Uninhabitable…for humans!
We only know of one rock in all existence that’s habitable to humans or literally anything else. Relative to humans, yeah life finds a way cuz it’s a lot more resilient than us; relative to the kinds of extremes the universe of capable of producing, life is SUPER fragile.
So… yes, humans are fucked, but so are a lot of other critters, and who knows where all the feedback loops we’ve unleashed will end after we’re gone. Shit isn’t going to just magically get better once we’re gone.
Hopefully it’ll stabilize, but there comes a point that even the most hardy of extremophiles can’t survive, and if we cross that line, Earth becomes indistinguishable from every other lifeless rock in space.
if we cross that line, Earth becomes indistinguishable from every other lifeless rock in space.
But no other lifeless rock in space has abandoned shopping malls…
Life in general will be fine. We’ve had many mass extinctions that kill off 95% of all life, but life…life finds a way.
Of course, humans won’t be in the 95%, and a lot of animals are going to needlessly die, so womp womp…
I mean, hopefully. There are people that have driven drunk many times and been fine, but it only takes one incident to bring that trend to an immediate halt.
We have no way to tell if conditions will stabilize within the surviveability window of any specific critter. Nor can we claim all life will for sure be fucked - point is we don’t know.
There’s no reason to expect it to get that bad - humans will stop contributing to global warming long before extremophiles would be threatened.
I’m sure we’ll still have world teeming with life to remember us - jellyfish, fungi, and cockroaches
I don’t expect it will get that bad; it’s just within the realm of possibility. We can’t predict shit with any certainty.
with urgent, decisive action, we still can avoid unmanageable outcomes
But not just any urgent, decisive action, it must be the right action. The wrong action could be insufficient at best, and actively harmful at worst.
To meet the Paris climate agreement, we must reduce global GHG emissions by 45% to 50%, from current levels, by 2030. To achieve that, we must begin decommissioning all existing fossil fuel powered machinery, from power plants, to manufacturing, transportation, and agricultural equipment, and replace them with net zero emission alternatives, as quickly as possible. I don’t think anyone really knows how best to do that, at least not on a global scale. It’s not something we’ve ever done before.
I rewatched The Day After Tomorrow, and while none of that is happening (and likely can’t happen), I kinda wish it did. But it won’t, and the lack of drastic impacts will continue to create more slow burning action from disaffected parties.
The Atlantic current is going to collapse soon though. Which will drop temperatures in Northern Europe. Everything from about Germany up on that coastline is going to to get colder.
So while it certainly isn’t going to be like the movie, it is going to create a colder area.
The living Earth will be fine, and has recovered from worse than us, even other runaway mutations from within that wreaked havoc, see the carboniferous period and the trees that couldn’t yet effectively decompose and release their carbon, doing the opposite of us, creating an ice age.
The Earth recovers, It just won’t recover on a timescale we can perceive.
There’s life that’s evolved to survive in acid pools, at depths we can’t touch, in crevices we can’t reach. We arrogantly fashion ourselves Gods of this world, but we couldn’t sterilize it if we wanted to.
We will be gone, sooner rather than later because of our actions, but the 3.8 billion year old living Earth will be fine with a negligible few million years of cleanup, and to paraphrase George Carlin, it will be like we never even existed at all, thank goodness for that.
That.is disconcerting
Its more inhabitable now than any other time in history…
October 30th, yesterday, was 70° where I live. In practically Canada. Concerningly warm for this time of year.
F I hope? C is extremely hot, K is extremely cold.
K
