Yes all life will perish, but the earth itself will continue.
Why would all life perish? From what I’ve heard and read about nuclear disaster exclusion zones, humans disappearing tends to make space for other forms of life that had previously been displaced by cities full of humans and such. To my understanding long time life probably won’t care about anything for the next few million years.
Short term many or most humans might die or suffer. I don’t think it’s easy to predict how fragile humankind is, civilization may crumble. I doubt all of humankind will be gone in a thousand years, though I wouldn’t bet against a semi “post apocalyptic” future.
Basically it’s due to the heat, acidification of the ocean, and the massive drop in oxygen production as the ocean acidifies.
Most of the oxygen we breathe is produced by microorganisms in the ocean and as the ocean gets more acidic (from absorbing CO2 from the air) and hotter (from greenhouse effects) it makes it harder for those little fellas to survive. And when they die their impact on our breathable air goes away. And if course the stuff that’s eats those organisms no longer have food and due off.
That’s not even mentioning just the heating from greenhouse effects making unlivable temperature conditions (humidity + heat = unable to cool down and overheat) more likely to occur.
All life wouldn’t perish per se but the current complex animals we have (and us humans) would be greatly impacted to say the least.
Do I understand this right that the really big argument here is actually ocean acidification? I can’t really believe that this wouldn’t open up niches for other life forms in oceans. I’m certain that complex animals will be greatly impacted - they already are - but temperature shifts will lead to animals migrating and complex life will keep flourishing one way or another.
I feel as though the assumption that humans had the ability to kill all complex life like some people suggest is exaggerating the significance of humans. To my understanding humans have about the same impact as many other of the more impactful species do and while many have lead to big changes on the planet, to my knowledge none have managed to come close to “ending all life”. That’s reserved for grander desasters, either from inside Earth or extraterrestrial.
I didn’t say it’d kill all complex life, I said complex life would be greatly impacted.
For example ocean acidification is tempered by reacting with build ups of calcium which is the building blocks of many things in the ocean. Shelled critters and corals immediately come to mind as examples of directly impacted complex life.
As the corals die and can no longer form due to acidification that whole ecosystem collapses.
The stuff that eats the phytoplankton (sensitive to ocean acidification and heat) no longer can eat it due to it dying along with the other little micro organisms, also suffers from ecological collapse.
A big issue that impacts complex life is how quickly it can adapt to the changes in their ecosystem and if they can find new places to go or new things to eat.
For example E. Coli: it has quick generations so it can adapt really quickly. This experiment has been going since the late 80s and the E. Coli has gone through over 70,000 generations and they’ve seen a lot of changes. If you went back that many human generations it would take you back before modern homo sapiens.
I didn’t say it’d kill all complex life, I said complex life would be greatly impacted.
True! I tried to acknowledge that with my first paragraph and add that they already are greatly impacted. My second paragraph wasn’t aimed at your person, I merely wanted to bring it up/let it out.
I feel as though the assumption that humans had the ability to kill all complex life like some people suggest is exaggerating the significance of humans
It absolutely is. There are microbes that thrive at the bottom of the ocean in the boiling acidic conditions of hydrothermal vents. There is absolutely no way anything humans can do at this point would kill ALL life on the planet. There will absolutely be some specialist microbe somewhere that looks at whatever we did to the planet and says ‘yup, now is my time to shine!’.
Just a heads up, you quoted me writing “kill all complex life (…) is exaggerating”. Then as far as I understand you wrote “it absolutely is [an exaggeration]”. Then you argued that surely microbes would survive. However, to my knowledge microbes do not count as complex life. Was that intentional?
I wasn’t trying to prove what would survive, merely show how resilient life can be. If a simple microbe is guaranteed to survive in hell, something more complex able to behaviourally adapt/relocate is likely to as well. The greatest danger to complex life is having nothing to feed on.
Tropical fish might have to survive in the Arctic Ocean, or grasses in the northern prairies, insects of a zillion different types and sizes. Life, uh, finds a way.
We won’t kill everything. No matter what we do. Life will continue and more of it than anyone thinks will, even of the plants and animals. It is humans and most of the large animals and intolerant plants that need fear the impending Climate catastrophe.
There’s a chance that the aluminum residue from hundreds of annual rocket launches will destroy the ozone layer, without which the earth will lose its atmosphere relatively quickly.
*the aluminum is from all of our satellites burning up on reentry, which makes way more sense.
The aluminum and other metals in the space crafts bond with the ozone, which could fuck with our magnetosphere. It turns out it’s mostly from satellites burning up on reentry, which makes way more sense though.
