Surely the circulation will increase in power and shift to different places. The circulation of water isn’t going to just stop, right?
Life on earth:
Fuck it let’s go. Day After Tomorrow us. There’s a whole section on tax law down here that we can burn.
Damn, we actually collapsed our environment in the name of profit. This must be the great filter. Its the enticing imaginary bullshit that leads to total obliteration over advancement. The chasing of made-up dragons to make some nonexistent number rise.
There’s a scene in Sagan’s Cosmos where he’s exploring the possibilities of life elsewhere. He’s in the Ship of the Imagination, looking around at various potentials. He runs across one planet teeming with a civilization, from orbit it had even more lights and connections that our own at night. And then the lights suddenly go out. He discusses how even thriving life can suddenly die and speculates on a few reasons why this one might have, like resources or war or whatever. Summary from memory, I have no idea which episode it’s in.
In reality it wouldn’t be a sudden disappearance, but a longer decay. The lights shutting off was just to illustrate how easy it is to lose something assumed to be permanent. I’d also recommend the beginning of Revolution to get that same surreal feeling, although the rest of the series was blah.
Ah, Cosmos, I remember watching that when I still believed people were creatures of knowledge and advancement. We’ll never know any of those things cause we spent the last 50 years prioritizing profit over all else. It didnt have to be like this.
What we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization, and perhaps our species as well
Carl Sagan
Sagan always said we had the potential to be better, but he was also concerned it was an uphill climb. Where Carlin got angrier with age, I think Sagan would just have been disappointed in us. Especially in the fall back into ignorance and superstition, something else he warned about in The Demon-Haunted World. Every quote you can find from that book is profound, but this one is eerily hard hitting:
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
Just read it a couple of months ago and it was these little nuggets that kept hitting me hard leaving me like what’s-his-face when he saw the statue of liberty in planet of the apes. We had a nice thing going.
I don’t believe planet self-destruction is the The great filter, just our filter and we failed. In all fairness it’s probably the first of many future filters that would have gotten us too.
The irony of filling up my screen with an advertisement as I try to read about what will be the collapse of our civilization is not lost on me.
So, what does this all mean for us? It means we have even less time to get our act together. Reducing emissions isn’t just a good idea — it’s crucial.
Our planet’s systems are interconnected in ways we’re only beginning to understand. If we want to keep things from getting worse, we need to act now. Every little bit counts, and the clock is ticking.
In other words…we’re fucked.
Well, yeah.
You were expecting maybe all of the countries of the world to absolve their differences and join hands to defeat the problems of climate change?
Sounds kinda like a fairy tale.
Yes, we are likely seeing the last generation of humans on earth.
We’re likely to see a lot of suffering and disruption along with increased mortality, but humans are way too resourceful to go extinct, even with a severe disruption to the climate
Maybe, depends on how uninhabitable the planet actually gets. We think we know what that looks like, but there are pretty wide error bars around the worst case scenarios.
Hmm, even if parts of the world become totally uninhabitable, this would also mean that other parts of the world will become more inhabitable. Usually arctic areas further away from the equator.
So yes there would be a lot of death and suffering but I don’t think we’d go 100% extinct.
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This only fucks Europe, right?
“This would bring big changes to the climate and ecosystems, including faster warming in the southern hemisphere, harsher winters in Europe, and weakening of the northern hemisphere’s tropical monsoons.”
Short answer: no.
Long answer: nope.
But I was told capitalism was the best economic system in the world! Would the capitalists lie to me?
Close your eyes and think of England…
Great Britain will get more than chilly. Arable land was expected to drop from 32% of the region down to 22% by 2080, slashing their economy by a third. If the AMOC is already showing signs of breakdown, that timeline will need to be shortened.
I’m reasonably sure I read a Clive Cussler book with that as the evil villain’s plot.
