Send thisaround to climate change deniers, if you know any.
I doubt there’s much point in doing so. They’ll simply say it’s alarmist bullshit.
Scary stuff!
Y’know, when something like this gets passed around, even if there’s truth to it, what the hell are we supposed to do?
Start crying and yelling? Pissing our pants? Save that piss for drinking water later?
Honest to whatever passes for God, when stuff like this makes the rounds, and the tone is so utterly **“It’s already started!!! There’s no stopping it!!! Mankind will go extinct in the next sixty years!!!” ** How the fuck are we supposed to react?
My reaction is to shrug, and be glad I’m in my fifties, okay?
Because why even bother anymore? If climate change is going to sterilize the planet by 2100, and it’s too late to do anything, then fuck, let’s just give up and party until it happens!
I don’t think that’s the reaction the OP is looking for, but shit, what else can we do?
I mean, look all you Steven Hawking groupies, we aren’t going to develop interstellar travel in the next half century, so shut the fuck up, okay? You’re harshing my buzz.
Yes, our descendants may be facing a new dark age, or maybe they won’t even exist.
But then again, the majority of us will be dead already, so who the fuck cares?
Or maybe, just maybe, the human race will adapt ourselves to the situation like we always have.
And maybe, just maybe some of this doomsday stuff is bullshit too, just like the what the climate change deniers are spewing.
It is alarmist bullshit. If the earth is going to be uninhabitable in just 83 years it’s too late do anything about it. This is a bunch of worst case scenarios intended to scare and alarm some, and it’s just ammunition for the deniers who will ridicule it.
The only technology that can be deployed on a wide enough scale within the next decade that meets the world’s energy needs is nuclear. This is just as well-established an idea as that of global warming itself, or better. If someone is going to post apocalyptic bullshit about the end of the world, at least make it apocalyptic bullshit that pushes for a realistic solution. Or else shut up.
Because Tripolar and others are correct - ‘scientists say that Miami is doomed’ is way too easy to debunk. Which scientists, and what is the likelihood, and based on what projections, and what is the track record of those projections, if any?
We aren’t going to do anything about global warming. Republicans don’t want to say it’s happening, Democrats don’t want to do anything realistic, and China and India are not going to choke off their economies chasing moonbeams.
It’s too bad, but…
Regards,
Shodan
Five changes of climate change denial have been called out in various places. Here’s one example.
Basically, they are:
- It’s not happening
- People aren’t causing it
- It won’t be bad
- We can’t fix it (or it would be too hard)
- It’s too late
All of them are BS, way more so than any perceived BS in this article. The article is far from scientifically rigorous, but it lays out what’s at stake in a basically accurate way. (Maybe Climate Feedbacks: Article Reviews – Climate Feedback will take it on soon, and we can see if real scientists agree with my assessment.)
Yes, this is a bleak article, but it shouldn’t push us to give up hope. That is just the fifth stage of denial. Even though bad things are happening and worse things are coming, that doesn’t mean we can’t mitigate them, for ourselves and for the future of our species. The need for action becomes more urgent with each day we don’t take any.
Before the launch of the first space shuttle, I heard a reporter reflecting on the Apollo 11 mission. He had (pretty morbidly) asked Buzz Aldrin what he would do if the engine went out on the lunar lander. How would he spend his final six hours? Buzz Aldrin told the reporter that he’d spend his final six hours trying to fix the engine. That’s the attitude we need. Not complacency, not despair, but a will to work on the problem.
You mention that you believe “it’s too late” is BS.
From the article -
The author of the article doesn’t seem to agree.
Apparently he should be trying to convert the engine to run on solar power.
Regards,
Shodan
Given the timescales involved, and the fact that humans have only been around for a small fraction of them, “always have” does not mean very much.
Humanity did not exist on the planet the last time the conditions we are creating were around, so there is no guarantee that we will adapt to it.
It means nothing at all. We have*** never*** had to adapt to climate change of this magnitude, or had such a huge global population dependent on an industrialized infrastructure and food crops that are suddenly vulnerable. In a mere century, C02 levels have soared 40% higher than they have ever been in human history.
Yeah, well, to be honest, I doubt humans will go extinct, even in the worst case scenarios, we’re pretty tenacious. There will be some people with the wealth and resources to be able to cope with pretty much anything that the climate throws at them.
We are still talking about complete loss of biodiversity, and humanity reduced to the tens or hundreds of thousands, living only what can be grown hydroponically or in the few areas left that can grow crops, scarce not only due to the climate, but due to damage from fighting over them. I wouldn’t put it past some powers to drop some nukes on the last arable land around just as a final “fuck you”.
So, we (humans as a species, certainly not you or I) may survive, but at what cost, and in what condition?
The argument you’re trying to make with those examples is simplistic and misleading.
