Extinction as a result of global warming

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Extinction as a result of global warming

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Lemurs and giant tortoises among species at risk if global heating hits 3C, The Guardian
"Analysis of 270 biodiversity hotspots suggests almost half of endemic marine species and 84% of endemic mountain species will face extinction if the planet warms by more than 3C."
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Virgo »

We've already reached 1.55 C AGT according to Beckwith since he takes into account that the real preindustrial is 1750.

Virgo
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

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I'm wondering about the extinction of the human race... and how to prepare for the coming apocalypse. (only half joking)

Any thoughts? Or perhaps good books on what to expect and how to prepare?
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by nikolamatanga »

This is something that frightens me immensely.
I wish I understood more. :yinyang:
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Kim O'Hara
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Kim O'Hara »

SilenceMonkey wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 11:45 pm I'm wondering about the extinction of the human race... and how to prepare for the coming apocalypse. (only half joking)

Any thoughts? Or perhaps good books on what to expect and how to prepare?
We already have a long (but still active) thread on the science and politics of global warming. There are lots of links in it to good recent science reporting. :reading: https://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=36334 :reading:

If you're more concerned about spiritual preparation, there's a companion thread which is not so active. :meditate:

The coming apocalypse is a slo-mo event and it's already underway. If you're in NW USA you might have noticed it has been a bit warm recently. That's part of it. If you're in Czech, you would have seen news of a tornado ripping through. That's part of it. If you're in Florida, there was an apartment block collapse. That could be part of it, too, via sea-level rise undermining the foundations. If you're in Australia you will remember a summer of horrific bushfires. That's part of it. And there's more, of course.

Extinction of the human race isn't likely but lots of suffering and millions of deaths are very likely. Rolling famines, climate migrations sparking wars ... lots of not-good stuff.

The slightly less-bad news is that we can still make it all less bad than it otherwise would be.

:jedi:
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

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Kim O'Hara wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 4:07 am .

The slightly less-bad news is that we can still make it all less bad than it otherwise would be.

:jedi:
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IDK, I read the news about Bezos and Branson's competing space tourism ventures, then I read another article about how all the fire crews are quitting because some of them were getting paid 13 bucks an hour. In a world with those kind of priorities, mitigation feels pretty hopeless.
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Kim O'Hara
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Kim O'Hara »

Johnny Dangerous wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 6:30 am
Kim O'Hara wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 4:07 am .

The slightly less-bad news is that we can still make it all less bad than it otherwise would be.

:jedi:
Kim
IDK, I read the news about Bezos and Branson's competing space tourism ventures, then I read another article about how all the fire crews are quitting because some of them were getting paid 13 bucks an hour. In a world with those kind of priorities, mitigation feels pretty hopeless.
I know, but ...
Your house is on fire. You have three choices - (1) throw on a bucket of gasoline (2) throw on a bucket of water or (3) sit and watch it burn, and live with the fact that you did nothing.

:juggling:

And we can make a difference. Look at the push-back on oil pipelines, for instance. Look at the tree-planting programs in Africa. Look at Plastic-free July https://www.plasticfreejuly.org/.
And do something!

:jedi:
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Johnny Dangerous »

Kim O'Hara wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 7:25 am
Johnny Dangerous wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 6:30 am
Kim O'Hara wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 4:07 am .

The slightly less-bad news is that we can still make it all less bad than it otherwise would be.

:jedi:
Kim
IDK, I read the news about Bezos and Branson's competing space tourism ventures, then I read another article about how all the fire crews are quitting because some of them were getting paid 13 bucks an hour. In a world with those kind of priorities, mitigation feels pretty hopeless.
I know, but ...
Your house is on fire. You have three choices - (1) throw on a bucket of gasoline (2) throw on a bucket of water or (3) sit and watch it burn, and live with the fact that you did nothing.

:juggling:

And we can make a difference. Look at the push-back on oil pipelines, for instance. Look at the tree-planting programs in Africa. Look at Plastic-free July https://www.plasticfreejuly.org/.
And do something!

