Global climate action lies on a knife edge, hinging upon American leadership that is threatened by a prospective Trump second term and a radicalized GOP intent on undermining climate progress both …
Can’t make any assumptions one way or another. We’re dealing with positive feedback loops, so even if humans all get Thanos-snapped out of existence RIGHT NOW putting a full stop to emissions, pollution, etc, the environment will continue to worsen on its own because of the downward spirals we’ve set into motion.
The question is how long those feedback loops can go until they’re broken naturally; or if they even can be broken naturally.
We may well have set our planet on a warming path that ends with it being molten, or one that sheds our atmosphere into space.
So… things might fix themselves after we go extinct; or it’ll get worse until even the most resilient of extremophiles can’t carry on, and Earth becomes another lifeless rock floating in space.
The climate will be just fine (give or take a few tens of thousands of years). It’s us and all complex organisms above a certain size that are fucked.
This is the correct answer
Can’t make any assumptions one way or another. We’re dealing with positive feedback loops, so even if humans all get Thanos-snapped out of existence RIGHT NOW putting a full stop to emissions, pollution, etc, the environment will continue to worsen on its own because of the downward spirals we’ve set into motion.
The question is how long those feedback loops can go until they’re broken naturally; or if they even can be broken naturally.
We may well have set our planet on a warming path that ends with it being molten, or one that sheds our atmosphere into space.
So… things might fix themselves after we go extinct; or it’ll get worse until even the most resilient of extremophiles can’t carry on, and Earth becomes another lifeless rock floating in space.
/shrug
That’s true. We couldve pulled a Venus, which would suck massive donkey balls.