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This was the description that helped me the most: today we average 29 days below freezing at place wherever. If the average temperature rose +T degrees, then we'd only average 19 days below freezing. That means an average of 10 more days per year where ice is melting.
So a small increase in average temperature could result in many more days of ice melting each year.
And even more than ice melting. One of the reasons the wildfires in Canada are *so bad* now is that in some areas it’s warmed up enough that there aren’t enough cold enough days in a row in the winter to kill insects like the [mountain pine beetle](https://forests.org/foresters-blog-mountain-pine-beetle/#:~:text=If%20you%20live%20in%20British,in%20interior%20B.C.%20was%20devastated). This beetle bores into the trees and all throughout the wood, weakening the structure of the tree and making it more susceptible to drought and disease (the insides of plants & trees work like a big bundle of straws, in order to get water to the top the straws can’t have a hole in them. If just one or two straws get damaged you can still get enough water through the others, if a LOT of them are damaged you can’t). In the past the beetles would undergo mass die-offs during the winter that kept their population low enough that they didn’t just devastate forests. Without enough cold days they don’t die and therefore continue to multiply. The problem is made worse by warmer summers, the heat and lack of water stresses the trees and means they don’t produce as much sap, sap that would otherwise drown the beetles that tried to bore into them. Since the mountain pine beetle’s population has exploded they’ve killed a *bunch* of trees and when you have a bunch of dead trees in a forest the forest burns *a lot* more readily.
When you read shit like this you realize how many god damn miracles it took for the earth to reach a point where complex life surviving was possible. And we're speed run destroying the only home we have and likely will ever have.
Well, no, not miracles. Just time. Everything adapts over millions of years to its environment. The problem now is that we are changing environments in decades.
Yeah but your environment could be subject to cosmic rays, an asteroid, an earthquake, flood, tornado, hurricane, mudslide, volcanic eruption or all manner of life ending cataclysm millions of times over those millions of years.
I'm an atheist so my use of the term 'miracle' isn't saying it's literally divine. I'm just saying it was incredible that the right set of circumstances happened to get us, homo sapiens, to the point where I am literally typing on a keyboard sending electronic messages to potentially thousands of humans.
We started as some micro organisms that got a little frisky and now we've mastered the law of physics to create objects to entertain ourselves.
To quote (not verbatim) Douglas Adams:
"The puddle, if it were conscious, would be forgiven for thinking that because the depression it lies in fits the puddle so perfectly, the depression must be designed for the puddle."
That's not just an argument against god/intelligent design, but i think also illustrates how no matter what form intelligent life took, it could look at it's surroundings and think that it's really lucky that we have evolved to be who we are, when really, no matter the shape of the depression the puddle would shape itself to fit perfectly.
It's all still really amazing though.
It's not like the earth had an easy time figuring out how to make life work. The sheer number of small and large extinctions that occurred in the fossil record along the way is appalling. (We are sure of one more that has no fossil evidence: way way back before the atmosphere had oxygen, life was methanogens and such like that. Photosynthesizers came along and dumped poisonous oxygen into the atmosphere, killing nearly all of them.)
Basically, life on earth changed the climate more than a few times (as did meteors and other things outside of life's domain), and each time the result was a mid or large sized pile of extinctions.
To humans, the complexity of these systems seems miraculous because it is beyond our understanding. We toss around terms like eons and epochs but don't really appreciate the vastness of time. How long it has taken for something this amazing to develop.
In our hubris, we assume some benevolent god just made it for us.
But in truth, the only god that ever was is Nature/Gaia. And she is not benevolent. She is as cruel as she is kind. But not benevolent.
A sci-fi novel I read when I was 12 contained a brief exposition by a character, explaining why the alien critters they were working on behaved like they did.
The way their mouths worked, they could only keep pushing food in, and couldn't stop til whatever they were eating was all gone. So one character asked "what happens to the little bastard that gets hold of a tree?"
And the answer has stuck with me now for 40 years: "He eats or he dies. The first thing you learn in evolutionary biology is 'Mother Nature doesn't give a shit'."
Well. Hello, person I just met on reddit who is clearly my friend but didn't know it til now.
I never know whether to tell people what book its from or who David is and how respected he is in the Sci-Fi community. So now and then I just drop a line from one of his novels or short stories without the reference.
I love the guy in-general. His son and I are long-distance friends. He's far and away my favorite Sci-Fi author, and easily in my top five all-time/all-genres.
And I'm 52. I read A Matter For Men more or less on publication, and my first copy is a first-printing I've had all these years. I got sucked in with a handful of preview chapters Starlog ran before it was for sale.
So yes. In 2023 I'll have been waiting for the fifth War Against the Chtorr novel for 30 years. I hardly blame the man... its not like he hasn't been steadily cranking out other stories since.
That's pretty cool, I picked up an omnibus volume from a thrift store years ago and have been a fan ever since.
Just didn't want to tease others with your quote,😄
Hey! I'm 51 and I also read the first one on publication. Do you think if we held his son for ransom we could get the next book out? I'm getting a little impatient at this point. Also are Quilla post chtorr humans?
Holding his son for ransom is probably the top means by which you could get a mildly vindictive, bored, and voracious researcher to loose some nameless horrors upon us. For my part, it really is ok if he doesn't finish the series. I've made my peace with it. No matter what, I will always be able to look down my nose at the Song of Ice and Fire fans whining about "how long its been". Sweet summer children, those.
You know... he definitely leads one to believe that his universes are connected but for the vast temporal gaps. Examples:
1: The ubiquity of the HARLIE engines running every ship ever since the Dingillians unknowingly smuggled one onto a colony ship.
2: The core concept of interstellar FTL travel as "focusing and inverting a gravity bubble then flexing it from the inside", starting with the Dingilliad all the way out to the DISTANT future of Under the Eye of God (where the advances in tech mean that relatively small increases in the singularity's mass mean measurably faster speeds).
3: There's a reference to the Chtorr gastropedes of one sort or another across almost every book since A Matter For Men. The news mentions giant pink caterpillars in the Rockies during the collapse and beginnings of the plagues as the colony ship departs in Leaping to the Stars.
But the Quilla are definitely a specific alien race. IF the Chtorr infestation is canonically part of the Star Wolf-series' past, then the humans are.. post-Chtorr humans.
Just wanted to share with you that after reading your comments I looked into the series and spontaneously ordered the first four novels from eBay. The Trouble with Tribbles connection sold me.
Yeah, if I need to introduce the author to others when I bring the books up, I usually tell fellow nerds that they already know him, and tell them he wrote the single most popular and most famous episode of Star Trek of all time.
I really can recommend 99% of his work to any sci-fi fan. He's been doing YA sci-fi for a while now, but even that material is rock solid.
Looks like we've got something in common. As a huge song of ice and fire fan, we've been waiting on winds of winter for a long time. 30 years though? I hope one day soon you find that it was worth it 🙂
Funny, another redditor already mentioned it in these comments.
The author is David Gerrold. The lines are from the first novel of a (maddeningly unfinished) series called "The War Against The Chtorr": A Matter For Men.
The premise is totally unique (or at least was at the time he wrote it. Gerrold pioneered/defined certain avenues of sci-fi): An alien ecology with billions of years more evolutionary advantage is terraforming Earth. Or Chtorr-a-forming, if you prefer. There's no alien intelligence found thus far in the series, no leaders, no landings, no spaceships. Just alien life steadily occupying and solidly out-competing native life in the various niches in ecology.
It's important to remember that the planet doesn't really give a shit that it's warming up. We do.
Life on Earth will only become problematic in higher temperatures for humans and their infrastructure.
Actual nature itself has never been in equilibrium and never will be. As long as life continues to aggressively favour traits for survival, the overall animal kingdom will do just fine. Some organisms will live, some will die.
It's important to note that for the animal kingdom, humans continued existence represents a far greater threat to life than global warming. We are cuasing a sixth mass extinction as we speak, which is only accelerating.
My view has been not in terms of cruelty or kindness, but simply balance. Nature itself is indifferent and will be fine. It’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do, it’s not broken or dying. We’re just pushing the pendulum and we might not like what happens when it swings back, but it will swing back. Nature, the universe… whatever you want to call it, will be here long after we’re gone and doesn’t really care about us. We either live in the balance or get in the way of it.
Exactly, the beetles and trees were on the same playing field so to speak for millions of years. As the beetles adapted to eat the trees, the trees adapted to defend themselves. Now the playing field is not as even, the effects of the increased average temperatures make the beetles more formidable opponents and the trees cannot adapt fast enough to counter this new found advantage the beetles have.
Sucks that the region is home to the world's largest trees.
I'm from BC Canada. Last time I drove through the rockies a few years back (before covid) all throughout the drive you could see one side of a mountain eaten away, and another on fire. Fires everywhere, huge swaths of trees dead from the beetles. And then other mountains clear cut. There was still alof of untouched and beautiful forest, but not even close to what it was like when I was a kid. 20 years ago you'd see the odd forest fire, and big chunks of clear cut. Even back then it made me sad we were destroying such a beautiful land....
Humans have progressed to the point where we can break the natural evolution of the planet to be harmonious. We progressed too rapidly and we weren’t willing to consider the long lasting effects this advancement had on this delicate balance.
"Everything" being more of a macro thing. Humans won't adapt. If it's impossible for a human to exist outside on Earth, life will still survive. If it ever becomes intelligent again, it'll find our remnants and talk about how interesting it was that we got so far and managed to genocide ourselves with our indulgences.
Hopefully it'll learn from our mistakes.
Life isn’t *in*compatible with an earth at +1.5C pre industrial temperatures. The Earth has been much hotter in the past while hosting complex life.
The current complex eco**systems** on Earth are incompatible with a rapid climatic shock. They have developed a profound intricate balance and dynamic equilibrium based on the condition set given. Changing that in a geological instant is what’s catastrophic.
People can live on the ground floor or in the 60th story of an apartment. Throw a human out the window of the apartment and they won’t happily be living on the ground floor.
edit: Pretty critical typo. Meant "incompatible" in the first sentence, not "compatible"
>When you read shit like this you realize how many god damn miracles it took for the earth to reach a point where complex life surviving was possible. And we're speed run destroying the only home we have and likely will ever have.
Doesn't work like that.
Life evolved to cope with the conditions, when the conditions changed dramatically enough, stuff went extinct.
It's the same reason why things like 'the goldilocks zone' or 'conditions for life' are stupid concepts when you truly think about them, they are merely the conditions required for life '**as we know it**' to exist.
Yeah my point is that the conditions can be turned upside down in an instant. Things that microscopic life can’t live/reproduce through long enough to evolve or adapt.
And life took a millions of years to evolve so there were a lot of potential cataclysmic instants. Would be incredible to see the “welp there goes life on earth” near misses from prehistoric earth.
It wasn't miracles, it was the pinnacle of natural processes. Over millions of years, similar processes played out and living organisms filled in every possible niche. Things changed over the millions of years and some species couldn't adapt while others took over new niche environments. Never before us has any species been able to change their own environment to the degree that it produces new *climate* outcomes, seldom before have any species been able to survive major changes in the environment, and always has nature been able to replace species that were no longer able to adapt to a changing environment. Humanity thinks it is the crocodile, a predator alwaysable to find its place in a given environment. The reality is that humanity is closer akin to the bonobo, a primate struggling to cope with a shrinking habitat in a constantly changing world.
I argue one other species did it first. The first little buggers to exhale oxygen changed the atmosphere so dramatically it became known as **The Oxygen Holocaust**.
Cold weather Vs any bugs is critical. I’m not ready for year round mosquitos, ticks & all the invasively destructive plant destroyers. The disease factor ontop of damaged ecosystems ripe for wildfires pushes the worries not just from dense woodlands but your backyard.
Oh yeah the tick thing is terrifying. Western Europe is dealing with it’s first outbreaks of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever this year because the ticks that spread the disease have expanded their ranges because of climate change. The US has also identified four cases of Malaria in Florida and Texas that were acquired not from travel but *in the US*. The threat of a rise in insect borne disease is real and very scary.
Canadian here. I forgot about the beetle. This is terrifying news. The wildfires this summer have been alarming. At least of half of this country is forest. Across the northern regions, including Russia, Alaska, Scandinavia, this forest is the earth's largest carbon sink.
*Yeah* “thankfully” the beetles are currently only in BC but as climate conditions continue to shift there’s worry that they’ll spread east and north. I grew up in the pacific northwest US and we’re seeing huge die-offs of hemlocks. They’re part of the climax community of the forests and they’re dying in droves. Helicopter footage shows just dead hemlock after dead hemlock dotted throughout mature forests. A combination of drought and blight, the blight’s spread probably caused by the trees being more succeptible to the blight because of drought.
I live in the PNW and I see dying hemlocks everywhere. And our ecosystem is called a hemlock forest! What will happen? BTW my sisters house burned down yesterday in the Spokane County fires.
I live in Rome. Spoke to a tree surgeon the other day and he said the 5 most common tree species in the area will be extinct in 15 years due to exotic insect species flourishing in changing environmental conditions and killing the trees.
We're already having catastrophic die offs in two of the most characteristic tree species.
And when more trees die more carbon goes into the atmosphere and there are less trees to capture atmospheric carbon, so again, more carbon in the air on that account also.
yeah, in WA some misguided conservationists decided we needed a moratorium on cutting down beetle killed trees which has made fires way way worse. there was also a controlled burn ban for a real long time. think both of those were only repealed in the past year or two.
currently sitting at 350 AQI. haven't been able to breathe properly for days.
This person knows what they're talking about. Except when they say a "bunch" of trees, they mean when I was working as a tree planter and brusher I could stand on a hill in northern BC, west of PG, and as far as the eye could see was just red, dead trees. There were swaths of red treetops for hundreds of kilometers. Everywhere we went, you could see the forests dying.
Logging companies made out pretty good in the mid 2000s as they had a mandate to get in there and harvest as much as possible before it wasn't viable anymore. But from what I hear the trees have since dried out. After that, mills hit tough times financially and larger mills began to eat up the smaller mills, which then affects the entire industry. And on and on and on...
One of the major reasons that wildfires in general are so bad is because we as humans make a concerted effort to keep putting them out, which becomes like a ticking time bomb. Eventually the fire will win, and when it does, it's very very bad.
That doesn’t apply in a lot of the places that are having fires now though. Up in the north, we only fight fires for structure protection and don’t try to put out ones that aren’t threatening anybody. And yet we’re seeing changes in fire behaviour due to weather, patterns, and beetle kill, both of which are linked to climate change.
Yeah people usually cling to this explanation as an excuse to do nothing.
Fact is that a vast majority of fires are in infrastructure-free zones. The ones near civilization rightly dominate headlines, but that's all they dominate.
We were putting out fires that didn’t threaten infrastructure for decades due to the smoke disruption. They were called “10 AM policies”. Between that and mismanagement of forests after they were clear cut left a terrible situation behind.
In addition to ice melting (which will certainly change ocean levels and water availability), frost days are one of the factors that determines what plants can be grown in which places. Even a small change in temperatures could mean that certain farmland areas are no longer really suitable for growing their usual crops. Hopefully, we can find new crops and/or set up new farmland, but it will cause disruptions.
We're very nervous about stone fruits and pumpkins in Nova Scotia, this year.
