Re:Climate endgame: exploring catastrophic climate change sc...
by deepdriver on Tuesday August 02, 2022 @05:21PM
(#32324422)
I'm surprised that this paper doesn't mention hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas emitted into the atmosphere during anoxic ocean events, which is thought to be responsible for several known periods of mass extinction:
>The trigger for these mass extinctions appears to be a warming of the ocean caused by a rise of carbon dioxide levels to about 1000 parts per million
To me, this is the most concerning potential result of climate change. Short of hermetically-sealed self-sustaining biodomes, which must run smoothly for up a million years before the atmosphere naturally clears of H2S, an event like this could wipe out all human life on Earth. Our political or ideological alignment would be of no consequence. Even communist utopian societies can't survive a poisoned atmosphere.
We'll hit 1000ppm in a few centuries if current trends hold, or much sooner than that if certain positive feedback loops kick in. Last I checked, the methane clathrate gun hypothesis wasn't as bad as previously thought, but we simply don't know what we don't know in this area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event#Atmospheric_effec...
>The trigger for these mass extinctions appears to be a warming of the ocean caused by a rise of carbon dioxide levels to about 1000 parts per million
To me, this is the most concerning potential result of climate change. Short of hermetically-sealed self-sustaining biodomes, which must run smoothly for up a million years before the atmosphere naturally clears of H2S, an event like this could wipe out all human life on Earth. Our political or ideological alignment would be of no consequence. Even communist utopian societies can't survive a poisoned atmosphere.
We'll hit 1000ppm in a few centuries if current trends hold, or much sooner than that if certain positive feedback loops kick in. Last I checked, the methane clathrate gun hypothesis wasn't as bad as previously thought, but we simply don't know what we don't know in this area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis#Curre...