Don’t be foolish; do you want them to rise as zombies ? Burning the bodies is mandatory in Apocalypses.
Plus dead bodies are a carbon neutral fuel source!
They like to think of them not as people, but as little tiny carbon sinks. Kill a thousand, and Al Gore can buy up the carbon offset and get himself another SUV for his entourage.
Yes. It should be ‘the human habitat’ that needs to be saved. It is more alarming (or alarmist) to frame it as the planet.
No, I think it is pretty out there. The idea was inspired by Blake’s comments on various GW threads about (something along the lines of) hysterical global warming alarmists.
The ‘all the ice in the world will melt’ scenario is the most extreme GW doomsday scenario I’ve heard, along with the end of the European heat conveyor plus other drastic effects. Add them all up and it is certainly a cause for alarm, if not hysteria.
I’m definitely interested in what the is real worst-case scenario though, and how it compares to the alarmist version. Thanks for the info. 6.4 degrees C doesn’t sound like a joke for sure, but is pretty mild compared to my scenario.
Longer term, how likely is the ‘all the ice will melt’ scenario?
Ah, but you’re forgetting the nuclear-powered carbon sequesterers mentioned in the OP. They’re not even keeping up with emissions before the anthrocide- not good enough.
The idea is that in the future the ‘tipping point’ can be predicted, and it is predicted to be right around the corner. Drastic action now, or doom later.
I did make the world’s poorest 1/3 off limits to population reduction, and allowed bigger emitters to ‘count more’. I didn’t think it was necessary to nail the math for an example like this…
Obviously it is a flaw in the theory that the head of the Illuminati can’t control places like Russia and Saudi Arabia that will sell their oil no matter what, yet can kill as many people as needed. I guess you’re not the type to be swayed into activism by apocalyptic GW drama.
It sure is. I have a list that will take care of at least 40% of the world’s population. No huhu. I don’t know any of the personally, so what do I care?
Agreed. Besides which if we intervene early it will mean fewer deaths in the long term, so actually we’d be doing the people of the future a favour.
Also technically if we introduced global birth control right now (I know that is not actually possible, but this whole thread is hypothetical) then no one would need to be killed as it would be possible to get to 2038 with the"right" amount of people.
But to quote Spock, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…” so it makes logical sense to reduce the total number of the species so that the species can continue.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to be culled, but who would?
It depends on the global catastrophe - and I’d view an impending Ice Age as a more serious threat to which, if necessary, slaughter on the mass scale would be the lesser of two horrendous evils.
You know how it is. Many are culled, but few are frozen.
Why not then just reduce the 1/3 people that need killing to third world standard and so make them off limits? Surely that must be preferable to killing? Ask me if I’d rather be a farmer in Etiopia or be dead, then farming sounds very nice.
I’ll take option 3, Alex. Humans in and of themselves are carbon neutral. I’ll find ways of supplying my fellow humans with food etc in a carbon-neutral manner.
Just throwing out there non-alarmist scenarios from an earlier thread…
As far as I know, we don’t have good information on what might happen beyond 4°C, but if over a billion people get limited access to fresh water before we hit that temperature, it’s unlikely to be good for us. (ETA: I don’t think it would be like killing a couple billion people, though, that sounds too extreme.)
ETA: The links didn’t carry through in the quote, but if you click through to the post I’m quoting they’re there.
The world is too crowded in 2035 for that. All these new farmers would push the original ones out of existence. They’re fiercer competitors- it is why they aren’t already in the bottom 1/3. In a way you would be achieving the same thing, but it still amounts to anthrocidal massacre. I suppose if you ‘reassign’ only people who emit double the average CO2, because they ‘count’ more then only 1/6 of the world’s population would be affected in this (hypothetical) example.
And besides, history shows that this approach is problematic. Look at Stalin’s USSR or Pol Pot’s radical agrarian reform. A sizable chunk of the population-in radically different cultures- would sooner die than be reduced to subsistence farmers. Of course Stalin’s and Pol Pot’s answer was, ‘that can be arranged.’
You, you’re not such a hard case. But history shows not everyone shares your opinion.
Thanks for the info!
If the IPCC worst-case estimate is over 6 degrees C, and we get total melting of Greenland’s and Western Antarctica’s ice sheets at 4 degrees C, how far does that put us from the catastrophic ‘all the ice in the world’ scenario? What percentage of ice is still left in the 4 degrees scenario?
And- what kind of time frames are we talking about for total ice melt? My hypothetical forces you to act right away, but in reality of course all this ice can’t just vanish overnight…
My (possibly wrong) understanding is that we are looking at the possibility of no sea ice during the summer months in the north by the end of this century…which is different than no ice at all world wide. I don’t think that any but the most gloom and doomy type predictions are looking at more than a couple of feet sea level rise this century…the most I’ve seen is something on the order of 5-10 feet possible (no idea how probable even this would be though) during that time frame. Even that would be bad…but nothing like the 200 feet you were talking about in the OP.
I’m sure there are models that predict much more radical events, but afaik no one is going to the extremes you are talking about…at least not in the next 50-100 years anyway.
-XT
We can reduce the worlds population in about 4 days , between nuclear and binary nerve gas warheads , to about 4 billion. Add in unrestricted bio warfare, and you could be down to somewhere between couple hundred million and two billion in say another two months, systemic breakdown with food distrabution, fuel distrabution adds further mayhem to the really bad year.
If what ever your talking about happens, the choice of who survives may not entirely be in your hands.
Declan
It is good to know that the alarmist version is so far from the reality.
One more question though, concerning this prediction:
So. If carbon in the atmosphere raises temperatures, and rising temperatures cause ecosystems to emit rather than absorb carbon, what mitigates the process after it has started? IOW, if things reach this point, are we facing a runaway climate change to Venus-like conditions?
Nah. For this outlandish scenario we have to assume that somehow the choice is in the hands of the Autocrat.
It could be that he takes out anyone who refuses to hand over Bin Laden (still alive in 2035), until there is no one left within a 950-mile radius of Kabul (except OBL of course). Or, who knows, death-by-email. I know I’m giving absurdity in response to a real-world population-reduction method. The method in this scenario is more free, in case one method may be considered more moral or acceptable than another. Under the circumstances.
You don’t presume the Supreme Chancellor of the Illuminati would be so gauche as to nuke the planet?!?
My guess would be that because we know there have been much higher concentrations of CO2 in the past, and that the Earth didn’t become Venus-like, that this is probably not a likely possibility in the foreseeable future. I seriously doubt the Earth is slated for Venus-like conditions in the next few hundred million years (or so).
-XT
A lot of the Earth’s atmosphere was lost early on (presumably in the collision which created the Moon), and of what’s left, a lot of the carbon was sequestered in limestone and other carbonate rocks, as well as in the biosphere. Plus, of course, we’re further from the Sun. So even in the absolute worst-case scenarios, we couldn’t be another Venus.
Of course, “not as bad as Venus” still leaves plenty of room for things to get pretty darned bad.