Temperatures above 50C used to be a rarity confined to two or three global hotspots, but the World Meteorological Organization noted that at least 10 countries have reported this level of searing heat in the past year: the US, Mexico, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, India and China.
In Iran, the heat index – a measure that also includes humidity – has come perilously close to 60C, far above the level considered safe for humans.
Heatwaves are now commonplace elsewhere, killing the most vulnerable, worsening inequality and threatening the wellbeing of future generations. Unicef calculates a quarter of the world’s children are already exposed to frequent heatwaves, and this will rise to almost 100% by mid-century.
Anyone who is “baffled” is either lying or hasn’t been paying attention.
I like to link this video when the subject comes up.
The issue here is that leading climate scientists are saying our current models aren’t accounting for the actual reported climate, and they’re not sure why it’s off. They’re hoping the new NASA climate program will provide more data for the causes. Currently it’s not explainable by CO2 emissions, sulfur from boats, volcanoes, etc, all of which when factored in still don’t account for more than 90% of how much warmer it is getting.
Yes, human caused global warming is real and happening. The big concern right now is it’s happening much faster than expected and we have no good, proven theory as to why. That’s a problem.
This isn’t just climate deniers though - even those that were expecting significant climate shifts are still seeing higher than expected. This isn’t “huh, things are getting hotter, who would’ve thought?” This is “we knew it would get hotter, but we predicted it would take longer.” We thought we were fucked, but we’re actually double fucked.
By definition, ideology is based on fantasy ideal. And the concept that ‘human economic growth is primarily good’ is a fantasy that can’t tolerate the reality of that economic growth harming our world.
Capitalism is a death cult.
And yet its the least worst functional economic system we currently have…
“Wow this cancer sure is good at growing and staying alive!”
Can’t believe people are saying this meme.
Capitalism has a historical tendency of imperializing all over the place and sabotaging other systems. It did not earn its spot as “best”, despite what capitalistic propaganda would have you believe.
“it’s the least worst way to spiral into definite hell on earth” doesn’t really sound that positive.
It doesn’t matter how “safe” capitalism is, it’s not solving our problems and we need something different.
Living and dying are the same process. You can’t be born without dying. You could say biology condemns us all - very loosely - to a cult of death, as we must all participate.
Capitalism is worse than that. Capitalism is an ideology of exploitation. I’m fine with dying, it’s my fault for being born. I don’t see why I must submit to exploitation while I do, temporarily, exist.
That’s because you’re a sinner and exploiting sinners isn’t to be punished, but praised. Exploit your fellow sinners, make them toil in suffering and you too shall redeem salvation in the form of stock options and tax evasion.
That’s the spirit! We must sacrifice the newborns to harvest better stock options.
it’s my fault for being born.
is it? I don’t recall ever asking to be born, i’m pretty sure that just kind of happened.
Just because you can’t recall it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. As a spermatozoon, you eagerly swam towards that egg, then that egg could have chosen to abort at any time. Yet here you are alive. You chose to be here. Deal with it, accept it and move on with your life.
Just because you can’t recall it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. As a spermatozoon, you eagerly swam towards that egg, then that egg could have chosen to abort at any time. Yet here you are alive. You chose to be here. Deal with it, accept it and move on with your life.
does a delusional person choose to have delusions?
Things that are outside of our psychological realm, and physical control are quite literally something we have no control over.
Yeah, there are plenty of things we have little to no control over.
Having delusions is one of them for sure, but can we say for certain we don’t at least influence what those delusions are or which direction they take?
i mean you probably influence them, but much like dreams, are they really representative of anything other than your mind left to its own devices?
Human conception may start at the sperm race, but human consciousness doesn’t begin until a few years into childhood, so at the end of the day, who knows.
Can thought be considered a process that begins after being affected by an external stimulus? And without prior experience on which to base our response, we can only react according to the conditions set by that stimulus?
So is it truly we who control our thoughts or are we just acting in a predetermined set of reactionary impulses based on the accumulation of our personal experiences and gained knowledge over our lifetime so far?
We who are so easily influenced into outrage by trigger phrases specific to our fears or spurred into action by resonating soundbites promising our desires, are those our thoughts or are they just the mind left to its own devices?
I really don’t know. But it’s probably some food for thought in a way.
I’m a Buddhist.
i’m not familiar with Buddhism so if there is something i’m missing here, that would be why lol.
