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The Roman Empire took 250 years to collapse, yet in hindsight we still consider it to have just stopped at one point. Likewise, we look at mass extinction events in the geologic histories as if they were one off blips, but e.g. this Hangenberg Event I just googled spanned 100K to several hundred thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangenberg_event But we're living a mass extinction event if you consider biodiversity and populations in non-human species has plummeted; bug populations have halved in a decade, with that bird populations have taken a hit, ten billion crabs starved because of a heat wave (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/research-confir...), etc. No, 8 billion people won't drop dead, and life will continue in many ways, but in our lifetimes we'll see worsening food scarcity because of climate change (already happening), consequent famines, mass migrations, wars, etc. But for a lot of people it mainly means food gets more expensive and the relative wealth of food choice we've had will be reduced, and houses will be built differently depending on the new climate trends. That or the gulf stream will stop and the northern hemisphere gets covered in a mile of ice again. But that too won't happen overnight. |