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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: RetiredNow who wrote (751855)11/8/2013 9:31:43 PM
From: combjelly2 Recommendations

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J_F_Shepard
tejek

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. I also believe that the earth quite possibly can handle the changes we are imposing, given that all the carbon we burn use to be organic at some point,


Sure. But it has been sequestered over hundreds of millions of years and we are putting it back into the system on a scale of hundreds of years. Million to one ratios can have an effect...

The Earth will survive. But nothing says we have to be in the mix. Oh, I suspect many in the developed world will survive. But much of the rest of humanity is going to have it pretty tough. Persistent droughts have caused more than one civilization to fall in our history. Not to mention many of our staple crops are adapted for our current climate. Most of them are also grown as a monoculture, so there aren't the gene reservoirs there used to be to help those crops to adapt to a new climate.

If you look at the fossil record, you should notice that most mass extinctions occur at the boundaries of climate change. In the past, climate changes were driven by things like super-continents forming or breaking up. Which meant the changes were very slow, yet massive extinctions still occurred. Now the one at the end of the Triassic period, which gave the dinos their chance, was the result of Pangea breaking up. There was a complicating factor that made the resulting mass extinction even worse than most, super-volcanoes. That put a major spike in CO2 release, warming the climate in a relatively short period of time and wiping out a larger number than usual of the extant species.

Slow changes kill. Fast changes kill many, many more.
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