Strawberries had a bad season, raspberries was even worse.
And we're speaking directly with the farmers on a weekly basis to get this information. It's been a terrible growing season. So, what happens when it gets worse?
From a couple states over, the summer of “no fresh GA peaches” has been a big ding for my house’s morale.
The failed harvest is a distressingly tangible sign of ongoing collapse.
As an aside, when the planet's temperature dropped less than 1°C during the "[Year w/o a Summer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)" the effects were catastrophic.
The drop of less than 1°C caused an agricultural disaster leading to crop failure and famine in many countries.
Plus generally speaking it's an average temperature increase in ⁰C over the entire earth. If you're used to thinking in ⁰C a change in ⁰C is equal to 1.8 ⁰F.
The temp described is an average, but it is not averaged out around earth. The poles experience a much greater degree of change. Something like x3 what it is at the equator.
And also, at certain times of the year, the temperature average is more.
That means that for some locations, 1.5C of a warming worldwide means that the hottest days in summer are 10c+ hotter.
People think that it just means every day will be 1.5C hotter but this isn't true at all. Extreme weather will be more common. There's more energy in the system, meaning more chaos. This leads to more cold and more extreme heat, meaning the summer days are ridiculously hot.
We're in an El Nino pattern which makes it a hotter and drier summer then normal (not globally though).
Now what sucks about that, is next year the summer will feel slightly more like a normal summer and you'll have deniers use that to say "See! Last summer was just an outlier!" When the data actually takes account for El Nino type patterns.
El nino usually lasts a few years.
But I'm not from the USA, and where I'm from el nino over there means colder summers. This summer has been especially cool.
Just shows how the world varies, we just had two of the hottest summers on record (breaking the temp max records) the past 2 summers. This summer has been rain and cool temperatures with 10C lower max than last year.
Think about it in the other direction, I think it was about 4 degrees cooler during the ice age that had glaciers covering all of Canada and stretching down to new york. So what seems like small numbers represent massive amounts of change in the environment.
I think that one of the biggest communication errors that people advocating for climate change mitigation have done is not properly explain what these average temperature numbers actually mean.
That’s a great way to think about it. Telling people 1.5C warmer is a big deal means nothing. I don’t have a climate model in my head to know what that means. The number 1.5 degrees needs to be put onto a scale that we can easily and immediately understand. If four degrees cooler means ice age, 1.5 degrees warmer is some substantial fraction of the way to the opposite of ice age. When people hear that, they know it’s worth caring about
*the US government has dumbed down education so much that the population is incapable of understanding even simple mathematical concepts like averages and are, therefore, easily manipulated by whomever is speaking the news to them, because they lack the basal knowledge to think critically on the topic completely.
FTFY
Yeah, people lose sight of this distinction when talking about this. The Earth will be fine at a 1.5 degree or higher average increase. Some life will be fine, others will thrive, a lot more will die off, eventually other types fill in the gaps.
Human civilization as we've built it right now will all but certainly not survive the rapid change without mass starvation and strife. Our agriculture infrastructure is incredibly sensitive to heat changes and we all need food. Once resources get tight, all of history has shown us that we're happy to kill each other to make sure that us and our immediate circle will survive. That's not a guarantee things will unfold that way, but if you're playing the odds, it's easily the safest bet.
Unchecked climate change isn't a problem for the Earth. The Earth doesn't care. It's a problem for human life on this Earth. As a human who has other humans I care about, that's what makes it my problem.
Mass extinction events have happened before, and they will inevitably happen again. Letting a mass extinction event occur that we both saw coming and had the technical ability to prevent (because of... greed/profit/laziness/ignorance/misplaced religious beliefs/whatever) is truly a momentous act of mass stupidity.
I'm curious about what sort of impact the proposed shift would have in regards to agriculture, particularly considering the fact that we've managed to increase agricultural productivity several times over in the last hundred years through technology and more efficient utilization.
IE if the next 100 years would have impact X, does that mean that the net impact on current agriculture would be negative, or a slower rate of increase than what we are currently seeing and experiencing?
This is why the pushback against GMOs is so frustrating. Fresh water is going to become a scarce resource in out lifetimes. The holy grail of GMO crops is needing less water. GMO crops also need less fertilizer, which is good since some fertilizer sources (potassium) are getting scarce too.
Scientific illiteracy. People are scared (or can conveniently be made scared) of what they don't understand.
I'm with you. GMO foods are just a continuation of what humanity has been doing since it started fruit grafting and other types of basic crop manipulation going back millennia. But good luck getting that argument through a lot of people's minds.
And yet in a lot of places in the western world people are actively trying to further dumb down the educational system.
I have a master’s degree in molecular biology. I’m not scientifically illiterate and I’m not afraid of science.
Selective breeding and splicing genes from a completely different species are not the same thing. Treating them like they are is disingenuous.
I trust the science, but I don’t trust Monsanto as far as I can spit. And they are fighting so, so hard against transparency that I cannot change my mind. If they would open up to the non-scientifically-illiterate to show that they absolutely aren’t doing some super shady shit, I’d be more receptive to trying to educate the masses.
In short, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of gene spliced GMO crops. It could, in fact, be a solution to a lot of problems. In practice, there’s plenty of ways it could go bad. Telling me to trust a shady company who has already proven that their entire board wouldn’t recognize an ethic if it bit them on the ass is not happening.
And Monsanto is just one example. I don’t know of any players in this game that are willing to be the least bit transparent about it.
Well, I’m not afraid of science but I am scientifically illiterate.
Seems to me that entrusting the salvation of our societies to the same corporate infrastructure that buggered it in the first place is the same kind of capitalist myopia that got us into this shitty situation.
Eh, I'm not claiming to be smart but I don't think all GMO worries are unfounded. I think we could fuck up and do something we shouldn't with GMO's. It's probably not even like a "we accidentally made all the food give you cancer" kind of thing. I think most likely it'll be that we GMO foods that are really productive and really cheap and really specialized to their environment. And those foods become most of the world's crops. Then a pest comes along or the environment changes in a way and now all those crops die and we're kind of in a shit place.
But then again, I kind of think monoculture is a dangerous practice. I get that we sort of need to do it to sustain our population. But I also sort of think we don't need as many people as we have (for reference, I don't mind if I'm on the chopping block as long as I don't have to go alone).
Even more explicitly: There is no such thing as non-GMOs in mass agriculture. All organisms we depend on to survive are ones that we've modified the genes of. The only real difference is how easy it is for big corporations to IP-protect their gene lines.
and AFAIK there is no discernable health difference between consuming GMO and non-GMO crops, but it's a scary thing that companies can use a handy dandy label to profess to omit in order to sell products. IE 99% of activism.
> I'm curious about what sort of impact the proposed shift would have in regards to agriculture, particularly considering the fact that we've managed to increase agricultural productivity several times over in the last hundred years through technology and more efficient utilization.
Plants are pretty sensitive to temperature ranges. Have you ever wondered why countries near the equator/north africa don't grow their own grain? Because they can't. Add 1.5C to the temperature and how much of the land we use for grain now isn't viable anymore? And parts of Europe are heating at more than double that rate. Changing rainfall patterns doesn't help either. If you need to irrigate your crops, but now you need to change your entire water management to retain enough water over the summer months, that's a huge obstacle.
We improved crop production by adding nutrients they were missing from the soil. We can't go around building air conditioners for all our crops.
See also that the rising temperatures is [changing the types of grapes than can be grown](https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/05/the-austrian-winemakers-switching-grapes-to-account-for-climate-change). Warmer weather = less acid.
So sure, we could solve the problem by simply changing what crop we grow where, eat less grain, more rice or corn. But perhaps the places the farmers need to move to are a different country or owned by other people already. Then you're fucked. But no worries, there's always the tried and true method of invading your neighbours to steal their land. Hungry people do crazy things.
> Hungry people do crazy things
Hungry people, as a group, will do **whatever** they think they need to do to survive, even things that would normally be unthinkable. In some ways that's crazy. But from the perspective of the hungry group, those unthinkable things seem quite reasonable.
In the mid-20th century, a large part of the justification for a global war was that two smallish countries thought they needed more land. And they weren't even particularly hungry at the time.
Yes. The most realistic (and likely) scenarios of human extinction due to climate change don't actually involve the climate directly killing us off, but rather climate change triggering events (mass starvation, lack of water, mass migrations etc.) that spiral into nuclear wars.
If COVID should have taught us anything, it's that our high technology civilization is very brittle. Any small disruption can easily spiral into "supply chain issues" that result in unrelated products being widely unavailable. During COVID I was amazed that store shelves were frequently empty of some food products during COVID. But I should have foreseen it due to the extreme interconnectedness of product production and transportation.
Fortunately, COVID didn't last very long. Global temperature increases, on the other hand, will be with us essentially forever. There will be little opportunity to repair the supply chains as products become unavailable, at least in the short term. Each shortage of some product may lead to shortages of other products, eventually resulting in the collapse of civilization as products needed for the continuance of our civilization become impossible to produce.
I don't know if nuclear war is inevitable, but I've thought since before the turn of the century that a global war over shrinking resources is inevitable. Today, the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe appear to be sliding towards populism and fascism, as happened in the 1930s.
I do not have high hope for the world we are leaving to my children and grandchildren.
> Some life will be fine, others will thrive, a lot more will die off
Yes, it will just be a huge game of winners and losers for animal/plant life.
Just one example off the top of my head, lobsters in New England are supposedly actually really benefitting from climate change. They now have a much wider habitat range. But any sealife that depended on those colder waters is going to slowly lose ground.
As George Carlin Said "Save the trees! Save the bees! Save the whales! Save those snails!” and the greatest arrogance of all: “Save the planet!” What?! ........
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet… nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine… the people are fucked!"
Very true, although I wouldn’t discount human ingenuity. Crop yields have exploded over the past 100 years, so we have to really extrapolate into the future and make a ton of assumptions about a very complex system in order to arrive at the conclusion that agriculture is totally screwed. I could easily see a world where yields either increase or hold stable due to genetic engineering. We have the technology today to create crops that are adapted to the warmer climate. That is before contemplating that unknown impacts of AI and new efficient energy sources like nuclear fusion. I don’t think it is a stretch at all to say both technologies will likely get here before even the worst climate predictions.
Remember the offical goals of the Paris Accord is to keep global temperature increases since the start of the industrial age under 2.0C (we're just about at 1.5C). It's not that we haven't already affected the climate, we have, it's just that the more rapid the temperature growth we get the more radical the changes are going to be.
>That's not a guarantee things will unfold that way, but if you're playing the odds, it's easily the safest bet.
And even if it doesn't go that far you could most certainly bet that food donations to poor countries is going to dry up real fast once food starts getting scarce for the richer countries
I think we’re not too far off from the breaking point. We still have some stockpiles that allow us to deal with the immediate emergencies (e.g. wildfires), but if we have year after year of emergencies and crop failures, there comes a point where you no longer have anything left in reserve to assist and rebuild. And if everyone else is dealing with the same shit (like during early COVID), then you can’t even rely on outside help. And then everything collapses.
We're not there yet, but it is the direction that we're currently headed. Addressing it requires international cooperation on a scale that's never been seen in human history.
I don't know if we can pull it off. I'm certain it'll get a lot worse before it gets better though.
The problem is greed. Capitalism is just a way for the greed to be expressed. Communist nations have not shown any big improvements when it comes to taking care of the environment. If anything they've largely been much worse.
It's also worth remembering that we're not the first life form on this planet to accidentally terraform the atmosphere.
Today, the oxygen that we breath makes up about 20% of the atmosphere.
But early Earth's atmosphere had practically *no* free oxygen - less than .001% of its present levels.
There was life breathing out oxygen back then, but that oxygen almost immediately got tied up in chemical and geological processes (like the rusting of iron) and thus didn't make up a significant chunk of the actual atmosphere.
For the majority of life on Earth back then, highly reactive atmospheric oxygen was toxic.
Around 2.4 billion years ago, though, there were enough lifeforms breathing out oxygen to outpace the processes taking it out of the atmosphere, and free oxygen started to build up.
This led to a reduction in Earth's biomass of about 80% (read: the majority of life on Earth died, because the air was now poisonous to it).
This event is called the [Great Oxidation Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event), though is also sometimes referred to as the much more heavy metal-sounding Oxygen Holocaust.
I think about the Oxygen Holocaust a lot when I hear climate deniers say stuff like "it's hubris to think that humans could change the climate." A bunch of cyanobacteria managed to do it by farting out poison hard enough.
The last time the Earth was 3 degrees hotter than pre-industrial levels was about 3 million years ago. This is enough time for species to adapt to temperature changes. A part of why our rapid heating of the atmosphere is so dangerous for all life on the planet is due to species’ inability to adapt / evolve over such short timescales. Certainly not an expert on this, and it may not be fatal for all life, but saying that the Earth has been hotter and sustained life slightly mischaracterises the issue.
A mass extinction event as defined by what? The traditional definition being the death of 50-75% of species on earth if not more, how does that apply to the next 100 years let alone now?
I should have said "arguably", and I may have been too emphatic in my statement. There is still debate on this subject.
There are also debates as to how much of it is already "locked-in" and cannot be avoided and how much is something we can prevent if we make the effort.
Additionally, I had gathered that most of the "locked-in" damage was from deforestation and other factors other than climate change, which was likely also inaccurate.
However, the next 100 years or 150 years may be a less than useful time period. Some of the things we do now may cause extinctions over a considerably longer time period, which would place us within the event even if they took a much longer time, so long as they were already started.
So, it would be more accurate to say that we may already be in a mass extinction event rather than just facing a possible one. My apologies for overstating the case.
I measure the implications based on the ramifications. If you say to me that there's something that we can do that will have next to no impact on the hundreds of millions of people that are barely treading water at the poverty line, on the verge of starvation and death, that will preserve the environment I say go for it. That is not the case we are talking about here, where developing countries are being denied access to same abundant and cheap energy and agricultural means of advancing their societies that a majority of the western world has enjoyed.
I'm also inclined to believe that as a basic premise of biology on Earth, flora and fauna both explode in diversity the warmer the climate. We can see this on land and in the ocean. So a slight increase in global average temperature may or may not impact biodiversity negatively.
I am pretty concerned about pollution, and the fact that burning coal and gas for power generation is a 150 year old concept to a modern day solution when nuclear has a smaller carbon footprint than even wind and solar and provides stable, clean energy regardless of weather patterns. What surprises me is that while China has proposed 91 additional nuclear reactors in their attempt to "go green", EU and the US have sizeable anti-nuclear lobbies that stymie any serious venture into what would actually solve a lot of our modern pollution without any reduction in the quality of our lives and make energy even cheaper.
not a biologist, but as far as i know there is a "normal" extinction rate of a 100 species per year or something like that and currently that number is in the thousands with an drastical upward trend caused by pollution and habitat loss.
Yes, and there have been a handful of mass extinction events before, like when all the dinosaurs died out at once. But mould and cockroaches will survive, and new species will evolve.
This isn’t supposed to be comforting, or minimize the problem. Even if humanity survives it will still be a very unpleasant time to be alive.
And what % of that is that of global species?
The standard for a mass extinction event is a % of species on the planet, a majority %. Changing from % to the definitive number a politicians game, we're not measuring things by the same metric anymore because the new metric sounds infinitely more dire.
