Re: climate change "existential" threat to humanity
Posted: Sun 10 Jun 2018, 13:26:29
I've been reconnecting with Guy McPherson videos lately as a soothing anecdote to this amorphous feeling of doom.
I could not understand how he believes that humanity "will" be wiped out by as soon as 2025. He has a level of certainty that I don't hear elsewhere, so I wonder about that.
I understand his line of reasoning a bit better now. He says Arctic sea ice extent disappears by 2019 or so and the rest just follows. Well, that is a disappearance just during the end-of-summer period in the northern hemisphere, so I don't know how catatrophic by itself that is and, so, maybe he's mistaken.
His model appears to be:
1. Arctic sea ice extent goes to zero.
2. The climate is changed drastically enough to induce worldwide starvation.
3. Industrial civilization is thereby disrupted enough to reduce particulate emissions.
4. Now the temperature quickly rises another 2-3 degree C (guessing).
5. Game over as the additional C warming totally prevents our farming regiment being reestablished.
6a. Nuclear reactors start failing due to lack of maintenance, armed conflict, etc.
6b. The methane burb maybe comes into play now hammering the nails into the coffin of humanity amd not just of civilization.
7. Acidification, chemical changes to the oceans finishes off remaining percentages of life on earth.
Between numbers 4 and 5, most of us Western 5 percent'ers die for certain and take with us civilization. It would be nice and 'just', may I add, if it just stops here, but it won't. At this point humanity is certainly doomed and maybe quickly at that given 6a and 6b. Nobody left to remember us or our legacy. Oh well, just another advanced civilization wiped out before someone's SETI can find it
I could not understand how he believes that humanity "will" be wiped out by as soon as 2025. He has a level of certainty that I don't hear elsewhere, so I wonder about that.
I understand his line of reasoning a bit better now. He says Arctic sea ice extent disappears by 2019 or so and the rest just follows. Well, that is a disappearance just during the end-of-summer period in the northern hemisphere, so I don't know how catatrophic by itself that is and, so, maybe he's mistaken.
His model appears to be:
1. Arctic sea ice extent goes to zero.
2. The climate is changed drastically enough to induce worldwide starvation.
3. Industrial civilization is thereby disrupted enough to reduce particulate emissions.
4. Now the temperature quickly rises another 2-3 degree C (guessing).
5. Game over as the additional C warming totally prevents our farming regiment being reestablished.
6a. Nuclear reactors start failing due to lack of maintenance, armed conflict, etc.
6b. The methane burb maybe comes into play now hammering the nails into the coffin of humanity amd not just of civilization.
7. Acidification, chemical changes to the oceans finishes off remaining percentages of life on earth.
Between numbers 4 and 5, most of us Western 5 percent'ers die for certain and take with us civilization. It would be nice and 'just', may I add, if it just stops here, but it won't. At this point humanity is certainly doomed and maybe quickly at that given 6a and 6b. Nobody left to remember us or our legacy. Oh well, just another advanced civilization wiped out before someone's SETI can find it