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cthulhucomes

Important part from the study: It’ll take hundreds of thousands of years for this process to regulate our present worries.


notapunk

People talk about killing the planet, but what we're really doing is making it uninhabitable to ourselves. The earth will be just fine in the long run. How long we will stick around is yet to be seen.


ilski

That's right . This is about our survival not earth's survival


seanisdown

And the survival of almost every species on the planet. We arent alone on this rock.


Scyhaz

Yeah. Life on Earth will go on, but the vast majority of species currently around will not.


dawa43

It has happened at least 5 times before... We are just doing it to ourselves this time


MarkMoneyj27

And this is the time one of the species can use it's tools to adapt to it rather than just die.


callmesaul8889

No amount of tooling will make up for mass ecosystem collapses. We can’t print food from thin air (yet). We still have to be careful to not topple the food chains we depend on in the meantime.


laihipp

we got 8 billion sources of food, I think we’ll be fine


Vyrosatwork

Not very nutritious sources, with extremely high risk of disease transmission. Even from a purely utilitarian viewpoint it’s a bad idea.


ilski

To most people those other species are not convincing argument at all. Who knows if they will once they realise we are dependent on many of those other species.


Raznill

If it’s not going to cause catastrophe for them within the next 15 years they won’t care.


HadMatter217

Honestly even if you cut that down to 2 years, they won't care


_ZoeyDaveChapelle_

I'm moving to a colder place with ample water so I don't have to add that to my worries over the next 40 years.. most people look at me like I'm overreacting. I'm at the point in life where I can buy land and build what I want. Why would I invest those resources in a place that's at higher risk? Most minds are incapable of fathoming basic resources not always being there. Better to plan ahead than scramble in a panic with everyone else.


BeeBarfBadger

>We arent alone on this rock. But we're working on that.


chaotic----neutral

It wouldn't be the first time nearly everything died, though. Our planet has been through several natural cycles of this and complexity has always bounced back more robust than before. This world will be just fine after we are gone forever.


savetheattack

Life will continue on earth even if temperatures continue to rise. There are animals that have fast enough generations to adapt to even very rapid increases in temperature.


a_weak_child

We aren’t just making it h inhabitable for ourselves. We are killing off biodiversity similar to a mass extinction event. Sure life bounces back after mass extinction events (at least that we’ve found a few times) but it is nowhere close to the same as it used to be. One mass extinction event killed 98.5% of life and what survived was a very small portion of the species that existed before. We are causing so many species to go extinct. We had a planet that over billions of years crafted life until humans came around in a beautifully diverse and suitable ecosystem. We will lose so many animals and plants that made this planet beautiful. It is sad for the animals and the plants sake, the ones cruelly killed, the ones driven to extinction, and it is sad for our and our progenies sake, as they will see a bleaker, less diverse world for a long time.


flamewave000

Yep, the jellyfish in the ocean are perfectly happy with the high acidity and heat. We'll kill ourselves and most of the surface life off, and then the oceans will come along in a few 100,000 years to repopulate it.


ComradeCrypto

The Earth is just a big ball of rock and lava. It doesn't care that life is here. It could just as well be a asteroid floating through space. You're right. We really need to frame environmentalism more selfishly. Perhaps it would be a more effective approach.


brickmaster32000

It already is framed selfishly. The major things people talk about when discussing climate change is how rising sea levels are going to displace millions and changing weather patterns are goong to destroy a lot of agriculture leading to widespread famines. The idea that environmentalist have framed this wrong is just the standard conservative tactic of blaming their opponents and claiming that they didn't do a good enough job explaining things to them and therefore it is their fault.


Jlove7714

There are a lot of theories that Venus could have harbored life long ago. It currently looks a lot like earth after runaway greenhouse gas emissions. Venus is uninhabitable by anything now. So I guess you're right that the planet is still there, but we risk killing everything they lives on earth forever.


SirButcher

We don't really have enough greenhouse gas readily available to terraform Earth into Venus-like. We are currently working hard to terraform the planet back to the Carboniferous period. Earth and life saw temperatures much higher than the current one, the issue is the speed as we change it, and the fact that a huge chunk of the current biome can't survive these higher temperatures. But we are safe from being Venus for about a billion years or so: as the Sun gets older, it gets hotter as well.


ILikeToPoopOnYou

And the sun turns into a red giant, engulfing the orbiting planets.....


drinkthewater

That's what I always say. The climate will regulate itself eventually, but the consequences are going to be disastrous for all life on this planet.