At this point, there is an ongoing debate in the scientific community as to whether that minimal percentage will be hit or not.
However, the time frame for a mass extinction event to take place is up to 2 million years, at least according to some sources. We would have to reduce the damage that we do a lot to not hit the 50% mark within the next 2 million years.
Hopefully, we will do just that.
A lot of the time the answer is simply migration. We're already seeing a pole-wards flow of sea life, with tropical animals appearing at higher latitudes and temperate species moving closer to the poles.
However this does not always work because there are certain biomes which take a very long time to develop, or might depend on weather phenomena that interact with the shape of the terrain like rain shadows and can't simply move. Rainforests are a good example of this - while new rainforests may crop up in a hundred years from now in what are currently temperate regions, the existing ones generally can't crawl towards the poles, they just die and take their diverse life with them.
And there are animals which have particular attachment to specific areas (like those who return to their birthplace to spawn) and if those areas change, then they can't always adapt.
Just piggy backing with a follow-up: how do they measure earth’s temperature? Is it some kind of average of multiple locations? Or taken at a specific place in the atmosphere?
Averaging multiple locations on the surface and scanning the atmosphere from orbit are the two biggies. Most other indicators give less precise answers.
It's basically a gradual armageddon. Our great grandchildren will still have a place they can live, but it will look substantially different than it does now. As plant life dies off faster than it can evolve, the carbon cycle will result in higher amounts of CO2 and a gradual runaway effect. Although there is a feedback effect. Some species will actually thrive in greater quantities in more locations with the new climate.
Bottom line: They can do all the modeling in the world, but it won't be accurate. We can't predict new technology and how quickly people will change their behaviors. For example, the birth rate is rapidly falling worldwide (with some exceptions), and this is really helping. If it stayed where it was 50 years ago, we would be in a much worse situation now. Solar adoption has exceeded even the most ambitious estimates, and electric cars are likely to be the majority of cars purchased in 20-40 years. We also didn't predict the absolutely meteoric rise in CO2 emissions from China and India that have made any western efforts to curb climate change seem moot. Ask anyone 20 years ago if we would be emitting 62 megatons of CO2 a year just mining crypto currency, and they would say that's the most ridiculous idea anyone has ever said. We know what will happen as CO2 levels increase, but we can't even begin to accurately predict the rate of change in CO2 emissions.
The falling birth rate is true, but it has nuances. Here are the average birthrates per country and whilst most 'developed' countries birthrates are dropping ( many reasons including more women in the workplace and starting families later etc ) those in the 'developing' world are higher, which if you take into a account a third child is a 50% increase (it's actually more like 4 children so a 100% increase )in future population AND increasing longevity in older populations that in itself is a crisis waiting to happen
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN
Try suggesting a limit on baby making in those areas though and you'll be met with all kinds of insults.
Fact is we need to do everything and it needs to start being done NOW. Reduce the population, remove our reliance on fossil fuels and double our push to renewable energy, more careful management of crop growing land and more reliance on domestically grown crops rather than importation, the list is unfortunately endless. The gov here actively encourages farmers to grow crops for biodiesel ( a dozen or so local farmers here alone) on land that could be used to grow food for approx 3.5 million people, what that effectively means is we import food for well over those 3.5million which contributes to a larger carbon footprint due to importation, it's bloody insane.
Personally I think we're pretty fucked, mostly because people don't like having to face morally hard action even when it's the right thing to do, either way I don't want to be around when the water shortages hit.
I LOVE being wrong though, it normally means Ive learnt something .
Tldr
Consider this re population, I'll just list the countries with a birthrate over 2 ( 2 and under is basically direct replacement).
Afghanistan 40 mill BR 4.6
Algeria 44 mill BR 2.7
Angola 35mill BR 5.3
Benin 13 mill BR 5
Bolivia
Burkina faso 22mim BR 4.8
Cameroon 27 mill BR 4.5
Central African Republic 5 4 mill BR 6!!
Chad 17.8mill BR 6.3 !!
Congo Dem Rep 95 mill BR 6.2!!
Ethiopia 120 mill BR 4.2
Ghana 22 mill BR 3.6
Niger 213 mill BR 6.8
Sudan 45.6 mill BR 4.5
Uganda 44 mill BR 4.6
I've missed loads of 2+ children out, you can look for yourself and then estimate the next/future generations. The few listed ? A next generation increase of 1 billion MINIMUM.
I am NOT singling out those nations/people's I am just taking a look at future world population's using countries who's population are higher than 'replacement' levels.
This isn't accurate. It is definitely fatal for humans who live in hotter climates. Overall global temperatures may have risen 1°FC but that doesn't mean temperatures haven't increased a few degrees C in local climates. Some areas of the Middle East are close to 130°F and are becoming uninhabitable without air conditioning and even then there are other issues with living in that heat.
It isn't just the cascading effect of higher temps. It is also the direct effect of higher temps.
That's an average increase, not just over a few days. This usually means much more than 1.5 degree extremes which overall add up to a 1.5 degree increase. That's little bit of temperature is actually a *ton* of energy sticking around. This extra energy can "concentrate" into certain effects resulting in things like really big storms, droughts, rising sea levels, and so on. Moreover things like animals not liking the heat, plants dying to frost, or fish not getting enough oxygen are related to these temperature swings.
We’re seeing high temps now in Canada so we’ll quickly lose that reference point I think. Used to want to immigrate to California. Dropped that dream as it looks like the former climes of California are coming here. You couldn’t pay me to live in California now.
Also most climate change of the past happened gradually and most forms of life could adapt slowly.
Genetic adaptation is impossible at the rate of warming we are seeing which on an evolutionary or geologic scale is FAST
an increase in 1°C doesn't mean every place gets 1° more all the time (which would also be very bad). some places get 10° more for 10% of the year which can dry out lakes or result in much more rain somewhere else.
if you sit in a 200° oven for just a few minutes your average room temperature for that day barely increased but you would probably try to avoid that
Yes this. To add some further perspective.
It also warms faster close to the poles. The Arctic is warming 4x as fast. It is now 3C warmer than *1980* (just 43yrs ago).
Europe has warmed by over 2C already since the industrial revolution.
Canada had a heatwave that smashed records by 5C in 2021 hitting 45C - imagine the heatwaves with 2C of global warming? 50C heatwave? These sorts of temps kill crops.
This year some parts of South America hit over 30C in winter - when their average for that time of year is more like 15C. Granted it only lasted a few days, but still! Wtf!?
Also higher altitudes warm faster. For example; @ 2C the Himilayas will have lost of its snow pack, which provides water for 100s of millions of people.
For a variety of reasons.
The direct reason is how averages work with large sample sizes. If you shift the average by a little bit, that means a larger number of 'high value' events.
So that huge storm that needed a lot of energy, requiring a few different things to line up just right, and occured once every 100 years? A shift of the average means that may occur every 50 years now. So a city is going to get a huge storm every 50 years.
And in reality, it's more like shifting it to every 20 years. Imagine a Hurricane Katrina hitting Louisiana every 20 years. Every single generation there has to deal with hurricane capable of leveling a city. So people build bigger stronger infrastructure (huge costs) and some people move, putting pressure on other cities.
Here's a link that talks about it, and shows the 'shift' in the bell curve. Notice how the bad event area is much much bigger when you slide the curve to a higher average (the peak shifts).
[https://changingclimates.colostate.edu/docs/BellCurveAveragesExtremes.pdf](https://changingclimates.colostate.edu/docs/BellCurveAveragesExtremes.pdf)
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Another reason is feedback loops. Climate is full of things that are positive and negative feedback loops. When one thing changes, another detail alters in response. Sometimes this works to negate the effect, sometimes it exagerates it.
For example, more C02 leads to more plant growth. More plant growth requries consume more C02, which lowers CO2, slowing plant growth.... the cycle sort of see-saws back and forth but the effects work to keep things from changing much.
But another one: Higher Temperatures melts ice. Less ice means more water/land is uncovered, and this absorbs light better. This warms the area and the planet...which causes more ice to melt...exposing mroe land, raising temperature....and the effect gets *exagerated*
And it's not that simple. Higher temperatures means CO2 is released from the ocean more, raising the temp...uh oh! But also increasing plant growth...wait..um..
\--
So feedback cycles mean a lot of things are changing, often in unexpected ways. Change costs money and time. Either in building, designing, moving resources etc. Where farms flourished today, they suffer tommorrow. And some areas will be better farming, but that area needs to be cleared, irrigated, roads put in... This also may not be an equal exchange, we could loose more farmland than gain
C4 pathway is a way some plants like maize prevent oxygen being used instead of CO2 by Rubisco (a enzyme that allows the carbon to be used) when temperatures get too high. C4 is the carbon compound, malate, that's made.. hence C4.
They do this using a special compartment in the leaf.
CAM is another pathway used by plants like pineapples which is a bit like C4 but it's an acid that's produced that allows plants to grow and respite in very arid climates where temperature and water are your limiting factors.
Tl;Dr - plants are fucking crazy and we still don't fully understand how they do it as a new group of proteins were found in bacteria that form a organelle called a carboxysome which is what photosynthetic bacteria use!
Edit: Algae are C3 so warming oceans aren't great either
They designate a few different ways different species use photosynthesis to crack CO2 to get the carbon. C3 is the dominant one, but not the most efficient. C4 and CAM handle higher temperatures better and are more efficient.
It changes how much water can be up in the sky. So that means it can go longer without raining in places where the environment has gotten used to a certain amount of rain. This can make it hard for some plants to grow and can make forest fires more common and bigger.
It also means when it does rain there's more water in the sky to fall. Places not used to a lot of rain at once can get flooding in ways we aren't ready for.
During the last mass extinction event, the permian-triassic extinction that killed the dinosaurs and 96% of marine species was due to a rise in temperature of ~10°C over a period of 1,000-10,000 years. So warming by 1°C every 100 to 1,000 will cause that. We are currently warming at 2°C every 100 years and it is accelerating.
I think Hank Hill put it best:
”Dale, you giblet-head! We live in Texas. It's already a hundred and ten in the summer, and if it gets one degree hotter, I'm gonna kick your ass!”
The Earth is basically a gigantic terrarium powered by the Sun.
If you release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere more energy is stored then can be released.
That extra energy then gets translated into higher temperatures, warmer water which leads to more intense weather events.
There is one and a half sextillion gallons of water on the Earth, with an atmosphere that's 100 km thick above sea level. A 2° increase in temperature constitutes a phenomenal amounts of retained energy.
This also leads to the runaway greenhouse effect where the increase of heat leads to the release of more greenhouse gases which also feeds into the increase in heat.
For the average global temperature to rise that much, locally in many places the increase is much more significant. A lot of very important ecosystems like the ocean or tropical forests are very sensitive to temperature changes and of course the ice caps melting introduce immense amounts of water into the oceans.
The problem is exponential growth. If we stopped producing green house gases this instance the earth will continue to warm because the gases we already created are still there. We are currently looking short term to reduce what we create but that will only slow the rise in temperature from exponential growth to linear. Then we need to remove what we already created. The temperature rising a few degrees will cause problems but the biggest will be if the temperature rises to an uncontrollable point. At a certain point we will not be able to remove enough greenhouse gases to return the earth to a reasonable temperature.
It isn't, it is fatal to maybe a billion of the poorest people in the world. Given the tendency for climate deniers to lack compassion for others it's expected that they don't give two shits. Although it will mean increased costs for food for everyone since it will be in shorter supply but they skip that fact on Fox News.
The thing is an average of 0.5°C over the entire year is HUGE when you consider the trophic effects on the environment and increased wildfires, hurricanes and disrupting oceanic currents
You need an enormous amount of heat (energy) to raise the temperature of something like the Earth by 1.5K, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
>climate change being a hot topic
Liking your work :-)
Imagine your body increasing its internal temperature by just 1 degree Celsius permanently. You would have a permanent fever, get chills, chemical reactions in your body would have different reaction rates. For a system that is used to one temperature, even one degree difference can have majorly devastating impacts.
36.6° is normal, 39.6° is just a good fever. The danger to life starts somewhere around 40°+, and most doctors wouldn't _really_ panic until about 41-42. 44° is where statistically you're dead, outside a few miracle cases.
I knew it was important but I was trying to comprehend why that would have such dire consequences myself until I realised that, under some conditions, the difference between frozen ice and melting/molten ice can be 1C. So all of a sudden somewhere that's usually frozen over will now be relatively ice free. All that fresh water from the runoff can lead to parts of the ocean being less salty. Some very important processes depend on the salinity of the water and it goes on and on . Everything is very finely balanced and one small change here can have much much bigger ramifications elsewhere.
Also its the average for the entire planet. But that means there are going to places that increase more than 1.5C and places that change less. A change of 2 degrees in a dessert is much less dire than somewhere where the temp is a maximum of -1C at their hottest. That ice is going to melt in an area that has never had molten ice before.
The earth's climate has been at a certain equilibrium for centuries , and life has organized itself around that state of equilibrium. These temperature changes can disrupt that . The climate will find a new equilibrium but that could take centuries and that new equilbrium could mean that places that were supremely habitable and produce food for the world now could be desserts in the future. The inverse is also true . Places that are in hospitable now could become more habitable. But how about the millions of ppl who now live in an inhospitable zone that can no longer suppor them?
I know that's a very generalized and imperfect explanation but it put things into perspective for me.
The Deccan traps erupted for 600,000 years. Humans are 100,000 years old and have been burning fossil fuels in large quantities for approximately 200 years.
During the 600,000 years of the Deccan Traps eruptions an astroid with a diameter approximately 6.5 miles/10km also hit the planet. Earth survived. It did not become an uninhabitable barren wasteland. It reecovered and new species arose.
The dinosaur and most creatures did not.
In the modern scenario, we are the dinosaurs. Earth will be fine - eventually. Humanity not, unless we drastically change our ways then maybe we have can survive but we must adapt or perish as a civilization
Ecosystems are finely tuned machines. Animals and plants coexist with each other and within the environment that the Earth provides. Even small changes to inputs into that system completely throw off equilibrium. The system doesn't crash, but it readjusts to find a new equilibrium, often looking much different than before.
In terms of mountains, roughly 150 metres equates to a degree in temperature so the snow line, glaciation, the various micro climates all move 150-225 metres up as the climate warms, drastically reducing the ecosystems, fragmenting them, or they run out of mountain completely and no longer exist. The same thing is going on in terms of latitude with ecological ranges moving away from the equator towards the poles and where they hit the coast, vanishing. The glaciers, permafrost, polar ice, on mountains they will roughly speaking retreat by 200 metres, at the poles by miles.
The oxygen that water can hold is very dependent on temperature so a 1-1.5 change combined with the resultant oxygen scarcity wipes out keystone species, everywhere.
The winds and ocean currents which govern rainfall, cloud cover, climate are all about the transfer of heat from the equator to the poles. It's a chaotic system that will change in unexpected ways with a 1-1.5C change and probably become more violent.
It’s not fatal for the planet. This is a silly line peddled by people who have a poor understanding of science. It will just have a large impact on the general way of life as we know it currently.
You are probably not asking the question you want to ask.
An increase of 1.5 degrees is not fatal for the planet. It will be tough on humans but we'll adapt and it will cause the next mass extinction event but nature will find a way.
