2001

Somebody’s working on an interesting alternative: the bladeless wind generator. At least it should remove the problematic shadows…

2002

Well, at least the climate will change. That’s something!

2003

Yay!

/sarcasm

2004

Earth ‘entering new extinction phase’ - US study:

The Earth has entered a new period of extinction, a study by three US universities has concluded, and humans could be among the first casualties.

The report, led by the universities of Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley, said vertebrates were disappearing at a rate 114 times faster than normal.

The findings echo those in a report published by Duke University last year.

One of the new study’s authors said: “We are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event.”

The last such event was 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs were wiped out, in all likelihood by a large meteor hitting Earth.

“If it is allowed to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover and our species itself would likely disappear early on,” said the lead author, Gerardo Ceballos.

Thanks Capitalism! :(

2005

I am not an expert as to challenge that study, and I agree with the overall sentiment that climate change is one of the most important issues to tackle right now.

But the idea that, given a catastrophic climate change (something that is sadly on the cards), that humans will be among the first species to go extinct is disingenuous. We no longer belong just to the animal realm, and, as well as out impact in the environment does not mimic any other animal species, nor does our dependence on it. This doesn’t mean that the most likely coming change won’t lead to great suffering and an unthinkable tragedy for many, and that it’s not something we shouldn’t be trying to tackle with all our strenght, but as well as we had the ability to fuck things up, we also have the ability to survive for longer, and maybe even the ability to revert things. I find these kind of defeatist and simplistic extrapolations useless in the long term. It’s good to shout the warnings, but the more realistic they are they more effective they will be.

2006

Yeah i’m not a fan of defeatism (in anything really). I think maybe that study is looking at our reliance on the natural worlds resources as being key, and also as you mention, we are no longer part of the pure animal kingdom, which may impart some risks as we have (many of us in the first world atleast) moved away from our ancient survival skills? Once the big agriculture crash happens (already under strain due to the early climate change issues), that really sets things downhill fast, unless you are super adaptable. know how to find/grow/make/take food etc. That was the way i was reading their concerns for human survival etc.

On the other side is our super brains and out ability to adapt pretty quick and create solutions to problems. It may become a giant global game of rock-paper-scissors, about all our survival? It sort of feels like that already in many ways (with us allowing our companies to make the wrong call most of the time).

2007

Oh, I don’t doubt if this continues we are due for a lot of suffering and struggling. And for many deaths and tradegies. But human extinction, as of now, seems a little bit of an extreme (not that the alternative is not serious enough to fucking do something about it already, mind you).

2008

Yeah, given that we can live in freaking space, I’m pretty certain that humanity as a species will survive virtually any climate change.

2009

Sure, as a species. Throw a few famines around and the number of us around could go down a pretty significant amount.

2010

Yes, that’s a significant and real horrible threat that should be focused on, however that’s not what the article was saying.

2011

Some strain. Many crops at record highs. And expect crop yields to continue to increase with improving ag techniques.

Read Us dept Ag on crop yields.

2012

I do, we are just at the start of the crop issues related to AGW, and the USA (i know this may be a surprise!) is not the WHOLE WORLD! Really it is not. We are sort of fighting a rear-guard action where modern industrial agriculture is increasing yields, in countries that have the infrastructure to support that, but globally many farmers are having lots of different problems (wheat crash in Russia, North European issues around bad weather for growing seasons, El-nino (iirc) effects on crops in the pacific and southern hemisphere regions etc). We’ve covered most of those in this thread at some point (news articles, scientific studies etc).

A good test for this is has your food bill been going up or down over recent years?

And a kind of ‘fun’ silly thing, but food for thought maybe?

How much fossil fuel has been used in your lifetime?:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/apr/10/how-much-fossil-fuel-are-we-using-right-now

It is one of those growing common annoying pages you need to ‘allow’ things in your browser (if you use stuff like No-scripts etc) for it to function properly, but if it is working ok you should see running totals stacking up on Barrel’s of Oil, Tonnes of Coal and Cubic Meters of Gas extracted etc.

2013

Zak: usda looks at global food stocks. Global stocks of wheat are at highest level this decade.

Global rice is projected to reach new record.

I read that Paul Ehrlich is one of the mass extinction guys. Same guy who productrd mass starvation and deaths in the 1980’s. He peddles doomsday( and sells books!) and can’t be taken seriously.

So in short we have record food production and people should know better than to cite Ehrlich. His projected that half the people in the world would die from hunger

And he also said that the UK would fall into dark ages with a few roving bands of food seekers. By 2000. Don’t think that has happened, but any UK folks can tell me if there is some cannibalism going on there and mass starvation for last 15 years.

Global warming and climate change is a problem. But these predictions are dumb and hurt the activist cause.

2014

I think that part of the reason that we are having such a hard time addressing climate change is that we are over valuing our ability to exist apart from nature and under valuing the power of nature as a hostile force.

To Timex’s point, yes, we can live in space for extended periods of time but, bear in mind that most of our capabilities with regard to extreme survival are technology dependent and the types of change that might push us towards extinction would first cripple our economies and civilizations, plunging us back into a new dark age. As a collective, we are capable of sending a man into space but it’s fucking expensive and you’d be hard pressed to do it on your own.

I’m not saying that humans will definitely go extinct as a result of climate change but I’m saying there’s a much greater chance of that happening than people realize. What we are capable of achieving as a species at our best is far removed from what we might be capable of achieving when world economies and governments have collapsed. If we are stumbling along in such a regressed state when the oceans die and the atmosphere of our planet radically changes to something considerably less human friendly, that’s game over.

2015

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert is an excellent read. It shows interesting research and perspectives on extinction events in the past, and the current one occuring right now. The sheer loss of biodiversity in the past century is absolutely astounding. Climate change, human movement introducing alien species, ecosystem fragmentation, the book discusses all vectors of the causes of the current extinction event happening right now.