If the ozone layer fills with metallic alloys, it fucks with the magnetosphere, potentially to the point that the magnetosphere no longer protects us from solar winds, and that would lose us the atmosphere.
It also might not be that serious, but there’s no way to know until there’s a problem. Companies are rapidly increasing the number of artificial satellites in our orbit without any consideration to the potential consequences though.
Is this similar to the ozone depletion and ozone holes that were always a big deal in the early 2000s and had lead to bans of chlorofluorocarbons eg in refrigerants and other products, or is this an entirely different topic?
To me it sounds similar so I wonder why the danger of Earth losing its atmosphere “very quickly” hadn’t caused panic back then, it was only things like “stay inside so you don’t get sunburns”. Though the atmosphere disappearing would be a way bigger deal.
Because the threat is not a nuclear winter. It’s the disruption of all environmental systems that regulate the planet that is the threat in question. Which, in turn, disrupts the food chain, which starves whatever requires that food, which is for all intents and purposes, all life.
I don’t understand how this is such a conversation with so many people here.
Well disruptions of a system eventually lead to new, different forms of stability where things will settle down. I can’t imagine life is as fragile as you make it.
Having the ability to kill all complex life sounds like a misconception humans made up. After all, humankind always liked feeling important, feeling special and putting itself in the center: pretending they life at the center of a disc, pretending the whole universe revolves around the planet, pretending only human bodies were inhabited by an eternal soul, pretending an all-powerful being cared about them, pretending they’re the peak of evolution, pretending machines could never outperform them.
Humans always try to find new things that make them unique and set them apart from other forms of life. Yet they keep getting disproven.
The reason I use the term “human” is because this phenomenon seems to exist throughout all of history, it wasn’t limited to one specific person or culture or era. This is also why I gave so many examples. If you think there’s a better way to convey the point without using this term, let me know.
All life wouldn’t perish, the only things that will be left will be certain bacteria, phagocytes and viruses that can tolerate and indeed will likely proliferate in extreme environments. Everything larger then that will die of starvation due to a cascade of failing systems, likely starting with the death of the marine biosphere when the temperature rises to unsustainable levels and/or the pH lowers too much for the same effect. Though of course no one really knows what will actually happen because there are too many unknown variables.
There is absolutely, unequivocally, no evidence that this will happen and no serious scientific prediction that this will happen from climate change has ever been made.
The science illiteracy here is getting almost as bad as the right wingers.
“Given the solar constant that we have today, how large a forcing must be maintained to cause runaway global warming? Our model blows up before the oceans boil, but it suggests that perhaps runaway conditions could occur with added forcing as small as 10-20 W/m2 (Watts per square meter – a 60 watt light bulb provides 3 to 6 times more forcing per unit of area than is required to turn the Earth into a Venus)”
“There may have been times in the Earth’s history when CO2 was as high as 4000 ppm without causing a runaway greenhouse effect {the Mesozoic period – time of the dinosaurs}. But the solar irradiance was less at that time. What is different about the human-made forcing is the rapidity at which we are increasing it, on the time scale of a century or a few centuries. It does not provide enough time for negative feedbacks, such as changes in the weathering rate, to be a major factor. There is also a danger that humans could cause the release of methane hydrates, perhaps more rapidly than in some of the cases in the geologic record. In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale (a.k.a. oil shale), I think it is a dead certainty.”
You’ll note that it is not written from a catastrophizing perspective, yet it confirms the possibility of runaway warming with the release of just the CO2 in known FF deposits as expressed by Hansen. Hansen isn’t much of a catastrophizer, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to present external validation of his work.
This is all a little overkill, though! No runaway feedback loops are needed.
All that is needed for the situation described by the earlier comment is for plant carbon fixation pathways to fail, which occurs with just a few degrees of warming.
If runaway feedback loops are within reach, then just a few degrees is obviously within closer reach. Projected warming from existing emissions using an updated ECS of 4.8C is 10C, reduced (temporarily) to 8C by aerosol masking (https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889). Warming will average around double over landmasses (warming numbers are globally averaged and land temps are much more volatile than ocean temps). Photosynthesis efficiency for plants is already past the peak in the summer months in most places with current warming, as demonstrated by this paper (from 2007 so the climate assumptions are very out of date): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-3040.2007.01682.x
That 8-10C warming is already “in the pipeline” and as you can verify here, FF consumption is still trending upward despite increased renewable infrastructure: https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
As for burning that much FF being impossible, at current rates we are estimated to burn through known FF deposits in 30-50 years. Whether or not it happens, burning that much is certainly possible to do.
But we do know because thousands of hardworking scientists have devoted their lives to answering this question.