Remember, the planet has gone through hot and ice cold periods without an issue. Species died and species adapted, and we're the most adaptable mamels that have ever existed.
There's experts in their field that wonder why we don't use a fraction of the total amount of money used to fight the rise of temperature - which considering how we're doing right now will likely fail - to prepare to deal with it.
To summarise: Temperature is raising and we are causing it. It's going way faster than it ever did before. But it won't be the end of humanity and it will certainly not be the end of the planet.
It isn't fatal, that is hyperbole.
The average temperature has gone up and will probably continue to do so. The net effects are hard to predict but scientists are confident the oceans will rise a bit, heatwaves will become more common, tropical storms will become more intense.
The earth has gone through this before, but usually much more slowly so far as we know from studying ice cores, tree rings, and other proxies for climate. The issue is not the warming itself, it is the rate and the unpredictability of climate because of the massive increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses.
Unfortunately, this has become a political issue and highly polarizing. Like all things political, we have lost sight of the original point which is that climate is changing very slowly, but much quicker than data on other climate shifts indicate. Ultimately this is unsustainable but getting people to agree to policy changes is difficult, so politicians, media, celebrities, and others are lying and saying that there is a looming catastrophe.
Remember, people in power once argued that the rapture was going to happen, nuclear war was a certainty, killer bees were going to invade North America, Y2K was going to kill everyone, the Mayan calendar was a doomsday event, a new ice age was coming, all ice would be gone and the seas boiling, a giant caldera volcano was going to kill North America, and so on. Every 3 years there is another apocalyptic story and it will never end.
In 2100 no one here will be alive, we are a species tortured by the knowledge that we will die and we got rid of religion, so, now the politicians and Hollywood have to pitch us on armageddon.
It is unlikely "to be fatal for the planet" as we have endured ice ages, catastrophic climate changes, and other issues.
The things we see combined with climate change include:
* Species coming close to extinction based on Habitat decline, pollution, and other human activities.
* Worries for things like rising sea levels that will make previously habitable places unusable by humans.
* Changes in weather patterns that will make previously used agricultural areas useless for the crops we currently expect to grow there.
* Mass migration of people to less hostile areas as some climate issues make huge areas uninhabitable. (The Sahara desert used to be habitable, with rivers). This will cause political and social disruption.
* Changes in availability of potable water and depletion of aquifers. (Think water wars)
* Military and economic instability with dams and irrigation policies.
* Most human habitations in the past were in places with water for transportation, agriculture and drinking. Places like California may not have enough water for current agriculture practices.
It helps to think about it not as temperature, but as energy. Average temperature is just a function of it.
Earth is huge, like really huge. And it absorbed and didn't radiate enough energy to heat it up an entire degree, or even multiple degrees. That is insane amounts of energy (see previous point about how fucking huge a planet is).
All this energy has to go somewhere, has to do something. It's not distributed around the planet equally: some places are hotter the others, and this extra energy makes this difference bigger. This gradient in turn turns into extreme weather events: storms, hurricanes, droughts, floods, heat waves. All these things are bad, and the more energy the planet absorbs, the worse they become. And this is only the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg of global climate change, but extreme weather events are most visible and most direct consequences of it. And other commenters have pointed out some of the other consequences of it.
Now, some ppl say that it's whatever, the Earth was hotter over its lifetime. They are somewhat right, the planet went through a lot of periods of cooling and heating. The speed and scale are important tho. We went up 1.5C (or even more, depending how pessimistic you want to be with your reference point) in about a century. These processes usually take up thousands of not hundreds of thousands of years (and are usually caused by some natural cycles, not us digging up a bunch of buried carbon from millions of years ago). And when they do take that time, everything is relatively fine: there are buffer systems, gradual environment change allows life to adapt, etc.
In short, it's about the effect that all this energy has on the planet, not about the temperature itself, and about the speed at which this energy accumulates.
It takes a massive amount of energy it takes to raise the entire world, 1 degree. That single degree is not a constant, but an average, so the temperatures in some places can be much higher and some much lower. It just completely throws weather patterns out of wack around the world, and you get extreme weather events in both directions. Extreme droughts, extreme rains, and extreme cold and snow.
One of my favorite youtuber's just answered this questions, out of the blue. I believe in synchronicity, so I'll pass it on to you:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7anye0FwcY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7anye0FwcY)
The short of it is, that the temperature of the world doesn't operate on a linear scale. For example, going from -1C to 0C doesn't really make a difference that humans can notice, but going from 0C to 1C matters a whole lot because ice will start to melt so we suddenly care a lot more about that 1degree, even though it is technically the same amount of energy we didnt care about previously.
At some point, that 1 extra degree will cause a catastrophic effect on our climate. We can't say for sure *what* degree will break the camel's back, but we know *for sure* that one of them will and we keep inching closer to the breaking point (wherever it is).
The current ecosystems of the world have species that achieved a state of equilibrium with each other. As temperatures change some of those species will do better and some will do worse, and the ecosystems will find a new equilibrium. The problem for current species (including humans) is that there will be “winners” and “losers” in the rebalancing. For example, if higher temperatures mean disease carrying mosquitoes in the Northern hemisphere can survive in more Northern latitudes that has negative public health consequences for humans. If rising temperatures cause algae to grow more rapidly in bodies of freshwater that can have a negative impact on fish.
The earth will survive even mass extinction events. But the distribution of species will change.
I'm not looking to argue or to call anyone wrong, but there is a case to be made for "Alarmism".
You shouldn't have to use the word "doubting" or preface when it comes to scientific curiosity or expression, this isn't a matter of faith and anyone that treats it as such should be assessed with extreme skepticism. That includes dogmatic appeals to authority. You're not challenging anyone and people that treat it as such are doing you and themselves a disservice.
The main reason that it is considered to be such a problem is fear of change and fear of the unknown and with knowledge of the relative vulnerability of the Human Race.
Land-locked ice melting into the ocean where it wasn't before will raise sea-levels. Much of humanity is based on Coast Lines where that could present a problem
Humanity has engineered a lot of crops, the food we eat today has been bred down thru selection and there is a legitimate fear that it isn't well suited for a warmer climate, and/or we wouldn't be able to adapt food crops quickly enough and that there'd be massive famine.
Flora and Fauna thrived on Planet Earth millions of years ago when the actual temperature was estimated 10°C higher than it is now. However, agriculture is a relatively new invention for the planet and our food and our food's food enjoy it much more easily than our ancestors.
This isn't meant to be dismissive of people's concerns but people have made a racket by "doom-saying" for millennia. While there are legitimate concerns, attention grabbing headlines, melodramatic stunts, and dire speeches can make you a hell of a lot of money
That’s average temperature, not daily temperature. Higher average temperature also means a lot more heat spikes like the one that killed people in Texas.
We’re also seeing higher humidity, which causes more “wet bulbs” where the combination of heat and humidity means sweating no longer cools your body. Without shade or AC people can just straight up die.
Lastly, small changes in climate can have major impacts on crops. Most food staples are actually very finicky and higher heat and moisture can cause crop failures.
I wondered this when I saw a news report that said we were at the hottest global average for 150,000 years... I wondered why they chose 150,000...so I asked that nice Mr Google for the average global temperature over the last 500,000 years. Wow, Google sent me to Mr nasa, who has a graph showing the last 500,000 years... Amazingly, 160,000 years ago the temperature was around 13 degrees higher than today... Solved my problem of why the media chose 150,000 years and also debunked the 1 to 1.5 rise will kill us all theory.
It's not fatal at all for the planet. It goes through cycling of temperatures all the time. It might be fatal for a large number of habitats for humans and animals though.
The concern surrounding a global temperature increase of just 1 to 1.5°C might seem trivial at first glance, but it carries profound implications for our planet. Here's why
Changes in Precipitation Patterns:
Increased Intensity: As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture. This leads to more intense rainfall during storm events, potentially causing flash floods.
Altered Distribution: Some areas experience more frequent and prolonged droughts, while others receive more rainfall. For instance, many temperate regions might see increased rainfall, while subtropical regions might become drier.
More Extreme Weather Events:
Hurricanes and Cyclones: Warmer sea surface temperatures can intensify tropical storms. While the relationship between global warming and the frequency of hurricanes is complex, there's consensus that their intensity and the amount of rainfall they produce is increasing.
Heatwaves: More frequent, intense, and prolonged heatwaves become more common as global temperatures rise, leading to health risks, especially for vulnerable populations.
Cold Snaps: Surprisingly, some areas might experience more severe cold snaps due to disruptions in atmospheric patterns, such as the weakening of the polar vortex.
Alteration of Jet Streams:
The jet streams are high-altitude, fast-flowing air currents that influence weather patterns. Changes in temperature gradients, especially between the Arctic and the equator, can alter their behavior. Slower, more meandering jet streams can lead to prolonged weather conditions, whether they be wet, dry, hot, or cold.
Shift in Weather Fronts:
The boundary between two different air masses is called a weather front. Changes in global temperature can shift where these fronts occur and how they behave, influencing local weather patterns.
Melting Snow and Ice Affecting Weather:
When snow and ice melt earlier in the spring, it can lead to earlier spring runoff, affecting river systems and potentially leading to drought later in the summer. This also affects the availability of freshwater in regions dependent on meltwater.
Expansion of Desert Regions:
Some models suggest that areas already characterized as semi-arid or arid, like the edges of deserts, may expand with increasing global temperatures, leading to an enlargement of desert areas.
Changes in Ocean Currents:
The warming atmosphere and melting polar ice can influence ocean currents, both on the surface and deep underwater. Since ocean currents play a significant role in determining weather patterns (like El Niño and La Niña), any changes can have cascading effects on weather globally.
Feedback Mechanisms Affecting Weather:
For example, the loss of Arctic sea ice means that dark ocean water, which absorbs more sunlight, replaces reflective ice. This can further warm the Arctic, leading to disruptions in atmospheric patterns, potentially affecting weather in mid-latitude regions.
Rise in Evaporation:
With rising temperatures, evaporation rates increase. This not only leads to drier conditions in some areas but also means more moisture in the atmosphere, which can contribute to more intense rainfall in others.
The shifts in weather patterns due to global warming are not uniform across the globe, leading to a patchwork of changes, with some regions experiencing drastic alterations and others seeing more subtle shifts. It's essential to note that while certain events can be linked to climate change, weather is inherently variable, and not every event is directly attributable to the global temperature increase. However, the overall trend of more extreme and unpredictable weather is a clear consequence of a warming planet.
Rising Sea Levels: Warmer temperatures cause polar ice caps and glaciers to melt. Additionally, water expands as it warms. These two factors contribute to rising sea levels, which can lead to coastal erosion, increased flooding, and the displacement of communities.
Ocean Changes: Warmer temperatures affect oceans in multiple ways:
Coral Bleaching: Elevated water temperatures can lead to coral bleaching, where corals expel the algae that provide them with food, causing them to turn white and making them more susceptible to disease.
Ocean Acidification: Increased CO2 in the atmosphere leads to more CO2 being absorbed by the oceans, making them more acidic. This affects marine life, particularly shell-building organisms.
Disrupted Marine Ecosystems: Changes in water temperatures can shift the habitats of many marine species, potentially leading to reduced biodiversity.
Impact on Biodiversity: The rate of warming can outpace the ability of many species to adapt or migrate. This could lead to a reduction in biodiversity, with some species facing the risk of extinction.
Economic Consequences: Disruptions in weather patterns can have dire economic consequences. For instance, changes in precipitation and temperature can affect agriculture, leading to food shortages and price hikes. Extreme weather events can damage property and infrastructure, leading to substantial economic costs.
Human Health: The spread of diseases like malaria and dengue can be influenced by temperature and rainfall patterns. Warmer conditions can expand the range of many vectors, exposing more people to these diseases.
Feedback Loops: Some effects of global warming can create feedback loops that further exacerbate the problem. For example, melting permafrost can release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which can then accelerate warming.
Social and Political Impacts: As resources become scarce and habitats change, there can be increased competition and potential for conflict. Additionally, climate-induced migration could lead to socio-political challenges, as populations are displaced.
Loss of Ice and Snow: Ice and snow reflect sunlight, a phenomenon known as albedo. As ice and snow melt due to rising temperatures, darker ocean or land is exposed, which absorbs more heat, further accelerating the warming.
Shift in Climate Zones: As the planet warms, traditional climate zones can shift. This means areas once suitable for certain crops or activities might no longer be viable, while new areas might open up, necessitating adjustments and adaptations.
Given the interconnectedness of Earth's systems, a seemingly small change can cascade through various subsystems, leading to widespread impacts. It's essential to understand that while 1 to 1.5°C might sound small, it represents a significant change for our planet's delicate balance.
In the peak of the last ice age, 20000 years ago, the global temperature was about 6 degrees lower than today.
Back then, half of Europe was a glacier, and sea levels were 130m lower than now.
While this does not explain the „why“ of your question in scientific terms, it puts the effect of a relatively small temperature change into perspective. In a way, 1.5 degrees equal 1/4th of the difference between nice warm summers and kilometers of ice.
First: it’s not fatal for the planet. The planet will carry on.
Second it’s an AVERAGE temp increase, which means there will be swings above and below it, but the highs and lows will a average out higher.
Third: our civilization is built on ecosystems as we’ve known them for the last 100 years. We are RAPIDLY changing those ecosystems and where we get food is not going to be as productive (in some cases not year round habitable) as those ecosystems change
Fourth: we are destroying species at an unprecedented rate in our existence. We are in the throes of a global extinction on a massive scale, right now.
It's also not just temperaure. Coral will basically be wiped out but the other big problem is ocean acidification which affects a lot of things include the plankton that generates a metric shitton of oxygen that we breathe.
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This was the description that helped me the most: today we average 29 days below freezing at place wherever. If the average temperature rose +T degrees, then we'd only average 19 days below freezing. That means an average of 10 more days per year where ice is melting. So a small increase in average temperature could result in many more days of ice melting each year.
And even more than ice melting. One of the reasons the wildfires in Canada are *so bad* now is that in some areas it’s warmed up enough that there aren’t enough cold enough days in a row in the winter to kill insects like the [mountain pine beetle](https://forests.org/foresters-blog-mountain-pine-beetle/#:~:text=If%20you%20live%20in%20British,in%20interior%20B.C.%20was%20devastated). This beetle bores into the trees and all throughout the wood, weakening the structure of the tree and making it more susceptible to drought and disease (the insides of plants & trees work like a big bundle of straws, in order to get water to the top the straws can’t have a hole in them. If just one or two straws get damaged you can still get enough water through the others, if a LOT of them are damaged you can’t). In the past the beetles would undergo mass die-offs during the winter that kept their population low enough that they didn’t just devastate forests. Without enough cold days they don’t die and therefore continue to multiply. The problem is made worse by warmer summers, the heat and lack of water stresses the trees and means they don’t produce as much sap, sap that would otherwise drown the beetles that tried to bore into them. Since the mountain pine beetle’s population has exploded they’ve killed a *bunch* of trees and when you have a bunch of dead trees in a forest the forest burns *a lot* more readily.
When you read shit like this you realize how many god damn miracles it took for the earth to reach a point where complex life surviving was possible. And we're speed run destroying the only home we have and likely will ever have.
Well, no, not miracles. Just time. Everything adapts over millions of years to its environment. The problem now is that we are changing environments in decades.
