Ready for the next Ice Age? Winter is coming.

FluffyMcDeath said:
It's not the world that's going to end - but we do face the possibility of human extinction by the middle of the century. It doesn't take many crop failures to cause mass starvation on the planet as it currently is and if we lose significant population we cannot keep the machinery running that we depend on to grow our crops - and most people don't have access to seed or knowledge of how to grow and if climate change moves the crop region sufficiently north then the growing season will be decreased because of less daylight hours and we won't be able to move production north at any rate that will make much of a difference. Combine that with the collapse of the ecosystem - large edible fauna especially - because other systems won't be able to keep up with the rate of change then there aren't likely to be too many living humans in that kind of realm. It's actually a real possibility that deserves some attention.
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Doomsday scenarios like this are fear mongering. That's not how a warming planet would work out.

FluffyMcDeath said:
Watch the wheat.
https://www.graincentral.com/cropping/global-supply-issues-likely-to-push-wheat-values-higher/
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Wheat is no longer wheat. Over the last ~50 years wheat has been hybridized and genetically modified into something that is not wheat. What human beings cultivated and consumed for thousands of years is not what is being grown now. Modern wheat is poison. What this bastardization of a plant species will ultimately do to its yield over time is uncharted territory.
 
redrumloa said:
Doomsday scenarios like this are fear mongering. That's not how a warming planet would work out.
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Nobody really knows how it would work out. But rapid change is worse than slow change. We don't really know what sensitivities all of the things we depend on for life have, but everything we eat must be grown.

Wheat is no longer wheat. Over the last ~50 years wheat has been hybridized and genetically modified into something that is not wheat. What human beings cultivated and consumed for thousands of years is not what is being grown now. Modern wheat is poison. What this bastardization of a plant species will ultimately do to its yield over time is uncharted territory.
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Doesn't really matter what you think wheat is these days - but it's food. If more than one of the worlds bread baskets sees a sever failure then people will die of something we thought was history - famine. Other crops are also vulnerable.
 
Robert said:
31 years? Possible but highly unlikely.
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Unlikely, but also, consider - how many weather related crop failures will it take to bring people into the streets? How many deaths before the systems of modern civilization don't work properly and how many deaths will the break downs of those systems bring? And at what point are high level things like air travel impacted? After 9/11 air travel was shut down for a few days and studies suggest that the surface temperature in the shut down areas was 2C above normal. If global air travel shuts down because the underlying infrastructure is struggling due to lack of capable workers and willing users, the global temp goes up a degree or two in a week - and then how are the humans and the animals and the crops doing? There are a few trip wires in the system and we won't really know what they are unless we trip on them - but if we trip, we quickly lose the ability to respond.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Unlikely, but also, consider - how many weather related crop failures will it take to bring people into the streets? How many deaths before the systems of modern civilization don't work properly and how many deaths will the break downs of those systems bring? And at what point are high level things like air travel impacted? After 9/11 air travel was shut down for a few days and studies suggest that the surface temperature in the shut down areas was 2C above normal. If global air travel shuts down because the underlying infrastructure is struggling due to lack of capable workers and willing users, the global temp goes up a degree or two in a week - and then how are the humans and the animals and the crops doing? There are a few trip wires in the system and we won't really know what they are unless we trip on them - but if we trip, we quickly lose the ability to respond.
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I get all of that but, even if everything you suggest were to come to pass, the chances of that resulting in every single human being dead within the next 31 years is still quite the stretch.
 
Robert said:
I get all of that but, even if everything you suggest were to come to pass, the chances of that resulting in every single human being dead within the next 31 years is still quite the stretch.
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Would you be more comfortable if it was 100 years? Complex systems tend to be chaotic - they don't degrade linearly, they fail catastrophically. A Jenga pile gets taller and more porous with time, but its collapse is always sudden and often near total. The passenger pigeon population went from billions to zero in 50 years and that wasn't all down to hunting - it seems like they were not able to adapt to the biggest change in their environment - which was the sudden drop in number of passenger pigeons - they couldn't survive as small populations. Humans are similarly dependent on their being a large number of humans.
Perhaps it's only civilisation as we know it that ends (we don't really know how many bad harvests it takes to destroy our civilisation but old, more localised civilisations fell very fast. If we returned to the pretech state of the 1400s or thereabouts, the carrying capacity of the planet was just a couple of hundred million people, most of whom were farmers, hunter-gatherers or both, were smaller, genetically more severely selected, and for farmers were geographically constrained to try to make their living within 10 miles of their birth place. Migration was difficult, establishing new colonies unreliable. 31 years may be a low ball number but I don't think people have much understanding of the artificial system that support their lives. About half of the nitrogen in your body (in proteins) was fixed from the air by the Haber Bosch process which uses 1-2% of the worlds energy annually - but that process itself depends on a functioning infrastructure.
It's not possible to predict when the damage will be enough to cascade and how far it will collapse but when it collapses it will probably happen fairly suddenly and be a surprise.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Would you be more comfortable if it was 100 years?
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It's not a question of being comfortable.
It's simply an opinion on the probability, taking into account average human lifespan, world population and the incredibly narrow window of 31 years.
 