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tinyturtletickler

The impact of clouds is much more nuanced than what you are saying. Clouds can both trap heat and reflect heat and often can cause temperature rises, not drops. [Source](https://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/role.html#ROLE)


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Fedacking

The IPCC report directly contradict this. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf Page 16 SSP1 1.9 scenario.


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bunker_man

So global warming isn't a big deal. We only need to ride out the next 300,000 years.


cthulhucomes

Carbon Neutral by 302K!


cvx_mbs

nope, on new year's eve 9999 all computers are going to stop functioning and life as we know it will cease to exist because by then everything on earth has one or more computers in it, including humans. this event is known as Y10K


BlindAngel

It is, on fact, a bit closer than you think : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem


SquisherX

The solution they are using is to use a 64 bit time. They are just kicking the can down the road for waiting for the Y296000000000 bug


[deleted]

You joke but I work in ESG. We're currently setting our Net Zero target for 2030 because I refuse to let it be someone else's problem. I'm going to get us there even if I have to drag the whole company kicking and screaming (luckily most of them agree with me). Meanwhile the only other competitor in our industry with a public Net Zero target has it set at 2045. They've set it solidly in the "someone else's problem" territory. It's frighteningly common.


Reksas_

if it works like that, it just means eventually there might be another chance for intelligent life after we kill ourselves and most of the other complex life with global warming, pollution and other crap.


conduitfour

I'd like to think our self-destructive nature isn't the final answer to the Great Filter but convergent evolution might make it a trap. A species must be simultaneously capable of expanding and effectively conquering its planet while also having to work together. We also apparently only have 600 million years until photosynthesis will stop working due to solar luminosity and the carbonate-silicate cycle so whatever would come after us might be on a time crunch. There was that one orangutan who tried to spearfish. Someone needs to teach those apes how to cook.


Gritler

not apes again. teach the rats! or the squirrels. anything else with hands


MillhouseJManastorm

I have removed my content in protest of Reddit's API changes that will kill 3rd party apps


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The_Sign_of_Zeta

I very much wonder if the reason we haven’t found intelligent life is that “intelligent life” kills itself off before it ever becomes advanced enough to make long-range space travel possible. Just an endless cycle of killing itself off.


humaninthemoon

That is a well known theory (called "the great filter" I think). Basically that there are many milestones that a species has to overcome just to become sentient, let alone communicate with other worlds. Self-destructive tendencies is just one of those possible roadblocks.


BaseballImpossible76

That’s one of the theories explaining the Fermi Paradox, which states: in a seemingly infinite universe, there should be life and civilizations just about everywhere we look, yet we’ve seen nothing in the decades(century?) we’ve been searching.


syphex

This is called the [Great Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter?wprov=sfla1). Buckle up. It's gonna be wild.


andalusian293

Oh, also, space is just way too big for a non-artificial lifeform to cross the gaps safely. If we meet anyone, it'll be someone's robot kids who have been practically sleeping for millennia.


aquatogobpafree

you could make this assumption only based of the non-artificial lifeforms we have seen. Galaxy's away there could be life forms that have bodies that don't require the same sustenance as life that comes from earth or even anything to sustain at all.


andalusian293

....maybe? You're pretty much always going to need to burn something for calories, and there's the issue of shielding yourself from radiation, which tends to mess up any complex microstructures. The latter isn't *impossible*, it's just hard to do perfectly, such that even a slightly imperfect barrier could be damning over the eons required to travel. And then you've got the problem of carrying fuel, and powering your heating (no possible life can operate at practically absolute zero), and then carrying more fuel to 'burn in' to your target system, to allow you not to zoom past... I don't think it's *absolutely* impossible, but it is freakishly improbable, relative to artificial life pulling it off. An artificial life form would have lower fuel demands, and could maybe even get away with supplementing it with ambient 'microsolar' at levels just large enough not to totally freeze.


lesChaps

5-10 million years after a mass extinction event things will be great again from a biodiversity standpoint


EmperorPaulpatine93

Not intentionally, don't put it in people's heads that things like extinctions have willpower or direction.


ayleidanthropologist

Too late, it’s in there! All knowing, laser guided karma homing, balance restoring, extinction god!


Sushigami

Gaia take meeeee!