If you want to have fun speculating wildly then be clear that this is what you’re doing and don’t frame it as things that “will” happen.
Sorry this is a pet peeve of mine because I think it feeds into a paralyzing pessimism. People need to understand that we aren’t doomed to feel like they can work for a better future.
Why would all life perish? From what I’ve heard and read about nuclear disaster exclusion zones, humans disappearing tends to make space for other forms of life that had previously been displaced by cities full of humans and such. To my understanding long time life probably won’t care about anything for the next few million years.
Short term many or most humans might die or suffer. I don’t think it’s easy to predict how fragile humankind is, civilization may crumble. I doubt all of humankind will be gone in a thousand years, though I wouldn’t bet against a semi “post apocalyptic” future.
Basically it’s due to the heat, acidification of the ocean, and the massive drop in oxygen production as the ocean acidifies.
Most of the oxygen we breathe is produced by microorganisms in the ocean and as the ocean gets more acidic (from absorbing CO2 from the air) and hotter (from greenhouse effects) it makes it harder for those little fellas to survive. And when they die their impact on our breathable air goes away. And if course the stuff that’s eats those organisms no longer have food and due off.
That’s not even mentioning just the heating from greenhouse effects making unlivable temperature conditions (humidity + heat = unable to cool down and overheat) more likely to occur.
All life wouldn’t perish per se but the current complex animals we have (and us humans) would be greatly impacted to say the least.
Do I understand this right that the really big argument here is actually ocean acidification? I can’t really believe that this wouldn’t open up niches for other life forms in oceans. I’m certain that complex animals will be greatly impacted - they already are - but temperature shifts will lead to animals migrating and complex life will keep flourishing one way or another.
I feel as though the assumption that humans had the ability to kill all complex life like some people suggest is exaggerating the significance of humans. To my understanding humans have about the same impact as many other of the more impactful species do and while many have lead to big changes on the planet, to my knowledge none have managed to come close to “ending all life”. That’s reserved for grander desasters, either from inside Earth or extraterrestrial.
I didn’t say it’d kill all complex life, I said complex life would be greatly impacted.
For example ocean acidification is tempered by reacting with build ups of calcium which is the building blocks of many things in the ocean. Shelled critters and corals immediately come to mind as examples of directly impacted complex life.
As the corals die and can no longer form due to acidification that whole ecosystem collapses.
The stuff that eats the phytoplankton (sensitive to ocean acidification and heat) no longer can eat it due to it dying along with the other little micro organisms, also suffers from ecological collapse.
A big issue that impacts complex life is how quickly it can adapt to the changes in their ecosystem and if they can find new places to go or new things to eat.
For example E. Coli: it has quick generations so it can adapt really quickly. This experiment has been going since the late 80s and the E. Coli has gone through over 70,000 generations and they’ve seen a lot of changes. If you went back that many human generations it would take you back before modern homo sapiens.
True! I tried to acknowledge that with my first paragraph and add that they already are greatly impacted. My second paragraph wasn’t aimed at your person, I merely wanted to bring it up/let it out.
It absolutely is. There are microbes that thrive at the bottom of the ocean in the boiling acidic conditions of hydrothermal vents. There is absolutely no way anything humans can do at this point would kill ALL life on the planet. There will absolutely be some specialist microbe somewhere that looks at whatever we did to the planet and says ‘yup, now is my time to shine!’.
Just a heads up, you quoted me writing “kill all complex life (…) is exaggerating”. Then as far as I understand you wrote “it absolutely is [an exaggeration]”. Then you argued that surely microbes would survive. However, to my knowledge microbes do not count as complex life. Was that intentional?
I wasn’t trying to prove what would survive, merely show how resilient life can be. If a simple microbe is guaranteed to survive in hell, something more complex able to behaviourally adapt/relocate is likely to as well. The greatest danger to complex life is having nothing to feed on.
Tropical fish might have to survive in the Arctic Ocean, or grasses in the northern prairies, insects of a zillion different types and sizes. Life, uh, finds a way.
We won’t kill everything. No matter what we do. Life will continue and more of it than anyone thinks will, even of the plants and animals. It is humans and most of the large animals and intolerant plants that need fear the impending Climate catastrophe.
There’s a chance that the aluminum residue from hundreds of annual rocket launches will destroy the ozone layer, without which the earth will lose its atmosphere relatively quickly.
*the aluminum is from all of our satellites burning up on reentry, which makes way more sense.
What?
The aluminum and other metals in the space crafts bond with the ozone, which could fuck with our magnetosphere. It turns out it’s mostly from satellites burning up on reentry, which makes way more sense though.
And a messed up ozone layer means the atmosphere will… disappear?
