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Comment by nicklecompte | Hacker News Reader

To be clear I don't think anthropogenic climate change will cause human extinction. But a terrible series of volcanos could absolutely turn Earth into a colder Venus for, say, a couple hundred years - pelagic vertebrates and certain microbes would be ok, but I am not sure humanity would survive more than a few generations, even in underground sci-fi bunkers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_ev...

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It would have to be worse than the previous volcanic extinction events, which were massive. It's not clear the Earth can even do that anymore.

> It's not clear the Earth can even do that anymore.

This is a good point, but the event wouldn't need to be more volcanic so much as that volcanism would need to ignite more carbon-containing materials - naively I would expect there to me more "fuel" in the Earth than there was 300m years ago.

That's also a good point

> But a terrible series of volcanos could absolutely turn Earth into a colder Venus for, say, a couple hundred years

Minoans went from the thriving trading center of the Mediterranean with written language as old as Egyptian Hieroglyphics to seemingly irrelevant for a while during the Bronze Age because volcanic eruptions seemed to have turned the air they breathed to poison. Not to mention places allegedly hit by the fall of volcanic ash whose remains are so far deep we only speculate they lived there.

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