this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Actually there is a serious risk that Earth turns into Venus. Perpetually self-reinforcing green house effect. All life on Earth, fried, for all eternity.
Edit: Well, until the sun blows.
I'm sorry, but no. There's not. Not only is there not a serious risk, there's not even a slight chance. Even if we burned every drop of oil and bit of coal and released all the methane deposits, the earth still wouldn't even be close to reaching the conditions required for runaway greenhouse effect. Not for about 2 billion years, when it's estimated the sun's output will have increased sufficiently to vaporize much of our oceans.
I get that climate change is serious - my graduate thesis centered around it and carbon cycling - but please don't spread bullshit. We have enough issues to deal with already without making up more. Please fact check yourself and others.
Relevant articles you should read:
Scoping of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report Cross Cutting Issues
Low simulated radiation limit for runaway greenhouse climates
The Runaway Greenhouse: implications for future climate change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres
Can Increased Atmospheric CO2 Levels Trigger a Runaway Greenhouse?
Thank you. Wow. I was basing that on something I saw or thought I saw in Cosmos (the 1980s version with Carl Sagan). Perhaps I was stoned when watching it. There is little better than to watch one of the Cosmos series while stoned - or the autotuned versions by Melodysheep (on YouTube).
For anyone who wants a quicker read on the above: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect
I shall have to revise my world view now. 🤯🤯🤯 Wow. I feel optimistic.
Tardigrades - they will likely survive then. And cockroaches, and other life. So even if we all + most animals die out, we will be like the dinosaurs, and life may indeed bounce back.
I mean... A shadow has been lifted from my soul.
Goddamn. I know it seems like I am joking but I am not.
Good news.
No worries! I get corrected on things all the time. Thanks for taking it constructively instead of saying choice things about my mother.
Want even better news? The earth totally isn't fucked! Humans might be, but life on earth will probably be alright.
Edit: I got in trouble with crazies when I said "fine" before, so let me elaborate - I mean life will likely survive and in sufficient variety to have no issue rebounding.
The last big extinction event we had was the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event. Almost 90% of species died out. We're not quite sure what caused it (probably volcanoes), but CO2 levels were nearly 6x higher than now, the oceans were sulfurous, acidic, and oxygen starved, and global warming was leagues beyond where we're at now. Life bounced back and we're not even close in severity.
So should we keep fighting climate change? Hell yeah! But it's not as dismal as it seems.
I don't believe you
Isn't the carbon were releasing now from fossil fuels carbon that used to be in the atmosphere? What self reinforcing mechanisms will allow for temperatures roughly beyond what has already occurred, which still sustained life?
Briefly, they're wrong. I responded in detail above.
You are correct, what we're burning as fossil fuels is largely the remains of millions of years of vegetative and microbial life, altered due to heat, pressure, and time. Millions of years of time.
All that carbon making up those organisms was fixed from the atmosphere. While biological functions have been busy fixing CO2, volcanoes, the Earth's mantle, and even some geochemical processes release CO2. If not for biological fixation, the atmosphere's CO2 content would be higher.