| > The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine This entire school of thinking that has derived from a George Carlin bit never ceases to annoy me. For starters the "world" as some abstract ideal that we find comforting only exists because our human minds perceive it and imagine it as such. Our planet is just a rock out in spaces with some complex chemical reactions fizzlingly along on the surface. There is no "mother Earth" that will still be around to enjoy the life that reemerges in millions of years. And there really is no guarantee that it is "going to get by just fine". Are you familiar with the current hypothesis behind the End-Permian extinction? It's believed by some to have been caused by a super volcano that ignited massive coal veins around what is today Siberia. Now the scale of CO2 emitted in the End Permian was much more dramatic than even current worse case scenarios, but we're emitting about 10x faster than lava burning coal was able to do back then. The End Permian nearly did wipe out life on this planet. We don't fully understand all the possible CO2 feedbacks. We're already in one of the top 6 extinction events on this planet and that has little to do with climate change.... yet. CO2 has played a surprisingly big role in most mass extinctions. Now it's certainly a low probability scenario, but it is not inconceivable that the end result of our insane release of CO2 in the atmosphere could lead to an unrecoverable extinction event. At the very least a startling percent of the current species on this planet will go extinct (because a startling number already have). Corals which have survived plenty of extinction events might be replaces with green slime. |