You'll also read that mammals had time to adapt better surface area to body mass ratios (primarily through dwarfism) just as I said in Message 114.
That's one big difference. Another big difference is that the mammals at the center of things today (us) don't have to rely on evolutionary adaptation to survive changes to the environment.
Life in general did OK, but do you know what typically accompanies rapid evolutionary change? Lots of premature deaths.
Yes. But those deaths are likely to be in poor areas where people have always had limited access to resources and technologies for adapting their surroundings and premature deaths from living at the mercy of the environment are business as usual.
The unequal distribution of consequences from global warming and their burden on the poor and undeveloped is something you can find discussed pretty much anywhere climate change is discussed.
We could all get together and share, but that's hardly likely. And the fact that developed societies seem more suited to weathering climate change might be part of why they aren't as interested in dealing with it (despite pretty much being its sole progenitor).
So it's possible that life in general will still do okay; but lots of lives probably won't.
The original time I brought it up was:
quote:
Think PETM (35% extinction rate) happening 100-500 times faster (thus prohibiting evolution from attaining dwarfism as a means to allow for diversification and extinction avoidance). Insects would collapse, and pollination would be more limited, grasses and grains would die off and the animals that graze on them would follow (if they aren't dying of hyperthermia) as would we. We might be able to survive in Antartica or Siberia or something.
and this was in context of
quote:
If we manage to burn all the coal that's thought to be left
My point was that even with conditions worsening, population is still increasing.
Right, we're below the carrying capacity of the earth which we have raised to unknown heights. Climate change is bringing that down, but we're still underneath it right now. I'm not sure what this demonstrates.
g. I wasn't so much talking about burning through all the fossil fuels but just about releasing the amounts of greenhouse gasses currently estimated if we decide to take certain measures before global warming completely fucks us (and not much sooner).
Well, I was responding to when you said:
quote:
And none of those solutions seem likely to replace fossil fuels before we burn through the whole damn works.
Perhaps it's ironic, but I think the saddest thing of all this is not that we will be forced to switch from fossil fuels (which have plenty of drawbacks) after running out of them, but that we will completely lose a part of history. It seems like it'd be cooler to teach 10th graders about the Industrial Revolution by showing them coal-fueled steam engines than simply telling them about this thing called 'coal' that no longer exists and never will again exist for the rest of their lives.
For several reasons (which we can certainly discuss) I honestly don't see us getting to a world in which all the fossil fuels have been burned. Do you?
quote:
Running out isn't the problem we once thought it was going to be.
quote:
That's because models for global warming tend not to include projections for burning all the fossil fuels (mostly because achieving this would take longer than any reliable projections we can make).
quote:
Burning all the fossil fuels at the current rate would be insane and I'm betting - pretty hard to do.
quote:
I didn't think a formal study on this madness has been conducted
So yeah, I've pretty much been saying its crazy since you first posted this hypothetical scenario.
Fair enough. I do think burning through all the fossil fuels is unlikely given most plausible play-outs for the future. The planet may become uninhabitable long before that point. We may find a better energy source. Our governments may act to eliminate our use of fossil fuels.
But I've also been talking about economics and willingness. A world in which people are forced to give up fossil fuels isn't a world in which people are switching to solar and wind because they see it as a better option. All the arguments and evidence about global warming and the environmental benefits of renewable energy aren't changing anyone's opinion. For many things fossil fuels are still the economically best option, and will likely remain so for a long time to come.
Maybe we should look to Portugal or Switzerland. They have pretty low emissions, though Portugal and to an extent Switzerland probably doesn't have the heating issues of more northern countries. Mexico can probably be added to this list.
Maybe we should. I went investigating to figure out what the numbers might tell us. From Wikipedia (
Countries by GDP, 2013, the E.U. has an economy of about $17,512,109 million and emits about 3,709,765 Kt of CO
2 (
Countries by CO2 Emissions, 2010); all of this in a single year. That equates to about $4.70 earned off every Kg of CO
2.
From the same charts, the U.S. has an annual GDP of about $16,768,050 million and emits slightly more CO
2 at 5,433,057 Kt. That's an efficiency of $3.10/Kg CO
2. There is some error in the calculations, of course, because the numbers come from different years, but it is what it is. Same-year data is likely there, but I went the easy route.
Anyway, the two 'countries' are pretty close. They are lightyears above China, which has an efficiency of only $1.14/Kg CO
2 (they burn more fossil fuels and get less benefit from them). This is probably related to China's use of coal (which is almost as much as the rest of the world combined:
U.S. EIA).
There is room for improvement everywhere, but the world's economic superpowers seem to already be supporting substantially higher standards of living with relatively low carbon emissions.
One of the issues that I brought up earlier was the ability of solar and wind power to maintain such economies by meeting their massive energy requirements. RAZD all but laughed at me, but I have a feeling you can take the matter a little more seriously.
Energy consumption is essential to advanced societies; our alternatives to fossil fuels need to be able to meet the same demands for energy. Solar and wind seem incapable of this (unless they are, but I'm still waiting on RAZD to demonstrate as much). Fission can do the job easily due to its similarities to fossil fuels (convenience, reliability, etc.) but presents waste disposal issues of its own. Which I guess brings me to your last point:
In the meantime, we can figure out more long term plans for the material - there are already plans in mind.
That's kind of like 'in the meantime we can figure out ways to deal with global warming'.
Either path puts us into the situation of having problems that we hope can be solved somewhere down the line. The job is figuring out which problems are less severe and more plausibly solvable in the future. One of the downsides to fission is that it seems like generating enough power to replace fossil fuels entirely (with, for example, electric cars) will be tough. And it's not at all certain what a world in which all of our energy is produced by nuclear fission (with the resulting waste products) will look like or what problems it will present. One of the downsides to fossil fuels is that they are heating up the planet.
Where do we win?
Jon
Love your enemies!
™ Version 4.2