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Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by pdonis on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @11:16AM (#20929137)
> having the earth temperature go up 5 degrees would kill most phytoplankton, and that would end the oxygen supply (eventually)

The global average temperature has been higher than that in the past, and there was plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere.

Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by gambiting on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @11:28AM (#20929276)
Yes, but the temperature rose to those levels over millenia, not just hundreds of years. Ultimately, life on Earth will adapt - it's just that we might not survive long enough to witness the adaptation.
Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by dahdum on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @02:41PM (#20931701)
I'm curious how you picture the scenarios in which humanity doesn’t survive even +10F average over the next 200 years? Let’s also say a population of several billion.

I see the sentiment often, even in journalism, and I don’t see a realistic path even absent the inevitable new technology.

Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by gambiting on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @06:20AM (#20938346)
Right, so I don't think we would completely die out. As always with almost any catastrophe, there would always be small pockets of humans surviving somewhere and I think it's reasonable to say they would rebuild eventually.

I'm just thinking that if the oxygen levels drop a few percent that won't kill us, but it will start affecting our cognitive levels - so I'm imagining that those who can afford it will just carry portable oxygen bottles with them. Offices/homes will be equipped with oxygen disperses through the ventilation systems, just so we can feel "normal". I imagine that would cause massive unrest with people who cannot afford this.

But hey, this is just speculation. Maybe we will find a technological solution long before this happens.

Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by pdonis on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @11:47AM (#20929485)
> the temperature rose to those levels over millenia, not just hundreds of years

We don't actually know that. The time resolution of the data is not good enough to tell us. It's quite possible that it happened faster in the past as well.

> we might not survive long enough to witness the adaptation

Quite honestly, I don't understand why people think our ability to adapt is so poor. We already have more than 5 C variation in average temperature across different regions of Earth, yet people adapt to living in all of those different regions.

Also, all the alarmist rhetoric about the supposed impacts of changes in temperature is not based on actual knowledge or on models with demonstrated predictive power. It's based on very crude extrapolations of trends that assume that people will do nothing at all to adapt. In other words, they assume people won't adapt and then complain that we can't adapt.

What's more, the two main things we can do to adapt are things we should be doing anyway: (1) bring more people out of poverty--the richer people are the easier they can adapt to change; and (2) make our infrastructure more robust. The second, in particular, is exactly what "green energy" should be marketed as--making energy more decentralized, which makes the entire system more robust. And doing those things benefits us regardless of what kind of change happens--whether it's climate change or any other kind of change.

Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by partialrecall on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @12:01PM (#20929681)
> "The time resolution of the data is not good enough to tell us."

Is that actually true? What's the sampling rate and subsequent Nyquist frequency? It's my impression that the sampling rate given by ice core samples is surprisingly high (something in the neighborhood of year-by-year.)

Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by pdonis on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @12:18PM (#20929857)
> It's my impression that the sampling rate given by ice core samples is surprisingly high (something in the neighborhood of year-by-year.)

Ice cores only cover hundreds of thousands of years into the past (I think the oldest is about 800,000 years). I'm talking about times millions of years ago.

Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by SlowRobotAhead on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @11:28AM (#20929266)
Agreed, that seems like the sensationalism he’s willing to ignore. Which as everyone else pointed out is harmful.

Can GP explain if these plankton did not exist in these times of higher temperatures? Because I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t, but we’ve had whales and plankton separately for millions and millions of years over drastically different climates. So I’m curious how they are making such absolute statements.

I don’t know nearly enough about plankton, maybe someone could explain?

Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by orwin on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @11:27AM (#20929247)
> The global average temperature has been higher than that in the past Yes > there was plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere. Well, citation needed.
Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by SlowRobotAhead on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @11:28AM (#20929275)
>there was plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere. Well, citation needed.

Isn’t that entirely the basis of the giant flora and fauna we know existed?

Re:The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs by marcosdumay on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @11:40AM (#20929403)
The loss of formatting is a problem for understanding your comment, but you seem to be arguing that there isn't evidence that the level of oxygen on the atmosphere is steadly going down since the Great Oxidation Event. If, so, there's plenty of evidence.