
'High likelihood of human civilisation coming to end' by 2050, report finds - ForHackernews
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-global-warming-end-human-civilisation-research-a8943531.html
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yongjik
I hate this kind of headlines. There's very little chance that civilization
will "end" by 2050: the two world wars barely made any dent on "human
civilization".

This kind of rhetoric only sets up an impossible bar and serves to invite the
anti-rhetoric that is "Of course it will be fine, because humanity will not
end!"

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notfromhere
two world wars couldn't impact the ability of agriculture to feed 7+ billion
people

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commandlinefan
Well, I guess then that depends on what you mean by “civilization” ending. If
the food runs out, humans will continue to exist, but probably not in a way
that we would consider to be particularly civilized by modern standards. If
3.5 billion people need to turn against the other 3.5 billion to survive, it’s
pretty likely that they will.

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notfromhere
civilization ending means the end of large-scale, complex human societies
built around the specialization of labor

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4bpp
It seems to me that most of the recent wave of climate change alarmist
articles take it for granted that a mean temperature increase of +4°C or more
would result in a collapse of the functioning of Earth's ecosystems/render the
planet uninhabitable/cause in a runaway effect where more carbon is released
and the planet heats until it turns into Mercury or Arrakis. However, based on
our best knowledge [1], it seems that during the Cretaceous period and for a
while after, temperatures were well in excess of this (~+10°C or more?), but
the global ecosystem was closer to being tropical and extremely fertile than
to being barren, and there was no runaway warming. What is the argument that
this isn't going to happen in our current iteration of climate change? If
there is none, is it safe to dismiss any documents that claim or imply an
uninhabitable Earth as a consequence of climate change as primarily
ideological rather than scientific?

(I'd be much more willing to entertain arguments that a rapid transition to a
Cretaceous-style planet would be a political catastrophe for the "global
south"/equatorial countries that are already struggling with drought, but then
I'd need to see reasoning why we should expect any threat to human
civilisation as a whole rather than "just" a massive humanitarian crisis
through which the residents of the currently-temperate northern hemisphere can
just sit back on their pile of futuristic weaponry and laugh.)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:All_palaeotemps.svg)

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earthicus
I think the claim that Earth is going to turn into Venus or Arrakis is absurd
- I haven't heard anyone argue that, but I have heard the claim that it will
cause a mass extinction on a geologic scale that could affect humans and our
'pets' as well.

I don't know if it is accurate and based on good science, but I believe that
the argument revolves around the _timescale_ that the change is occurring
compared to natural climate shifts: that the temperature is increasing so fast
there is not enough time for plants and animals to evolve, or even for
ecosystems to gradually migrate their locales. For example, one reason you
can't simply replace farms with land in, say, the Canadian shield is the lack
of good topsoil. According to [1] it takes at least 100 years to form an inch
of topsoil in wet, hot climates, and the process is much slower in cold or dry
climates. Thus if we render our existing farmland unfit for our existing crops
in timescales measured in tens of years, we would have to rely on _manually_
bringing a literal continent's worth of soil north - whatever process was at
work during the Cretaceous cannot be relied on to solve this particular
problem.

[1]
[https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/wa/soils/?c...](https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/wa/soils/?cid=nrcs144p2_036333)

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4bpp
Right, but it's not like nothing would grow on it if you took good Canadian
topsoil into the tropics, is it? I assume that even if there is a substantial
difference that renders soil that is conducive to plant growth in one climate
less suitable for it in another, the correction of this difference should not
take the same amount of time as it takes for the "correct topsoil for the
climate" to form from nothing, and in fact probably should be much faster.

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mdorazio
For those who haven't read the article, the prediction is based solely on
climate change, not on other factors (predicting up to 3 degrees centigrade
increase in mean temps globally by 2050 in comparison to pre-industrial
levels, which as far as I know is on the extreme side of most predictions). It
is also from Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, which
obviously is probably slightly biased toward alarmism regarding climate
change.

To me as a pragmatist, climate change is a foregone conclusion at this point
and we should be exploring ways to cope with it and engineer around it.

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LinuxBender
As mentioned for a few other articles, it may be worth correlating CO2 levels
to the Milankovitch cycles relative to our current orbit. NASA track this,
though I don't have a graph link handy. Depending on our current phase, the
oceans may be about to release a lot of CO2.

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bayareanative
$8-20 trillion would be the cost for BeCSS to return CO2 to pre-industrial
levels. This is less than the cost of the endless wars. It's doable, but it
won't happen without extreme public pressure or the violent overthrow of the
vampiric, corporate, inverted totalitarian cabal.

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d1ffuz0r
Maybe they should say "Western Civilization coming to end", it would be
correct. But the rest of the world will be fine

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mimixco
To quote Mark Twain, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

