Microblog Memes

The scary thing is, this graph is probably far too conservative.

Evidence is now emerging that indicates that warming has accelerated dramatically in the last 2-3 years. As in, we may see more warming in the next 10 years than we have seen in the last 50, with +3℃ happening just after 2035, and +4℃ happening by some time around 2040 to 2050.

You know what happens around +4℃? The extinction of all megafauna - animals larger than 45kg. Like humans. The entire ⅓ of the planet between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn will experience lethally high wet bulb temperatures across all regions for at least several weeks out of every year, rendering it permanently uninhabitable for the 4+ Billion people that currently live there. India is currently flirting with that reality.

And with that heating inertia, 2100 may see +8℃ temps, which essentially means ice-free poles year round (once things calm down), with palm trees and alligators at the North Pole. Of course, by that time chaotic weather and resource exhaustion will have killed off all remaining humans.

And the lovely thing about “moving parts” is that they all have this little thing called inertia… the faster they move, the further they go. And +8℃ is very close to the +12-15℃ that a Venus Scenario would be triggered by.

Past warming events have been “similar” in that they have gotten just as warm, but they took hundreds of thousands of years to get to the same place, allowing entire continent-wide ecosystems to quite literally migrate across thousands of kilometers to adapt. Our changes are happening in less than 0.01% of that time scale, giving ecosystems no time at all in which to react. So our biosphere will get slaughtered along with us, and will be unable to compensate in time.

And with the biosphere becoming overwhelmed by rapid changes, there goes the “friction” that could do something about that “inertia”.

And the worst part is, we still haven’t moved off of the worst-case-possible “business as usual” path. We are swan-diving into the worst possible future. Thanks to billionaires addicted to fat profit margins and who control all of the processes, we are utterly failing to generate the change needed to save ourselves, with CO2e production - purely human sources, excluding the feedback loops in nature!! - CONTINUING TO ACCELERATE.

Fun times. I just might live long enough to see humanity go extinct.