Dr. Deborah Brosnan, a climate and ocean scientist, predicts that Earth could eventually become uninhabitable for humans given the grave state of the planet
Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.
In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun’s output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we’ve applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they’re mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we’ve not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We’re so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun’s output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us – assuming we survive that long.
That doesn’t detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.
How can you be so optimistic? With everything that’s going on in the world, I get more pessimistic everyday. At bad days, I’d just think “let just humanity perish because we just keep repeating the same horrible things over and over anyway”.
For me its because if you zoom out, the world is a better place to live in now, than it was 1000 years ago. Progress moves in waves, and right now it definitely feels like a significant low tide, but over time the coastline keeps creeping forward.
Humanity is the only meat eating animal that has significant percentage of its population willingly avoiding eating meat and instead finding ways to obtain essential nutrients without it (need to add that I am NOT one of those animals, I’m personally waiting for lab grown meat before I obstain from death based meat, if I ever do)
Humanity by and large no longer needs to leave its sick and wounded to die because we invented technology and infrastructure to both heal, and take care of those we cant heal
We’ve progressed to the point as a species where in order to bring more prosperity to our community, we no longer have to take from other communities, and that wasnt always the case (unfortunately this is only a recent achievement, and as such, not all of our population has adapted to this, hence our current problems)
Allow me to introduce you to: an abstract concept of facebook-
People, separated by thousands of miles, tap messages into their glass topped smart rocks that can then be seen by other people with smart rocks - it does this communicating with big metal trees that talk to magic caves, where millions of smart rocks think about those messages and pass them over to other magic caves by a glass wire, which in turn pass the messages to another metal tree and over to other glass topped smart rocks for people to read.
So much of our modern economy is rooted in assumptions about where and how to mass produce food stocks. Climate change threatens all of that.
Obliterating breadbasket regions in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran would devastate the regional populations.
Then you’ve got the wars in places like Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, further strangling access to fresh food stocks.
People joke about the looming “water wars”, but consider how much Israel and the Saudis have invested in desalination and what dehydration is doing to the million plus Gaza residents who have lost access to reliable drinking water.
What happens during a substantial crop failure in the South Pacific? It isn’t as though India and China haven’t experienced massive famines in living memory.
You can argue the finer details, but it is easy to see a scenario in which a billion or more people are wiped out over the course of a generation, because of substantive shifts in access to basic living needs.
Scientist piping in with my two cents. Granted my speciality is geophysics and planetary science, and not specifically climate.
In geoscience we tend to talk about things on very long timescales. Like: at what point with the sun’s output cause the earth to turn into Venus (250 million years as a lower bound, ish, then all life is doomed on Earth). The rate of change we’ve applied to our atmosphere is faster than any natural process other than a meteor strike or similar event. There are climate change scenarios where all life on the planet dies (why wait 250 million years!?), but they’re mostly improbable unless we have some sort of runaway feedback mechanism we’ve not accounted for. 2/3 of humans dying is also unlikely. Coastline and ecosystem disruption are almost certain though.
The thing about humans are: we are frighteningly clever. We can build spacecraft that can survive the harsh environment in space and people survive there. As long as climate change doesn’t happen “too fast” (values of “too fast” may vary), we will engineer our way around it. On the small scale: air conditioning; and on the larger scale, geo-engineering (after accumulating sufficient political will). We’re so clever that, if we (or our descendants or similar) can probably even save the earth in 250 million years when the sun’s output passes the threshold where it wants to fry us – assuming we survive that long.
That doesn’t detract from her statement. But it is the Mirror, and the headlight is trying to be incendiary.
Dude, shut up, I’m trying to doom scroll over here .
My gf calls me a “radical optimist” for believing in people eventually doing the right thing :)
How can you be so optimistic? With everything that’s going on in the world, I get more pessimistic everyday. At bad days, I’d just think “let just humanity perish because we just keep repeating the same horrible things over and over anyway”.
For me its because if you zoom out, the world is a better place to live in now, than it was 1000 years ago. Progress moves in waves, and right now it definitely feels like a significant low tide, but over time the coastline keeps creeping forward.
Humanity is the only meat eating animal that has significant percentage of its population willingly avoiding eating meat and instead finding ways to obtain essential nutrients without it (need to add that I am NOT one of those animals, I’m personally waiting for lab grown meat before I obstain from death based meat, if I ever do)
Humanity by and large no longer needs to leave its sick and wounded to die because we invented technology and infrastructure to both heal, and take care of those we cant heal
We’ve progressed to the point as a species where in order to bring more prosperity to our community, we no longer have to take from other communities, and that wasnt always the case (unfortunately this is only a recent achievement, and as such, not all of our population has adapted to this, hence our current problems)
“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
Let me introduce you to Facebook.
Allow me to introduce you to: an abstract concept of facebook-
People, separated by thousands of miles, tap messages into their glass topped smart rocks that can then be seen by other people with smart rocks - it does this communicating with big metal trees that talk to magic caves, where millions of smart rocks think about those messages and pass them over to other magic caves by a glass wire, which in turn pass the messages to another metal tree and over to other glass topped smart rocks for people to read.
So much of our modern economy is rooted in assumptions about where and how to mass produce food stocks. Climate change threatens all of that.
Obliterating breadbasket regions in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and Iran would devastate the regional populations.
Then you’ve got the wars in places like Ukraine, Lebanon and Sudan, further strangling access to fresh food stocks.
People joke about the looming “water wars”, but consider how much Israel and the Saudis have invested in desalination and what dehydration is doing to the million plus Gaza residents who have lost access to reliable drinking water.
What happens during a substantial crop failure in the South Pacific? It isn’t as though India and China haven’t experienced massive famines in living memory.
You can argue the finer details, but it is easy to see a scenario in which a billion or more people are wiped out over the course of a generation, because of substantive shifts in access to basic living needs.
This and I keep repeating this: don’t fight the global warming, let’s think how to live with it.