I don’t recall ever asking to be born
Who would do the asking and what would be providing the answer?
this is a good question, amusingly enough there is no answer, philosophy sucks.
If you’re fine with dying, Tepco is still looking for guys to clean up under Fukushima. They ran out of old gambling addicts who had big debts with the Yakuza.
Late or not, we have to do all we can to stop runaway warming and ecological collapse. We know corporations and populations won’t do anything voluntarily. That is why legislation is the only way. EU is taking the lead on this. I’m hoping world countries will follow.
A lot of companies won’t even allow remote work which would put a huge dent in commuter related pollution. Will that fix everything by itself? Nope, but it’d be a step in the right direction.
But they won’t even do THAT. This one little thing that’d be better for a lot of people and reduce car dependence related pollution for people in areas with little to no public transit access.
I have a hard time believing the US will ever catch up to green initiatives since corporate lobbying pays corrupt assholes more…
This one little thing that’d be better for a lot of people and reduce car dependence related pollution for people in areas with little to no public transit access.
It’s better for everything, cheaper, and notably has exactly zero impact on productivity, but God damnit Johnson, how can I force the interns to get me my coffee without everyone being back in the office?!
Its cause none of these systems are static or by themselves in a vacuum. There are feedback loops in all parts of our environment. Its not a coincidence that the temperature started to accelerate after the recent series of MAJOR volcanic eruptions in the many parts of the worlds oceans. Throw in the absolute monstrosity that is human industry and well the feedback there is more heat from industry combined with greenhouse gases means the the heat in those areas rises. What does heat do? It rises and moves outwards until it reaches equilibrium. Where is it cold? The arctic and antarctic. What’s happening in those places recently? Oh yeah huge spikes in temperature that are causing shifts by over 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit or about 8-10 degrees celsius. Sure it’s technically still freezing over the arctic and antarctic for portions of the year. However the arctic has, for the last several years during summer, been almost entirely ice free. The North fucking Pole is ice free during the summer time. That’s fucking insane. Everything feeds into everything else with our environment and climate.
Until more people in power actually understand these facts, we are all going to suffer needlessly.
Plenty of powerful people know these things. The profit motive makes these things hard to care about. We will continue like this until options are gone.
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
The answer is aluminum roofing! I was a the beach a couple of weeks ago and you just couldn’t step on the hot magma for any amount of time. But if you sat down on the shadeless aluminum benches provided by the idiots at the government, you were welcome to the best feeling of freezing your ass off while searing your nuts off. It’s aluminum, we know it can reflect like 90% of all incoming light including heat and UV…and Wi-Fi. But I much rather have antennas that allow phone communications than to have to run the AC non stop even when the house has more insulation than my fridge.
Aluminum oxidizes and no longer reflects after long term exposure to moisture. It would have to be painted white, which is really no different than current metal roofing.
Which does bring up a good point though… all we need is some really environmentally friendly and long lasting white paint (that doesn’t get dirty) and we could easily slow down climate change. Unfortunately white paint gets dirty real quick and the dirt absorbs radiation the same as a dark paint.
Anodized aluminum absorbs some heat, but that’s only one single light pass. Or well two passes. But that’s way better than aluminum with white bird poop on it which is easily cleaned. Clear anodized aluminum or white reflective aluminum would be quite superior to anything out there.
110⁰ heat wave in a high humidity climate
“Have you tried switching out your shingled roof for aluminum?”
Like, idk, maybe this can save a few bucks on your AC bill. But this isn’t magic. It can’t keep the air getting into your house from being superheated.
But it isolates radiated heat. You’ll have to pump heat built up inside. But also, aluminum radiators pointing upward can help reduce climate temperatures similar to the way trees do. Trees absorb the heat and shade the ground. These would shade and reflect heat creating a cooler area underneath if heat is not actively being generated…no humans or computers or pets. So not a silver bullet but just makes me so puzzled to see people using tar, which pollutes the ground, and steel which perfectly absorbs heat. No, the best solution is to use aluminum.
steel which perfectly absorbs heat. No, the best solution is to use aluminum.
Aluminum is far more thermally conductive and makes both a far better radiator and absorber of heat. Ultimately it’s a coating that does the absorbing though, as shiny metal reflects IR regardless of the material. Source: I work with this stuff
Light coloured or reflective roofs do make sense though and that’s why traditional homes in most hot climates are painted white.