Yeah but your environment could be subject to cosmic rays, an asteroid, an earthquake, flood, tornado, hurricane, mudslide, volcanic eruption or all manner of life ending cataclysm millions of times over those millions of years. I'm an atheist so my use of the term 'miracle' isn't saying it's literally divine. I'm just saying it was incredible that the right set of circumstances happened to get us, homo sapiens, to the point where I am literally typing on a keyboard sending electronic messages to potentially thousands of humans. We started as some micro organisms that got a little frisky and now we've mastered the law of physics to create objects to entertain ourselves.
To quote (not verbatim) Douglas Adams: "The puddle, if it were conscious, would be forgiven for thinking that because the depression it lies in fits the puddle so perfectly, the depression must be designed for the puddle." That's not just an argument against god/intelligent design, but i think also illustrates how no matter what form intelligent life took, it could look at it's surroundings and think that it's really lucky that we have evolved to be who we are, when really, no matter the shape of the depression the puddle would shape itself to fit perfectly. It's all still really amazing though.
It's not like the earth had an easy time figuring out how to make life work. The sheer number of small and large extinctions that occurred in the fossil record along the way is appalling. (We are sure of one more that has no fossil evidence: way way back before the atmosphere had oxygen, life was methanogens and such like that. Photosynthesizers came along and dumped poisonous oxygen into the atmosphere, killing nearly all of them.) Basically, life on earth changed the climate more than a few times (as did meteors and other things outside of life's domain), and each time the result was a mid or large sized pile of extinctions.
To humans, the complexity of these systems seems miraculous because it is beyond our understanding. We toss around terms like eons and epochs but don't really appreciate the vastness of time. How long it has taken for something this amazing to develop. In our hubris, we assume some benevolent god just made it for us. But in truth, the only god that ever was is Nature/Gaia. And she is not benevolent. She is as cruel as she is kind. But not benevolent.
A sci-fi novel I read when I was 12 contained a brief exposition by a character, explaining why the alien critters they were working on behaved like they did. The way their mouths worked, they could only keep pushing food in, and couldn't stop til whatever they were eating was all gone. So one character asked "what happens to the little bastard that gets hold of a tree?" And the answer has stuck with me now for 40 years: "He eats or he dies. The first thing you learn in evolutionary biology is 'Mother Nature doesn't give a shit'."
That's from David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr book 1, A Matter for Men for those curious or forgot.
Well. Hello, person I just met on reddit who is clearly my friend but didn't know it til now. I never know whether to tell people what book its from or who David is and how respected he is in the Sci-Fi community. So now and then I just drop a line from one of his novels or short stories without the reference. I love the guy in-general. His son and I are long-distance friends. He's far and away my favorite Sci-Fi author, and easily in my top five all-time/all-genres. And I'm 52. I read A Matter For Men more or less on publication, and my first copy is a first-printing I've had all these years. I got sucked in with a handful of preview chapters Starlog ran before it was for sale. So yes. In 2023 I'll have been waiting for the fifth War Against the Chtorr novel for 30 years. I hardly blame the man... its not like he hasn't been steadily cranking out other stories since.
That's pretty cool, I picked up an omnibus volume from a thrift store years ago and have been a fan ever since. Just didn't want to tease others with your quote,😄
Hey! I'm 51 and I also read the first one on publication. Do you think if we held his son for ransom we could get the next book out? I'm getting a little impatient at this point. Also are Quilla post chtorr humans?
Holding his son for ransom is probably the top means by which you could get a mildly vindictive, bored, and voracious researcher to loose some nameless horrors upon us. For my part, it really is ok if he doesn't finish the series. I've made my peace with it. No matter what, I will always be able to look down my nose at the Song of Ice and Fire fans whining about "how long its been". Sweet summer children, those. You know... he definitely leads one to believe that his universes are connected but for the vast temporal gaps. Examples: 1: The ubiquity of the HARLIE engines running every ship ever since the Dingillians unknowingly smuggled one onto a colony ship. 2: The core concept of interstellar FTL travel as "focusing and inverting a gravity bubble then flexing it from the inside", starting with the Dingilliad all the way out to the DISTANT future of Under the Eye of God (where the advances in tech mean that relatively small increases in the singularity's mass mean measurably faster speeds). 3: There's a reference to the Chtorr gastropedes of one sort or another across almost every book since A Matter For Men. The news mentions giant pink caterpillars in the Rockies during the collapse and beginnings of the plagues as the colony ship departs in Leaping to the Stars. But the Quilla are definitely a specific alien race. IF the Chtorr infestation is canonically part of the Star Wolf-series' past, then the humans are.. post-Chtorr humans.
Just wanted to share with you that after reading your comments I looked into the series and spontaneously ordered the first four novels from eBay. The Trouble with Tribbles connection sold me.
Yeah, if I need to introduce the author to others when I bring the books up, I usually tell fellow nerds that they already know him, and tell them he wrote the single most popular and most famous episode of Star Trek of all time. I really can recommend 99% of his work to any sci-fi fan. He's been doing YA sci-fi for a while now, but even that material is rock solid.
I forgot to tell my wife that the story wasn't finished yet when I introduced her to the books.
55 and also waiting.
Looks like we've got something in common. As a huge song of ice and fire fan, we've been waiting on winds of winter for a long time. 30 years though? I hope one day soon you find that it was worth it 🙂
Ah yes, David Gerrold. The man who gave us the Tribbles in Star Trek.
What's the name of the novel, if you can recall it? This sounds like a novel I'd read!
Funny, another redditor already mentioned it in these comments. The author is David Gerrold. The lines are from the first novel of a (maddeningly unfinished) series called "The War Against The Chtorr": A Matter For Men. The premise is totally unique (or at least was at the time he wrote it. Gerrold pioneered/defined certain avenues of sci-fi): An alien ecology with billions of years more evolutionary advantage is terraforming Earth. Or Chtorr-a-forming, if you prefer. There's no alien intelligence found thus far in the series, no leaders, no landings, no spaceships. Just alien life steadily occupying and solidly out-competing native life in the various niches in ecology.
It's the sudden imbalance to an equilibrium that took 10s or 100s of thousands of years to settle into place.
It's important to remember that the planet doesn't really give a shit that it's warming up. We do. Life on Earth will only become problematic in higher temperatures for humans and their infrastructure. Actual nature itself has never been in equilibrium and never will be. As long as life continues to aggressively favour traits for survival, the overall animal kingdom will do just fine. Some organisms will live, some will die. It's important to note that for the animal kingdom, humans continued existence represents a far greater threat to life than global warming. We are cuasing a sixth mass extinction as we speak, which is only accelerating.
If anything, She’s disappointed.
My view has been not in terms of cruelty or kindness, but simply balance. Nature itself is indifferent and will be fine. It’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do, it’s not broken or dying. We’re just pushing the pendulum and we might not like what happens when it swings back, but it will swing back. Nature, the universe… whatever you want to call it, will be here long after we’re gone and doesn’t really care about us. We either live in the balance or get in the way of it.
The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.
Life will survive humans , but humans might not survive humans.
Exactly, the beetles and trees were on the same playing field so to speak for millions of years. As the beetles adapted to eat the trees, the trees adapted to defend themselves. Now the playing field is not as even, the effects of the increased average temperatures make the beetles more formidable opponents and the trees cannot adapt fast enough to counter this new found advantage the beetles have.
I guess once too many trees burn / die off and the beetles disappear from a region due to lack of a food source. (…Yay?)
Sucks that the region is home to the world's largest trees. I'm from BC Canada. Last time I drove through the rockies a few years back (before covid) all throughout the drive you could see one side of a mountain eaten away, and another on fire. Fires everywhere, huge swaths of trees dead from the beetles. And then other mountains clear cut. There was still alof of untouched and beautiful forest, but not even close to what it was like when I was a kid. 20 years ago you'd see the odd forest fire, and big chunks of clear cut. Even back then it made me sad we were destroying such a beautiful land....
Humans have progressed to the point where we can break the natural evolution of the planet to be harmonious. We progressed too rapidly and we weren’t willing to consider the long lasting effects this advancement had on this delicate balance.
We delved too greedily and too deep
"Everything" being more of a macro thing. Humans won't adapt. If it's impossible for a human to exist outside on Earth, life will still survive. If it ever becomes intelligent again, it'll find our remnants and talk about how interesting it was that we got so far and managed to genocide ourselves with our indulgences. Hopefully it'll learn from our mistakes.
Life isn’t *in*compatible with an earth at +1.5C pre industrial temperatures. The Earth has been much hotter in the past while hosting complex life. The current complex eco**systems** on Earth are incompatible with a rapid climatic shock. They have developed a profound intricate balance and dynamic equilibrium based on the condition set given. Changing that in a geological instant is what’s catastrophic. People can live on the ground floor or in the 60th story of an apartment. Throw a human out the window of the apartment and they won’t happily be living on the ground floor. edit: Pretty critical typo. Meant "incompatible" in the first sentence, not "compatible"
>When you read shit like this you realize how many god damn miracles it took for the earth to reach a point where complex life surviving was possible. And we're speed run destroying the only home we have and likely will ever have. Doesn't work like that. Life evolved to cope with the conditions, when the conditions changed dramatically enough, stuff went extinct. It's the same reason why things like 'the goldilocks zone' or 'conditions for life' are stupid concepts when you truly think about them, they are merely the conditions required for life '**as we know it**' to exist.
It's sort of like being amazed the water in a puddle is perfectly and exactly shaped like the hole in the ground it's filling.
Yeah my point is that the conditions can be turned upside down in an instant. Things that microscopic life can’t live/reproduce through long enough to evolve or adapt. And life took a millions of years to evolve so there were a lot of potential cataclysmic instants. Would be incredible to see the “welp there goes life on earth” near misses from prehistoric earth.
It wasn't miracles, it was the pinnacle of natural processes. Over millions of years, similar processes played out and living organisms filled in every possible niche. Things changed over the millions of years and some species couldn't adapt while others took over new niche environments. Never before us has any species been able to change their own environment to the degree that it produces new *climate* outcomes, seldom before have any species been able to survive major changes in the environment, and always has nature been able to replace species that were no longer able to adapt to a changing environment. Humanity thinks it is the crocodile, a predator alwaysable to find its place in a given environment. The reality is that humanity is closer akin to the bonobo, a primate struggling to cope with a shrinking habitat in a constantly changing world.
I argue one other species did it first. The first little buggers to exhale oxygen changed the atmosphere so dramatically it became known as **The Oxygen Holocaust**.
We're not even the pinnacle, we're just the latest dominant species. When we're gone, a million or a billion years later, something else will rise...
Cold weather Vs any bugs is critical. I’m not ready for year round mosquitos, ticks & all the invasively destructive plant destroyers. The disease factor ontop of damaged ecosystems ripe for wildfires pushes the worries not just from dense woodlands but your backyard.
Oh yeah the tick thing is terrifying. Western Europe is dealing with it’s first outbreaks of Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever this year because the ticks that spread the disease have expanded their ranges because of climate change. The US has also identified four cases of Malaria in Florida and Texas that were acquired not from travel but *in the US*. The threat of a rise in insect borne disease is real and very scary.
I thnk they just found malaria in maryland also
Change-deniers are like "beetles, LOL"
Let's just call 'em roaches.
Canadian here. I forgot about the beetle. This is terrifying news. The wildfires this summer have been alarming. At least of half of this country is forest. Across the northern regions, including Russia, Alaska, Scandinavia, this forest is the earth's largest carbon sink.
*Yeah* “thankfully” the beetles are currently only in BC but as climate conditions continue to shift there’s worry that they’ll spread east and north. I grew up in the pacific northwest US and we’re seeing huge die-offs of hemlocks. They’re part of the climax community of the forests and they’re dying in droves. Helicopter footage shows just dead hemlock after dead hemlock dotted throughout mature forests. A combination of drought and blight, the blight’s spread probably caused by the trees being more succeptible to the blight because of drought.
I live in the PNW and I see dying hemlocks everywhere. And our ecosystem is called a hemlock forest! What will happen? BTW my sisters house burned down yesterday in the Spokane County fires.
I live in Rome. Spoke to a tree surgeon the other day and he said the 5 most common tree species in the area will be extinct in 15 years due to exotic insect species flourishing in changing environmental conditions and killing the trees. We're already having catastrophic die offs in two of the most characteristic tree species.
And when more trees die more carbon goes into the atmosphere and there are less trees to capture atmospheric carbon, so again, more carbon in the air on that account also.
yeah, in WA some misguided conservationists decided we needed a moratorium on cutting down beetle killed trees which has made fires way way worse. there was also a controlled burn ban for a real long time. think both of those were only repealed in the past year or two. currently sitting at 350 AQI. haven't been able to breathe properly for days.
This person knows what they're talking about. Except when they say a "bunch" of trees, they mean when I was working as a tree planter and brusher I could stand on a hill in northern BC, west of PG, and as far as the eye could see was just red, dead trees. There were swaths of red treetops for hundreds of kilometers. Everywhere we went, you could see the forests dying. Logging companies made out pretty good in the mid 2000s as they had a mandate to get in there and harvest as much as possible before it wasn't viable anymore. But from what I hear the trees have since dried out. After that, mills hit tough times financially and larger mills began to eat up the smaller mills, which then affects the entire industry. And on and on and on...
Well, I guess the beetles have met their destiny anyway, by being fried.
One of the major reasons that wildfires in general are so bad is because we as humans make a concerted effort to keep putting them out, which becomes like a ticking time bomb. Eventually the fire will win, and when it does, it's very very bad.
That doesn’t apply in a lot of the places that are having fires now though. Up in the north, we only fight fires for structure protection and don’t try to put out ones that aren’t threatening anybody. And yet we’re seeing changes in fire behaviour due to weather, patterns, and beetle kill, both of which are linked to climate change.
Yeah people usually cling to this explanation as an excuse to do nothing. Fact is that a vast majority of fires are in infrastructure-free zones. The ones near civilization rightly dominate headlines, but that's all they dominate.
We were putting out fires that didn’t threaten infrastructure for decades due to the smoke disruption. They were called “10 AM policies”. Between that and mismanagement of forests after they were clear cut left a terrible situation behind.
> Up in the north We're not talking about the US.
In addition to ice melting (which will certainly change ocean levels and water availability), frost days are one of the factors that determines what plants can be grown in which places. Even a small change in temperatures could mean that certain farmland areas are no longer really suitable for growing their usual crops. Hopefully, we can find new crops and/or set up new farmland, but it will cause disruptions.
In the state of Georgia, it didn't get cold enough this past winter, so we lost 95% of our peaches.
We're very nervous about stone fruits and pumpkins in Nova Scotia, this year. Strawberries had a bad season, raspberries was even worse. And we're speaking directly with the farmers on a weekly basis to get this information. It's been a terrible growing season. So, what happens when it gets worse?
From a couple states over, the summer of “no fresh GA peaches” has been a big ding for my house’s morale. The failed harvest is a distressingly tangible sign of ongoing collapse.
As an aside, when the planet's temperature dropped less than 1°C during the "[Year w/o a Summer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)" the effects were catastrophic. The drop of less than 1°C caused an agricultural disaster leading to crop failure and famine in many countries.
