some credible scientists believe humanity is verrrrrry close to destruction | vice united kingdom
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SOME CREDIBLE SCIENTISTSBELIEVE HUMANITY IS VERRRRRRY
CLOSE TO DESTRUCTIONBy Nathan Curry
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Presumably painted by a Near Term Extinctionist. via Flickr.
If you were to zoom out and take a comparative look back at our planet during the 1950s from
some sort of cosmic time-travelling orbiter cube, you would probably first notice that millions of
pieces of space trash had disappeared from orbit.
The moon would appear six and a half feet closer to Earth, and the continents of Europe and
North America would be four feet closer together. Zooming in, you would be able to spot some
of the industrial clambering of the Golden Age of Capitalism in the West and some of the stilted
attempts at the Great Leap Forwardin the East. Lasers, bar codes, contraceptives, hydrogen
bombs, microchips, credit cards, synthesizers, superglue, Barbie dolls, pharmaceuticals, factory
farming, and distortion pedals would just be coming into existence.
There would be two thirds fewer humans on the planet than there are now. Over a million
different species of plants and animals would exist that have since gone extinct. There would be
90 percent more fish, a billion less tons of plastic, and 40 percent more phytoplankton
(producers of half the planets oxygen) in the oceans. There would be twice as many trees
covering the land and about three times more drinking water available from ancient aquifers.
There would be about 80 percent more ice covering the northern pole during the summer
season and 30 percent less carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. The list goes on...
Most educated and semi-concerned people know that these sorts of sordid details make up the
backdrop of our retina-screened, ethylene-ripened story of progress, but what happens when
you start stringing them all together?
IfDoomsday Preppers, the highest rated show on the National Geographic Channel is any
indication, the general public seems to be getting ready for some sort of societal collapse. There
have always been doomsday prophets and cults around and everyone has their own personal
view of how the apocalypse will probably go down (ascension of pure souls, zombie crows), but
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threat of human-induced climate change on the survival of the human species.
Recent data seems to suggest that we may have already tripped several irrevocable, non-linear,
positive feedback loops (melting of permafrost, methane hydrates, and arctic sea ice) that make
an average global temperature increase of only 2C by 2100 seem like a fairy tale. Instead,
were talking 4C, 6C, 10C, 16C (????????) here.
The link between rapid climate change and human extinction is basically this: the planet
becomes uninhabitable by humans if the average temperature goes up by 4-6C. It doesnt
sound like a lot because were used to the temperature changing 15C overnight, but the thing
that is not mentioned enough is that even a 2-3C average increase would give us temperatures
that regularly surpass 40C (104F) in North America and Europe, and soar even higher near
the equator. Human bodies start to break down after six hours at a wet-bulb (100% humidity)
temperature of 35C (95F). This makes the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed over
70,000 people seem like not a very big deal.
Factoring in the increase were already seeing in heat waves, droughts, wildfires, massive
storms, food and water shortages, deforestation, ocean acidification, and sea level rise some
are seeing the writing on the wall:
Were all gonna die!
If you want to freak yourself the fuck out, spend a few hours trying to refute the mounting
evidence of our impending doom heralded by the man who gave the Near Term Extinction
movement its name, Guy McPherson, on his blog Nature Bats Last. McPherson is a former
Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the
University of Arizona, who left his cushy tenured academic career and now lives in a straw-bale
house on a sustainable commune in rural New Mexico in an attempt to walk away from
Empire. There are a lot ofinterviews and videos available of Dr. McPherson talking about
NTE if you want to boost your pessimism about the future to suicidal/ruin-any-dinner-party
levels.
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be on a clear path toward extinction now that its probably too late to do anything about it (hint:
suicide or shrooms). As Drumright points out, the entirety of human philosophy, religion, and
politics doesnt really provide a framework for processing the psychological terror of all of
humanity not existing in the near future.
Outside of the official NTE enclave, there are a lot of scientists and journalists who would
probably try to avoid being labeled as NTE proponents, but are still making the same sort of dire
predictions about our collective fate. They may not believe that humans will ALL be gone by
mid-century, but massive, catastrophic population decline due to human-induced rapid climate
change is not out of the picture.