Robert said:
It's not a question of being comfortable.
It's simply an opinion on the probability, taking into account average human lifespan, world population and the incredibly narrow window of 31 years.
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And so I asked how whether changing the timescale to 100 years changed your feeling about how probable it would be in that case.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
And so I asked how whether changing the timescale to 100 years changed your feeling about how probable it would be in that case.
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Given how this conversation started, wasn't it already blindingly obvious I'd think anything longer than 31 years would be more probable?
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
So the answer was "yes" then.
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Of course it was. That much was implicit in my original skepticism of your projected timescale.
Unless you thought I was implying that 31 years was too long, but that would be even sillier than this straw-man nonsense.

The only point I was making was that the timescale seemed short.
Your point now seems to be, "would you still think the timescale was short if the timescale wasn't short?"
The glaringly obvious answer to which is "of course not," perhaps followed by "what's your point?".

Unless I've missed something.
 
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Robert said:
Unless I've missed something.
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I think you must have. I'm not talking about it talking a hundred years to kill everyone versus 30 years to kill everyone - it only takes 40 days to kill someone by starvation, a fourth of that (or less in heat) to die of dehydration, and only a few hours from heat stroke. The question isn't how long it would take to kill everyone, but how likely a major killing event will occur in a given time period. The lives of billions of people depend on an entire system working, just as the trillions of cells in your body depend on certain vital functions. You could make an argument that it is unlikely that all of those trillions of cells would be dead at some arbitrary time in the future - generally some will die and some won't - until something important goes wrong and then it's a virtual certainty that all of the cells will be dead shortly thereafter. The probability each day that this will have happened is low, but over 30 years it's greater than 0, over 100 years it's a virtual certainty (200 yrs probability is 1 unless we make a breakthrough).

There have always been things that could end us, like asteroids and super volcanoes, but there are also many small insults here or there that will knock us back. The collapse of the Soviet Union caused millions of excess deaths especially in young and middle aged men and it takes a while to recover from those things, but the further we put ourselves down the path of making the planet harder to live on the more those little things add up. Refusing to look at how things could go pear-shaped means not seeing them coming and having no way to cope if they do. It's the economy in 1929 or 2008 - there are problems already apparent to those who look but the pundits don't want the marks to stop putting there money in so the Cassandra's are poo-pooed.

We live in sophisticated times with complex systems. One of the things that made the Soviet collapse less bad than it could have been is that most people didn't trust the system to work for them and maintained black markets and back channels and parallel economies to get by. In the past the systems were less complex and more people had the knowledge and means to survive on their own or in small groups, so they were able to plant and farm or hunt as needed. This is less true now.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
I think you must have. I'm not talking about it talking a hundred years to kill everyone versus 30 years to kill everyone ...
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This discussion started because of a suggestion that the world would end in 12 years time.
Red and I ridiculed it but you replied that "we do face the possibility of human extinction by the middle of the century" (31 years time)
I pointed out this was highly unlikely in such a short space of time.
You explained why you thought extinction was possible & when I said I agreed with your explanation but 31 years was still a short space of time, you asked if I'd be more comfortable with 100 years.
I pointed out that should be obvious because it's a longer period of time.

Given all that, it sure looked like you were talking about the length of time for humanity to become extinct.
It's certainly what I thought we were talking about.

If you're now saying you were not talking about that but instead highlighting the mechanism and didn't mean to put a time on it, that's great - we are in agreement.

But maybe if you had have left out the "by the middle of the century" part, it would have saved us both a lot of time. ;)
 
Robert said:
If you're now saying you were not talking about that but instead highlighting the mechanism and didn't mean to put a time on it, that's great - we are in agreement.

But maybe if you had have left out the "by the middle of the century" part, it would have saved us both a lot of time. ;)
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The actual extinction need only take a couple of years and it happens because of the dependencies. Every year there is a probability that an extinction triggering condition will occur. As the globe warms an extinction triggering event become more likely. If you went to the front in 1914, each day brought a risk of becoming completely dead - but that didn't mean you couldn't survive the war, but it still meant you had a high probability of becoming a corpse within the year.
 
Arctic summers at hottest temperatures for 115,000 years, study reveals
‘The magnitude of warming is so high that everything is melting everywhere now’

Evidence that this century is the warmest the region has faced for millennia came from plants collected in the remote wilderness of Baffin Island.

As glaciers melt in the Canadian Arctic, landscapes are emerging that have not been ice-free for more than 40,000 years.

While providing worrying evidence of climate change taking place, this also allows scientists to investigate previously inaccessible areas.

“The Arctic is currently warming two to three times faster than the rest of the globe, so naturally, glaciers and ice caps are going to react faster,” said Simon Pendleton, a PhD student at the University of Colorado at Boulder who led the research.
 
redrumloa said:
hahahahahahahahahahaha

50170636_10162404755740354_1588385726192418816_n.jpg
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Doomsday clock has world at two minutes from Armageddon!

"Citing nuclear arms races, threats of cyber attacks and climate change"
 
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