Energy Giant Shell Says Oil Demand Could Peak in Just Five Years

Good note. Oil is fairly inelastic. I would say terminal velocity on that would be just before it costs the same amount of energy to extract energy. That can be converted to dollars just as well. That's a good thing about renewable and alternate energy, it erodes that inelasticity so when terminal velocity hits, we aren't all breeding horses again.

I'm not sure how likely/unlikely this is, but that's the theory.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/06/could-fo...

That may not be quite as pressing an issue for us as war and famine, but it's not the same thing as "fine".

Keep in mind though that a mass extinction is part of the process of accelerating evolution. You don't get a quick adaptation without a strong selection process.

Edit: By 'slight chance' I mean very much near zero btw. However I'm skeptic enough of climate models to know that they aren't good enough to include all the domino effects we've never seen. The Permiam-Triassic boundary saw tremendous forest fires along with abrupt methane release, and that didn't include a species actively releasing enormous amounts of fossilised carbon. I'd imagine that if a few worst case scenarios came together - finding more fossil fuel sources, burning up all of it and causing unstoppable forest fires in all large remaining forests, it could happen.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130729-runaw...

On the specific question of evolution, major changes happen on a timescale of thousands if not millions of years. For example, despite huge changes in our environment, humans today are basically the same as they were tens of thousands of years ago.

Earth will probably return to something like an equilibrium, both in terms of climate and in terms of wildlife, in a million years or less. But that doesn't do us any good when the threat to our civilization, from climate change and ecosystem collapse, is in the next century or two.

I know that I was vague with using the word 'complex', but 96% of all marine species, with only small, 'squishy' (low calcium carbonate content in bodies) species surviving, is enough for me.

It's also interesting to look at what probably caused that particular, so far most devastating extinction event.

2. After several generations nobody alive has ever seen a coral reef, a whale or dolphin. Most of the 'attractive' marine environments are heavily compromised so nobody is interested in preserving the marine environment anymore as it's mostly gone already.

3. Humans develop a global stable civilization.

4. After a million years or so the remaining marine habitats and life forms have heavily adapted to the new environment. Few to no higher animals remain that resemble their 'natural' forms. Humanity comes to regard these as vermine.

Project the above over another couple of billions of years.

Alternative hypothesis: it's simple denial, much like Nokia and more recently RIM.

"The Aegean Collapse has been attributed to the exhaustion of the Cyprus forests causing the end of the bronze trade. These forests are known to have existed into later times, and experiments have shown that charcoal production on the scale necessary for the bronze production of the late Bronze Age would have exhausted them in less than fifty years."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age#European_timeline

I don't know enough about the subject beyond what's there to say how accurate it is, but it's a place to start.

Careerwise, I have avoided going with the pull of migrating to our industry's big centers (the most known being Sillicon Valley), since I consider those places to be unsustainable. If I were young and single, I may have gone for a couple of years to gain a quick buck, and then get out; but I am a middle-aged father or two now, and don't think it is worth it even today to subject your family to that kind of pressure, just for the sake of being one of the cool guys.

This will not save the world at all (not that it is the world that needs any saving), but hopefully puts me and my family in a less exposed position for the consequences of resource depletion.