Comment by maxxxxx
9 years ago
Global warming will cause a lot of problems and people may die but no way will we go extinct. There is zero risk for that unless global temperature goes up an enormous amount and the oceans boil off or something like that.
Zero risk? The human race has come close to extinction already by our own hands directly. To say that there's zero risk, adding in all the chaos that will spawn from the climate change projected, is simply laughable. More and more people will have nothing to lose, and they'll go down fighting.
And besides, there are more catastrophic risks on our plate than just climate change.
Even then, if some small number were to survive, the modern ways of living would be over and it'd be a much harder go the second time around, with so many things we take for granted now already spent, or tainted.
When has the human race come close to extinction by our own hands? The only near-extinction I'm aware of is the theorized population bottleneck caused by the Toba eruption, whose existence seems to be disputed and which in any case wasn't caused by our own hands.
If you're referring to global thermonuclear war, there was (and still is) the constant threat of destroying civilization, but never any chance of causing the extinction of the species.
I agree with that guy, our economies will collapse, our civilization will stagnate. But no way will this lead to our extinction (unless it breeds a superbug).
The biggest issue I see is that the already tropical areas of the world will become unsustainable for farming. How are we going to move these billions of people out of there newly created deserts. Of course, such changes are going to be slow and visible beforehand. It will happen over the course of decades if not a century. I wonder if we will make a world government and allow people from those regions to immigrate to places that are currently frozen tundra.
So, allow mexicans to go to Canada?
Unless the economy collapse will trigger a truly destructive world war. That is not out of question.
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I am not saying that things can't get very bad but I don't believe we can go extinct. Even if 99.9% of humans die the rest could go underground and have nuclear reactors to provide energy and whatever is needed. It won't be pretty but I believe humans are just too inventive to go completely extinct.
Humans won't go extinct but modern civilization might
Open positive feedback loops are very difficult to estimate where they will end up. We could easily end up in a range of climate where it's difficult to impossible for human kind to raise food or conduct civilization in the nearly the same manner as we do now. In the really far out outcomes, who knows if the atmosphere would stay in any sort of human habitable range.