Yes. Ideally you want a sandwich aluminum -steel - aluminum. But that’s not ideal. Sometimes you see this in heat shields around exhaust systems. But nothing beats experience. The fact is that if you put a sheet of tar roofing, a sheet of steel and a sheet of aluminum under the sun, the tar will get melty, the steel will get fucking hot and the aluminum will be nice and cool to the touch. Sure you can spray aluminum onto the steel or the tar but it won’t be as efficient and you won’t get the reflective properties that aluminum has. Remember the wavelength of heat is past the 0.1um and it’s up to 100um, so most coatings are not that thick and most roughnesses are not that rough locally where it matters. Machined aluminum for example will have a local roughnesses less than 25um, sometimes under 1um.
climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating
Could it be … fossil fuel producers lying about their output of greenhouse gases? Nah.
You don’t have to lie if you don’t measure …… for example, methane leaks from natural gas drilling, refining and distribution
Don’t forget countries, especially China.
If these companies and countries could just show their real numbers, we could be at least be helping each other better.
“Are you telling me that our valued wealth creators are capable of… lying???”
Aren’t climate scientists also measuring atmospheric composition levels around the world to track this, usivg satellites and whatnot? I.e., do they really rely that much on self reported data?
The fossil fuel companies would fund like 9 studies for every independant one.
oh it’s much worse than that. not that it isn’t also that and them doing that isn’t the reason we didn’t get started mitigating this shit seventy years ago when we wouldn’t have needed substantial sacrifices.
see, climate scientists are scientists. that means they can only announce what they KNOW, what they can be very confident in, what IS in the data.
the thing about climate change is; it’s full of unknowns, most of them bad. so they can’t say “we have had this many unknown unknowns pop up and fuck our shit up, and expect (range of numbers) more”, because that’s predictive, and it’s useful, but its not SCIENCE, because science is inherently a very conservative bedrock-of-knowledge try-not-to-give-permission-to-fuck-up paradigm of knowledge. that’s not a flaw generally, it’s why we can trust it and why it’s hard to compromise, but generals and combat sports athletes do not choose their actions scientifically-it’s too fucking slow, and they would all fucking die/get punched in the face and lose literally every single time.
so while they have calculated the known dangers of the path we’re tumbling down, they can’t really include the assumption that there was a military base here during a civil war 20 years ago, and both sides in that conflict really liked land mines. they can only point to specific mine fields they know about, even if that’s way less than any other site that was involved in that conflict.
so however bad a climate scientist says it’s going to be, dude, holy shit, it’s going to be so much fucking worse. however much time they say we have, we have less than that. how much worse? how much less? no fucking clue.
no way to know unless we sit on our asses and let it happen, at which point everyone dies.
Yes, can’t emphasize this enough. It worse than predicted. And it’s all exponentially getting worse.
its fine though. our masters are aware of it now, so we don’t need to do anything about it. everything fine.
Nonlilnearity has begun
Thanks for using the term ‘nonlinearity’, I’m now reading about nonlinear dynamic climate systems.
I’d say “thanks, now I’m scared,” but I fully expect humans to be a self-limiting species, anyway, so I’m just ‘oh, okay’ about it all.
I’m now reading about nonlinear dynamic climate systems.
Do you have a tl;dr to the paywall?
I use “Bypass Paywalls Clean v3.6.3.0”.
Does it work on ISBNs too?
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/nonlinear-climate-dynamics/82CA69FF3507BE781F5762B0CD8E5CF8
I found the 22mb pdf on Libgen. There are many mirrors for that site, there are recommendations online as to which mirror is best. Searching for “nonlinear climate dynamics henk” was enough,
Oh, thanks! I looked for the wrong thing in the wrong place.
I thought the consensus was that it was El Nino exacerbating things, but I guess that’s not the only factor.
times like these, I feel pretty shitty about how the world and I have condemned my kids to suffer the water wars in a handful of years
Yeah, I feel the same. I was having a tough day already but reading this has made me particularly gloomy.
I feel as though we will look back at these days wistfully.
Here are some sites to remind you that not everything in the world is bad, friend:
Here are some sites to remind you that not everything in the world is bad, friend:
wow have we procrastinated real climate action long enough yet?
Yes we have ages ago. So might as well relax and keep posting
Nope
we are way past that point, its just that it takes a while to heat up.
