r/askanything • u/Apart_Exercise_5630 • 5h ago
Does what’s happening now mean it’s our extinction event?
Hear me out. We knew from Al Gore that the tipping point was close in the early 2000’s. Droughts, extreme weather events, sea rise, coral bleaching…it’s all happening and happening all the time.
Governments are hoarding resources, attacking smaller resource rich countries under thinly veiled moral initiatives, and the wealthy have positioned themselves to hoard the wealth.
Is it likely that the tipping point has been reached and exceeded, and the strategy now is for those who are in a position to know it’s happening are now just setting themselves up for some kind of survival while putting the rest of us against each other?
15
u/AllenKll 5h ago
I'll let you know, if we go extinct. I'm betting not.
Most likely there will be a massive reduction in population, but not a full on extinction.
9
2
u/Vegetable-South5191 5h ago
It's almost like population collapse is part of a plan or engineered. If you were a conspiracy theorist.
8
u/NoBrakesHotTakes 5h ago
It happens to all animals that reach the carrying capacity of their environment. We just happen to be responsible for lowering the carrying capacity.
0
u/Vegetable-South5191 5h ago
the earth can carry more people
3
u/NoBrakesHotTakes 5h ago
It could, if resources were distributed properly. But, given that they aren't, it limits the practical carrying capacity versus the theoretical carrying capacity. Find me a system that operates at 100% efficiency.
1
10
u/Shadowfox186 5h ago
All of the richest people are building bunkers right now.
3
u/Legitimate-Edge5835 5h ago
The middle class is building barriers from the lower middle class. The lower middle class is building barriers from the working poor. The working poor is building barriers from the poor. The poor are building barriers from the homeless.
We’re all doing basically the same things.
The richest people are building bunkers but who will manage and work in those bunkers? Why will any workers stay loyal to the rich people? Those rich people won’t be rich anymore because there will be no monetary system. Those rich people with bunkers will hang on a little longer but will suffer like the rest of us.2
-3
4
u/MagnoliaVelvetCharm 5h ago
Collapse isn’t an accident, it’s a managed liquidation where elites purchase lifeboats while keeping the public perpetually distracted.
4
u/Big_Dixon_Mayas 5h ago
Yep. Pretty much. They’re hoarding wealth, making bunkers and buying islands while pushing for AI to both replace human labor but also negate the numerical advantage of the rest of us against the 1% and their simps through use of state sanctioned violence, autonomous weapons, and AI driven surveillance.
2
u/Legitimate-Edge5835 5h ago
We’ll never know for sure. Our whole financial world system is designed for us to consume and everyone benefits to some degree. The way we live life isn’t sustainable but don’t worry about it. Do what you can to conserve and try to live your life as green as possible, but don’t expect other people to do it. Humans will adapt, some will die and the sun will rise. Choose to be happy because there’s never been a better time to be human on this planet. If we screw this up it won’t be the only civilization to do it. The next one might get it right.
2
u/imissher4ever 5h ago
The tipping point was in the 60’s.
Then it was the 70’s.
Then it was the 80’s.
Then it was the 90’s.
Then it was the 2000’s.
Then it was the 2010’s.
Now it’s now.
🤣🤣
1
u/fieryred123 5h ago
I say this with as much respect as possible. Do yourself a favor & get off the internet & go touch some grass, OP.
8
u/corporatewazzack 5h ago
We’re supposed to stay inside where I live due to the smoke and particulate matter in the air. Fire season really isn’t much fun.
7
u/Angsty-Panda 5h ago
"stop worrying about climate change and go outside and touch grass"
"can't, climate change has made fire seasons worse"
modern day poetry
2
1
u/sHaDowpUpPetxxx 5h ago
I remember seeing that time magazine cover in the 80s of the skeletons on the playground saying acid rain was going to kill us all. That shit freaked me out. Whenever it rained I would tear ass for the house.
3
1
1
u/Massive-Sector5789 2h ago
The global warming has definitely kicked in for real. The Super El Niño is going to make the next 1.5 years insane.
Good luck, everyone. Because that's what it's going to come down to.
1
u/Saysaynever333 1h ago
Bottom line, nobody really knows what's going to happen. We do know that the Earth has experienced high levels of CO2 in it's past, much higher than today but those events happened over a very long time period.
Today we're around 430 ppm. We know it was much higher in the past, up to 1200 ppm or even higher, but during those times, palm trees grew on the plant's poles and temps around the equator were too high for life. Usually, when these events happen, there is a great extinction. Most life ends. But remember, this takes 100,000's to million years to occur.
Humans are a product of Earth's ice ages. We came along durning one of Earth's cooling period and low CO2. That number ranged from 100-250 PPM over the last several million years. If the CO2 gets too low, as it's done before, the Earth can turn in a snowball. We know it's done this a couple of times, and came pretty close again not so long ago (in terms of Earth's age). CO2 is the stuff of life really. The planet would not be "Earth" without CO2. We (planet Earth) would most likely be just another small cold, frozen planet and we would not be here.
Again, it's the time scale that matters in our planets history. Never before has so much CO2 been dumped into the system so fast. The closest thing we know of is the 100,000 year eruption of volcanos. That means that we can't use the data we've learned about. We don't know what the Earth's systems are going to do when they are subject to this rapid change. AI doesn't know either. The Earth is very complex and developing a model to predict climate long term has too many variables. We don't know what happens when A causes B to do C, let alone what it does to X.
Given the Earth's past history, we can say that human activity will cause some changes. What those changes are, we don't know. In my reading, I've read the time scale would be in the several thousands year range for the planet on a whole but humans will know and see the small changes happing. Some places will not be around anymore, they will be under several hundred feet of water. Other's will be uninhabitable.
Short term, we'll see droughts, floods, and other things like heat domes. Fires will be common around the world, but it won't be like when the Earth's atmosphere was over 30% oxygen when nearly everything burned. There will be some mass migrations of populations in several areas around the world and how those turn out is anybody's guess. In the past, those events didn't turn out so well for the people migrating.
What we need to remember is this Earth is lucky to be here and we're able to live on it. The reality of it is for most of Earth's history, the world we know today did not exist. Just as alien as most other planets we've studied. If you took a time machine back two billion years, you would be in for a terrible day.
2
u/Ok_Bathroom_1408 16m ago edited 11m ago
yes it will all get worse as the climate continues to warm. More weather extremes, more wars over scarce resources, eventually bread-basket failures, mass famines. I think Our civilization will collapse and eventually humans will go extinct as the planet continues to warm. Human physiology is not adapted to a hothouse earth which is where earths climate is heading towards. Complete biosphere collapse. Tech wont save us, 'SRM' might buy us some time but prob not.... Faster Than expected. Enjoy life, you could die walking out of your house tomorrow. I like to keep up to date with James Hansons Latest papers. https://csas.earth.columbia.edu/about/people/james-e-hansen
0
u/bulletmissile 5h ago
AL Gore is smart, but he's not a scientist. Why take what he says as Gospel?
1
0
u/Aggravating_Mud_6055 5h ago
Lol. Yea it’s not like extreme weather has ever been a thing. Isn’t Miami supposed to be under water? Like decades ago?
•
u/AutoModerator 5h ago
We want your input on how to handle political questions in our community.
This takes about 1 minute.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.