Comment by pingou
7 hours ago
How is global warning gonna kill all of humanity? Even a full scale nuclear war wouldn't manage that.
They could destroy most civilisations, culture and scientific achievements though.
7 hours ago
How is global warning gonna kill all of humanity? Even a full scale nuclear war wouldn't manage that.
They could destroy most civilisations, culture and scientific achievements though.
Because nuclear war balances itself: more nuclear bombings = less nuclear weapons, less people to send them. It will naturally stop at some fraction of humanity left which is incapable of making and launching more nukes
The general idea of a nuclear apocalypse is that all the nukes that matter are launched in a matter of hours, and anyone being targeted gets their launches out before they're hit. The feedback loop that slows things down is too late to matter.
In the exact same way major sudden changes in the climate have lead to the extinction of the majority of plants an animals over this planets history. We are not special.
We are special in many ways, we have technology, we are everywhere, and we can think and plan (although considering global warming that is debatable). Global warming would have to create dramatic conditions everywhere on the planet, not leaving any small pocket of survivability to make humans extinct.
Possible? Theoretically yes, but pretty unlikely. But obviously extreme global warming would be a catastrophe even if some of humanity survive.
Technology depends on a lot of people cooperating around the globe. Disrupt a few critical chains (power generation, fertilizers, computers), add a bit of good old war and you'll soon be in the era before Haber process and a lot of people die. And then the remaining people will have trouble keeping that level of technology with how sudden the change would be.
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There's little evidence that humans are able or willing to cooperate at this scale. See: the past century of climate change.
Runaway greenhouse effects on other planets have resulted in surface temps of 400C+
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We have a massive survival range and we're on every continent. That kind of sudden climate change is not nearly enough to wipe us out. Some other climate scenarios might. Nuclear war definitely could.
The thing that would end our species due to nuclear war is the exact same thing that would end us from climate change - a collapse of the modern systems of society that we depend on for survival. A nuclear exchange won't set every human on fire, but it's the collapse of food production, healthcare, logistics chains, security, and eventual disease that follows. And because of the size of our population and how depended the majority of us are on these systems, it would likely happen extremely quickly before plateauing out to very small, scattered population groups that would struggle in a hostile environment.
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Humans need food. Food does not just appear in supermarkets.
While true, the impact from global warming is likely to be less crops rather than no crops.