A lovely little sentence, elegantly understated and used as a seemingly off-handed conclusion to the abstract, which essentially means "the world may be about to end."
Also, NASA is hosting the full article: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201800...
It’s the unprecedented suddenness of this climate change that makes it doubtful organisms will be able to adapt. Maybe we shouldn’t be concerned with whether or not some form of life will still exist, but whether or not we will.
Another wildcard is how much damage humans may inflict on ecological systems in a desperate search for food, when crop yields decline.
I also expect increased overfishing and slash & burn agriculture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn#Ecological_impl...
In case it's of interest to anyone, the more general (and extreme) concept would be vertical farming.
For civilisation, humanity and most food chains that would effectively be the end of the world even if it did not include extinction of homo sapiens.
I don't understand why is that. What I do understand is that somehow, for so many like you, change is too often pictured as a bad thing. And I am glad that on the large scale we are inclined to be skeptical in our nature. And if some change happen to have something undesirable, I won't rush to blame the change, I would rather take a look at what change brought, good and bad, and only do something about the bad. So far, observing the general attitude, most of us seem to think like me.
Humans can (and will) get through climatic change events well enough. Even if today we could have only 20% of our current arable land, that would be enough to feed more than our current population level, providing that the necessary diet adjustments are made (e.g. less beef). The past mass extinctions could not be mitigated by coordinated reactive actions that are possible today and it's simply wrong to attempt to project something similar with equal level of destruction into our future. We have the power to preserve almost everything we deem worth preserving and we do exactly that. Actually, if nothing else, thanks to us, the life on our planet has the highest chance of survival in the future "mass extinction events".
Nothing wrong with change per se. Nothing at all wrong with discoveries and inventions that have brought modern levels of health and comfort if we mitigate the costs. Everything wrong with change that makes our planet less able to support biodiversity, or to be slightly more emotive, an unpleasant, marginal, place to be for everyone. Change and develop without triggering the next great collapse. I do not want my comfort to be at the expense of every future generation.
Thankfully, at least in Europe, there are signs that critical mass of public opinion is being reached and there are increasingly strident calls to do something substantive. That's at odds with the general state of political opinion which seems to be trailing public opinion markedly.
> Humans can (and will) get through climatic change events well enough
Based upon what? This appears to be nothing more than wishful thinking or presumption.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jan/06/katharine-ha...
> We have the power to preserve almost everything we deem worth preserving
Which appears to be nothing unless it is profitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
That humanity could survive is moot if it involves going through a millennia long dark age, or effectively bombing ourselves back to the iron age.
> thanks to us, the life on our planet has the highest chance of survival in the future
Again, our track record speaks loudly against this.
Based on many things. Our tenacity, for starters. Primitive as we were, tens of thousands of years ago we already had the capacity to populate almost the entire planet, be it the lush grasslands, or arctic/sandy deserts. Now count in our current capacity. Even in the unlikely event where we "bomb ourselves" into a nuclear winter, I very much doubt we'll suffer any long term major drawback. As the time progressed we simply became more proactive and prepared ourselves for such eventuality and have bounce-back plans in place. We have technical capacity to do a lot of things here on earth, including to direct the current climate change or even to arrest it if necessary. We just had no serious reason to do that. Overall, we are mostly at "seeking our comfort" stage, not on "straightening it up" stage. If the upcoming global warming will prove to be bad in almost all its aspects, that will warrant a change in our priorities; I have no doubts about it. But as I've tried to say, maybe the coming change isn't necessarily bad. Why won't we welcome it and experience it up close? What if the current increase in planetary temperature can be used somehow in our advantage? That, I reckon, is (or should be) our defining trait as evolving civilization.
"the life on our planet has the highest chance of survival in the future" "Again, our track record speaks loudly against this"
That is because you are inclined to listen that voice and ignore anything else contradicting it. We have reservations and other means where as time progressed, unlike the other extinction events, we took responsible steps towards preserving the existing species even in the face of their natural decline (arguably, examples of this may include Kakapo parrots or Panda bears).
Life's evolutionary adaptive capacity is stagerring! Just take a look at the experiment where it barely stretches muscles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8
What I understand they mean is "Life as we know it" defined as large animals and familiar plants roughly in places where we are used to seeing them. We are looking at life with our antropocentric point of view and we basically want familiar stuff to stay the same and we don't want unfamiliar stuff to show up. We don't want things to change and that's why potential large shift in how life presents itself may be caulled as "end of the world" event, but it is not.
Life doesn't care whether oceans are clean or polluted, hot or cold. It WILL adapt some way or another even if all crustaceans and fish will die because they can't adapt quickly enough to lowering pH.
We should care not because life is at danger but because we are at danger. Life as we know it is a machine that supports us, let's us grow food and provides air and water and soil and climate that we need. Humans will survive for sure in one way or another even if the temperature rises by 20 degrees but what kind of life will it be and how much suffering for those that can't deal with it?