Doubt procrastination will stop even after 60-70 becomes a new high in those countries and people start dying en masse
“But mah profits!!!”
I see a lot of doom and gloom in the comments here. Correct me if I’m wrong, but is not the main concern being that sea levels will rise and flood costal cities? Plus some parts of the world will be too hot to comfortably live? Human beings are remarkably creative when they need to be. Right now most are overweight watching TV and worried about stupid unimportant things. But if the need arose to build new towns/cities in higher and cooler locations, we have the man power. Literally BILLIONS of humans, some smart ones to plan it all, and the rest to build it. I don’t see an “end of humanity” or “don’t have kids” as being reasonable. Humanity will adapt. Please correct me if I’m missing something here.
Sea levels rising is only one of the concerns. I think the biggest concern is the reduction of ariable land due to climate change. I.e. the carrying capacity of the Earth will decrease (and I’m of the opinion that the human species has already greatly overshot Earth’s carrying capacity; hence the current degradation of our environment).
I think the species will survive, but may experience a population crash (i.e. mass death), and severly reduced quality of life. I think having 1 or 2 kids is fine for now, and hope I’m wrong in my Malthusian-like thinking.
Pretty spot on, except the part condemning only 1 or 2 kids to a horrible death is fine for now.
Yea I’m twisting your words around a bit, but really that’s the horrible reality I’m seeing.
It’s just very on point - too much to ask humans to stop procreating.
I agree that humans are remarkably creative, and I agree “don’t have kids” is reasonable. But the “end of humanity” might come through this. However, I agree that we might be able to survive this. But please take it seriously. The whole climate crisis is a complex challenge by itself, and the politicization of it, along with the capitalistic interests, are complicating it further. We need urgent global action if we want humanity to survive.
Consider: Not all those billions of people will survive the sudden shift in climate. The breaking points in climate make everything super difficult to plan for. It is not just about finding higher ground that is climatic for humans, the whole agriculture will be a big problem. The climate will be so different from what we have right now, we are not perfectly sure how which crops would work where. We need globally aligned tests, knowledge sharing at the very best, along with all the action we need to take along with carbon emissions.
This challenge, is our biggest yet. We need a global, aligned, focused effort. But, we are far from it. The stress is causing conflict everywhere. Our international order is not up to coordinate this global effort, unfortunately. And if COVID-19 showed us what we can have on a global scale as a response, it means every nation state will turn inwards, try to fight against it by themselves while also fighting against everyone else. This problem is the crux. Our systems, our worldviews, our doctrine are not up for this fight ahead.
There is hope. But there is also a lot to despair about.
And if COVID-19 showed us what we can have on a global scale as a response, it means every nation state will turn inwards, try to fight against it by themselves while also fighting against everyone else.
My money is on hot, stressed, scared people tending to vote for politicians who blame immigrants / feminists / queer people. Maybe there will even be sacrifices.
Human beings are remarkably creative when they need to be.
Yes! Humans say they think children are important, then create situations where children are hungry, abused, or killed in war. Then they create rationalisations for that being inevitable, or acceptable, or even deserved.
Humans also create technology to ‘make the world better’, then use it to convince people as a group to do things which make the world worse.
Aren’t humans creative? They’re going to create a lack of humans eventually - isn’t that imaginative?
Please correct me if I’m missing something here.
Those in power often use crises to invent reasons to take more power, and to direct it against scapegoats. The point is not often to make the world better for everyone, the point is very often to make the world better for those who already have the most.
There is a lot more to it than rise of sea levels on the one hand and some places being too hot.
TL;DR: Climate change causes mass extinctions, ecosystem collapse, extreme weather, and life-threatening heat. Technology alone won’t save us; prevention is crucial. Ignoring climate action risks severe economic damage, comparable to a permanent Great Depression.
(Prepare for a great wall of fuck.)
In short (list is not exhaustive, there’s surely more which I also don’t know of or don’t think of right now):
- Mass extinction of several species, which can’t keep up with the pace of climate change. You might have heard already how insect popluations dramatically declined in the past decades.
- Extinction or even significant deaths and lack of offspring in various species leads to imbalance and collapse of entire eco systems.
- Humans are part of and relying on functioning and healthy eco systems. Without them our very basis of life starts collapsing, leading to numerous human deaths and a lot of misery.
