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This is the first time I've heard about this issue. If this is as severe and terrifying as these comments are making it seem, why has this not been covered more?
What do you think climate scientists have been screaming about for the past several decades?
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Our grandchildren are in for tough times. Unless a political miracle occurs. Even then, it might be too late.
More likely our models will turn out to be slightly wrong and it won't be as apocalyptic as we thought and we'll adjust according to our observed reality.
Not once has there been an "oh, it wasn't as bad as we thought" moment. It's always worse.
It's going to be bad. A little panic is not a bad thing. If we panic for nothing that's better than brushing it off and having the worst possible outcome unfold because of inaction.
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It's not a particularly good candidate I would think. For example we know what's happening and could theoretically have stopped it but didn't/don't have the will. The Fermi paradox requires it to be extremely unlikely to survive, but you could imagine scenarios on other worlds where the right kind of political situation was around to stop it.
> but you could imagine scenarios on other worlds where the right kind of political situation was around to stop it. I can't imagine that. The only evidence I have to date (from a sample size of 1 planet) is that there is next to zero real political will, even if the politicians of the world create additional heat saying they have in fact found the political will.
And we ourselves are not that far from being able to deal reasonably with problems like this. If nothing else were different about us, except that average IQ were, say, 120 on the current scale, I think we'd be able to respond sensibly to non-immediate threats.
Scientists have been warning about this for decades. And we've done nothing. Not even to slow down!
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...
Indeed.
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Our grandchildren are in for tough times. Unless a political miracle occurs. Even then, it might be too late.
> ...a political miracle occurs. You mean the Republicans get voted out of office completely and the other party isn't completely incompetent? On that day.
The Dems are already cleaning up their act, and if the system works, and Trump is impeached for treason, the GOP will need to clean house too.
We might just end up with an actual, honest to goodness, functioning democracy in the U.S. as politicians seek to regain trust.
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More likely our models will turn out to be slightly wrong and it won't be as apocalyptic as we thought and we'll adjust according to our observed reality.
Every single time the models have turned out to be wrong it's always been that they've been overly optimistic. Not once has there been an "oh, it wasn't as bad as we thought" moment. It's always worse. It's going to be bad. A little panic is not a bad thing. If we panic for nothing that's better than brushing it off and having the worst possible outcome unfold because of inaction.
It's always lose/lose for the skeptics:
Scenario A: skeptics were wrong - "burn them at the stake, they screwed us all over!"
Scenario B: skeptics were right - "well, they got lucky. It wasn't as apocalyptic as experts were claiming. They were still wrong to have rejected the evidence at hand and I was still right to have believed the evidence at hand"
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Yep. Everything depends on how fast that methane will get released. It can vary from "we are completely fucked up, good bye" to "that's a rounding error, no big deal". Methane should be easier to take out of the atmosphere than CO2. Spraying something at the Stratosphere could be incredibly helpful even if the substance is short lived. (But I have no idea what to spray there, would water make any difference?)
When you look at the many different potential sources of, "Fucked... goodbye..." the trend is very clear. We're juggling apocalypses and just waiting to find one that will stick. Will it be ocean acidification first? Ocean levels rising? Catastrophic weather patterns? Famine? Drought? War touched off by rapid changed? Mass extinctions? They're all in play, each with the potential to end us.
Famine and drought would be localized so we can use international trade to smooth them over, just like we currently do. For long term failures, there will always be other arable places to grow crops, they just might be fewer or more inconvenient than they currently are, and they'll change at an easy human scale speed. China has a 300,000,000 migrant worker population. That's all of the US population migrating every year!
We currently produce far more food than we need, so even losing a big part of production capacity will still leave us with enough to eat, but perhaps with less meat or seafood for poor people.
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Unchecked GW may possibly very well kill millions of people, and destroy quality of life for millions more, but it won't be the end of civilization.
Define "civilization". I could see a return to the dark ages (or at least, pre-electricity civilization) as totally possible.)
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> but you could imagine scenarios on other worlds where the right kind of political situation was around to stop it. I can't imagine that. The only evidence I have to date (from a sample size of 1 planet) is that there is next to zero real political will, even if the politicians of the world create additional heat saying they have in fact found the political will.
I feel like your imaginative capacity could stand to be exercised more. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways in which intelligent entities could meaningfully differ from us, and which would lead to different political circumstances. And we ourselves are not that far from being able to deal reasonably with problems like this. If nothing else were different about us, except that average IQ were, say, 120 on t…
Some rules are universal, because they're thermodynamic. That's not to say that your species of intelligent individuals is impossible, but it is unlikely. When you really take the time to think through these scenarios, you often find that there is no justification to assume that exceptional intelligence would evolve.