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Re:Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? by titzer on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @05:57AM (#18183402)
> Earth will be fine. Life on Earth will be fine...

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.

Re:Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? by ryanwaggoner on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @06:46AM (#18183623)
I’d love to see a credible source suggesting that climate change has any kind of remote chance of wiping out all life on earth larger than a few cm.
Re:Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? by titzer on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @06:53AM (#18183650)
It's not just climate change, it's the combined effects of a lot of different things, not the least of which is overfishing, deforestation, loss of habitat, and selective destruction of ecosystems.

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.

Re:Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? by ryanwaggoner on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:25PM (#18198418)
All those things are horrible. None of them have the remotest chance of wiping out all life larger than a few cm.
Re:Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? by adrianN on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @07:50AM (#18183935)
Phytoplankton seems to decline due to warming[1]. If this trend continues we're going to have a bad time. Phytoplankton produces at least half of the oxygen we breathe and is key to the oceanic food web.

[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/news.2010.379.h...

Re:Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? by mahasvin on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @09:36AM (#18184674)
I worked a bit around the data, and I am very sceptical about humanity ability to produce enough CO2 for The Climate Change. Volcanic activity was, is, and will be the main contributor to the CO2 pool. Humanity is not the geological force, regretfully.
Re:Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? by mahasvin on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @10:31AM (#18185176)
Ah, Forbes always was an authoritative source on climate change. I am not in the mood for battling over the authors who are unable to consider 250 000 underwater volcanoes. You know, 250 000 underwater volcanoes cannot be wrong.
Re:Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? by plopilop on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @11:23AM (#18185713)
That's a nice cherry-picking over the sources you're doing here. From Scientific American, quoting USGS:

> 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...

Re:Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe? by m_mueller on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @11:22AM (#18185702)
So you‘re biased against one source and ignore all the others given here?