Current Events > Irreversible climate change = Potential cause of the end of the world?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Its possible that people (including myself) have been dooming too much, but is it really dooming when it is a serious contender for an end of the world scenario (the other being nuclear warfare/apocalypse)?

the world will persist, but it might take a long time to course correct.

the chance of humanity, and a bunch of other life forms, continuing to live is a lot lower, though.

Its not a potential end of the world, its a potential end of humanity. Big difference tbh. The planet will keep spinning.

boxoto posted...

the world will persist, but it might take a long time to course correct.

the chance of humanity, and a bunch of other life forms, continuing to live is a lot lower, though.

This.

The short answer is yes.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/8/80a2ed57.jpg

By "end of the world" I always just assume the person is talking about humanity. And...I mean, yes, it is likely to happen. Business lies and tells the people willing to believe them that technology will somehow magically fix this with a breakthrough some day. Religious Western folks don't actually follow the Bible, so they don't know that taking care of the Earth is part of their duties. Billionaires for some reason think they will survive in their bunkers or in space. And the average person seems to think that there is "nothing we can do about it". So as things continue to get worse, we all suffer. No one, not even these delusional billionaires, will be spared.

At this point, the only way I don't see anthropogenic climate change as the guaranteed cause of humanity's eventual extinction is if we get into a global thermonuclear war first.

I don't think it will even be the end of humanity. But a lot of people would die and society will be forever changed by it.

Climate change will not destroy humanity.

A lot of areas will be a lot more hostile for us to live in. Landscapes are going to change, a lot of people will be killed in natural disasters.

But humans will survive. We've made it our business to find ways to live in places we have no business living. People will find a way.

worlds fine, we're fucked though.

SAlYAN posted...

Climate change will not destroy humanity.

A lot of areas will be a lot more hostile for us to live in. Landscapes are going to change, a lot of people will be killed in natural disasters.

But humans will survive. We've made it our business to find ways to live in places we have no business living. People will find a way.

we've also invented ways to kill ourselves far eclipsing anything humanity has ever seen in its tens of thousands of years of existence. climate change isn't going to kill us all, but the wars fought over limited resources brought on by climate change will go nuclear and finish us off.

planet will glow for a couple thousand years but it'll be fine.

SpawnShadow posted...
At this point, the only way I don't see anthropogenic climate change as the guaranteed cause of humanity's eventual extinction is if we get into a global thermonuclear war war first.

Now I want to rewatch WarGames with Matthew Broderick. It has been a few months.

The world will be fine, humans won't.

https://imgur.com/a/ugdfYDN

Humanity FOFA

SAlYAN posted...

Climate change will not destroy humanity.

A lot of areas will be a lot more hostile for us to live in. Landscapes are going to change, a lot of people will be killed in natural disasters.

But humans will survive. We've made it our business to find ways to live in places we have no business living. People will find a way.

When the resources start running out and people start dying off by the tens or hundreds of millions, the odds of someone finishing the job with nukes will go up exponentially.

The world doesn't require us. We can absolutely make ourselves go extinct and life will continue on.

SpawnShadow posted...

At this point, the only way I don't see anthropogenic climate change as the guaranteed cause of humanity's eventual extinction is if we get into a global thermonuclear war first.

Even then the world will recover after awhile. Might take millennia but it will recover

Earth has gone through multiple mass extinctions due to climate change and natural disasters. Nothing is going to end it before the sun does. It's got many cycles to go before that.

No i dont think the world will end. There will probably be worst case a long term reordering and some degree of societal collapse. I find the chance of humanity dying out being close to zero. How many and what does it look like is the real question to me not whether we are somehow going to go extinct from it.

I think Humans will survive even nuclear war in some capacity.

1 billion+ climate refugees will be the end of civilization as we know it.

Not if AI does it first

(well humanity anyway, but that applies to climate change too)

The planet is fine. The people are fucked.

Irreversible seems hyperbolic. We dont actually know that to be the case.

But were pretty fucked. Humanity is going to have to lose a few billion people to learn their lesson here.

Its not going to end the world, and probably wont even end humans. But it might end civilisation.

Trumble posted...

Its not going to end the world, and probably wont even end humans. But it might end civilisation.

Sometimes I wonder if humans are just here because the Earth decided it needed a lot of plastic.

There is far too much "she'll be right" going on.

No, "she won't be right." Earth is on a distasterous course for the greatest mass extinction event since 'The Great Dying' (an event that wiped out 97%+ of all life).

The Great Dying is an event I bring up because it was an extinction event brought about by, you guessed it, massive CO2 emissions! Earth was turned in to a "hot house" where the seas boiled and the land was a arid landscape of nothingness.

We are currently on course to trigger Earth back in to a hothouse climate. Our emission rate is faster than that time period as a matter of fact (we're essentially speedrunning it).

"Humans won't go extinct." They will in less than 200 years on current projections. We have gone over so many unknown tipping points and triggered so many feedback loops that it might legitimately be too late already (just the other week I posted a topic about how scientists have found the Southern Meridial Ocean Currents have already begun to reverse, a tipping point and feedback loop not even factored in nor expected this half of the century), but what I can say with certainty is that if we pass 2.5C degrees of warming (we're set to do that by 2050 at the latest BTW) we will absolutely have locked in hothouse Earth within a few centuries.

"But life finds a way!" Sure, if Earth had another billion years to develop back from cellular lifeforms to actual animals. Too bad Earth has two time limits for habitability of higher life (higher life is all complex life, mammalian reptilian avian, ect ect ect) and there is a very large probability that we are the last chance (as garbage as our species is).

The atmosphere is depleting, the sun will expand, and the continents will all some day hundreds of millions of years from now collide back into a super-continent where life is extremely rare.

The topic is very much correct in its thesis. Climate change is a potential cause for our extinction and whether it takes the entire planet with it will come down to whether human civilization dies off fast enough (or we change our ways as a civilization, unfortunately I suspect that will also require a massive die-off to occur first as well) to avert the worst of the emissions or whether we cling on long enough to cross some truly apocalyptic tipping points.

For what it's worth we have scientists literally giving up and saying the fight is over now. Things are that bad.

We have at most 20 years left before we start seeing a mass die-off of humans.

Unless we fuck up bad enough we strip our atmosphere away, life will go on *somewhere*. It is pure fucking hubris that mankind thinks that the end of mankind is the end of all life. It'd be like the dinosaurs thinking the Ice Age was the end of all life.