- The occurence of extreme weather conditions as well as catastophes in consequence of climate change increases. The occasional summer storm might become less occasional, which is less of a problem. But so do floodings, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or forest fires increase. And those cost lives and do a lot of damage. We experience weather conditions in places today, which most common people would’ve deemed impossible or extremely unlikely at least. (Not every extreme weather condition is the result of climate change though. But a lot are. An entire field of attribution science has emerged to elaborate which catastrophe has been a direct cause of climate change.)
- Increased temperatures, but especially heatwaves, are already now costing more and more lives and that’s not just some particular places with extremely hot temperatures, but it’s also occuring in entire nations known for more temperate conditions. For example in the EU.
- Being “too hot” is only one side. You can survive 40°C or higher, if the air humidity is low. But due to global warming we can also observe time frames in regions where the air humidity plus temperature reaches such levels that people are exposed to life-threatening health risks already at 31°C. (See also “wet bulb temperature” in general.) Higher humidity makes it harder to cool ourselves by sweating, i.e., evaporative cooling. This is being observed more and more often in south-east asia and the middle east but also started to affect the USA in some regions (Texas, last year in 2023).
You might now understand a bit better why even a few degrees more around the globe incur existential threats.
Human beings are remarkably creative when they need to be. […] if the need arose […] some smart ones […] plan it all, and the rest […] build it
(Sorry for quoting you a bit more freely here.)
Technology can do much, but it is not magic. (I’m an engineering scientist, because I realised at some point that I can’t become a magician.) Entropy is a bitch and current solutions or attempts I know of regarding carbon capture are a nice idea at best, but in practise currently not feasibe and therefore a money-pit at worst. “Building higher and cooler” seems a naive approach given the scale and complexity of human lives and disregards the problems we’re facing due to climate change. I don’t mean that condescendingly, rather to highlight how massively impractical that approach would be on the one hand and no solution for most problems caused by climate change on the other hand.
I absolutely think that it’s necessary to continue research in that area, but until we have developed solutions which can tackle the problems we’ve caused in a significant way (which can still take decades until we’ve got large-scale applicable solutions), I think it’s best to practise prevention. Avoid contributing factors to climate change at allmost all costs.
Don’t put all your money on the “technology will save us”-horse.By the way:
The people who think that climate and environmental protection are damaging the economy are short-sighted, as climate change is projected to cause a tremendous amount financial damage world-wide in the long-term. One of many many sources on this puts it like this:when the researchers added in the possibility of a moderate 2 degrees of warming before the end of the century, this led to a decline in future GDP of between 30 and 50 percent by 210 […] In the U.S. alone […] A 50 percent decline in 2100 GDP relative to baseline means a loss of $56 trillion each year, which exceeds the current GDP. Such declines would leave individuals with “a 31 percent drop in purchasing power relative to a world without climate change,” Bilal adds. Such losses are “comparable to living in the 1929 Great Depression, forever,” he says.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/09/harvard-economic-impact-climate-change
Environmental protection is economical protection. They go hand-in-hand.
“faster than expected” lol
It is almost like we are stupid fucking monkeys with rockets and bullets
Rockets and bullets are a problem. But it is the desire to use them against a scapegoated group to cement our own power and status that is the bigger issue.
While some argue that the world will soon pass the lower Paris agreement guardrail of 1.5C of heating above the preindustrial average, Schmidt says
Unless 2022 - present turn out to be an anomaly, we already have.
It’s okay. Remember the IPCC panel decided in 2018(?) that we’ll just go over the limit a bit and then figure out how to pull back down. With magic or something.
Giant ice cube in the ocean?
Global warming is a test. We’re failing the test, so the warming is going to start accelerating until we learn our lesson
Mother Nature, Earth, or Gaia, is an organism. In my loose perspective, I like to think that this is it’s “fever” attempt at eliminating the virus.
And thereby eliminating a whole bunch of other species than just humans as well.
Although I’m totally in for the occasional misanthropy, I don’t like seeing it as “just a fever” anymore as too many species will go down. Life will probably persevere in the end, but so will probably a bunch of rich shitpieces, who are significantly responsible for this fever in the first place.
Our world has gone through many life cycles in the past. At the beginning, was darkness, at the end, probably the same (unless it’s a Futurama time cycle).
The earth will continue on and life will find a way. At this time, we, as humans, have screwed the pooch and now the pooch will screw us. We used the earth and culled it’s resources. We are taking no consideration to the world around us, and instead focus on ourselves alone.
