Abysmal on 7/11/2016 at 16:53
Edit: thread surgically modified by moderator, context lost
faetal on 7/11/2016 at 17:00
Username checks out.
Renzatic on 7/11/2016 at 17:23
I'm a firm believer in global warming, though I'm not one of those people who thinks it's all absolute doom and gloom.
The absolute worst case scenario won't produce an environment that's inimical to life. The world won't be vastly different than it was before. But the sociological and economic implications of it would be pretty profound, likely setting us back at least 20 years while we deal with it.
faetal on 7/11/2016 at 17:58
Depends really. Humans are a very resource-expensive species and we have a lot of time between generations coupled with long gestation and hyper-fragile offspring which mostly occur one at a time. If we get an extinction event on a par with the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, we may be out-competed vigorously. We're very adaptable, but only if certain baseline conditions are there.
Life on earth in general will bounce back barring a scorched planet, as per the last few MEVs.
nbohr1more on 7/11/2016 at 18:08
Quote Posted by Abysmal
A green Hitler is what this world urgently needs right about now, environmentalist fascism is the only path forward to an actual, viable future for humanity. Head out of the clouds, no trying to make people's lives better; being evil is how things get done. Coal miner? Slaughter them. Haven't converted your roof to solar by the deadline? Slaughter the entire family. Clean energy and the death of billions of people, for a better future. I'm only half joking.
This is something I've been floating around as a conspiracy theory angle to the election... (obviously out on the lunatic fringe)
A cabal of world leaders including George Soros determine that the populace and commercial sector will not "go green" in time to avert catastrophic escalations of
Carbon and Methane leading up to:
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis)
As an emergency measure, they decide to interfere in world geopolitics on an unprecedented scale.
1) To begin, they entice OPEC nations to work on a fake oil-pipeline scheme from Qatar to Turkey.
2) This ensnares the region in wars and weakens many of the OPEC nations
3) Simultaneously, they begin pushing Fracking in the West to cut the dependency on foreign Fossil Fuels and deplete the OPEC economies thus their influence on the world stage
4) As the West emerges from the grips of OPEC influence, begin moving towards Electric Cars and Solar plants
5) Move to complete the Qatar to Turkey pipeline and engage Russia in conflict to ensure that they too are kept from affecting Fossil Fuel influence in the EU
6) Keep the wars cooking until the world is sufficiently converted to Green energy.
Time to call Alex Jones I guess...
Renzatic on 7/11/2016 at 18:10
Well, the absolute worst case scenario would probably lead to about 1/3rd of the population dying while global society readjusts itself, and that's assuming it's a sudden change, rather than a gradual one.
The biggest concern is that the change makes our current bread baskets become unable to produce as much food they once could. The US Midwest is pretty susceptible to this change, since it's fairly arid, and low lying, making it a prime flooding plane if the sea levels rise too high. I've seen maps that have it becoming a good sized inland sea if the ice caps melt entirely.
On the plus side, the change in climate will probably make some areas previously considered too warm, too cold, or too dry perfect environments for producing food. The change could actually be beneficial in the long term, depending on how it all goes, but the adjustment to this new standard will be very, very painful to say the least.
faetal on 7/11/2016 at 18:22
Quote Posted by Renzatic
Well, the absolute worst case scenario would probably lead to about 1/3rd of the population dying while global society readjusts itself, and that's assuming it's a sudden change, rather than a gradual one.
The
absolute worst, which would be something like the P_T extinction, would result in around 95% of all living stuff dying. The best guess for how that happened was a 5 degree hike in temperatures over a 200k year time period (possibly triggered by sheet basalt eruptions), causing sequestered methane residing in the seas to be released, causing a sudden (again, thousands of years) 5 degree increase in temperature. Evolution happens slowly and in a non-linear fashion, so when you get sudden shifts in temperature way faster than the rate of adaptation, species start dropping off of the face of the earth. For humans, the big worry is the de-synchronisation of insects and the plants they pollinate. If the life-cycles drift out of synch, such that e.g. an insect species responds to a temperature increase by hatching and dying two months earlier, whereas its corresponding plant species only shifts by a week or two, then in the space of a few years, you could get massive disruption of any associated food webs. Multiply that by pretty much everything if you get a fast enough increase with high enough magnitude and big things like us just don't have enough to eat and get out-competed (probably right after we decimate ourselves with resource wars) by things which don't need quite so much energy.
Renzatic on 7/11/2016 at 18:31
Well, the absolute worst within the most likely outcomes based on current trends.
Though a PT extinction event probably wouldn't mean the extinction of the entire human race. We're an adaptable bunch, and our current sciences allow us to do some very interesting things, up to and including making meat and vegetable matter from test tubes using raw components. We're no longer entirely beholden to the ecosystem. If it's a change that occurs over thousands of years, we would be able to compensate, though it would still lead to being able to sustain only a much smaller population overall.
faetal on 7/11/2016 at 18:56
Quote Posted by Renzatic
We're an adaptable bunch
I think you may be underestimating how young a species we are and how dependent our existence is on both social stability and resource abundance.
We're adaptable, as I mentioned before, but only in the presence of baseline conditions.
When the conditions change, there may be a bunch of stuff which copes way better than we do.
Humans really aren't all that. We've been around only 100k years or so.
Renzatic on 7/11/2016 at 19:20
Quote Posted by faetal
I think you may be underestimating how young a species we are and how dependent our existence is on both social stability and resource abundance.
We're adaptable, as I mentioned before, but only in the presence of baseline conditions.
When the conditions change, there may be a bunch of stuff which copes way better than we do.
Humans really aren't all that. We've been around only 100k years or so.
I may be giving us too much credit, but you're giving us far too little.
The baseline conditions for survival are that we have an environment we can breathe in, and have enough energy to leverage our intellectual applications. That's a considerably broader field than most animals must adhere to.
We can take a cow embryo and produce tons upon tons of synthetic meat. We can build atmosphere controlled greenhouses to grow our food in almost any environment. We can build equally controlled inland aquariums to house fish and sea life for harvesting. We can manipulate the world around us to granular degrees, with our only requirement being the energy to produce and maintain these manipulations, of which we have a myriad ways of harvesting. Compare our capabilities to a wolf, a deer, or a fish, which is limited only to harvesting from what its ecosystem provides, and you'll see that there's much more of a limit to their adaptability in contrast.
Animals are limited entirely to a prebuilt environment. To a good extent, we can build our own. This gives us considerably more flexibility through a much wider set of conditions and circumstances.