It is hard to grasp what is occurring right now, but the book does a pretty good job of showing the scale of these things. The Permian-Triassic extinction known as “The Great Dying” occurred 250 million years ago and was probably the most catastrophically close to life completely dying out on the planet 96% of all marine life disappeared, 70% of vertebrates, etc. But this all occurred for each species/family seperately. It didn’t happen in 10 years, or 100 years or 1000 years, we are talking estimates of 10,000 to 10 million years for the extinction to take place. This extinction event could have begun even before humans started increasing greenhouse gas emissions. But what we do know, and the evidence from the great dying shows this, is that rising ocean temperatures (14F) and an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere can cause an extinction event. We know that this has caused catastrophe in the earth’s past, so we can’t look away at how we are essentially feeding the fire right now.

2016

Yeah if we manage to break the oceans, that’ll be it for us and pretty much all higher level organisms. All it really takes is the death of something like krill and things will go sideways pretty quick.

2017

There is no need for the “probably” qualifier, heh.

But what we do know, and the evidence from the great dying shows this, is that rising ocean temperatures (14F) and an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere can cause an extinction event. We know that this has caused catastrophe in the earth’s past

This is wrong and disingenuous in the extreme. We definitely do NOT know what caused the Triassic Permian extinction event and the various theories (asteroid impacts, natural climate change, volcanism, shifting earth plates, methane and other greenhouse gases altering the atmosphere (a recent theory that’s obviously politically charged), oxygen depletion in the seas, proliferation of smothering hydrogen sulfide, superkiller microbes, etc. – it is a huge mystery.

But what we DO KNOW is that the Earth was a radically different place that doesn’t resemble ours in the slightest - there was just the supercontinent Pangea, (which itself was likely to blame for the exacerbating the extinction event), which had climate that was far more extreme than anything that’s existed in the hundreds of millions of years since - the entire world was covered in glaciers in an ice age, and then heated and dried up to such an extreme that it was ultimately dominated by deserts. Pretending anything about our world being analogous to the situation in the Permian is just intellectually bankrupt fappery.

The fact that so much life managed to live within the Permian Period (for 40m years) is actually the best evidence of life on Earth’s ability to adapt and endure and persevere, which makes the talk of life being wiped out by the change of a couple of degrees particularly ludicrous and unhelpful. Of course, if the species we need to survive die, it won’t matter to us that the Earth will happily carry on, but it does give some solace. Maybe we’ll get some giant preying mantises.

2018

What we DO know, is the main cause of the mass ocean death. The increase in atmospheric CO2 (global warming) causes a rise in sea levels, and increases the acidity of the oceans, 2 key factors (in the overall gangbang) that was the Permian extinction. This increase in acidity was devastating, particularly in the 96% fatality rate of sea creatures, a great majority of which were calcium fixing shellfishlike creatures. With the higher acidity, these animals couldn’t form shells and died out over several millenia.

I think that the key take-away here is how long and drawn out an extinction event is, typically. I doubt any echinoderm knew what was happening during its short life, but I think we can draw better conclusions than an ocean proto-starfish, and maybe theorize that we are seeing some similar things that happened in past extinction events. The fact remains that ocean acidification was a key part in what killed off the ocean creatures back then, and we are seeing the ocean becoming more and more acidic. These are all theories, yes, but we can only theorize to the events that happened then, and the best fossil evidence greatly suggests the change in Ocean pH being a major factor.

The Permian extinction was a hollywood blockbuster of changing ocean pH, rising sea levels and temperatures, massive volcanic activities, possibly a meteroic event (still a very early theory), and huge releases of trapped methane under the ocean. It was basically all of your doomsday scenarios happening over a short few million years. While this was catastrophic for many land vertebrates and large bugs, the therapsids (proto-mammals) weathered the climate change much better.
God I wish we could still have giant bugs.

One interesting thing is that right before most extinction events there is a tremendous boom in biodiversity, and if this “sixth extinction” is happening right now, I don’t think we had the Permian “burst” that happened before it. This is probably due to the earth, over millions of years, recovering exponentially from the previous mass extinction with massive amounts of biodiversity. If you look at the extinction timeline, we have basically flattened off as a planet as of now, I don’t know what that is the case.

I think it would be foolish and naive to not draw at least some parallels to what extremely quick climate change is occurring now to catastrophic past events, but obviously things are not equivalent today to what they were back then. And while I personally think we are on the slippery slope of a mass extinction event, we can all know that it will probably take at least tens of thousands of years to happen, and if we aren’t in space by then, by golly, we deserve to die.

2019

Completely false. We do not. And the dominant theory is Oxygen deprivation, which is contrary to the more fringe CO2 theories, all of which have major problems, primarily of scale. Even the most credible theories relating to the involvement of greenhouse gases contemplate the other causes also occurring (and significant involvement of methane in addition to CO2 as a greenhouse gas).

But even if acidification didn’t cause the Permian Extinction event, there is no doubt the acidification of the oceans would be catastrophic, but even the evidence that it is happening, or that CO2 doesn’t decrease (rather than increase) acidification is somewhat controversial and political, like so many other aspects of climate change.

But it’s certainly extremely foolish and naive to manufacture fantasies to draw parallels to the world’s most extreme ecological transition when the actual problems we know about are serious enough, and distracting people with fantasies that ultimately diminish credibility of climate alarmists doesn’t facilitate intelligent responses to real problems. Everything doesn’t have to be WORSE EVER to mandate responding, and while climate alarmist seem to think that extrapolating or exaggerating gets more attention, it doesn’t get the right sort of attention, and ultimately is counterproductive.

2020

Controversial like the Earth being billions of years old?