dbat 
Maybe we should change the wording: from "climate change" to "extinction horizon"
Yora@dbat Nah, we're not going to go extinct.
Probably millions of us will survive.
@yora Yay, the bright side! 🤓
Infrogmation@Infrogmation @dbat No. Humans are stupidly durable. To make humans go entirely extinct, you would have to annihilate the entire biosphere.
As long as daytime temperatures at the poles don't regularly exceed 40 degrees, some humans will hang on.
As long as daytime temperatures at the poles don't regularly exceed 40 degrees, some humans will hang on.
Nelson@yora @dbat Of course, if the human population is reduced to millions, that reduces the odds that humanity will survive the next existential threat. Every time you lose a large percentage of people, that's less diversity of genetics and experience to handle another shock. So climate change may not be sufficient to wipe out humanity, but what if it's e.g. accompanied by nuclear war triggered by resource wars?
@skyfaller @dbat I doubt even with the entire nuclear arsenal of the world going off, we would get anywhere close to killing every last person on earth.
But that's already moving goalposts.
But that's already moving goalposts.
@yora Yeah it's the same deal, say you're left with a million people in one location that's far from anywhere nukes went off. Now basically anything could finish off the remaining population, like a volcano erupting, because the last of humanity is all bunched up in one place.
@skyfaller Sure. If we just keep throwing more and more things at the planet, eventually all humans will die.
But what's the argument here?
But what's the argument here?
@yora
1. Climate change alone may not be sufficient to drive humanity to extinction, but it could be a contributing factor. Humanity could go extinct in the next few centuries in part because of climate change. If not for climate change, other existential threats may not have a shot at wiping us out.
2. Climate change makes other existential threats more likely, like resource wars leading to nuclear war.
3. We can't predict all existential threats, so we should avoid the predictable ones.
DianeFor most of us the difference between something that kills 98% of humanity and 99.9999% of humanity isn't meaningfully different.
Make it simple and personal, do you want to watch everyplace that you have every known be ground into rubble by war and increasingly frequent hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and fires while everyone you have ever known slowly dies of deprivation as all the worlds agriculture collapses or are you willing to boycott the fossil fuel industry?
@yora @skyfaller well I am cheered by the idea of people surviving the horizon. I wish we could send our best science and medicine etc. in a bottled form for them to pick up from somehow. Good luck you guys!
ghosttie
Clinton Anderson SwordForHire"Anthropogenic Global Extinction Horizon" has a nice ring to it.
There won't be enough left alive to bury the dead.......