Life has continuously existed on the planet for 4.28 billion years. Life we can eat has existed for most of that. I’m not saying there can’t be expensive and fatal problems associated with climate change, but “end of civilization” is hyperbole.
Yeah so the Earth vacillates between two general phases: greenhouse earth epochs and icehouse earth epochs. You get ice ages and then periods without ice ages during icehouse earth epochs. We are technically in an icehouse epoch right now but just between ice ages. We have been in an icehouse epoch since about 34 million years ago. In a greenhouse epoch you have no ice sheets anywhere, no glaciers, no ice ages. Our most distant ancestors that can be generally called hominid go back as far as six million years. We’re icehouse earth animals.
Sudden releases of CO2 have triggered sudden switches to greenhouse earth epochs in the past due to sudden huge eruptions of volcanic activity. We are in the process of triggering such a switch right now because we’ve more than doubled the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere in about 200 years. The issue is, nobody has any fucking clue if agriculture will even be possible in a greenhouse earth epoch or how it would work or how productive it would even be. Also, the example I mentioned of a very sudden transition to a greenhouse Earth state was followed by a horrific mass extinction because ecosystems don’t take well to sudden drastic transformations like that. In the long run it all evens out. The long run being millions of years.
If the ecosystems and natural processes that allow for agriculture to take place just fall apart and nothing takes their place (no we can’t just magically fill the gap agriculture is literally reliant on ecosystems doing a huge huge amount of work for us), you’re just going to have a sudden collapse and then probably a very, very very long time of effectively no agriculture being possible, or only very sparse and small scale agriculture that would not allow for populations approaching anything like we have today.
Life has continuously existed on the planet for 4.28 billion years. Life we can eat has existed for most of that. I’m not saying there can’t be expensive and fatal problems associated with climate change, but “end of civilization” is hyperbole.
Yeah so the Earth vacillates between two general phases: greenhouse earth epochs and icehouse earth epochs. You get ice ages and then periods without ice ages during icehouse earth epochs. We are technically in an icehouse epoch right now but just between ice ages. We have been in an icehouse epoch since about 34 million years ago. In a greenhouse epoch you have no ice sheets anywhere, no glaciers, no ice ages. Our most distant ancestors that can be generally called hominid go back as far as six million years. We’re icehouse earth animals.
Sudden releases of CO2 have triggered sudden switches to greenhouse earth epochs in the past due to sudden huge eruptions of volcanic activity. We are in the process of triggering such a switch right now because we’ve more than doubled the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere in about 200 years. The issue is, nobody has any fucking clue if agriculture will even be possible in a greenhouse earth epoch or how it would work or how productive it would even be. Also, the example I mentioned of a very sudden transition to a greenhouse Earth state was followed by a horrific mass extinction because ecosystems don’t take well to sudden drastic transformations like that. In the long run it all evens out. The long run being millions of years.
If the ecosystems and natural processes that allow for agriculture to take place just fall apart and nothing takes their place (no we can’t just magically fill the gap agriculture is literally reliant on ecosystems doing a huge huge amount of work for us), you’re just going to have a sudden collapse and then probably a very, very very long time of effectively no agriculture being possible, or only very sparse and small scale agriculture that would not allow for populations approaching anything like we have today.