James Hansen, the former head of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the
worlds leading climatologists has recently retired from his position after 43 years in order to
concentrate on climate-change activism. He predicts that without full de-carbonization by 2030,
global CO2 emissions will be 16 times higher than in 1950, guaranteeing catastrophic climate
change. In an essay published in April of this year, Hansen states:
If we should succeed in digging up and burning all fossil fuels, some parts of the planet would
become literally uninhabitable, with some times during the year having wet bulb temperatures
exceeding 35C. At such temperatures, for reasons of physiology and physics, humans cannot
survive it is physically impossible for the environment to carry away the 100W of metabolic
heat that a human body generates when it is at rest. Thus even a person lying quietly naked in
hurricane force winds would be unable to survive.
Bill McKibben, prominent green journalist, author, distinguished scholar, and one of the founders
of 350.org the movement that aims to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels to 350ppm in the hopes
of avoiding runaway climate change wrote a book in 2011 called Eaarth: Making a Life on a
Tough New Planet. In it he highlights current environmental changes that have put uspastthe
predictions that had previously been reserved for the end of the 21st
century. He emphasizes
that the popular political rhetoric that we need to do something about climate change for our
grandchildren is sorely out of touch with reality. This is happening now. Were already living ona sci-fi planet from a parallel universe:
The Arctic ice cap is melting, the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with
disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans are distinctly more acid and their level is
risingThe greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more
powerfulThe great rain forest of the Amazon is drying on its marginsThe great boreal forest
of North America is dying in a matter of years [This] new planet looks more or less like our
own but clearly isnt This is the biggest thing thats ever happened.
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Climate Change protesters in Melbourne. via Flickr.
Peter Ward is a paleontologist and author whose 2007 book Under a Green Sky: Global
Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What they Can Tell Us About the Future,
provides evidence that all but one of the major global extinction events (dinosaurs) occurred due
to rapid climate change caused by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This time
around, the carbon dioxide increase happens to be coming from humans figuring out how to dig
billions of tons of carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the air. Ward states that during
the last 10,000 years in which human civilization has emerged, our carbon dioxide levels and
climate have remained anomalously stable, but the future doesnt look so good:
The average global temperature has changed as much as 18F [8C] in a few decades. The
average global temperature is 59F [15C]. Imagine that it shot to 75F [24C] or dropped to
40F [4C], in a century or less. We have no experience of such a world... at minimum, such
sudden changes would create catastrophic storms of unbelievable magnitude and fury...lashing
the continents not once a decade or century but several times each year...For most of the last
100,000 years, an abruptly changing climate was the rule, not the exception.
Far from being a Mother Earth lover, Ward has also developed an anti-Gaia hypothesis that he
calls the Medea Hypothesis in which complex life, instead of being in symbiotic harmony with
the environment, is actually a horrible nuisance. In this hypothesis, the planet and microbial life
have worked together multiple times to trigger mass extinction events that have almost
succeeded in returning the earth to its microbe-dominant state. In other words, Mother Earth
might be Microbe Earth and she might be trying to kill her kids.
Scientists are putting out the warning call that rapid, life-threatening climate change lies ahead
in our near future but most are drowned out by the political arguments and denialist rhetoric of
climate change skeptics. The well-funded effort by free market think tanks, energy lobbyists, and
industry advocates to blur the public perception of climate science should come as no surprise.
The thermodynamic forcing effects of an ice-free artic by 2015 dont seem so threatening if you
stand to gain billions of dollars by sending drill bits into the potentially huge oil reservoirs there.
It may not be the case that the southwest US will be uninhabitable by 2035, or that all of human
life will be extinguished in a generation, but we should probably start to acknowledge and
internalize what some of the people who have given their lives to better understand this planet
are saying about it. Its depressing to think that humans, in our current state, could be the
Omega Point of consciousness. Maybe sentience and the knowledge of our inevitable death
have given us a sort of survival vertigo that we cant overcome. As the separate paths of
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Previously:
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By Nathan Curry 2 weeks ago
Tags: climate change, extinction, human extinction, near term extinction, Global Warming, world, planet, Heat
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