All of the movies about aliens are true. Humans are selfish, greedy, parasites.
What are you basing this on? Like what scientific knowledge exactly? That life will find a way? You realize the “scientist” in Jurassic Park who said that wasn’t a real scientist???
Look at every other planet. Do any of them have life? What makes you so blindingly confident this planet won’t join them? We are in a mass extinction right now due to unprecedented rapid climate change. The only life left might just be extremophiles and they may never be able to evolve to be multicellular. And not even extremopjiles can survive everything.
That people are so casual about this shows a profound lack of scientific knowledge.
Calm down there, sport. I don’t have to cite sources or be factually correct to have a conversation about my perspective and pop culture references.
Um but you’re talking about a scientific phenomenon so if you want people to value your thoughts, it’s good to support them with evidence
You don’t have to do anything ofc. It just bothers me to see people say that George Carlin quote “the planet will be fine,” the Jurassic Park quote “life will find a way,” or the idea that the planet is alive and will kill us off like a fever. Because all of those things are downplaying the seriousness of what’s actually happening. From my PoV, what you’re doing is very close to climate change denialism and it stops people from realizing how serious things are right now. Literally right now.
I’m posting on the internet on a place that is not super populated. I have no followers and want to gain nothing from these aside from conversation, learning, and my version of social interaction. Climate change is real. It’s a very real threat to all life. I do what I can, donate to places I agree with, and advocate for groups that need to be heard. I do believe that life will find a way, because we came from nothing to begin with. Species have been destroyed, life was reborn. Civilization have been destroyed and rebuilt.
If life does not find a way, then it’s the end of the road for our relative area. We succumb to silence like the rest.
And we have evidence for at least 6 other major mass extinction events. Yet life on this planet found a way to survive and re-evolve. Quit being so fucking pedantic about something so silly.
I’m not being pedantic, I’m openly disagreeing with the idea that life “must” or absolutely will carry on. There’s no such guarantee. That you hold onto that is a cope but not reality. That’s fine if you need to do that ig but I disagree.
Humans aren’t selfish, greedy, parasites. We just get brainwashed into being that way by our culture
Hard to disagree with a famous lemur.
Our carcasses could end up being petrochemicals of the emerging life forms.
The earth, by any definition, is not alive. Sure there are ecological systems that interact with each other, but there’s absolutely no guarantee they are able.to address issues together in an environment. I highly recommend Half Earth by EO Wilson explaining about species diversity loss and ecology.
It’s important that we realize that life is the exception. None of the other planets have conditions needed to support life. Our planet would be fine to join them. It doesn’t care about fevers or anything. It isn’t alive.
i feel like you could describe a human body that way also :)
No, by definition of what’s alive, which is already scientifically described. That’s my entire point, is that the people commenting on this are laypeople without scientific understanding or basis. I’m trying to correct that because our scientific ignorance is literally killing us.
A rock is not alive. A volcano is not alive. This is grade school science. This is what “biology” is.
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/intro-to-biology/what-is-biology/a/what-is-life
Properties of life
Biologists have identified various traits common to all the living organisms we know of. Although nonliving things may show some of these characteristic traits, only living things show all of them.
- Organization Living things are highly organized, meaning they contain specialized, coordinated parts. All living organisms are made up of one or more cells, which are considered the fundamental units of life.
- Metabolism Life depends on an enormous number of interlocking chemical reactions. These reactions make it possible for organisms to do work—such as moving around or catching prey—as well as growing, reproducing, and maintaining the structure of their bodies. Living things must use energy and consume nutrients to carry out the chemical reactions that sustain life. The sum total of the biochemical reactions occurring in an organism is called its metabolism.
- Homeostasis Living organisms regulate their internal environment to maintain the relatively narrow range of conditions needed for cell function. For instance, your body temperature needs to be kept relatively close to 98.6 [^\circ]F (37 [^\circ]C). This maintenance of a stable internal environment, even in the face of a changing external environment, is known as homeostasis.
- Growth Living organisms undergo regulated growth. Individual cells become larger in size, and multicellular organisms accumulate many cells through cell division. You yourself started out as a single cell and now have tens of trillions of cells in your body [^1]! Growth depends on anabolic pathways that build large, complex molecules such as proteins and DNA, the genetic material.
