RicOlie_2 said:
generalfrevious said:
DuracellEnergizer said:
generalfrevious said:
It totally sucks that I am living in the last decades of humanity, and that all life on Earth will probably be wiped out.
The largest extinction event in history -- the Permian-Triassic extinction event -- wiped out 96% of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial vertebra species. Yet look at the Earth now -- chockful of life in all it's various forms.
Somehow, I don't think something as relatively minor as global warming is going to be the straw which breaks the Earth's back.
I disagree. Global Warming WILL destroy 100% of all living organisms on Earth within the next century. We have never seen this before; and science will probably confirm my worst fears a few years from now. They could predict a 10-12 C rise in temperature by 2100 instead of 4-6 C. We could see South America, Africa, and half of Asia rendered uninhabitable much sooner than we expect; maybe by 2030 or 2040. The news is getting progressively worse every year.
Scientists were predicting last winter that the icecap over the North Pole would be gone in 2015 (no joke). They seem to suck at predicting things.
Regardless, how would a 10-13 degree rise in temperature wipe out all living things? The temperature of the world has dropped and risen to far greater extremes in the past, so why would it wipe everything out this time? I can't imagine that everything would be wiped out if it was 35 to 40 degrees C in the summer and -20 to -10 degrees in the winter in Alberta (which is what it would be like with a 10 degree change). I'm pretty sure most things could survive within that temperature range, or at least move north (or be moved north, in the case of plants). Also, just because the good ol' U.S. of A. is warming up does not mean that the whole world is. Antarctica, for instance, is as cold as ever, if not colder.
Yeah, but never in our geologic history has it risen so fast in so short a time: 10 degrees C in less than 300 years, all cause by fossil fuels that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. Life on Earth may exist by 2150, but it will be nothing more than Archea species that will survive. It will end up like Mars at best. No plant life will likely to exist by the end of the century, and without plants there are no other life forms that can live on land; at sea the acidification of the ocean will kill of plankton, causing the same effect for marine life and reducing atmospheric oxygen to roughly 10% or less. It will be nothing but endless deserts on both land and sea a hundred years from now.
