Science!! Fucking magnets, how do they work?

pharmakos_sl said:

we've been getting high 80s / low 90s here in Michigan this summer. sure would make the below 0 winters nicer, though.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm in northern MI as well, other side. It was pretty nice up until that shitty storm over the weekend destroyed everything.

Also, if I've learned anything from watching Survivorman, it's that even an experienced survivalist is not good at getting food.

BrotherWu_sl said:

Also, if I've learned anything from watching Survivorman, it's that even an experienced survivalist is not good at getting food.

Click to expand...

You can only drink so much of your own piss before you just really need a beer.

You're thinking of that asshat Bear Grylls.

Cad_sl said:

Climate change won't be zombie apocalypse where society suddenly collapses, or naked survivalists given a flashlight and some string and put on a desert island to fend for themselves, it'd be a gradual change in lifestyle as certain things become untenable.

Click to expand...

Which is why I guess SpaceX needs to get the first 100 to Mars.

Cad_sl said:

Climate change won't be zombie apocalypse where society suddenly collapses, or naked survivalists given a flashlight and some string and put on a desert island to fend for themselves, it'd be a gradual change in lifestyle as certain things become untenable.

Click to expand...

Sure.

A steady, gradual change in climates already drove pretty much all our closest relatives to extinction as well though.

It doesn't all have to happen overnight like in some disaster movie to result in our extinction.

As ecological systems collapse, oceans rise, and humans die off, a tipping point will be reached beyond which thar be dragons.

BrotherWu_sl said:

Which is why I guess SpaceX needs to get the first 100 to Mars.

Click to expand...

Yeah this is exactly why space exploration and hopefully habitation and terraforming is so mission critical to our survival.

And yeah, Bear Grylls, Survivalman. Its all the same to me though.

Cad_sl said:

We drove our closest relatives to extinction, wouldn't you say?

Click to expand...

I would say its more complicated than that. There was some interbreeding, some outcompeting, climatic changes altering habitats more rapidly than they could adapt to, all contributing to the situation. Particularly with the Neanderthals.

We don't know enough about the Denosivans yet to say one way or the other.

A 1000 years of change might seem like a long time for gradual change, but on an evolutionary and world history time scale, its a flash in the pan.

Cad_sl said:

What animal could compete with us in any place on earth? What animal will adapt to a situation that we cannot? What habitat do we need to survive as a species (not 7 billion of us, but some number of us to survive as a species) that climate change can take away without scouring the entire earth?

Click to expand...

This is where you're getting hung up.

We won't need an animal to outcompete us, when the ecological niches are all dying out and there's nothing left for us to eat, and we can't grow our own food because all the arable land is too hot to grow food, and all the regions where food could be grown aren't amenable to it due to not having hundreds of millions of years worth of plant growth living, dying, and decaying on them to create enough top soil to support life.

You've created a complete non sequitor that the ONLY WAY we can cease to exist is if we're OUT COMPETED by other species.

Species go extinct all the time without something else driving them to it.

And the habitat that can be taken away from us is the arable land, as I've already described, due to the lack of top soil and nutrients for intensive agriculture.

All you have to do, Cad, is look at North Africa and how hard it is to grow anything there, to understand what happens if the climate heats up 3-5 degrees over the next century.

khalid_sl said:

We have enough technology to probably survive indefinitely on Mars if we could ship things there. We could ship dirt to northern areas for example, we could build huge greenhouses, etc. We aren't going to go extinct. Well, outside of nuclear war or a huge ass meteor strike.

Click to expand...

Dude, the shipping dirt to northern regions to grow food thing is so crazy I can't even begin to fathom how you think that's possible. Top soil needs to be renewed on the regs. Right now we do that by dumping shitloads of artificial fertilizers on it.

This requires a complex technological human society to still exist in the first place. Also good luck shipping enough of it to cover enough of the ground to grow enough food to feed the people who are already starving due to the climate changing. Where will the energy come from to drive the transportation devices? More oil?

Sorry but this is silly season stuff here, Khalidbro.

Greenhouses will require sunlight and chemical fertilizers.

The scale we're talking about is science fiction levels. The whole of human society would be constructed solely around food production at this point.

Cad_sl said:

People still lived in North Africa with iron age tech. We could live in North Africa indefinitely. This is not an extinction.

Click to expand...

North Africa was cooler then, and most of the people lived along the rivers, like the Nile.

Living like Arabs humping camels across the Sahara is not a survivable condition for the entire human species for long. Those people are able to survive that situation due to trade with outside sources who have access to better technology, food, water, etc.

You guys are being pretty unrealistic here. Its very sad from people I tend to consider fairly rational. I'm going to chalk it up to simply not having a real understanding of the biological and cultural adaptations and interactions required for humans to survive these sorts of conditions.

Its actually easier to live in colder terrain than it is warmer.

Cad_sl said:

So why wouldn't we... live near a river?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a climate change denier. I'm whole hog on stopping putting co2 in the atmosphere. I'm just saying even if it happens, we just might reduce population back to 100 million or 50 million, and live a much more basic life, rather than 7 billion with globalization and SJW's complaining their facebook feed oppresses them.

But humans are not going to go extinct on earth in any plausible scenario that doesn't wipe out all life on the planet making it physically impossible for us to exist.

Click to expand...

A 5 degree temperature increase would probably be enough to collapse every major ecological system on the planet bro. That is making it physically impossible for life as we understand it to exist. Microbes would exist, and possibly adapt over time to new, more complex life forms, but virtually everything we know as alive today would be gone.

I'd be surprised if 100k humans survived a full 10 degree temperature increase across the globe for 100 years.

"Three degrees of warming increases the risk of strong sea level rise from, for example Antarctica, or the collapse of marine ecosystems, such as Arctic sea ice or coral reefs . [It] increases the risk of intensification of extreme events ... In short, beyond two degrees of warming we are leaving the world as we know it."...

Professor Richard Betts from the UK's Met Office is the coordinator of a new international project called Helix, which looks at the impact of very high levels of warming. He tells us:

"t's very difficult indeed to know what a two degree world will look like, let alone four degrees or even six."

Click to expand...

What happens if we overshoot the two degree target for limiting global warming? | Carbon Brief

When the world's leading climatologists and political appointees meant to oversee this issue are saying "We can't even begin to predict how fucked this shit would be at a 4 degree global temperature increase" that should sound warning bells for anyone.

All these ecological systems are intricately interlinked. Its chaos theory on a global scale. Butterfly effect and shit.

Like I said, I'm not fully convinced that the sky is falling on this shit, as in I'm not a complete global warming believer. I'm really addressing primarily right now you're statement, which may well have been tongue in cheek, that a 5-10 degree global temperature increase wouldn't be an event that could potentially lead to our extinction. It could. I'm not saying its certainly going to happen at this point. Merely pointing out that the hypothetical you proposed is absurdly dangerous to life on this planet in ways we can't even properly predict, it would alter things so radically.

khalid_sl said:

Hodj, has not the climate of the planet switched much more than 2 degrees in the past?

Click to expand...

Never this fast. 10,000 times as fast as ever in the past is the issue here bro. Adaptation takes TIME. Long stretches of it. This is going to sort of the heart of why, for instance, Creationists have a hard time grasping evolution in general. The time scales involved. A 2 degree increase over, say, 50 million years is one thing. A 2 degree increase over 100, or a 1000 years, or even 10,000 years, is a LOT more impactful. Much less a 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 degree increase in a similar time frame.

Bill Nye literally just posted a fantastic video on this topic to his facebook page. Talk about serendipity

https://www.facebook.com/billnyefilm