grown throughout the history of agriculture (about 10,000 years).
- adrianN 3y agoGood luck trading for enough food when your former high yield farmland only allows for light goat herding or poverty crops now because the glaciers that you relied on are no longer there and your aquifers are empty.