TBH statements like these really grate on me. Yes, Earth will be fine in the same sense that you'd be fine if you surgically removed your arms, legs, eyeballs, ears, and tongue and then were fed intravenously and your waste disposed of for you. You might live a long life and have lots of nice dreams.
The reality is that we are in early stages of kicking off a cascade of effects that could wipe out the majority of the food web on Earth--let's say, everything larger than your finger. Yeah sure, insects and microbes will reboot it all--in a hundred millions years, if ever. Wonderful!
To make such flippant remarks about so profoundly annihilating the bioversity of this very special planet is not helpful in the dialogue.
Let's please work on this problem seriously.
So far we've really only scratched the surface, but there have been hundreds of local mass die-offs (billions of individual animals each). https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/01/150113-mass...
The Great Barrier Reef is about half dead now. In two years. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-20...
But look at what happened at the end of the Permian age. 96% of species were lost. It was due to CO2/methane causing climate change. https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinction...
(btw we still have no idea what caused the extinction at the end of the Triassic).
We're basically on the way to combining all of these causes of mass extinctions in a super-short timeframe that may mushroom into one super-massive extinction.
And as far as what-if's go, if climate change sets off a global conflict, and there's a nuclear war, forget it.
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/news.2010.379.h...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/volcano-carbon-emissions/
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits...
https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warmin...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how-...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...
> According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world’s volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide
But I guess you're more knowledgeable on the subject than the US geological survey?
> On average, human activities put out in just three to five days, the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide that volcanoes produce globally each year
https://www.usgs.gov/news/human-activities-produce-more-carb...
Humans will be fine, as a species. But the human and economic costs will be large.
Compare it to the Hurricane Katrina: most people in New Orleans weathered it fine (i.e. by evacuating the city). The city itself also survived mostly okay (it's still there). But the economic cost of cleanup was huge; and while most people survived without injury, many did not for various reasons.
The choice of "spend a bit of money now, save a Katrina later" versus "save money now, have a Katrina later" is pretty clear. Unfortunately in the case of Katrina we didn't have much of a choice, but for climate change we do. If we invest resources now we can save a lot of problems later on. Or we can spend our resources on other things now, and pay a huge price later.
Alarming "zomg we might all die" stuff isn't really all that helpful or likely to convince politicians or businesses to actually do something. It also invites the "meh, the earth has been warmer" counter-argument, which is missing the point. I think more level-headed risk analysis which lists potential costs/benefits is more useful.
For example, is it worth for some country to "invest", say, $100 billion in reducing emissions - which, at least unilaterally, won't be sufficient to prevent the effects of climate change but just mitigate them - or can they achieve better mitigation by a comparable investment in reinforcing their shoreline, updating or relocating buildings, etc?
If USA had to vote on whether to spend (or lose by restricting growth) $1 trillion of USA resources to prevent $10 trillion of future losses in SE Asia, then I'd assume that such proposals would be swiftly declined; spending our resources on other things now and having someone else pay a huge price later would be considered a quite good deal by many governments, as the countries that most need to take action are not the same countries that will bear the harshest consequences.
Economic, human, and ecological costs. I am not hugely in favour of reducing everything to economics (although it's definitely an important part).
I also don't think that it's as simple as "$1 trillion of USA resources to prevent $10 trillion of future losses in SE Asia". Globalisation means that "local" economies aren't really all that local; so problems in e.g. SE Asia will also affect other parts of the world.
Humans will survive. They will adapt. It may not be in the same numbers and lifestyle as today, but the human race will likely be here for a very long time.
As individuals, we're not much more interesting than any other animal. It's our technological civilization that makes us interesting in the grand scheme of things, and that civilization is both hard to bootstrap and extremely fragile.
Well yes, nearly ('extreme' perhaps: 'ultimate' sounds a bit magical), but that's the problem. Darwinian evolution has created a creature than can avoid most sources of population limits that permit ecosystem stability. This same creature has the flexibility to repeat the trick in all regions on the planet, crashing one after another.
And then although our species is (for better or worse) remarkably resilient, agricultural civilisation is far too new to be able to make similar claims about it. The 21st century signs aren't good. It's hard to imagine major climate collapse convulsions not resulting in ongoing wars, probably nuclear.
So yes, literal extinction of humans doesn't seem likely. Some people may enjoy the idea of a dystopic 'The Road' style rag-tag dog-eat-dog existence (though they're probably mostly pale wormy teens who in real life panic when out of reach of a screen). But the breakdown of a planetary society of 7-12 billion (depending on how far into this process we can jury rig nations to hold together) is going to be nothing but a litany of sorrow & pain.
Have to agree with you there. Things will probably get much worse before they get better. Now there are 2 possible attitudes, either depression from obvious lack of adequate action, or acceptance of what's about to come will come, whatever it is.
By acceptance I don't mean ignorance, by all means promote moral, 'green' solutions, recycle, vote for sane people who at least pretend to care (I am looking at you, US). Or do gazillion of other things that help, and avoid those which don't. I know I do my part, however insignificant.
But change is inevitable. Even though on paper we can still avoid most dark stuff, we won't. Mankind as a whole will react properly only when it really will start to hurt, globally, and rich won't be able to comfortably escape or hide from it.
Some will die because of this. Some will profit from it. On enough long-term scale, it won't matter unless mankind will go extinct which I don't believe will happen.
Do I like it? Not at all. Can I change it? Same answer. Am I content with it and not waste my time, energy and mood on being depressed about it? Absolutely.
Life on Earth will be fine, but that life will be different to the life we have today.
The only thing not fine is whether humans survive what they/we ultimately have brought about.
But in there is a kind of beautiful justice that the universe has in it's self-correcting algorithm... if you create imbalance, the imbalance will correct in time but perhaps to do so it kills you.
If we care about the human race, it means to care about the whole ecosystem and all other life on Earth. But the evidence of behaviour by people and governments is that they only care for themselves as individuals and not the wider human race, and other life on Earth.
I no longer see hope for significant change in the behaviour of humans, and I've shifted my view to believing that what is needed to provide massively long-term stability in the ecosystem for life on Earth is another mass extinction that includes humans.
Which sounds depressing, but doesn't feel it. I'm positive about life on Earth, just not about humans.