Climate Change - Human Extinction

[Rahn127]

My fears mostly come from a few articles and an interview with David Suzuki.

When talking about a 6C temperature rise by the end of the century (worst case scenario if we have business as usual), then it relates to a time in our past when 90% of all species went extinct in the Permian period 250 million years ago.

Here is a link to the article I read talking about 2C change and 6C change.

https://www-m.cnn.com/2015/05/21/opinion...index.html

I think the problem I'm having is one of hearing the worst that could happen and believing it without justified reason.

I thought I was more skeptical than that.

I appreciate all the information you put in your reply.
It helps to ease my mind and make me realize I'm overreacting and basing my fears on nothing but opinion and speculation, instead of scientific studies and credible sources.

[Anomalocaris]

Extinction is likely inevitable, but not for the flaky reasons nor on the hysterical time line you proposed.

In the short run, humans are vastly more difficult to eradicate than can be equalled by our most extravagantly vainglorious efforts at self eradicate. In the long run, the power of nature to eradicate us is more total, absolutely and inescapable than vast majority of the most pessimistic of us can imagine.

[Yonadav]

I had a long drawn out message I was going to post but frankly I'm kinda depressed by the thought of losing 90% of our population by the end of the century.

Within 80 years, a death toll of 6 billion 930 million all due to climate change and the extreme warming of our planet.
And this is the conservative estimate.

My grandson is 8 years old. Will he live to be 88 ? What will his life be like ? Fuck what will mine be like. I still have a good 30 years left in me.
The 2C degree change is already locked in. We're now talking a 6C degree change by the end of the century.

Extinction seems inevitable.

Do you think other countries will attempt to drastically eliminate those problem countries in order to save those nearly 7 billion lives on the line ?
Would you kill a billion people to save 6 billion ?
Would you kill 3 billion to save 4 billion ?

That's a bottleneck of death I'm not quite ready to even think about and yet it's in our immediate future.

I'm an alarmist when it comes to this stuff. I already know it and accept it within myself.
Maybe when I'm 60 or 70 I'll calm down a bit.

You can't solve the problem by randomly exterminating billions of people. First, something like ten percent of the world's population emits ninety percent of the carbon. So if we exterminate that ten percent, we theoretically solve ninety percent of the problem. But that won't work, because another group of people will fill in the gap left by those who were exterminated and start polluting at that same pace. Mass exterminations of people simply won't buy that much time, if any. And strangely, it's the ten percent who are the biggest offenders who are making the most noise about global warming. I keep trying to talk them into killing themselves, but they just won't do it. They want to exterminate Indian and Chinese people. I guess they are horrible racists. 

[The Grand Nudger]

-any big death toll is likely including sustained conflict arising from mass migration or resource scarcity.   In effect, they're saying...if climate change continues at this pace..and if there's a massive global war, then lots of people will die.

The massive global migrant water war being the hand that holds the knife.

Now, personally, I just think this shows that we're underacheivers..because we know that we can have that massive global migrant water war climate change or no climate change...and we're really just dragging our feet on getting it started.

[no one]

That's how life works. Human beings, at least the current rendition of them is going away.

[Jehanne]

That's how life works. Human beings, at least the current rendition of them is going away.

Sad, but true.  A great (albeit, depressing) movie is the Age of Stupid:

Wikipedia -- The Age of Stupid

[Anomalocaris]

That's how life works. Human beings, at least the current rendition of them is going away.

The highlighted present progressive tense inescapably applies universally to all things that are. The struggle is to make it progress for as long as possible for us.


It’s like saying I don’t mind dying at all so long as it lasts a long time.

[Jehanne]

That's how life works. Human beings, at least the current rendition of them is going away.

The highlighted present progressive tense inescapably applies universally to all things that are. The struggle is to make it progress for as long as possible for us.


It’s like saying I don’t mind dying at all so long as it lasts a long time.

If we could get our act together, the human species could last hundreds of millions of years; the dinos did.

[Rahn127]

The highlighted present progressive tense inescapably applies universally to all things that are. The struggle is to make it progress for as long as possible for us.


It’s like saying I don’t mind dying at all so long as it lasts a long time.

If we could get our act together, the human species could last hundreds of millions of years; the dinos did.

I am not quite so sure that a thinking species, at our level, can last millions of years.
Humans went for hundreds of thousands of years without much of any advancement in thought.
It wasn't until we started farming and building not only shelters for ourselves but storage areas for grain.
We had to make better tools and domesticate animals for plowing the fields.

What we have accomplished in the past 200 years is beyond amazing.
We put men on the moon. We can talk to others of our own kind from anywhere on the planet as if we had some kind of magic.

Could you even envision us remaining at this same level of tech for a hundred thousand years ?

I can't. We think too much.

[Anomalocaris]

The highlighted present progressive tense inescapably applies universally to all things that are.   The struggle is to make it progress for as long as possible for us.


It’s like saying I don’t mind dying at all so long as it lasts a long time.

If we could get our act together, the human species could last hundreds of millions of years; the dinos did.

It’s not one specie of dinos that lasted hundreds of millions of years.   Rather it is thousands of descendant species of Dinos that each came and went in its own time within those hundred million years, rather like individual bubbles come and go within a persistent head on beer in a glass, that kept the genetic lineages of the original ancesteral ur-dinosaur going all that time.

Even if our descendants are still in existence a hundred million years from now, we as the ur-sapien specie need not ourselves be particularly long lived and avoid extinction for all that hundred million years.   We could emigrate from earth and quickly and prolifically speciation, leading within a few million years to many daughter species of human descendants better adopted to a wider array of environments and technology conditions, while we the original ur-specie either linger or go extinct.    Some of our daughter species would in their turn spectate, but all of them will also go extinct sooner or later but mostly long before the hundred million years is up, leaving our genetic future in the hands of yet more generations of grand daughter species.