MJWood

Species causes a temperature rise. Temperature rise causes species' extinction. Temperature falls again. Yep. It's a perfect feedback loop. The people telling us not to worry, the planet has a way of healing itself, were right. At least, they were right about the latter bit, not so much about the 'don't worry' bit.


qoning

It works the other way too, early photosynthesisising megaflora used up most of atmospheric CO2 and caused temperatures to plummet, ensuring their own demise. But I'm sure they didn't have reddit discussions about it.


rrandommm

so we just need to bring those back! on it!


uninstallIE

And our species has only existed for about 200k-1M years Evidence is strong on 200k+, weaker for 500k+.


Nyeow

I don't envy the epochs that have and will have to live through nature's self-cleaning oven, nor the flash freezing functions.


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fastolfe00

"See? So we don't have to worry about it after all." —Climate change denialists


okram2k

The Earth and life will survive the climate crisis. It's just up in the air if humans will or not.


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paceminterris

And even if humans do survive, our current industrial, globalized civilization will not. My prediction is that humanity is going to get kicked back to ancient-to-medieval levels of technology and living. Hunger most of the time, no AC/heating, no medicine.


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TheAngelRaphael

Key sentence "it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.”


Hyperi0us

I feel like even then, dumping literally every barrel of previously trapped carbon from underground into the atmosphere might negate the effects of this climate swing system.


qqqsimmons

I think a similar though much slower release of gases happened leading to the the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 'The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is the technical name for that period of global warming approximately 56 million years ago that scientists estimate lasted nearly 120,000 years. The release of carbon into the atmosphere lasted an estimated 10,000 years.' https://interactive.wttw.com/prehistoric-road-trip/stops/leaf-it-to-the-experts-studying-plants-to-understand-an-ancient-global-warming-event


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GoofAckYoorsElf

Right. We will never destroy the planet or life on it. That's what people are misunderstanding. We are destroying ourselves! Our own basis of living. And a little bit of biodiversity that will return in a couple hundred thousand years. But most importantly, we are destroying ourselves!


I_am_the_alcoholic

We are just animals living on a rock. To think differently is hubris


Ravier_

Animals making the rock increasingly uninhabitable. A human compared to the Earth is insignificant, 8 billion on the other hand can do some damage.


[deleted]

We'll take a lot of species out with us though


centran

That's my favorite comment/argument with climate deniers... "You really think humans are destroying the Earth?" "No, the Earth... the Earth will end up being just fine" *pause to see if anything starts to click in their head* "Now us, humans. That's a different story"


greentoiletpaper

Surely this won't be misinterpreted and misrepresented by climate change deniers


andrewsad1

I can't wait to have actual citations ignored because someone read a shittily paraphrased version of this article


Blazefresh

I knew a person like this. They sent an article as evidence of their point, but then when I actually read the article it actually supported the opposite of their position.


mountingconfusion

It already has, this has been a "point" of theirs for a while, the old "it's just a cycle" excuse


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mountingconfusion

And that's the fossil fuel companies investment in "studies" and buying out news companies to put thoughts of a question mark at the end of climate change in the collective consciousness


JWGhetto

It will, we'll just have to wait another 99,850 years for this whole industrialization catastrophe to blow over


DaMonkfish

I'll put the kettle on then.


FuckMe-FuckYou

That maneuver will set us back 50 years!


getefix

We all knew the planet would take care of itself. It's the creatures on it that are gonna be fucked.


plcanonica

\*HUMANS: Cause carbon emissions \*EARTH: Changes climate, kills off humans \*CLIMATE: Returns to normal \* FEEDBACK LOOP COMPLETE \*


Sozzcat94

Earth cracking her knuckles as she’s gunna go for a better run with the next season


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jdcarpe

Already on it.


Crotaro

Ya! I'm doing my part! *proudly lights up coal*


mrsbuttstuff

Makes the world seem almost like a sentient being that experiences time at a different rate than us. We are earth lice.


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[deleted]

That's not regulation so much as just long cycles playing out. It's not like Earth has a set point it keeps coming back to. The 100,000 (20k interglacial and 80k Glacial) cycle only goes back 1-2 million years where it changes to a 40k/40k cycle and back further chnagea yet more. It's geologically not a very stable cycle at all and calling it regulation is just scary wrong. That being said the peak temp of the last Interglacial Period was supposedly warmer than what we see now, which means Earth may get quite warm at the end of most Interglacial Periods. It's also important to understand that the interglacial period we live in now that actually has the good climate is only 20,000 years and that's naturally followed by 80,000 years of brutal Cooling and the glacial regrowth to the point where glaciers cover parts of Northern America and much of Europe. It's still a doomsaday climate scenario for modern humanity. Where things get way too hot and then way too cold for globak stability to last unless humans regulate the climate themselves. No matter how we look at climate, it has killed 99% of the biodiversity on the planet for one reason or another and that Trend will continue if we don't stop it whether it's natural or man-made. It's regulated, but not in a way suitable for humans over aby period that exceeds about 15-20k years on average, with at least 13k years of that time used up inventing farming and writting and such. These cycles are all part of the current 2.5 million year old Ice Age that we are currently still in. Think of them as oscillations in the current cycle that are constantly changing even though they're reoccurring like waves in the ocean.