- Reproduction Living organisms can reproduce themselves to create new organisms. Reproduction can be either asexual, involving a single parent organism, or sexual, requiring two parents. Single-celled organisms, like the dividing bacterium shown in the left panel of the image at right, can reproduce themselves simply by splitting in two!
- Response Living organisms show “irritability,” meaning that they respond to stimuli or changes in their environment. For instance, people pull their hand away—fast!—from a flame; many plants turn toward the sun; and unicellular organisms may migrate toward a source of nutrients or away from a noxious chemical.
- Evolution Populations of living organisms can undergo evolution, meaning that the genetic makeup of a population may change over time. In some cases, evolution involves natural selection, in which a heritable trait, such as darker fur color or narrower beak shape, lets organisms survive and reproduce better in a particular environment. Over generations, a heritable trait that provides a fitness advantage may become more and more common in a population, making the population better suited to its environment. This process is called adaptation.
We can see how earth as a planet doesn’t qualify as a living organism based on these 7 parameters. Metaphorically calling earth “living” to describe the various interacting systems and ecologies is common but not in this context with climate change and insisting the earth will actually repair itself like a living organism.
I’m all for philosophically wondering about stuff, but we need to have an agreement on terms and what they mean. And in this case, these terms are already defined amd we know the planet isn’t able to heal itself to address climate change. That’s just a cope.
“I want to play a game”
Maybe John Kramer has gone too far this time.
Or until the test is complete and humanity has failed.
Like will the bacteria survive the self cleaning cycle?
Probably some extremophiles, tardigrades at least. Depends on how the planetary boundaries get crossed. Hope horseshoe crabs and lichens and some birds make it through. Those guys have been around so long for us to mess it up for them.
Algae are having an amazing time right now.
It’s one of their biggest moments since multicellular life evolved
LikeLife on earth has survived more extreme environments before. Not only microbes but multicellular life should be fine.Source for this prediction? What are you basing this on?
Great question, I glad you asked. When I said both multicellular and microbial life would be fine, what I meant is it’s unlikely either would be wiped totally out.
As highlighted in the article you linked, only about 90% of [multicellular] species died out during the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, specifically the “things have been worse before” situation I was thinking about. Also noted in the article is that the conditions we’re experiencing now are not to the same degree although we’re observing events similar to what we understand may have happened during the Permian-Triassic Extinction, again to a much lesser degree.
Keep in mind atmospheric CO2 levels were estimated to be around 2500 ppm, about 6 times greater than our current levels of around 420 ppm. Preindustrial CO2 levels were 270 ppm, so we’ve added about 150 ppm. It’s not all that much but it’s enough to start changing things for the worse for many of the planet’s current inhabitants.
As to microbial life, I’m a microbiologist so I know my microbes. They as a whole are far more resilient and will outlast all multicellular life. Some thrive in conditions where no multicellular life on Earth could survive. Even if conditions were so hostile than no microbes could survive, some form endospores. These are incredibly resilient little escape pods that can remain viable for millions of years, then reactivate when conditions are better, reconstituting back to bacteria.
While extinctions are frankly depressing, they do open ecological niches into which other species with suitable traits can expand and, given time and selective pressure, differentiate. For example, all we’d need is mice and a suitable food source to survive and, a few million years later, the earth will be covered with various species decended from both of them.
When you said life would be fine, what you meant was it may MOSTLY all die and may take millions of years to evolve again. That’s not “fine.”
Second, we really don’t know that it will ever evolve again or that other conditions won’t deteriorate. Bacteria can’t live in molten lava. Biology has a general upper and lower limit before things start denaturizing. Our moon is further away and the earth isn’t as young as it once was. The conditions that gave rise to life so long ago might not be replicable enough in the future.
I agree that it’s likely extremophiles at least will survive. I don’t take for granted that it definitely will happen and I don’t call it “fine.”
I pretty distinctly defined when I meant by saying “fine” in my follow-up comment. If you want to pretend I meant something different so you can “prove me wrong”, that’s “fine” (define that however suits you.).
That, along with the rest of your comment, suggests you’re just more interested in feeling you’re right at all costs instead of actually discussing the topic, so I’m out.
Edit: I had to look - of course you downvoted me. LOL.
Yes, you moved the goalposts to have “fine” include what I do not consider “fine.” This is part ofntthe disagreement we have here. Agree to disagree ig.
I mean go ahead, be out. Have a good day. You don’t have to believe as I do, and your last comment also made it seem you were “happy I asked.”