:jedi:
Kim
Yeah, you're right, there is stuff we can do. It just makes me so angry that the richest people in the world (whose companies often skirt their tax obligations that could pay for some of this stuff) are busy with Space Tourism for the wealthy, but somehow we can't pay the friggin' firefighters on the front lines of battling these huge blazes that are at least partially a result of climate change. Green New Deal? Crap, if we can't even pay people to fight the fires that's just a pipe dream.

The backwards priorities really boggle the mind. While you're right that we can do things, we are operating as consumers in a capitalist society, what we can do as individuals is pretty limited until something big changes, or so it seems to me. I'm not sure that expecting individual abstinence from this or that is really going to make a big dent when it's not pared with a serious program of demanding real social change from the people with their hands on the levers. Maybe once some more condos crumble or something we will move past just asking politely.
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Kim O'Hara
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Kim O'Hara »

You've touched on one of the keys to progress - activism. It's mentioned a few times in How to Decarbonize Your Life, a two-page thread here a few months ago - https://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.p ... 7&start=20 - along with other good ideas.

I came across that while looking for a reference to something else, actually. It turns out that the energy cost of merely being an American (or German or Aussie) is so high that we simply can't live sustainable lives without changing the system, and that makes activism essential. I will try to remember where I saw that or wrote it down.

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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Kim O'Hara »

Here it is - https://news.mit.edu/2008/footprint-tt0416
Leaving our mark
MIT class tracks carbon footprint of different lifestyles; finds even the smallest U.S. footprints are relatively large

Whether you live in a cardboard box or a luxurious mansion, whether you subsist on homegrown vegetables or wolf down imported steaks, whether you're a jet-setter or a sedentary retiree, anyone who lives in the U.S. contributes more than twice as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as the global average, an MIT class has estimated.

The class studied the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles--from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms--and compared them to those of other nations. The somewhat disquieting bottom line is that in the United States, even people with the lowest energy usage account for, on average, more than double the global per-capita carbon emission. And those emissions rise steeply from that minimum as people's income increases.

"Regardless of income, there is a certain floor below which the individual carbon footprint of a person in the U.S. will not drop," says Timothy Gutowski, professor of mechanical engineering, who taught the class that calculated the rates of carbon emissions. ...
:reading:
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by SilenceMonkey »

Thanks Kim. I think I might have written that in parallel with the environmental threads back in April... I appreciate your comments and I'll take more of a look at our collective pooling of resources and understanding here on DW.
Virgo wrote: Sat Apr 10, 2021 10:46 pm We've already reached 1.55 C AGT according to Beckwith since he takes into account that the real preindustrial is 1750.

Virgo
I appreciate your advocacy of Paul Beckwith, Virgo. I ended up into him for a month or two and getting really freaked out at our situation... I asked my uncle about him. My uncle is a very respected science journalist who teaches at NYU and publishes in places such as Scientific American, The Economist and The NYT. This was his response:
When it comes to something as complex as the climate, I think it's important not to depend on any one scientist but to figure out what the consensus is. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is probably the best body for figuring out and publishing that consensus; their reports can be a little technical, but they're really good -- the industry standard. And they do make predictions... every few years, they reassess and update everything. I'd start with the synthesis report and then move to the detailed reports here:
https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/

National Academy of Sciences does some good stuff too, although they're more embedded in the American perspective. Niche, technical, but check out the reports at the bottom and see if any might be of interest:
https://www.nationalacademies.org/topics/climate

As for Beckwith himself, I don't really have confidence in his work. I didn't know much about him, but he seems to be getting a few things wrong and definitely seems to be well outside of consensus territory. Not that I want to minimize the problem -- the term "crisis" is the right word! -- but he does seem rather alarmist to me.
So right now, I'm not totally sure about Beckwith... But I'm still quite worried about a climate Armageddon and think that maybe the human race will be gone in 100 or 150 years... And I'd like to look more into how much of a possibility this really is.
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Kim O'Hara »

Hi, SilenceMonkey,
You may be right about where I came across the footprint article. If so, thank you (again?) for it. It's important.

As for your uncle, I agree with his list but would like to add RealClimate as a place where real climate scientists hang out and discuss the most recent stuff. This article is a fairly good example - https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/a ... ssic-2021/.
The regular monthly threads vary in quality but are often good.

