There were no ice caps when primates evolved. I am excited to go back to the climate of my ancestors.
edit: bryanlarsen pointed out that there was an even more extreme event in earth's history.
It kicked off the largest mass extinction event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
"very quick" = 60 ± 48 thousand years, we're aiming for 100 years or so
> It kicked off the largest mass extinction event
Yet. Let's wait few decades.
> It is also the largest known mass extinction of insects.
We're already 75-80% down.
https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-insect-population-fl...
https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-202...
https://wwflpr.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_2022_full_r...
There has been about 69 per cent decline in the wildlife population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish across the globe in the last 50 years. The highest decline, 94 per cent was in Latin America and Caribbean region. According to WWF report, Africa recorded 66 percent fall in wildlife population, the Asia Pacific 55 percent and population of freshwater species reduced by 83 percent globally.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12816
The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?
"Estimate that, since around AD 1500, possibly as many as 7.5–13% (150,000–260,000) of all ~2 million known species have already gone extinct, orders of magnitude greater than the 882 (0.04%) on the Red List."
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22287498/meat-wildlife-bi...
The way we eat could lead to habitat loss for 17,000 species by 2050
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-glob...
Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss
While the 19th-21th century increase of 1-1.2C or so is a bit faster, it's not a magnitude faster.
Humans have definitely changed nature everywhere, and is probably responsible for many species dying. But blaming that on the climate change doesn't really make sense. Deforestation is much more likely to be the cause.
Mainly our agriculture (deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution), misuse of fossil fuels and the structures of our societal and financial systems.
Reform of agriculture might be it. Agriculture is also the leading driver of deforestation (50% of pastures were forested in the past).
> large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either
But it could, it's probably the best tool in our arsenal. And it would not only affect CO2, but many of our other problems too (droughts, biodiversity, warming ...).
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4
Agricultural land use, particularly for animal feed, poses the biggest obstacle to ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration, hindering climate efforts. The potential for carbon sequestration is vast, with enough capacity to meet the entire 1.5°C carbon budget.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/improvin...
Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests. Better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap...
The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately, says study
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/06/to-meet-u-n-climate-biodiv...
To meet U.N. climate, biodiversity goals, 79% of plant cover must be saved, study
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).
No we wouldn't. Everybody gets cause and effect backwards on this one. They see that we're using essentially all of our arable land for food production and draw the conclusion that's how much is needed to produce the amount of food we currently produce.
But it's actually the other way around. We use all the land available because that's the cheapest way to produce the amount of food we need. If we had more land, we'd use it and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd produce the same amount of food, but it would be more expensive.
For an extreme example, we could probably feed 8 trillion people on the same amount of land by covering all of our arable land with greenhouses.
So, while we can definitely get creative with land use, we also need to consider the costs and environmental impacts.
It would not be so bad, imho. Industrial ag might be effective (from the economic viewpoint, very destructive from the environmental one), but not as much as producers of that stuff would like us to beliveve. And if we manage to deplete our soils even further, then even industrial ag wouldn't be able to do much.
We could and should change the way we farm, while preserving comparable yields. It might be necessary to learn farming again, or invent new machinery. There are dozens of methods we could utilize (syntropic, natural, veganic farming, permaculture, food forests, nitrogen fixing plants / trees, companion planting, etc.), and new ones would be found.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...
"The analysis we present here offers a new perspective, based on organic yield data collected from over 10,000 organic farmers representing nearly 800,000 hectares of organic farmland. Averaged across all crops, organic yield averaged 80% of conventional yield. However, several crops had no significant difference in yields between organic and conventional production, and organic yields surpassed conventional yields for some hay crops."
https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/what-is-the-sixth-mass...
15 thousand years ago Canada was under 3 kilometers of ice. Now it is home to 40 million people and covered in wildlife.
The human population went from 2 million to 8 billion during this warming period.
All the evidence points to a warmer planet supporting more life, not less.
A fast enough change will:
- Make places where large numbers of people currently live uninhabitable due to temperature and sea levels
- Kill off most plants and animals because the ones in a given place won't be adapted to the new climate, even if theoretically the climate in other places would now be suited to them, in a way that will take millions of years to recover from.
Simply saying "warmer is better" is utterly missing the point.
Where is the evidence that the trend is ending?
An airliner lands on a runway and smoothly decelerates from 150 MPH to zero over 10,000 feet. This is just fine.
An airliner does the same deceleration over 10 feet. Everyone on board dies in a huge fireball.
Even for neutral or beneficial changes, the rate matters.
You mean wildfire? Bad autocorrect. /s
current population 50.000.000 population in 1950: 6 191 000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sudan
I'd say they've been thriving.
Russia's tundra becomes arable land, and their fossil fuels become more accessible. Their navy will be able to freely roam the seas when the polar ice caps melt.
Canada will receive the same benefits - enormous access to fresh water, ease of navigation, and agriculturally ideal conditions.
Greenland will have an increasingly large stake in geopolitics, trade, and energy.
China will be less existentially concerned about a blockade of the Strait of Malacca.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/wildfires-peat-chall...
And they'll lose.
If you look at the distribution of power, it's not predicted to change all that much. The superpowers are enormously capable of maintaining their grip.
The complaints of poor nations will be met with meager welfare packages and mostly tuned out by the working class of weather nations. It's how the world already operates.
Put the American economy at risk and you get the Gulf War. Attack America directly and you get the Pacific theater.
In any case, none of those particular points matter. No poor country is going to be able to resource starve the wealthiest nations. If they try to invade or block trade, they'll find out the limits of their power.
Several of the countires made "poor" by climate change will have nuclear weapons: Indian, Pakistan, France, Israel, North Korea. You're living in a fantasy. Time to wake up.