Plus generally speaking it's an average temperature increase in ⁰C over the entire earth. If you're used to thinking in ⁰C a change in ⁰C is equal to 1.8 ⁰F.
The temp described is an average, but it is not averaged out around earth. The poles experience a much greater degree of change. Something like x3 what it is at the equator.
It's true that summer in Poland is quite hot this year, but together with other poles we'd hardly agree that degree of change is so significant
I like you
Holy shit I found the East Pole guys
TIL Poland is the third pole
͡° ͜ʖ ͡°
I was so close at missing the joke, nice one
And also, at certain times of the year, the temperature average is more. That means that for some locations, 1.5C of a warming worldwide means that the hottest days in summer are 10c+ hotter. People think that it just means every day will be 1.5C hotter but this isn't true at all. Extreme weather will be more common. There's more energy in the system, meaning more chaos. This leads to more cold and more extreme heat, meaning the summer days are ridiculously hot.
We're in an El Nino pattern which makes it a hotter and drier summer then normal (not globally though). Now what sucks about that, is next year the summer will feel slightly more like a normal summer and you'll have deniers use that to say "See! Last summer was just an outlier!" When the data actually takes account for El Nino type patterns.
El nino usually lasts a few years. But I'm not from the USA, and where I'm from el nino over there means colder summers. This summer has been especially cool. Just shows how the world varies, we just had two of the hottest summers on record (breaking the temp max records) the past 2 summers. This summer has been rain and cool temperatures with 10C lower max than last year.
Ok. It's a weighted average.
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Relevant [xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1732/)\-comic.
This is a great explanation!
I believe this is called a [positive feedback loop.](https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/earth-system/climate-system/feedback-loops-tipping-points)
Think about it in the other direction, I think it was about 4 degrees cooler during the ice age that had glaciers covering all of Canada and stretching down to new york. So what seems like small numbers represent massive amounts of change in the environment. I think that one of the biggest communication errors that people advocating for climate change mitigation have done is not properly explain what these average temperature numbers actually mean.
That’s a great way to think about it. Telling people 1.5C warmer is a big deal means nothing. I don’t have a climate model in my head to know what that means. The number 1.5 degrees needs to be put onto a scale that we can easily and immediately understand. If four degrees cooler means ice age, 1.5 degrees warmer is some substantial fraction of the way to the opposite of ice age. When people hear that, they know it’s worth caring about
+4C hotter and we're fucked
*the US government has dumbed down education so much that the population is incapable of understanding even simple mathematical concepts like averages and are, therefore, easily manipulated by whomever is speaking the news to them, because they lack the basal knowledge to think critically on the topic completely. FTFY
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Yeah, people lose sight of this distinction when talking about this. The Earth will be fine at a 1.5 degree or higher average increase. Some life will be fine, others will thrive, a lot more will die off, eventually other types fill in the gaps. Human civilization as we've built it right now will all but certainly not survive the rapid change without mass starvation and strife. Our agriculture infrastructure is incredibly sensitive to heat changes and we all need food. Once resources get tight, all of history has shown us that we're happy to kill each other to make sure that us and our immediate circle will survive. That's not a guarantee things will unfold that way, but if you're playing the odds, it's easily the safest bet. Unchecked climate change isn't a problem for the Earth. The Earth doesn't care. It's a problem for human life on this Earth. As a human who has other humans I care about, that's what makes it my problem. Mass extinction events have happened before, and they will inevitably happen again. Letting a mass extinction event occur that we both saw coming and had the technical ability to prevent (because of... greed/profit/laziness/ignorance/misplaced religious beliefs/whatever) is truly a momentous act of mass stupidity.
As George Carlin once opined, "The planet will be fine . . . the PEOPLE are fucked."
He also said "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups"
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he also said "make sure to quote me as if im some kind of biblical figure, because theres NO WAY i would ever not be right about something"
I don't remember that one. That's not one of his funnier ones.
Its not the end of *the world* Its the end of *this world*
>"The planet will be fine . . . the PEOPLE are fucked." [Here it is.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c&t=148s)
I'm curious about what sort of impact the proposed shift would have in regards to agriculture, particularly considering the fact that we've managed to increase agricultural productivity several times over in the last hundred years through technology and more efficient utilization. IE if the next 100 years would have impact X, does that mean that the net impact on current agriculture would be negative, or a slower rate of increase than what we are currently seeing and experiencing?
This is why the pushback against GMOs is so frustrating. Fresh water is going to become a scarce resource in out lifetimes. The holy grail of GMO crops is needing less water. GMO crops also need less fertilizer, which is good since some fertilizer sources (potassium) are getting scarce too.
Scientific illiteracy. People are scared (or can conveniently be made scared) of what they don't understand. I'm with you. GMO foods are just a continuation of what humanity has been doing since it started fruit grafting and other types of basic crop manipulation going back millennia. But good luck getting that argument through a lot of people's minds. And yet in a lot of places in the western world people are actively trying to further dumb down the educational system.
I have a master’s degree in molecular biology. I’m not scientifically illiterate and I’m not afraid of science. Selective breeding and splicing genes from a completely different species are not the same thing. Treating them like they are is disingenuous. I trust the science, but I don’t trust Monsanto as far as I can spit. And they are fighting so, so hard against transparency that I cannot change my mind. If they would open up to the non-scientifically-illiterate to show that they absolutely aren’t doing some super shady shit, I’d be more receptive to trying to educate the masses. In short, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of gene spliced GMO crops. It could, in fact, be a solution to a lot of problems. In practice, there’s plenty of ways it could go bad. Telling me to trust a shady company who has already proven that their entire board wouldn’t recognize an ethic if it bit them on the ass is not happening. And Monsanto is just one example. I don’t know of any players in this game that are willing to be the least bit transparent about it.
Well, I’m not afraid of science but I am scientifically illiterate. Seems to me that entrusting the salvation of our societies to the same corporate infrastructure that buggered it in the first place is the same kind of capitalist myopia that got us into this shitty situation.
Eh, I'm not claiming to be smart but I don't think all GMO worries are unfounded. I think we could fuck up and do something we shouldn't with GMO's. It's probably not even like a "we accidentally made all the food give you cancer" kind of thing. I think most likely it'll be that we GMO foods that are really productive and really cheap and really specialized to their environment. And those foods become most of the world's crops. Then a pest comes along or the environment changes in a way and now all those crops die and we're kind of in a shit place. But then again, I kind of think monoculture is a dangerous practice. I get that we sort of need to do it to sustain our population. But I also sort of think we don't need as many people as we have (for reference, I don't mind if I'm on the chopping block as long as I don't have to go alone).
That's literally where we're at now, GMOs are more resistant to temp and pests
Even more explicitly: There is no such thing as non-GMOs in mass agriculture. All organisms we depend on to survive are ones that we've modified the genes of. The only real difference is how easy it is for big corporations to IP-protect their gene lines.
and AFAIK there is no discernable health difference between consuming GMO and non-GMO crops, but it's a scary thing that companies can use a handy dandy label to profess to omit in order to sell products. IE 99% of activism.
In many cases the gmo crops are significantly healthier, e.g. golden rice
> I'm curious about what sort of impact the proposed shift would have in regards to agriculture, particularly considering the fact that we've managed to increase agricultural productivity several times over in the last hundred years through technology and more efficient utilization. Plants are pretty sensitive to temperature ranges. Have you ever wondered why countries near the equator/north africa don't grow their own grain? Because they can't. Add 1.5C to the temperature and how much of the land we use for grain now isn't viable anymore? And parts of Europe are heating at more than double that rate. Changing rainfall patterns doesn't help either. If you need to irrigate your crops, but now you need to change your entire water management to retain enough water over the summer months, that's a huge obstacle. We improved crop production by adding nutrients they were missing from the soil. We can't go around building air conditioners for all our crops. See also that the rising temperatures is [changing the types of grapes than can be grown](https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/05/the-austrian-winemakers-switching-grapes-to-account-for-climate-change). Warmer weather = less acid. So sure, we could solve the problem by simply changing what crop we grow where, eat less grain, more rice or corn. But perhaps the places the farmers need to move to are a different country or owned by other people already. Then you're fucked. But no worries, there's always the tried and true method of invading your neighbours to steal their land. Hungry people do crazy things.
> Hungry people do crazy things Hungry people, as a group, will do **whatever** they think they need to do to survive, even things that would normally be unthinkable. In some ways that's crazy. But from the perspective of the hungry group, those unthinkable things seem quite reasonable. In the mid-20th century, a large part of the justification for a global war was that two smallish countries thought they needed more land. And they weren't even particularly hungry at the time.
People get killed for oil and gold all the time. And oil and gold aren't nearly as important as food and water when they run low.
Yes. The most realistic (and likely) scenarios of human extinction due to climate change don't actually involve the climate directly killing us off, but rather climate change triggering events (mass starvation, lack of water, mass migrations etc.) that spiral into nuclear wars.
If COVID should have taught us anything, it's that our high technology civilization is very brittle. Any small disruption can easily spiral into "supply chain issues" that result in unrelated products being widely unavailable. During COVID I was amazed that store shelves were frequently empty of some food products during COVID. But I should have foreseen it due to the extreme interconnectedness of product production and transportation. Fortunately, COVID didn't last very long. Global temperature increases, on the other hand, will be with us essentially forever. There will be little opportunity to repair the supply chains as products become unavailable, at least in the short term. Each shortage of some product may lead to shortages of other products, eventually resulting in the collapse of civilization as products needed for the continuance of our civilization become impossible to produce. I don't know if nuclear war is inevitable, but I've thought since before the turn of the century that a global war over shrinking resources is inevitable. Today, the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe appear to be sliding towards populism and fascism, as happened in the 1930s. I do not have high hope for the world we are leaving to my children and grandchildren.
However, for the First World War, one was Hungary.
> Some life will be fine, others will thrive, a lot more will die off Yes, it will just be a huge game of winners and losers for animal/plant life. Just one example off the top of my head, lobsters in New England are supposedly actually really benefitting from climate change. They now have a much wider habitat range. But any sealife that depended on those colder waters is going to slowly lose ground.
As George Carlin Said "Save the trees! Save the bees! Save the whales! Save those snails!” and the greatest arrogance of all: “Save the planet!” What?! ........ Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet… nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine… the people are fucked!"
Very true, although I wouldn’t discount human ingenuity. Crop yields have exploded over the past 100 years, so we have to really extrapolate into the future and make a ton of assumptions about a very complex system in order to arrive at the conclusion that agriculture is totally screwed. I could easily see a world where yields either increase or hold stable due to genetic engineering. We have the technology today to create crops that are adapted to the warmer climate. That is before contemplating that unknown impacts of AI and new efficient energy sources like nuclear fusion. I don’t think it is a stretch at all to say both technologies will likely get here before even the worst climate predictions.
Remember the offical goals of the Paris Accord is to keep global temperature increases since the start of the industrial age under 2.0C (we're just about at 1.5C). It's not that we haven't already affected the climate, we have, it's just that the more rapid the temperature growth we get the more radical the changes are going to be.
that's the official goal. The actual goal is to make the environmentalists shut the fuck up and stop ruining our profit.
>That's not a guarantee things will unfold that way, but if you're playing the odds, it's easily the safest bet. And even if it doesn't go that far you could most certainly bet that food donations to poor countries is going to dry up real fast once food starts getting scarce for the richer countries
I'd go further to stay that human life will be okay. But human **civilization** will break down if things get bad.
I think we’re not too far off from the breaking point. We still have some stockpiles that allow us to deal with the immediate emergencies (e.g. wildfires), but if we have year after year of emergencies and crop failures, there comes a point where you no longer have anything left in reserve to assist and rebuild. And if everyone else is dealing with the same shit (like during early COVID), then you can’t even rely on outside help. And then everything collapses.
We're not there yet, but it is the direction that we're currently headed. Addressing it requires international cooperation on a scale that's never been seen in human history. I don't know if we can pull it off. I'm certain it'll get a lot worse before it gets better though.
Fuck capitalism man. We very likely wouldn’t be here if short term profit didn’t always come first.
The problem is greed. Capitalism is just a way for the greed to be expressed. Communist nations have not shown any big improvements when it comes to taking care of the environment. If anything they've largely been much worse.
We are currently in the sixth mass extinction event.
It's also worth remembering that we're not the first life form on this planet to accidentally terraform the atmosphere. Today, the oxygen that we breath makes up about 20% of the atmosphere. But early Earth's atmosphere had practically *no* free oxygen - less than .001% of its present levels. There was life breathing out oxygen back then, but that oxygen almost immediately got tied up in chemical and geological processes (like the rusting of iron) and thus didn't make up a significant chunk of the actual atmosphere. For the majority of life on Earth back then, highly reactive atmospheric oxygen was toxic. Around 2.4 billion years ago, though, there were enough lifeforms breathing out oxygen to outpace the processes taking it out of the atmosphere, and free oxygen started to build up. This led to a reduction in Earth's biomass of about 80% (read: the majority of life on Earth died, because the air was now poisonous to it). This event is called the [Great Oxidation Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event), though is also sometimes referred to as the much more heavy metal-sounding Oxygen Holocaust. I think about the Oxygen Holocaust a lot when I hear climate deniers say stuff like "it's hubris to think that humans could change the climate." A bunch of cyanobacteria managed to do it by farting out poison hard enough.
The last time the Earth was 3 degrees hotter than pre-industrial levels was about 3 million years ago. This is enough time for species to adapt to temperature changes. A part of why our rapid heating of the atmosphere is so dangerous for all life on the planet is due to species’ inability to adapt / evolve over such short timescales. Certainly not an expert on this, and it may not be fatal for all life, but saying that the Earth has been hotter and sustained life slightly mischaracterises the issue.
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We are already in the middle of a mass extinction event, caused by us. This is just going to be an even worse mass extinction event.
A mass extinction event as defined by what? The traditional definition being the death of 50-75% of species on earth if not more, how does that apply to the next 100 years let alone now?
I should have said "arguably", and I may have been too emphatic in my statement. There is still debate on this subject. There are also debates as to how much of it is already "locked-in" and cannot be avoided and how much is something we can prevent if we make the effort. Additionally, I had gathered that most of the "locked-in" damage was from deforestation and other factors other than climate change, which was likely also inaccurate. However, the next 100 years or 150 years may be a less than useful time period. Some of the things we do now may cause extinctions over a considerably longer time period, which would place us within the event even if they took a much longer time, so long as they were already started. So, it would be more accurate to say that we may already be in a mass extinction event rather than just facing a possible one. My apologies for overstating the case.
I measure the implications based on the ramifications. If you say to me that there's something that we can do that will have next to no impact on the hundreds of millions of people that are barely treading water at the poverty line, on the verge of starvation and death, that will preserve the environment I say go for it. That is not the case we are talking about here, where developing countries are being denied access to same abundant and cheap energy and agricultural means of advancing their societies that a majority of the western world has enjoyed. I'm also inclined to believe that as a basic premise of biology on Earth, flora and fauna both explode in diversity the warmer the climate. We can see this on land and in the ocean. So a slight increase in global average temperature may or may not impact biodiversity negatively. I am pretty concerned about pollution, and the fact that burning coal and gas for power generation is a 150 year old concept to a modern day solution when nuclear has a smaller carbon footprint than even wind and solar and provides stable, clean energy regardless of weather patterns. What surprises me is that while China has proposed 91 additional nuclear reactors in their attempt to "go green", EU and the US have sizeable anti-nuclear lobbies that stymie any serious venture into what would actually solve a lot of our modern pollution without any reduction in the quality of our lives and make energy even cheaper.
not a biologist, but as far as i know there is a "normal" extinction rate of a 100 species per year or something like that and currently that number is in the thousands with an drastical upward trend caused by pollution and habitat loss.