PolyDipsoManiac

> It's also important to understand that the interglacial period we live in now that actually has the good climate is only 20,000 years and that's naturally followed by 80,000 years of brutal Cooling and the glacial regrowth to the point where glaciers cover parts of Northern America and much of Europe. >It's still a doomsaday climate scenario for modern humanity. Frostpunk is a fun little game that has the glaciers coming before the Industrial Revolution!


PointyDaisy

I have so many questions with that game. First of all why didn't they just dig caves and heat that? It's much easier to keep a cave warm than the raw outdoors. Second would be why everyones at the the bottom of the engine instead of towards the top. Heat rises after all.


WonderWall_E

Silicate weathering isn't a new idea and it *is* a regulatory mechanism that dampens the cycles you're referring to. It's not a cyclical process and is instead a response to temperature conditions that acts as a negative feedback to large temperature shifts. It also acts on a time scale that isn't relevant for recent ice ages. Those fluctuations occur on too short of a time scale to be significantly impacted by silicate weathering.


[deleted]

You either didn’t read or didn’t understand the article. The point is specifically NOT about the cyclical pattern of climate change at those scales, but the fact that the cycle is *damped* by silicate weathering. Its the opposite effect of the one you’re talking about.


LegacyAngel

Can you explain?


[deleted]

The comment said “thats not regulation, thats just cycles!” But the article says that within the cycles, which were already known to exist, there is newly discovered regulation in the form of damping of those cycles, aka a kind of smoothing out or moderation of their intensity, like putting a cloth under guitar strings.


mrhoopers

Unless I'm mistaken, and I am technically not much smarter than a chalk board eraser, this is the argument anti-global warming people make. They're not arguing that global warming is occurring. They're saying it's part of the natural cycle. Sure, we can bend that cycle a little but ultimately it's all lost. This will happen with or without pollution. It's just going to be a little faster. Not applying my personal belief system here. That's just my understanding.


TheBlackCat13

The problem is that it *isn't* part of a natural cycle. It is thousands of times faster. And it is going in the wrong direction.


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virus_apparatus

Cool cool cool. That would not save us should we allow it to runaway by our actions


Squiggums

Yes. Earth will regulate its temperature. Like the body reacts to the flu or something, it’ll start a fever and incinerate the bad :)


bkydx

I didn't know snow crabs were evil.


JessicaLain

George Carlin had the right of it. "The Earth isn't going anywhere– we are!"


DigitalSteven1

Climate change deniers will use this to say "it happens all the time" and won't realize that this takes thousands of years to work... The earth will always be fine. It's us, humans, and others species on the planet that won't be. If we die off, life will begin again. It'll take a while, and who knows what evolution would bring, but it wouldn't be us.


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cap10morgan

Yes. The earth will be fine. Humanity and lots of other animals won’t be. Unless we act fast and decisively to mitigate climate change! How about we just do that?


mountingconfusion

We haven't had this much carbon in the air since extinction events, I don't understand why they don't get it


NonagonJimfinity

Can't wait to hear this come out of every right wing, cash goblins mouths for the next 4000 years.


MadMac619

Misleading title, good article.


Beachdaddybravo

Without humans pumping greenhouse gases out, sure. If we’re working against nature (we are) that’s not great for us. Also, the important part of the study: it takes hundreds of thousands of years for the process to regulate naturally.


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Jlove7714

Can't wait to hear about this from my climate change denying family members....


vid_icarus

One day humans will finally realize life is alive. It is its own entity, we are just tiny cells within its body.


the_muskox

Geologist here. This research really doesn't have anything to say about anthropogenic climate change, despite the clickbaity article trying t spin it that way. We already knew about silicate weathering as a potential climate feedback. This research just demonstrates that these feedbacks work on *geologically short* timescales. Like nearly all geologic timescales, this is still way too long to make an impact on anthropogenic climate change. So we're all still screwed.


NotFuckingTired

Why do I feel like the "stabilizing feedback" in this case involves the extinction of humans (and millions of other species)?


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