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by hyperhello 17 days ago
In what way does +4C kill all animals exactly?
2 comments

Desertification, wet bulb temperatures, heat stress, loss of food in the environment, ecosystem collapse due to climate change happening too fast for ecosystems to migrate, and the massively increased range required to find food causing them to not find mates.
To add: ratio of surface area (skin, sweating/cooling), versus volume/weight (muscle activity, biochemical processes etc).

The bigger the animal, the harder it is to keep cool.

Yes, I tried to encapsulate that within the term “heat stress”, but thank you for laying that all out for those not in the know.
We are already living through a mass extinction event: https://www.worldwildlife.org/news/press-releases/catastroph...

+4C would be game over.

And capitalism demands the “business as usual” path that is also the worst-outcome-possible path.

Wholesale civilizational collapse has already been modelled to occur between 2035 and 2045 to an extremely high degree of confidence, with a 50-80% collapse in human population to occur before the end of the century. You can’t maintain a post-iron-age civilization through that degree of collapse.

I would even posit that a post-bronze-age civilization would be difficult enough to maintain. Because you need a fair amount of tech to work iron on scales larger than a blacksmith’s shop.

And these models do not include major attributes of climate change, such as wet bulb temperatures forcing billions to migrate into first-world countries to survive, or how regional ecosystem collapses cause trophic cascades that ripple around the globe. They only looked at simple things like desertification, topsoil loss, chaotic weather (unreliable rainfall) and so forth.

True, high-tech supply & manufacturing chains are hard to mantain if social structures break down (as is happening already).

But you'll probably see large-scale crop failure first. It's simply not possible to grow the world's food supply indoors.

Migrant flows, political chaos & wars can do the rest.

Imho it's too strong to say that will happen worldwide. But on local (country/regional) scales? Absolutely.