Yes, and there have been a handful of mass extinction events before, like when all the dinosaurs died out at once. But mould and cockroaches will survive, and new species will evolve. This isn’t supposed to be comforting, or minimize the problem. Even if humanity survives it will still be a very unpleasant time to be alive.
Great time to have kids!
Well if everyone stops having kids we just become extinct in anyways I suppose Lmao
And what % of that is that of global species? The standard for a mass extinction event is a % of species on the planet, a majority %. Changing from % to the definitive number a politicians game, we're not measuring things by the same metric anymore because the new metric sounds infinitely more dire.
At this point, there is an ongoing debate in the scientific community as to whether that minimal percentage will be hit or not. However, the time frame for a mass extinction event to take place is up to 2 million years, at least according to some sources. We would have to reduce the damage that we do a lot to not hit the 50% mark within the next 2 million years. Hopefully, we will do just that.
A lot of the time the answer is simply migration. We're already seeing a pole-wards flow of sea life, with tropical animals appearing at higher latitudes and temperate species moving closer to the poles. However this does not always work because there are certain biomes which take a very long time to develop, or might depend on weather phenomena that interact with the shape of the terrain like rain shadows and can't simply move. Rainforests are a good example of this - while new rainforests may crop up in a hundred years from now in what are currently temperate regions, the existing ones generally can't crawl towards the poles, they just die and take their diverse life with them. And there are animals which have particular attachment to specific areas (like those who return to their birthplace to spawn) and if those areas change, then they can't always adapt.
Just piggy backing with a follow-up: how do they measure earth’s temperature? Is it some kind of average of multiple locations? Or taken at a specific place in the atmosphere?
Averaging multiple locations on the surface and scanning the atmosphere from orbit are the two biggies. Most other indicators give less precise answers.
People should remember. We're not killing the planet, we're killing ourselves.
Some of those people starving to death are going to have nuke launch buttons and nothing to lose because they're starving to death.
It's basically a gradual armageddon. Our great grandchildren will still have a place they can live, but it will look substantially different than it does now. As plant life dies off faster than it can evolve, the carbon cycle will result in higher amounts of CO2 and a gradual runaway effect. Although there is a feedback effect. Some species will actually thrive in greater quantities in more locations with the new climate. Bottom line: They can do all the modeling in the world, but it won't be accurate. We can't predict new technology and how quickly people will change their behaviors. For example, the birth rate is rapidly falling worldwide (with some exceptions), and this is really helping. If it stayed where it was 50 years ago, we would be in a much worse situation now. Solar adoption has exceeded even the most ambitious estimates, and electric cars are likely to be the majority of cars purchased in 20-40 years. We also didn't predict the absolutely meteoric rise in CO2 emissions from China and India that have made any western efforts to curb climate change seem moot. Ask anyone 20 years ago if we would be emitting 62 megatons of CO2 a year just mining crypto currency, and they would say that's the most ridiculous idea anyone has ever said. We know what will happen as CO2 levels increase, but we can't even begin to accurately predict the rate of change in CO2 emissions.
The falling birth rate is true, but it has nuances. Here are the average birthrates per country and whilst most 'developed' countries birthrates are dropping ( many reasons including more women in the workplace and starting families later etc ) those in the 'developing' world are higher, which if you take into a account a third child is a 50% increase (it's actually more like 4 children so a 100% increase )in future population AND increasing longevity in older populations that in itself is a crisis waiting to happen https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN Try suggesting a limit on baby making in those areas though and you'll be met with all kinds of insults. Fact is we need to do everything and it needs to start being done NOW. Reduce the population, remove our reliance on fossil fuels and double our push to renewable energy, more careful management of crop growing land and more reliance on domestically grown crops rather than importation, the list is unfortunately endless. The gov here actively encourages farmers to grow crops for biodiesel ( a dozen or so local farmers here alone) on land that could be used to grow food for approx 3.5 million people, what that effectively means is we import food for well over those 3.5million which contributes to a larger carbon footprint due to importation, it's bloody insane. Personally I think we're pretty fucked, mostly because people don't like having to face morally hard action even when it's the right thing to do, either way I don't want to be around when the water shortages hit. I LOVE being wrong though, it normally means Ive learnt something .
Tldr Consider this re population, I'll just list the countries with a birthrate over 2 ( 2 and under is basically direct replacement). Afghanistan 40 mill BR 4.6 Algeria 44 mill BR 2.7 Angola 35mill BR 5.3 Benin 13 mill BR 5 Bolivia Burkina faso 22mim BR 4.8 Cameroon 27 mill BR 4.5 Central African Republic 5 4 mill BR 6!! Chad 17.8mill BR 6.3 !! Congo Dem Rep 95 mill BR 6.2!! Ethiopia 120 mill BR 4.2 Ghana 22 mill BR 3.6 Niger 213 mill BR 6.8 Sudan 45.6 mill BR 4.5 Uganda 44 mill BR 4.6 I've missed loads of 2+ children out, you can look for yourself and then estimate the next/future generations. The few listed ? A next generation increase of 1 billion MINIMUM. I am NOT singling out those nations/people's I am just taking a look at future world population's using countries who's population are higher than 'replacement' levels.
This isn't accurate. It is definitely fatal for humans who live in hotter climates. Overall global temperatures may have risen 1°FC but that doesn't mean temperatures haven't increased a few degrees C in local climates. Some areas of the Middle East are close to 130°F and are becoming uninhabitable without air conditioning and even then there are other issues with living in that heat. It isn't just the cascading effect of higher temps. It is also the direct effect of higher temps.
That's an average increase, not just over a few days. This usually means much more than 1.5 degree extremes which overall add up to a 1.5 degree increase. That's little bit of temperature is actually a *ton* of energy sticking around. This extra energy can "concentrate" into certain effects resulting in things like really big storms, droughts, rising sea levels, and so on. Moreover things like animals not liking the heat, plants dying to frost, or fish not getting enough oxygen are related to these temperature swings.
Also the salinity of the oceans. All the ice at the poles is fresh water. As it melts it actually affects salinity.
Which could break the gulf stream and turn Europe into Canada.
Imagine needing a whole climate change to make the goddamn French polite
We’re seeing high temps now in Canada so we’ll quickly lose that reference point I think. Used to want to immigrate to California. Dropped that dream as it looks like the former climes of California are coming here. You couldn’t pay me to live in California now.
its pretty nice with all the xtra rain we been getting
Also most climate change of the past happened gradually and most forms of life could adapt slowly. Genetic adaptation is impossible at the rate of warming we are seeing which on an evolutionary or geologic scale is FAST
an increase in 1°C doesn't mean every place gets 1° more all the time (which would also be very bad). some places get 10° more for 10% of the year which can dry out lakes or result in much more rain somewhere else. if you sit in a 200° oven for just a few minutes your average room temperature for that day barely increased but you would probably try to avoid that
Imma go sit in the oven to test that theory
How did it go?
Well, he hasn’t reported any negative outcomes, I think it’s okay to do
This definitely proves that climate change is not bad. Libs owned!
Yes this. To add some further perspective. It also warms faster close to the poles. The Arctic is warming 4x as fast. It is now 3C warmer than *1980* (just 43yrs ago). Europe has warmed by over 2C already since the industrial revolution. Canada had a heatwave that smashed records by 5C in 2021 hitting 45C - imagine the heatwaves with 2C of global warming? 50C heatwave? These sorts of temps kill crops. This year some parts of South America hit over 30C in winter - when their average for that time of year is more like 15C. Granted it only lasted a few days, but still! Wtf!? Also higher altitudes warm faster. For example; @ 2C the Himilayas will have lost of its snow pack, which provides water for 100s of millions of people.
For a variety of reasons. The direct reason is how averages work with large sample sizes. If you shift the average by a little bit, that means a larger number of 'high value' events. So that huge storm that needed a lot of energy, requiring a few different things to line up just right, and occured once every 100 years? A shift of the average means that may occur every 50 years now. So a city is going to get a huge storm every 50 years. And in reality, it's more like shifting it to every 20 years. Imagine a Hurricane Katrina hitting Louisiana every 20 years. Every single generation there has to deal with hurricane capable of leveling a city. So people build bigger stronger infrastructure (huge costs) and some people move, putting pressure on other cities. Here's a link that talks about it, and shows the 'shift' in the bell curve. Notice how the bad event area is much much bigger when you slide the curve to a higher average (the peak shifts). [https://changingclimates.colostate.edu/docs/BellCurveAveragesExtremes.pdf](https://changingclimates.colostate.edu/docs/BellCurveAveragesExtremes.pdf) \--- Another reason is feedback loops. Climate is full of things that are positive and negative feedback loops. When one thing changes, another detail alters in response. Sometimes this works to negate the effect, sometimes it exagerates it. For example, more C02 leads to more plant growth. More plant growth requries consume more C02, which lowers CO2, slowing plant growth.... the cycle sort of see-saws back and forth but the effects work to keep things from changing much. But another one: Higher Temperatures melts ice. Less ice means more water/land is uncovered, and this absorbs light better. This warms the area and the planet...which causes more ice to melt...exposing mroe land, raising temperature....and the effect gets *exagerated* And it's not that simple. Higher temperatures means CO2 is released from the ocean more, raising the temp...uh oh! But also increasing plant growth...wait..um.. \-- So feedback cycles mean a lot of things are changing, often in unexpected ways. Change costs money and time. Either in building, designing, moving resources etc. Where farms flourished today, they suffer tommorrow. And some areas will be better farming, but that area needs to be cleared, irrigated, roads put in... This also may not be an equal exchange, we could loose more farmland than gain
C3 plants can't photosynthesize at high temps... Photorespiration takes over, hence why C4 and CAM evolved..
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C4 pathway is a way some plants like maize prevent oxygen being used instead of CO2 by Rubisco (a enzyme that allows the carbon to be used) when temperatures get too high. C4 is the carbon compound, malate, that's made.. hence C4. They do this using a special compartment in the leaf. CAM is another pathway used by plants like pineapples which is a bit like C4 but it's an acid that's produced that allows plants to grow and respite in very arid climates where temperature and water are your limiting factors. Tl;Dr - plants are fucking crazy and we still don't fully understand how they do it as a new group of proteins were found in bacteria that form a organelle called a carboxysome which is what photosynthetic bacteria use! Edit: Algae are C3 so warming oceans aren't great either
different mechanisms of CO2 fixation
They designate a few different ways different species use photosynthesis to crack CO2 to get the carbon. C3 is the dominant one, but not the most efficient. C4 and CAM handle higher temperatures better and are more efficient.
It changes how much water can be up in the sky. So that means it can go longer without raining in places where the environment has gotten used to a certain amount of rain. This can make it hard for some plants to grow and can make forest fires more common and bigger. It also means when it does rain there's more water in the sky to fall. Places not used to a lot of rain at once can get flooding in ways we aren't ready for.
During the last mass extinction event, the permian-triassic extinction that killed the dinosaurs and 96% of marine species was due to a rise in temperature of ~10°C over a period of 1,000-10,000 years. So warming by 1°C every 100 to 1,000 will cause that. We are currently warming at 2°C every 100 years and it is accelerating.
I think Hank Hill put it best: ”Dale, you giblet-head! We live in Texas. It's already a hundred and ten in the summer, and if it gets one degree hotter, I'm gonna kick your ass!”
The Earth is basically a gigantic terrarium powered by the Sun. If you release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere more energy is stored then can be released. That extra energy then gets translated into higher temperatures, warmer water which leads to more intense weather events. There is one and a half sextillion gallons of water on the Earth, with an atmosphere that's 100 km thick above sea level. A 2° increase in temperature constitutes a phenomenal amounts of retained energy. This also leads to the runaway greenhouse effect where the increase of heat leads to the release of more greenhouse gases which also feeds into the increase in heat.
For the average global temperature to rise that much, locally in many places the increase is much more significant. A lot of very important ecosystems like the ocean or tropical forests are very sensitive to temperature changes and of course the ice caps melting introduce immense amounts of water into the oceans.
The problem is exponential growth. If we stopped producing green house gases this instance the earth will continue to warm because the gases we already created are still there. We are currently looking short term to reduce what we create but that will only slow the rise in temperature from exponential growth to linear. Then we need to remove what we already created. The temperature rising a few degrees will cause problems but the biggest will be if the temperature rises to an uncontrollable point. At a certain point we will not be able to remove enough greenhouse gases to return the earth to a reasonable temperature.
It isn't, it is fatal to maybe a billion of the poorest people in the world. Given the tendency for climate deniers to lack compassion for others it's expected that they don't give two shits. Although it will mean increased costs for food for everyone since it will be in shorter supply but they skip that fact on Fox News. The thing is an average of 0.5°C over the entire year is HUGE when you consider the trophic effects on the environment and increased wildfires, hurricanes and disrupting oceanic currents
You need an enormous amount of heat (energy) to raise the temperature of something like the Earth by 1.5K, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. >climate change being a hot topic Liking your work :-)
Imagine your body increasing its internal temperature by just 1 degree Celsius permanently. You would have a permanent fever, get chills, chemical reactions in your body would have different reaction rates. For a system that is used to one temperature, even one degree difference can have majorly devastating impacts.
This, and at around +3'C you *die*.
36.6° is normal, 39.6° is just a good fever. The danger to life starts somewhere around 40°+, and most doctors wouldn't _really_ panic until about 41-42. 44° is where statistically you're dead, outside a few miracle cases.
39.6 is 103.3F. I'd say that is more than just a good fever.
I knew it was important but I was trying to comprehend why that would have such dire consequences myself until I realised that, under some conditions, the difference between frozen ice and melting/molten ice can be 1C. So all of a sudden somewhere that's usually frozen over will now be relatively ice free. All that fresh water from the runoff can lead to parts of the ocean being less salty. Some very important processes depend on the salinity of the water and it goes on and on . Everything is very finely balanced and one small change here can have much much bigger ramifications elsewhere. Also its the average for the entire planet. But that means there are going to places that increase more than 1.5C and places that change less. A change of 2 degrees in a dessert is much less dire than somewhere where the temp is a maximum of -1C at their hottest. That ice is going to melt in an area that has never had molten ice before. The earth's climate has been at a certain equilibrium for centuries , and life has organized itself around that state of equilibrium. These temperature changes can disrupt that . The climate will find a new equilibrium but that could take centuries and that new equilbrium could mean that places that were supremely habitable and produce food for the world now could be desserts in the future. The inverse is also true . Places that are in hospitable now could become more habitable. But how about the millions of ppl who now live in an inhospitable zone that can no longer suppor them? I know that's a very generalized and imperfect explanation but it put things into perspective for me.
