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by eloff
2124 days ago
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Yes, I don't think that's surprising or seriously contested. Rapid change means species will have to adapt or die, and many will perish. It's not the first time that's happened on Earth, but it is the first time since the end of the last ice age. It's a terrible slow-motion train wreck that seems nearly unstoppable. Humans too will have to adapt, and some number of us could well perish also. Longer-term I have the controversial opinion that it's a good thing (downvotes incoming!), but that could just be my tendency to look for the silver lining. Being Canadian and knowing that my entire country was buried under kilometres of ice and then scraped clean to bedrock 12,000 years ago, I feel that's a more dangerous long-term risk than global warming and rising oceans. Think of how much food we grow in northern and southern latitudes. That process would maybe have begun in about 1500 years, and one could imagine that stopping that might involve crazy things like digging up buried hydrocarbons and burning it to add CO2 to the atmosphere, or spraying dark pigment over ice and snow to reduce the albedo (rename Greenland to Greyland anyone?) We've fucked things up pretty badly for the next thousand or more years, there will be mass extincions, mass migrations, maybe even famines and wars. But we also dodged an icy bullet for who knows how long. I take some comfort in that. |
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