If the ozone layer fills with metallic alloys, it fucks with the magnetosphere, potentially to the point that the magnetosphere no longer protects us from solar winds, and that would lose us the atmosphere.
It also might not be that serious, but there’s no way to know until there’s a problem. Companies are rapidly increasing the number of artificial satellites in our orbit without any consideration to the potential consequences though.
Is this similar to the ozone depletion and ozone holes that were always a big deal in the early 2000s and had lead to bans of chlorofluorocarbons eg in refrigerants and other products, or is this an entirely different topic?
To me it sounds similar so I wonder why the danger of Earth losing its atmosphere “very quickly” hadn’t caused panic back then, it was only things like “stay inside so you don’t get sunburns”. Though the atmosphere disappearing would be a way bigger deal.
Nah it could leak out into space.
Because the threat is not a nuclear winter. It’s the disruption of all environmental systems that regulate the planet that is the threat in question. Which, in turn, disrupts the food chain, which starves whatever requires that food, which is for all intents and purposes, all life.
I don’t understand how this is such a conversation with so many people here.
Well disruptions of a system eventually lead to new, different forms of stability where things will settle down. I can’t imagine life is as fragile as you make it.
Having the ability to kill all complex life sounds like a misconception humans made up. After all, humankind always liked feeling important, feeling special and putting itself in the center: pretending they life at the center of a disc, pretending the whole universe revolves around the planet, pretending only human bodies were inhabited by an eternal soul, pretending an all-powerful being cared about them, pretending they’re the peak of evolution, pretending machines could never outperform them.
Humans always try to find new things that make them unique and set them apart from other forms of life. Yet they keep getting disproven.
And what are you, a Klingon?
Qo’
The reason I use the term “human” is because this phenomenon seems to exist throughout all of history, it wasn’t limited to one specific person or culture or era. This is also why I gave so many examples. If you think there’s a better way to convey the point without using this term, let me know.
Ach.
All life wouldn’t perish, the only things that will be left will be certain bacteria, phagocytes and viruses that can tolerate and indeed will likely proliferate in extreme environments. Everything larger then that will die of starvation due to a cascade of failing systems, likely starting with the death of the marine biosphere when the temperature rises to unsustainable levels and/or the pH lowers too much for the same effect. Though of course no one really knows what will actually happen because there are too many unknown variables.
There is absolutely, unequivocally, no evidence that this will happen and no serious scientific prediction that this will happen from climate change has ever been made.
The science illiteracy here is getting almost as bad as the right wingers.
Dr. Hansen from 2008:
I may have stated it slightly too strongly but this is wild speculation on Hansen’s part. Show me a published prediction.
Even if what he said was accurate, burning that much fossil energy is almost certainly impossible.
It was not just speculation, here is the 2012 update to the 2008 paper that those quotes discussed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785813/
Here is a relatively comprehensive look at runaway greenhouse modeling, although it is a bit outdated (2012 - cloud modeling is slightly better now): https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/Goldblatt_and_Watson_2012.pdf
You’ll note that it is not written from a catastrophizing perspective, yet it confirms the possibility of runaway warming with the release of just the CO2 in known FF deposits as expressed by Hansen. Hansen isn’t much of a catastrophizer, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to present external validation of his work.
This is all a little overkill, though! No runaway feedback loops are needed.
All that is needed for the situation described by the earlier comment is for plant carbon fixation pathways to fail, which occurs with just a few degrees of warming.
If runaway feedback loops are within reach, then just a few degrees is obviously within closer reach. Projected warming from existing emissions using an updated ECS of 4.8C is 10C, reduced (temporarily) to 8C by aerosol masking (https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889). Warming will average around double over landmasses (warming numbers are globally averaged and land temps are much more volatile than ocean temps). Photosynthesis efficiency for plants is already past the peak in the summer months in most places with current warming, as demonstrated by this paper (from 2007 so the climate assumptions are very out of date): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-3040.2007.01682.x
That 8-10C warming is already “in the pipeline” and as you can verify here, FF consumption is still trending upward despite increased renewable infrastructure: https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
As for burning that much FF being impossible, at current rates we are estimated to burn through known FF deposits in 30-50 years. Whether or not it happens, burning that much is certainly possible to do.
It was fun thinking of it. Chill out.
But we do know because thousands of hardworking scientists have devoted their lives to answering this question.
If you want to have fun speculating wildly then be clear that this is what you’re doing and don’t frame it as things that “will” happen.
Sorry this is a pet peeve of mine because I think it feeds into a paralyzing pessimism. People need to understand that we aren’t doomed to feel like they can work for a better future.