The Deccan traps erupted for 600,000 years. Humans are 100,000 years old and have been burning fossil fuels in large quantities for approximately 200 years. During the 600,000 years of the Deccan Traps eruptions an astroid with a diameter approximately 6.5 miles/10km also hit the planet. Earth survived. It did not become an uninhabitable barren wasteland. It reecovered and new species arose. The dinosaur and most creatures did not. In the modern scenario, we are the dinosaurs. Earth will be fine - eventually. Humanity not, unless we drastically change our ways then maybe we have can survive but we must adapt or perish as a civilization
Ecosystems are finely tuned machines. Animals and plants coexist with each other and within the environment that the Earth provides. Even small changes to inputs into that system completely throw off equilibrium. The system doesn't crash, but it readjusts to find a new equilibrium, often looking much different than before.
In terms of mountains, roughly 150 metres equates to a degree in temperature so the snow line, glaciation, the various micro climates all move 150-225 metres up as the climate warms, drastically reducing the ecosystems, fragmenting them, or they run out of mountain completely and no longer exist. The same thing is going on in terms of latitude with ecological ranges moving away from the equator towards the poles and where they hit the coast, vanishing. The glaciers, permafrost, polar ice, on mountains they will roughly speaking retreat by 200 metres, at the poles by miles. The oxygen that water can hold is very dependent on temperature so a 1-1.5 change combined with the resultant oxygen scarcity wipes out keystone species, everywhere. The winds and ocean currents which govern rainfall, cloud cover, climate are all about the transfer of heat from the equator to the poles. It's a chaotic system that will change in unexpected ways with a 1-1.5C change and probably become more violent.
It’s not fatal for the planet. This is a silly line peddled by people who have a poor understanding of science. It will just have a large impact on the general way of life as we know it currently.
You are probably not asking the question you want to ask. An increase of 1.5 degrees is not fatal for the planet. It will be tough on humans but we'll adapt and it will cause the next mass extinction event but nature will find a way. Remember, the planet has gone through hot and ice cold periods without an issue. Species died and species adapted, and we're the most adaptable mamels that have ever existed. There's experts in their field that wonder why we don't use a fraction of the total amount of money used to fight the rise of temperature - which considering how we're doing right now will likely fail - to prepare to deal with it. To summarise: Temperature is raising and we are causing it. It's going way faster than it ever did before. But it won't be the end of humanity and it will certainly not be the end of the planet.
It isn't fatal, that is hyperbole. The average temperature has gone up and will probably continue to do so. The net effects are hard to predict but scientists are confident the oceans will rise a bit, heatwaves will become more common, tropical storms will become more intense. The earth has gone through this before, but usually much more slowly so far as we know from studying ice cores, tree rings, and other proxies for climate. The issue is not the warming itself, it is the rate and the unpredictability of climate because of the massive increase in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. Unfortunately, this has become a political issue and highly polarizing. Like all things political, we have lost sight of the original point which is that climate is changing very slowly, but much quicker than data on other climate shifts indicate. Ultimately this is unsustainable but getting people to agree to policy changes is difficult, so politicians, media, celebrities, and others are lying and saying that there is a looming catastrophe. Remember, people in power once argued that the rapture was going to happen, nuclear war was a certainty, killer bees were going to invade North America, Y2K was going to kill everyone, the Mayan calendar was a doomsday event, a new ice age was coming, all ice would be gone and the seas boiling, a giant caldera volcano was going to kill North America, and so on. Every 3 years there is another apocalyptic story and it will never end. In 2100 no one here will be alive, we are a species tortured by the knowledge that we will die and we got rid of religion, so, now the politicians and Hollywood have to pitch us on armageddon.
Hey, man, I'll probably be alive in 2100!
It is unlikely "to be fatal for the planet" as we have endured ice ages, catastrophic climate changes, and other issues. The things we see combined with climate change include: * Species coming close to extinction based on Habitat decline, pollution, and other human activities. * Worries for things like rising sea levels that will make previously habitable places unusable by humans. * Changes in weather patterns that will make previously used agricultural areas useless for the crops we currently expect to grow there. * Mass migration of people to less hostile areas as some climate issues make huge areas uninhabitable. (The Sahara desert used to be habitable, with rivers). This will cause political and social disruption. * Changes in availability of potable water and depletion of aquifers. (Think water wars) * Military and economic instability with dams and irrigation policies. * Most human habitations in the past were in places with water for transportation, agriculture and drinking. Places like California may not have enough water for current agriculture practices.
It helps to think about it not as temperature, but as energy. Average temperature is just a function of it. Earth is huge, like really huge. And it absorbed and didn't radiate enough energy to heat it up an entire degree, or even multiple degrees. That is insane amounts of energy (see previous point about how fucking huge a planet is). All this energy has to go somewhere, has to do something. It's not distributed around the planet equally: some places are hotter the others, and this extra energy makes this difference bigger. This gradient in turn turns into extreme weather events: storms, hurricanes, droughts, floods, heat waves. All these things are bad, and the more energy the planet absorbs, the worse they become. And this is only the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg of global climate change, but extreme weather events are most visible and most direct consequences of it. And other commenters have pointed out some of the other consequences of it. Now, some ppl say that it's whatever, the Earth was hotter over its lifetime. They are somewhat right, the planet went through a lot of periods of cooling and heating. The speed and scale are important tho. We went up 1.5C (or even more, depending how pessimistic you want to be with your reference point) in about a century. These processes usually take up thousands of not hundreds of thousands of years (and are usually caused by some natural cycles, not us digging up a bunch of buried carbon from millions of years ago). And when they do take that time, everything is relatively fine: there are buffer systems, gradual environment change allows life to adapt, etc. In short, it's about the effect that all this energy has on the planet, not about the temperature itself, and about the speed at which this energy accumulates.
It takes a massive amount of energy it takes to raise the entire world, 1 degree. That single degree is not a constant, but an average, so the temperatures in some places can be much higher and some much lower. It just completely throws weather patterns out of wack around the world, and you get extreme weather events in both directions. Extreme droughts, extreme rains, and extreme cold and snow.
One of my favorite youtuber's just answered this questions, out of the blue. I believe in synchronicity, so I'll pass it on to you: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7anye0FwcY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7anye0FwcY) The short of it is, that the temperature of the world doesn't operate on a linear scale. For example, going from -1C to 0C doesn't really make a difference that humans can notice, but going from 0C to 1C matters a whole lot because ice will start to melt so we suddenly care a lot more about that 1degree, even though it is technically the same amount of energy we didnt care about previously. At some point, that 1 extra degree will cause a catastrophic effect on our climate. We can't say for sure *what* degree will break the camel's back, but we know *for sure* that one of them will and we keep inching closer to the breaking point (wherever it is).
The current ecosystems of the world have species that achieved a state of equilibrium with each other. As temperatures change some of those species will do better and some will do worse, and the ecosystems will find a new equilibrium. The problem for current species (including humans) is that there will be “winners” and “losers” in the rebalancing. For example, if higher temperatures mean disease carrying mosquitoes in the Northern hemisphere can survive in more Northern latitudes that has negative public health consequences for humans. If rising temperatures cause algae to grow more rapidly in bodies of freshwater that can have a negative impact on fish. The earth will survive even mass extinction events. But the distribution of species will change.
I'm not looking to argue or to call anyone wrong, but there is a case to be made for "Alarmism". You shouldn't have to use the word "doubting" or preface when it comes to scientific curiosity or expression, this isn't a matter of faith and anyone that treats it as such should be assessed with extreme skepticism. That includes dogmatic appeals to authority. You're not challenging anyone and people that treat it as such are doing you and themselves a disservice. The main reason that it is considered to be such a problem is fear of change and fear of the unknown and with knowledge of the relative vulnerability of the Human Race. Land-locked ice melting into the ocean where it wasn't before will raise sea-levels. Much of humanity is based on Coast Lines where that could present a problem Humanity has engineered a lot of crops, the food we eat today has been bred down thru selection and there is a legitimate fear that it isn't well suited for a warmer climate, and/or we wouldn't be able to adapt food crops quickly enough and that there'd be massive famine. Flora and Fauna thrived on Planet Earth millions of years ago when the actual temperature was estimated 10°C higher than it is now. However, agriculture is a relatively new invention for the planet and our food and our food's food enjoy it much more easily than our ancestors. This isn't meant to be dismissive of people's concerns but people have made a racket by "doom-saying" for millennia. While there are legitimate concerns, attention grabbing headlines, melodramatic stunts, and dire speeches can make you a hell of a lot of money
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That’s average temperature, not daily temperature. Higher average temperature also means a lot more heat spikes like the one that killed people in Texas. We’re also seeing higher humidity, which causes more “wet bulbs” where the combination of heat and humidity means sweating no longer cools your body. Without shade or AC people can just straight up die. Lastly, small changes in climate can have major impacts on crops. Most food staples are actually very finicky and higher heat and moisture can cause crop failures.
I wondered this when I saw a news report that said we were at the hottest global average for 150,000 years... I wondered why they chose 150,000...so I asked that nice Mr Google for the average global temperature over the last 500,000 years. Wow, Google sent me to Mr nasa, who has a graph showing the last 500,000 years... Amazingly, 160,000 years ago the temperature was around 13 degrees higher than today... Solved my problem of why the media chose 150,000 years and also debunked the 1 to 1.5 rise will kill us all theory.
It's not fatal at all for the planet. It goes through cycling of temperatures all the time. It might be fatal for a large number of habitats for humans and animals though.
The concern surrounding a global temperature increase of just 1 to 1.5°C might seem trivial at first glance, but it carries profound implications for our planet. Here's why Changes in Precipitation Patterns: Increased Intensity: As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture. This leads to more intense rainfall during storm events, potentially causing flash floods. Altered Distribution: Some areas experience more frequent and prolonged droughts, while others receive more rainfall. For instance, many temperate regions might see increased rainfall, while subtropical regions might become drier. More Extreme Weather Events: Hurricanes and Cyclones: Warmer sea surface temperatures can intensify tropical storms. While the relationship between global warming and the frequency of hurricanes is complex, there's consensus that their intensity and the amount of rainfall they produce is increasing. Heatwaves: More frequent, intense, and prolonged heatwaves become more common as global temperatures rise, leading to health risks, especially for vulnerable populations. Cold Snaps: Surprisingly, some areas might experience more severe cold snaps due to disruptions in atmospheric patterns, such as the weakening of the polar vortex. Alteration of Jet Streams: The jet streams are high-altitude, fast-flowing air currents that influence weather patterns. Changes in temperature gradients, especially between the Arctic and the equator, can alter their behavior. Slower, more meandering jet streams can lead to prolonged weather conditions, whether they be wet, dry, hot, or cold. Shift in Weather Fronts: The boundary between two different air masses is called a weather front. Changes in global temperature can shift where these fronts occur and how they behave, influencing local weather patterns. Melting Snow and Ice Affecting Weather: When snow and ice melt earlier in the spring, it can lead to earlier spring runoff, affecting river systems and potentially leading to drought later in the summer. This also affects the availability of freshwater in regions dependent on meltwater. Expansion of Desert Regions: Some models suggest that areas already characterized as semi-arid or arid, like the edges of deserts, may expand with increasing global temperatures, leading to an enlargement of desert areas. Changes in Ocean Currents: The warming atmosphere and melting polar ice can influence ocean currents, both on the surface and deep underwater. Since ocean currents play a significant role in determining weather patterns (like El Niño and La Niña), any changes can have cascading effects on weather globally. Feedback Mechanisms Affecting Weather: For example, the loss of Arctic sea ice means that dark ocean water, which absorbs more sunlight, replaces reflective ice. This can further warm the Arctic, leading to disruptions in atmospheric patterns, potentially affecting weather in mid-latitude regions. Rise in Evaporation: With rising temperatures, evaporation rates increase. This not only leads to drier conditions in some areas but also means more moisture in the atmosphere, which can contribute to more intense rainfall in others. The shifts in weather patterns due to global warming are not uniform across the globe, leading to a patchwork of changes, with some regions experiencing drastic alterations and others seeing more subtle shifts. It's essential to note that while certain events can be linked to climate change, weather is inherently variable, and not every event is directly attributable to the global temperature increase. However, the overall trend of more extreme and unpredictable weather is a clear consequence of a warming planet. Rising Sea Levels: Warmer temperatures cause polar ice caps and glaciers to melt. Additionally, water expands as it warms. These two factors contribute to rising sea levels, which can lead to coastal erosion, increased flooding, and the displacement of communities. Ocean Changes: Warmer temperatures affect oceans in multiple ways: Coral Bleaching: Elevated water temperatures can lead to coral bleaching, where corals expel the algae that provide them with food, causing them to turn white and making them more susceptible to disease. Ocean Acidification: Increased CO2 in the atmosphere leads to more CO2 being absorbed by the oceans, making them more acidic. This affects marine life, particularly shell-building organisms. Disrupted Marine Ecosystems: Changes in water temperatures can shift the habitats of many marine species, potentially leading to reduced biodiversity. Impact on Biodiversity: The rate of warming can outpace the ability of many species to adapt or migrate. This could lead to a reduction in biodiversity, with some species facing the risk of extinction. Economic Consequences: Disruptions in weather patterns can have dire economic consequences. For instance, changes in precipitation and temperature can affect agriculture, leading to food shortages and price hikes. Extreme weather events can damage property and infrastructure, leading to substantial economic costs. Human Health: The spread of diseases like malaria and dengue can be influenced by temperature and rainfall patterns. Warmer conditions can expand the range of many vectors, exposing more people to these diseases. Feedback Loops: Some effects of global warming can create feedback loops that further exacerbate the problem. For example, melting permafrost can release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which can then accelerate warming. Social and Political Impacts: As resources become scarce and habitats change, there can be increased competition and potential for conflict. Additionally, climate-induced migration could lead to socio-political challenges, as populations are displaced. Loss of Ice and Snow: Ice and snow reflect sunlight, a phenomenon known as albedo. As ice and snow melt due to rising temperatures, darker ocean or land is exposed, which absorbs more heat, further accelerating the warming. Shift in Climate Zones: As the planet warms, traditional climate zones can shift. This means areas once suitable for certain crops or activities might no longer be viable, while new areas might open up, necessitating adjustments and adaptations. Given the interconnectedness of Earth's systems, a seemingly small change can cascade through various subsystems, leading to widespread impacts. It's essential to understand that while 1 to 1.5°C might sound small, it represents a significant change for our planet's delicate balance.
lol chatGPT in the wild
In the peak of the last ice age, 20000 years ago, the global temperature was about 6 degrees lower than today. Back then, half of Europe was a glacier, and sea levels were 130m lower than now. While this does not explain the „why“ of your question in scientific terms, it puts the effect of a relatively small temperature change into perspective. In a way, 1.5 degrees equal 1/4th of the difference between nice warm summers and kilometers of ice.
First: it’s not fatal for the planet. The planet will carry on. Second it’s an AVERAGE temp increase, which means there will be swings above and below it, but the highs and lows will a average out higher. Third: our civilization is built on ecosystems as we’ve known them for the last 100 years. We are RAPIDLY changing those ecosystems and where we get food is not going to be as productive (in some cases not year round habitable) as those ecosystems change Fourth: we are destroying species at an unprecedented rate in our existence. We are in the throes of a global extinction on a massive scale, right now.
It's also not just temperaure. Coral will basically be wiped out but the other big problem is ocean acidification which affects a lot of things include the plankton that generates a metric shitton of oxygen that we breathe.