No.
Argument : civilization ending meteor strikes in the past that killed off millions of species did not prevent the earth from bouncing back.
It is more poverty than religion that drives it. Iran has a tfr of 1.7 as an example. Outside of sub Saharan Africa most of the world is at or below replacement levels. Pretty much all the population growth in the next fifty or more years will come from Africa.
:: coughs ::
Agreed. Outside of Marvel Comics, there’s not much that could actually threaten the planet. Threaten certain things on the planet, perhaps, but not actually threaten the planet.
As others have said, I don’t think climate change will have much if any effect on the planet. The Earth basically won’t care, one way or the other, if the surface is in an ice age or a run away green house. Either way it will keep chugging along until the sun goes into it’s red giant phase, then it’s curtains for the Earth…so, I think the number one threat to the PLANET is the sun.
I also don’t think that climate change is the number one threat to humans. I believe (judicious use of that word) that the human species will weather climate change just fine. Individual humans and maybe human nations, probably not so much…but humans as a whole? I don’t see it wiping us out, which I’d say would be the number one threat…extinction. OTHER species, however, are definitely existentially threatened by climate change (as well as other human activities), so I think that because it’s not the planets or humankind’s number one greatest thread doesn’t mean it’s not a grave situation…it is. Very.
Honestly, I don’t think it should be the number one priority, since at this point the reality is that there is little we can do to halt it. What we can do is mitigate how bad it gets (limiting the upper temperatures we go to to, say, less than 2 degrees C, say), but even there I think that what realistically can be done is being done or will be done in the next decade. The US is slowly lowering our own carbon foot print, and short of the public suddenly deciding that nuclear energy isn’t the big boogie man they have been lead to believe I don’t see how we could realistically do a lot more on the scales we would need to do it. We are already shifting market forces away from coal, which is a big polluter (in more than just CO2). We are already shifting to natural gas, which is better than coal. We are already making cars that get better gas mileage and emit less. We are working on alternatives. I suppose we could artificially jack up the price of gas at the pump or oil at the well (or set it to some arbitrary cost that reflects the damage it does), but this will have a negative effect on the economy and will hit the poor and middle classes the hardest, so is going to be difficult to do politically (again, on the scales we are talking about…it HAS been jacked up some recently and that will probably have a smaller negative effect but will have a smaller effect on CO2 emissions as well). The one thing we aren’t doing is really looking hard at nuclear, which I think could be a game changer for emissions. I’ll REALLY think climate change is perceived by folks to be the number one threat when I see environmentalist groups and the public unite behind an effort to build a lot of nuclear power plants…or when I see a viable alternative that can scale up to meet our energy needs and folks get behind that to push to build it in a big way.
None of that has anything to do with whether climate change is the “greatest” threat to humanity. Even if you think that climate change will only kill 2 people over the next 200 years, if there’s no other global threat looming that might even violently wretch on a single person’s navel, then climate change would still be the “greatest” threat to humanity, of global issues. What, at the moment, do you think is more looming or has the greater probability of mass harm?
I think the OP in context shows that he is referring to humanity; but yeah, as Salvor and ITR Champion noticed, this is giving truth to what what Neil DeGrasse Tysen said, similar to George Carlin:
“Don’t Worry, Earth Will Survive Climate Change — We Won’t”
And of course there is little that can we done to halt it, but that is only half of the history, by thinking that we cannot do anything we are only allowing worse scenarios to be considered and to be expect, with more costs and as the now president of the American Association of Economists, Nordhaus told us, for less than the costs that are expected if nothing is done humans have gone to war.
I didn’t say there was nothing we can do, I said that realistically what can be done is being done, by and large. Could we do a bit better? Sure we could and I think it’s in our interests, collectively to push the envelop, to develop new technologies, to push alternatives and to use market forces to mitigate our CO2 emissions. But short of radical changes in the current paradigm…changes I don’t think ARE realistic…we aren’t going to change things enough to halt or even lessen the final outcome (though I think we WILL change where things eventually level off through our efforts, and that might be huge for the environment, even if the Earth doesn’t really care all that much).
I think the ‘nothing is done’ is a strawman argument, since I think that within the realm of what we realistically could do we are (all of us) are doing a lot. But until there is are viable alternatives that could actually be realistically implemented (I think there ARE alternatives, at least on the power production end, but I think that these are blocked because of the public and because of small determined groups to block them) it’s going to be small steps that will, hopefully, add up to something that is less disastrous than it could be if we REALLY did nothing and kept going at our previous pace.
Yes.
And while the OP was flawed by bringing the “planet” in, what you described later about “some powerful groups that are blocking solutions” points to what is also part of what should be done:
Until the Republican party and conservatives elsewhere stop ignoring science we should not vote for them, they are the weakest link here.
Realistically, the Republican party and conservatives have little to do with the current state of affairs. If they went away, public policy wouldn’t be drastically different. Getting off fossil fuels is a hard task, limited by the price-effectiveness of the technologies available to human kind and the fears around nuclear proliferation and nuclear energy in general. Liberal, scientifically-lead countries haven’t changed significantly more than the US and no one is rallying the war cry to start building more nuclear power plants in the US, developing countries, nor anywhere else.
Not accurate, several nations are doing better than the USA. What XT noted is accurate in regard of the USA doing good on this, but the reality is that we can do much better.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/01/07/3608898/denmark-sets-world-record-for-wind-power/
And there are indeed nuclear power plants still being constructed in the USA.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-T-Z/USA--Nuclear-Power/
But one snag has little to do with protesters:
That deserves emphasis. The most expensive effects of global warming IMHO will be our hamfisted attempts to keep up with it. Expect government subsidized construction on beaches vulnerable to ever more powerful hurricanes and failure to price water appropriately as it becomes scarcer or more plentiful depending upon where you live.
