Mass extinction date set by science.

[bennyboy]

I reckon around 2050, we'll have carbon dioxide reclamation plants siphoning carbon out of the atmosphere.

There are no workable proposals to do this.

No way it's gonna happen by 2050.  That's about 2 blinks away from now.

But I think eventually, we'll figure out how to use weather cycles, geological features, algae fields or whatever to do what by 2050 will basically be terraforming.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I reckon around 2050, we'll have carbon dioxide reclamation plants siphoning carbon out of the atmosphere.

You'll need thousands of them.

[I_am_not_mafia]

I'd noticed these little areas around Dresden that looked like tiny houses with gardens.  Finally got to see the entrance to one such area, and it turns out they are just tiny gardens, kleinesgärten. There buildings are sheds, and some small greenhouses. All right inside the city. I guess they have the right idea!

Sounds like an allotment. We have them in the UK as well. Always wanted one myself. We put ourselves on a waiting list for one once but moved by the time our name came up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)

Apparently a German great uncle of mine who used to own an allotment used to be a mining engineer. So he built a cellar underneath his shed and the soil was gradually distributed around all the other allotments. Then he built a cellar underneath the cellar and then went even deeper and installed a fish pond in it.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I'd noticed these little areas around Dresden that looked like tiny houses with gardens.  Finally got to see the entrance to one such area, and it turns out they are just tiny gardens, kleinesgärten. There buildings are sheds, and some small greenhouses. All right inside the city. I guess they have the right idea!

Sounds like an allotment. We have them in the UK as well. Always wanted one myself. We put ourselves on a waiting list for one once but moved by the time our name came up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotment_(gardening)

Apparently a German great uncle of mine who used to own an allotment used to be a mining engineer. So he built a cellar underneath his shed and the soil was gradually distributed around all the other allotments. Then he built a cellar underneath the cellar and then went even deeper and installed a fish pond in it.

And then Steve McQueen jumped over it on a motorcycle? 

[Cyberman]

I reckon around 2050, we'll have carbon dioxide reclamation plants siphoning carbon out of the atmosphere.

We already have plants that do this.

[LadyForCamus]

The deniers will be upset that someone is telling them that their house is on fire.

The left wingers set that fire to push their "climate change agenda"!

[Brian37]

I cant do anything after I die, but I certainly will say something everywhere every day as long as I am alive. If you have kids, and want a future for them and your grandchildren, you should say something too.

[TheBeardedDude]

Yep. It's official folks... We've got 83 years to go before we put ourselves out of our own misery! Yay! Go humans!
Just thinking about all those starving people and children not having to suffer anymore! It brings a tear to my eye...

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/techandsci...spartandhp

Planet Earth appears to be on course for the start of a sixth mass extinction of life by about 2100 because of the amount of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere, according to a mathematical study of the five previous events in the last 540 million years.

It'd be nice if the article linked to the study or provided a citation of it. I can't find the original source just yet.

Although I believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change, I'm very suspect of any calculation about when the mass extinction will occur. Primarily because of:
1) the resolution that we have in the fossil records vs the modern record is very different. So it is difficult to assess timing in the fossil record and this makes comparing mass extinctions with the modern difficult. This is especially true because...
2) the things we know that are going extinct today are primarily the charismatic megafauna, but the majority of the fossil record for mass extinction events is from the invertebrate record. Other studies of mass extinction (such as one by Payne et al. 2016 and another by Plotnick et al. 2016: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ea...ce.aaf2416 and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...12589/full) have shown this difficulty in comparing the modern extinctions with the past. 
3) Those aforementioned studies indicate that we are already in the mass extinction, and have been for some time. And for the charismatic megafauna, human activity is clearly a direct factor, but not necessarily changes in climate and environment from humans (more like overfishing and hunting as primary drivers). This is probably because of the previous issue of assessing the magnitude and timing of the extinction when we have very little idea about which species are in danger in the invertebrate realm (where we can make more direct comparisons with statistically significant numbers of samples. Both studies use the threatened/endangered/extinct designations from the IUCN, which has almost no invertebrates in it because most people don't care about the clams and other spineless creatures as much as they care about the big cuddly and cute things).
4) Following pt 3, there is probably more than one mechanism by which the current extinction will progress. The first is the human activity implicated in the loss of the megafauna (overfishing, hunting, habitat loss and fragmentation from human development), and the second is the change in climates from human activities (now it isn't humans directly causing the extinction, but humans are acting as the trigger for the mechanism that is). The signal from the latter would be better assessed by the invertebrate record as we can make more meaningful comparisons with the past, but as has already been noted, this is difficult. 
5) Past extinction events select against organisms in a non-random way (in most cases). Meaning that organisms susceptible to going extinct during a cooling event, died off. If a second cooling event occurs sometime later, the lineage of organisms susceptible to extinction in a cooling climate are already gone. So the magnitude of the extinction may differ even though the mechanisms are similar. What this means is that while we can compare past extinction events to the modern, we have to do so carefully because the physiology of the animals alive today could mean that they are less susceptible to extinction in a warming world because the lineages susceptible to it have already gone extinct (but organisms living in similar environments and doing similar things, may still be as susceptible as the extinct lineages)
6) The end-Devonian mass extinction is associated with major perturbations of the global carbon cycle. It is associated with 3 positive δ13C excursions (2 in the Frasnian and one at the end of the Famennian). So it is erroneous to conclude that perturbations of the global carbon cycle had nothing to do with the end-Devonian mass extinctions. A better example would have been the end-Cretaceous mass extinction where the primary mechanism driving the extinction was from a bolide impact and that the subsequent effects on the global carbon cycle were a consequence of the mass extinction whereas in other intervals, the perturbations of the global carbon cycle are directly associated with the triggering mechanisms (such as the end of the Permian around 250 million years ago). 


What we need in order to better assess when we could expect to see sudden declines in biodiversity, is better data on the modern distributions of invertebrates and a comparison with their historical distributions and abundances. Scientists are trying to do this, but it is obviously slow work.

[Court Jester]

Yep. It's official folks... We've got 83 years to go before we put ourselves out of our own misery! Yay! Go humans!
Just thinking about all those starving people and children not having to suffer anymore! It brings a tear to my eye...

http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/techandsci...spartandhp

Planet Earth appears to be on course for the start of a sixth mass extinction of life by about 2100 because of the amount of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere, according to a mathematical study of the five previous events in the last 540 million years.

I'm not buying it.

[vorlon13]

It's not 'just' carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide by itself in air is invisible.  In China, for instance, there is a toxic witches mega-brew of all kinds of nasties that will need to be ameliorated.