I believe a mix of runaway elitism + ecological devastation is the Great Filter. We’re at our great filter and definitely will not overcome considering the galactic evidence.
This is certainly a credible assertion, but it’s very broad.
As in, runaway elitism is probably relevant to almost all civilisation-ending catastrophes.
I don’t know exactly what to call it and I don’t want to sound like my agenda is just anti-capitalism. For a brief, 250yr period, humanity (not all, but enough of) valued science and reasoned law as the highest, most advanced expressions of our civilization. The enlightenment age brought about modernity as we know it based on science and liberal law (no kings above the law). Now we’ve devolved back to every nation basically establishing new oligarchich aristocracies no law can touch (the historic normal), and it’s definitely too late to correct course. No untouchable nobilities or kings will save this realm. So yeah, the great filter in my view is about letting elites be accountable to no one, with no interest other than accretion, rule things into the ground. And yeah that’s the broad gist of my point about a pretty broad theory. Most think the great filter as an asteroid or nuke. For me it’s runaway elitism that probably ends most civilizations which is why there’s no one out there.
Removed by mod
What if humanity was created to cause climate change for the next phase of Earth’s biological evolution? Is no-one considering a grander plan than what happens to humans?
And I’d be ok with this. I see that humans are failing the test. I think it would be totally fair for us to take some really huge losses as a consequence of our collective hubris. But the thing that makes me sad and angry is that we’re taking down everything else with us.
There’s such a huge diversity of life, basically just minding its own business in a totally sustainable way. It’s been like that for billions of years. More than 1,000,000,000 years. But then humans work out that burning stuff is an easy way to do mass-production, and in less then 1000 years things start turning to shit - for everyone. That’s so unfair. If it was just our own house we were burning down, I’d say its fair. But we’re burning down the whole world. We’re already causing mass extinction, and by all predictions it is going to get much much worse.
Maybe ten thousand years. That last ice age ending literally changed everything but yeah, ok, let’s pretend its hundreds of millions of years the same.
it’ll all return in due time, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was a major extinction event in the same caliber as global warming is likely to be.
If we continue on like this, it’ll be more like the Permian-Triassic Extinction 250 million years ago, which was also due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere and which killed 90 percent of all life.
gotta love extinction science
Oh ffs We are literally the most likely species to survive any of that.
Humans are famously good at surviving in the desert. That’s why so much of human civilization exists at the center of large land masses in arid climates.
Bacteria, viruses, insects all way more likely to survive.
The bigger and more complex generally means more likely to run out of something.
Patience, mostly.
“Ignorance” is not “patience”, you have the former, not the latter.
No, we aren’t
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.
The planetary boundaries framework (1, 2) draws upon Earth system science (3). It identifies nine processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of Earth system as a whole. All are presently heavily perturbed by human activities. The framework aims to delineate and quantify levels of anthropogenic perturbation that, if respected, would allow Earth to remain in a “Holocene-like” interglacial state. In such a state, global environmental functions and life-support systems remain similar to those experienced over the past ~10,000 years rather than changing into a state without analog in human history. This Holocene period, which began with the end of the last ice age and during which agriculture and modern civilizations evolved, was characterized by relatively stable and warm planetary conditions. Human activities have now brought Earth outside of the Holocene’s window of environmental variability, giving rise to the proposed Anthropocene epoch.
Check the post history of the person you’re replying to, they’re pretty blatantly ridiculous.
My general operating principle is that even if this person is engaging in bad faith, there may be other people lurking who want this info or who have similar questions who would be too nervous to comment or ask. So I give info anyway for others.
That’s a very good point! I found your post interesting, myself, so thank you.
well its probably cockroaches and bacterium, or some weird bullshit species that exists.
I hope humans are not very survivable, because then we wouldn’t have humans like you around.
Other organisms and natural disasters do that, too. Ice ages, meteors, waves of diseases. The difference seems to be we have the consciousness to predict consequences, then decide whether to embark upon a path of behavior, or continue it when latent consequences emerge. I guess the question ends up being whether the course chosen is “natural,” and how can we know, since plenty of organisms kill the host, while also surviving and even propagating? Then observation also changes the behavior of things. And we don’t kill everything. Just whatever life is left continues to evolve in expected and unexpected ways.
A test for what? From where? I don’t get it
A test of long-term sustainable viability, conducted by the limitations within the forces of nature that we audaciously call our home.