Example #1 is not relevant because it’s plainly obvious that there are some coastal areas and islands that are so close to sea level that they will either become uninhabitable or will need to be protected by levees, and there are a lot of other areas that will be more subject to storm surges – but that doesn’t change the fact that the amount of habitable land we will lose is directly proportional to how far we allow climate change to progress. As with all the other problems, it only underscores the necessity of urgent mitigation.
Example #2 is probably correct, but your apparent conclusion doesn’t make any sense. It’s doubtful that we can achieve anything less than two degrees, and that will have some bad consequences, but not likely “catastrophic” in the larger scheme of things. It’s also true that the relatively weak terms of the Paris accord are likely to result in a significantly higher temperature rise. What do you suggest? I suggest we consider it a good starting point and work to do better.
Example #3 doesn’t really mean anything by itself. What exactly is a “climate disaster”? By some measures – such as regional climate changes and increases in droughts, floods, and extreme weather events – we are already in a climate disaster, and it’s rapidly getting worse. All it says is the same as my original point: the sooner and the more effectively we act, the less damage will be done.
As for the article itself, I only skimmed it, but offhand it strikes me as a collection of worst-case scenarios that are each individually plausible, but it’s unlikely that all of them will be worst-case outcomes, so taken as a whole it seems overly pessimistic. The exception would be if the world on average did very little toward mitigation. It’s estimated that under this reckless “business as usual” scenario the increased climate forcing due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases would be a net increment of 8.5 W/m[sup]2[/sup] by the end of the century with about a 4 or 5° C temperature rise, and the consequences of that would be grim indeed.
The excuses made by denialists pretty much follow the same lines as those made by those who refuse to quit smoking, and I say this as an ex-smoker.
It is an addiction, and you will go to any lengths to justify that addiction, and do anything to rationalize it.
You will deny its negative effects, you will dismiss its negative effects, you will downplay its negative effects, you will tolerate its negative effects, then you will
accept its negative effects as inevitable.
No, but our ancestors have been here since the beginning, and we have survived all the so-called extinctions through the ages. So has every other living creature.
Dinosaurs may be extinct, but they live on in the birds, so to speak.
We survived those events because we were tiny generalized shrew-like things. Likewise the t. rex didn’t survive by becoming a bird; those happen to be “close” relatives that have already evolved before the tyrant king and survived it by being tiny and generalized.
Life will most certainly survive, we’d have to try pretty hard to wipe out all life, and I 'm not certain we could, but your claim was “Or maybe, just maybe, the human race will adapt ourselves to the situation like we always have.”, and our human ancestors have not been here since the beginning, and have survived exactly zero of the massive extinction events so far.
And dinosaurs do not live on through birds. Birds did not descend from the tyrannosaurus or the velociraptor, or any of the other dinosaurs you think of as dinosaurs. Other than being in the same rough patch of the family tree, there really is no comparison.
Basically, it is as if you are saying, it’s okay, humanity will live on through pygmy shrews.
The nice thing about evolution is that you will be long dead before you see it happen.
From pygmy shrews we came, and to pygmy shrews we may return.
But maybe they will be fantastically intelligent pygmy shrews. With air conditioning.
Can anyone give an informed critique of this article? I read it earlier today but I can’t tell if it is alarmist worse case scenario or a realistic assessment of our situation.
I don’t forsee how global warming can eridicate the human species. Even if it kills many/most of us, what is to stop us from growing crops further north, or using hydroponics or indoor farms powered by solar, wind, nuclear, tidal, geothermal, etc. power?
Keeping people alive isn’t hard. People need a few things.
Protection from microbes and pathogens
Protection from violence and physical trauma
Protection from environmental extremes
Clean water
Food
Basic medicine
Thats about it. Provide that and most people live to be 70. I know the article said some climates will become too hot for people to go outside, but what is to stop people from inventing personal cooling devices? We already have ice vests, which people who work construction in high temps use to not overheat.
Even if 99% of humans die, that means 70 million remain. That was the world population in 1000 BC
The article’s writer clears things up…he says that this is only a “worst-worst-worst” case scenario that has only a one-to-ten percent chance of coming true, and that the last thing he wants is to foster apathy or fatalism. He also outlines the strides that are being made, and what else we can do in the future. In short, he claims to be using a “scare-em-straight” tactic.
Whether that approach is the right one to take–and how sound Wallace-Wells’ scenario is–is something that many have debatedin the last few days.
I don’t really see climate change causing complete human extinction. Mother Nature is a cruel bitch and she will solve the crisis by just killing lots of people. The people that pay the heaviest price will be the ones that caused the least pollution. I especially wonder about things like tropical diseases spread by insects like mosquitoes, could lead to pandemics. The Earth can’t support the exploding human population so at some point the scales will balance themselves, probably won’t be very pretty though.