Temperatures above 50C used to be a rarity confined to two or three global hotspots, but the World Meteorological Organization noted that at least 10 countries have reported this level of searing heat in the past year: the US, Mexico, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Pakistan, India and China.
In Iran, the heat index – a measure that also includes humidity – has come perilously close to 60C, far above the level considered safe for humans.
Heatwaves are now commonplace elsewhere, killing the most vulnerable, worsening inequality and threatening the wellbeing of future generations. Unicef calculates a quarter of the world’s children are already exposed to frequent heatwaves, and this will rise to almost 100% by mid-century.
And I’d be ok with this. I see that humans are failing the test. I think it would be totally fair for us to take some really huge losses as a consequence of our collective hubris. But the thing that makes me sad and angry is that we’re taking down everything else with us.
There’s such a huge diversity of life, basically just minding its own business in a totally sustainable way. It’s been like that for billions of years. More than 1,000,000,000 years. But then humans work out that burning stuff is an easy way to do mass-production, and in less then 1000 years things start turning to shit - for everyone. That’s so unfair. If it was just our own house we were burning down, I’d say its fair. But we’re burning down the whole world. We’re already causing mass extinction, and by all predictions it is going to get much much worse.
it’ll all return in due time, the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was a major extinction event in the same caliber as global warming is likely to be.
If we continue on like this, it’ll be more like the Permian-Triassic Extinction 250 million years ago, which was also due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere and which killed 90 percent of all life.
gotta love extinction science
Oh ffs We are literally the most likely species to survive any of that.
Bacteria, viruses, insects all way more likely to survive.
The bigger and more complex generally means more likely to run out of something.
Patience, mostly.
“Ignorance” is not “patience”, you have the former, not the latter.
Other organisms and natural disasters do that, too. Ice ages, meteors, waves of diseases. The difference seems to be we have the consciousness to predict consequences, then decide whether to embark upon a path of behavior, or continue it when latent consequences emerge. I guess the question ends up being whether the course chosen is “natural,” and how can we know, since plenty of organisms kill the host, while also surviving and even propagating? Then observation also changes the behavior of things. And we don’t kill everything. Just whatever life is left continues to evolve in expected and unexpected ways.
Maybe ten thousand years. That last ice age ending literally changed everything but yeah, ok, let’s pretend its hundreds of millions of years the same.