Apocalypse now: the end of Earth brought forward

[GliderGuider]

Apocalypse now: the end of Earth brought forward

You may not need to write your last will and testament after all. Now a group of pessimistic scientists from the U.S., the UK and France say humanity has reached the point of no return and has little hope of continuing life on Earth.

A new study published by The Open Atmospheric Science Journal says the concentration of CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere has reached the point at which irreversible changes to climate start. Even if the concentration of carbon dioxide is lowered from its current level in record time, the catastrophic effects will still occur. The scientists give us about 30 years till the end of the planet to which humans are adapted.

The scientists predict spread of deserts, bad crop harvests, stronger hurricanes, the eventual dying out of coral reefs and complete disappearance of mountain glaciers that are the source of drinking water for hundreds of millions of people.

The most important point of the research, however, is not the horrifying figures or the apocalyptic promises. It’s the fact that our own industrial advances have ended up as the main factor of Earth’s downfall. And the worst hazard that comes with it is ignoring the danger.

No comment.

[jpak]

1. Doomer orgasm!

:bounce:


























:evilgrin:

[GliderGuider]

4. At every step of the way, the doomers have been shown not to have been pessimistic enough.

Whether you look at climate change and icecap/glacier retreat, the state of the oceans, the degradation of arable land or the current financial collapse, even the doomers have been surprised by the speed and depth of the problems. The implication of this observation is that the remaining areas where the pessimists have yet to be vindicated (such as a global decline in food production or the failure of renewable energy to supplant fossil fuels) are ever more likely to fall on our side of the ledger.

Mockery like yours is thus revealed to be simple whistling past the graveyard.

[GliderGuider]

2. The road ahead disappears into the mist

As far as I can tell, the two most damaging industries from the planetary perspective are automobiles and agriculture. If life on this planet (both human and non-human) were to have a chance of continuing in some recognizable form, both these industries would need to disappear. More realistically, the automobile industry would need to disappear, and agriculture would need to transform to something resembling permaculture and be cut back to perhaps a quarter of its current productivity.

Fortunately, the global automobile industry with its atmosphere-destroying exhaust, landscape-destroying infrastructure and soul-destroying product could be dealt the requisite death-blow within 10 years due to the implosion of the global economy.

Unfortunately for the rest of life on the planet, totalitarian agriculture – the major culprit in the devastation of the biosphere -- doesn’t appear to be in line for any such imminent revolution. At best we can expect marginal changes in practices here and there, but always with the objective of maintaining production. That means continuing growth in ocean and river dead zones, increasing habitat destruction, decreasing ability of cropland to absorb CO2 and growing rates of extinction. As we destroy the homes of other species and drive them into extinction, we simultaneously foul our own nest, making our own survival ever more problematic.

Fortunately, before we reach a state of complete ecosystem collapse we will arrive at a point where life becomes so manifestly intolerable that the pain of continuing on the established path will outweigh the pain of change. When that crossover point is reached, our old narratives will be willingly discarded and new ones will be eagerly adopted. My deepest wish is that there will be enough people at that point who have absorbed the foundational values of sustainability – enough to seed a new cycle of human civilization that recognizes and accepts where we went wrong in this one, and has the courage and compassion not to insist on repeating those mistakes.

[Dogmudgeon]

5. The change in agriculture may be mandatory

Nutrient loss, as you probably are aware, is happening extremely fast now, and is picking up speed. In a few decades, permaculture and other forms of "boutique" agriculture will be the only way to produce nutritious plant-based food.

I am surprised, though, that food crises are not further along than they are. There must be a lot of hump-busting in Africa and Asia to squeeze every last kilogram of food production out of increasingly barren land. At some point, undernutrition is going to allow epidemics turn into pandemics. The starvation-to-disease process is not well publicized, in spite of a backlog of over 100 years of medical literature.

Epochal changes in narrative usually require a great deal of pain. We in the developed world are still thinking in terms of driving less, being unemployed, and complaining about buying "stuff". When the food crisis finally kicks in, it's going to hit faster and hurt worse than we're prepared for.

A little "doomer orgasming" now could go a long way toward engaging efforts to change.

--p!

[OneBlueSky]

3. even worse than the carbon dioxide is the methane that's being released . . .

as the permafrost in the Arctic melts away . . .

[Marrah_G]

6. Nah- we are still a young race. We have only just begun.

One thing our species is good at is adapting.

We will look back at this as a tough time, a time of changes. But we will still be around to look back.

People have thought for thousands of years that the world was ending within their lifetime.

The world will change, people will change and adapt, but the world will not end, humanity will not end.

[GliderGuider]

7. I agree.

Humanity apparently survived a bottleneck that may have left our species with less than 50,000 individuals. From that perspective, it's all good -- the life of any organism is nothing but change.

However, from this side of the bottleneck (and speaking out of my egoic self-awareness) I'll admit that the fact that we're carrying off so many other species and disfiguring the habitat of so many more in the name of highways and plastic bath toys bothers my conscience a wee bit at three in the morning.

[The2ndWheel]

9. Force and control, not adapt

Adaptation doesn't allow for progress.

[NickB79]

10. Humanity may not end, but it may never regain it's former glory

I have heard more than a few convincing arguments that, if knocked back to a Medieval-era level of living, humanity simply wouldn't have the natural resources left to rebuild back to a 20th-century era of technology. No cheap energy, no revived Industrial Revolution.

[stuntcat]

12. the rainforests, the mountains, all the species..

We're the species clearing the rainforests, blowing the tops off so many mountains, causing thousands of species to go extinct forever, killing big parts of the oceans.

Yes we WILL figure out how to survive and some off us will live very comfortably. Those humans who don't care about what we've killed and don't think the natural world was so beautiful anyway will have very happy lives.

[tinrobot]

8. Not the end of Earth, the end of Earth as we have known it.

Humans thrived when the ice age hit, and it probably made us stronger as a species.

This will do the same, we will adapt, a lot of individuals might not survive, but as a species, we will survive to face a completely different planet than we have ever known.

Hopefully we will also have learned some hard lessons about the care and feeding of a planet along the way.

[kristopher]

11. Journal article available for download here - open access

http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOASCJ/2008/00000002/00000001/217TOASCJ.SGM

Abstract


Paleoclimate data show that climate sensitivity is ∼3°C for doubled CO2, including only fast feedback processes. Equilibrium sensitivity, including slower surface albedo feedbacks, is ∼6°C for doubled CO2 for the range of climate states between glacial conditions and ice-free Antarctica. Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago, the planet being nearly ice-free until CO2 fell to 450 ± 100 ppm; barring prompt policy changes, that critical level will be passed, in the opposite direction, within decades. If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm, but likely less than that. The largest uncertainty in the target arises from possible changes of non-CO2 forcings. An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.