That said, the worst case scenarios are pretty bad. (They are inevitable if no adjustments are made IMHO, but that scenario is itself unlikely.) Venus is far hotter than Mercury after all, even though it’s farther from the sun. That’s CO2 at work. Here’s one report about uninhabitablity. At a certain point you will hit human physiological limits in the great outdoors for a few days per year. [INDENT] “Seven degrees would begin to create zones of uninhabitability due to unsurvivable peak heat stresses and 10C would expand such zones far enough to encompass a majority of today’s population.”[/INDENT] Turn up that AC: it’s a sauna outside!
OP’s title asks about “greatest threat to our planet.” This is different from threat to humanity, or threat to civilization, or even – the real concern – major disruption to civilization. Climate change is on track to cause major disruption. Does anything else so qualify?
As others say, climate change is just one aspect of the more general problem of overpopulation and habitat destruction. (In fact, I think humans will combat the heating but still suffer other ill effects of habitat destruction, e.g. ocean acidification.)
Have forecasts really been revised so that 7°C rise by 2100 is considered probable? That would obviously be horrendously devastating. Long before that point I think nations will band together and inject coolants into the atmosphere. Any cost estimates for such a program?
The slight cost of adding some sulfur to jet fuel, to be turned on when they enter the stratosphere. Would send the planet into a glacier building period in a matter of years. Less if any large strato-volcanoes erupt at the same time.
The effects of jet traffic (adding water vapor and clouds to the dry stratosphere) is already altering the global climate. Adding some really bad pollution to the exhaust is child’s play.
But that ignores that Ocean acidification will get worse. And then we have the issue that many times the use of models has been an issue that has been poisoned by many contrarians and yet it is an item that needs to be used and trusted to calculate when and how much Geoengineering can be used. (As it is the need of the scientists that work with them, contrarians to the use of models will not be consulted)
But that ignores that Ocean acidification will get worse. And then we have the issue that many times the use of models has been an issue that has been poisoned by many contrarians and yet it is an item that needs to be used and trusted to calculate when and how much Geoengineering can be used. (As it is the need of the scientists that work with them, contrarians to the use of models will not be consulted)
[/QUOTE]
(Amusing that a denier who thinks man’s actions are inadequate to warm thinks it would be easy for man to plunge the Earth into an Ice Age. 
)
If warming, and associated climate change, can be easily thwarted, it seems slightly disingenuous to focus on warming rather than problems like ocean acidification.
But can it? And even if an “optimal” heating level could be maintained, would there be other problems? I think the spectrum of surface sunlight in a CO2+Sulfate scenario would be changed (more red, less violet) – would that change have significant effect?
I get the impression from reading these reports that climate change is certain, that its effects on the environment will be bad (in that it will reduce biodiversity as many species will be unable to adapt quickly enough), and that it will have lots of negative impacts on human society as well - but the scale of these effects is less certain. The prediction is that the less developed nations will be far more at risk.
And in particular:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/contents.html
To my mind, a far more serious threat to humanity (and, ultimately, the ecosystem of the planet itself) remains war.
We tend to discount war because we are living in an era where the developed world, at least, is mostly at peace: the ‘it will never happen again’ instinct is strong. However, if it does, and takes the form of total war between major world powers, it would be utterly ruinious - far more so than global warming is predicted to be. The difference is that global warming in the future is certain (the only question is how bad it will be), while a major “total war” is uncertain.
I think those observations are correct and quite astute. To put it another way, the science of climate change as laid out in the IPCC WG1 is quite certain in its fundamentals as to cause and large-scale global effects, but WG2, which deals with things like specific regional impacts and vulnerabilities and adaptation strategies, is necessarily more speculative with generally much wider ranges of uncertainty. WG3, which deals with mitigation, is somewhere in between and is mainly constrained by the fact that all such strategies are completely dependent on political will.
The observation about war is a good one, though I wouldn’t say it’s the greatest threat, only that it’s another threat in the overall mess and one that is often overlooked. When food crops fail in the most vulnerable regions it could induce mass migrations and pressures that lead to local conflicts and perhaps eventually to larger-scale wars.
Earth Day just passed. Let’s take a look at some predictions from the first Earth Day.
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
Kenneth Watt, ecologist
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
George Wald, Harvard Biologist
Note, keep in mind the first Earth Day was in 1970. Apparently civilization ended 15 years ago and no on told us.
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
Now, Ehrlich has never been right about anything in his life. And this pronouncement didn’t sully that record. The main cause of hunger is not environmental, it is political. We have enough food but we have a distribution problem.
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
Apparently reality didn’t like Peter Gunters ideas.
“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
Life Magazine, January 1970
“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
Sen. Gaylord Nelson
And my personal favorite:
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Taking the past predictions and their accuracy into account, I have no doubt that the present set of predictions will be just as bad.
There are issues with the science of Climate Change. It is a very hard problem and I am convinced that there is a whole lot going on that the climate scientists and modelers really don’t understand.
And on the side of actually doing something about our emissions, well, the green movement successfully killed the only real option which scales the way we need it to which is nuclear.
I will make a bold prediction. In 10 years things may be a bit warmer. However in 10 years the main cause of human suffering on the planet will be the same as it has been for the few thousand years and that is other humans. I also predict that in 10 years we will still be arguing about the exact same things and that, while things may have changed a bit, the coming catastrophe will still be 15 years away just like it always has been.
Slee