As for "I'm still quite worried about a climate Armageddon and think that maybe the human race will be gone in 100 or 150 years," I'm going to suggest (politely, of course) that extinction is actually a non-issue, in just the same way that the hope of interplanetary colonisation "saving the human race" is a non-issue. Why? In short, because "the human race" doesn't exist (individuals exist) and because the extinction/survival events are so far in the future that they don't affect us or anyone we know and - crucially - are a distraction from what we can and should be doing here and now.

:namaste:
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by SilenceMonkey »

Kim O'Hara wrote: Sun Jul 04, 2021 2:16 am
Thank you Kim, for the website and for your reassurance. I hope to find an opening in my life where I can take another dive into trying to understand all of this in the near future.
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

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I'm fairly sure the Earth is right around the right temperature for this now in its cycle. Scientists extracted some real deep down stuff from the arctic and it shows the then temperatures, water levels, etc. Animals live their lives, that's what they do. The ending of birth is death. Karmic seeds planted must be reaped. If their suffering, there purifying there karma. Good for them right!
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Schrödinger’s Yidam »

I'm wondering about the extinction of the human race... and how to prepare for the coming apocalypse. (only half joking)
Get ready to reincarnate on another planet. Hopefully there will be an ecosystem up and running before we get there. It would be a shame to have to start all over as blue-green algae.
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Kim O'Hara »

There's no telling where we might reincarnate, of course, but we won't have to go as far as another planet. Some species will survive, even thrive, on a warmer Earth. We could come back as cockroaches and mosquitoes in the Canadian jungles, for instance.
And some species will hardly be affected. There are whole ecosystems on the ocean floor which are completely independent of surface temperatures - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrother ... ommunities. Just think, you might come back as a two-metre-long tube worm living in perpetual darkness and (this is the weird bit) loving every minute of it.

:coffee:
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by SilenceMonkey »

Schrödinger’s Yidam wrote: Tue Sep 07, 2021 3:01 pm
I'm wondering about the extinction of the human race... and how to prepare for the coming apocalypse. (only half joking)
Get ready to reincarnate on another planet. Hopefully there will be an ecosystem up and running before we get there. It would be a shame to have to start all over as blue-green algae.
How can we get ready for that? :rolling:
Kim O'Hara wrote: Tue Sep 07, 2021 11:51 pm There's no telling where we might reincarnate, of course, but we won't have to go as far as another planet. Some species will survive, even thrive, on a warmer Earth. We could come back as cockroaches and mosquitoes in the Canadian jungles, for instance.
I guess we could create the kind of karma that would get us a human reincarnation. Then we might be reborn in another human world.
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by SilenceMonkey »

Say, has anyone read "The Ministry of Fortune" by Kim Stanley Robinson? Ezra Klein said last November that it was the most important book he's read all year. So important he hasn't written another article on Vox since then.

https://www.vox.com/authors/ezra-klein
In The Ministry for the Future, Robinson imagines a world wracked by climate catastrophe. Some nations begin unilateral geoengineering. Eco-violence arises as people begin to experience unchecked climate change as an act of war against them, and they respond in kind, using new technologies to hunt those they blame. Capitalism ruptures, changes, and is remade. Nations, and the relations between them, transform. Ultimately, humanity is successful, but it is a terrifying success — a success that involves making the kinds of choices that none of us want to even think about making.
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by Kim O'Hara »

I haven't read that one (I will have to look for it, though) but I've read a lot of his SF. It's always lucid and generally positive, which is a nice change from all the doom-and-gloom visions.
If you don't know it, look for his Forty Signs of Rain trilogy -
The first book of the trilogy can stand alone: The President of the USA doesn’t want to know about global warming but an odd coalition of American scientists and Tibetan diplomats is about to do something about that.
The other two books are very good as well but don’t really make sense without their partners.
In Fifty Degrees Below and Sixty Days and Counting we get disastrous climate changes, a presidential election which puts an activist in the White House, and the beginnings of wholesale changes to the way the USA operates; also a bunch of sub-plots which any other author would spin off into a whole new book.

:reading:
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Re: Extinction as a result of global warming

Post by SilenceMonkey »

You're deep in it, Kim!

Thanks for the reccomendations.
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