some credible scientists believe humanity is verrrrrry close to destruction | vice united kingdom

7/30/2019 Some Credible Scientists Believe Humanity is Verrrrrry Close to Destruction | VICE United Kingdom

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SOME CREDIBLE SCIENTISTSBELIEVE HUMANITY IS VERRRRRRY

CLOSE TO DESTRUCTIONBy Nathan Curry

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Presumably painted by a Near Term Extinctionist. via Flickr.

If you were to zoom out and take a comparative look back at our planet during the 1950s from

some sort of cosmic time-travelling orbiter cube, you would probably first notice that millions of

pieces of space trash had disappeared from orbit.

The moon would appear six and a half feet closer to Earth, and the continents of Europe and

North America would be four feet closer together. Zooming in, you would be able to spot some

of the industrial clambering of the Golden Age of Capitalism in the West and some of the stilted

attempts at the Great Leap Forwardin the East. Lasers, bar codes, contraceptives, hydrogen

bombs, microchips, credit cards, synthesizers, superglue, Barbie dolls, pharmaceuticals, factory

farming, and distortion pedals would just be coming into existence.

There would be two thirds fewer humans on the planet than there are now. Over a million

different species of plants and animals would exist that have since gone extinct. There would be

90 percent more fish, a billion less tons of plastic, and 40 percent more phytoplankton

(producers of half the planets oxygen) in the oceans. There would be twice as many trees

covering the land and about three times more drinking water available from ancient aquifers.

There would be about 80 percent more ice covering the northern pole during the summer

season and 30 percent less carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. The list goes on...

Most educated and semi-concerned people know that these sorts of sordid details make up the

backdrop of our retina-screened, ethylene-ripened story of progress, but what happens when

you start stringing them all together?

IfDoomsday Preppers, the highest rated show on the National Geographic Channel is any

indication, the general public seems to be getting ready for some sort of societal collapse. There

have always been doomsday prophets and cults around and everyone has their own personal

view of how the apocalypse will probably go down (ascension of pure souls, zombie crows), but

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threat of human-induced climate change on the survival of the human species.

Recent data seems to suggest that we may have already tripped several irrevocable, non-linear,

positive feedback loops (melting of permafrost, methane hydrates, and arctic sea ice) that make

an average global temperature increase of only 2C by 2100 seem like a fairy tale. Instead,

were talking 4C, 6C, 10C, 16C (????????) here.

The link between rapid climate change and human extinction is basically this: the planet

becomes uninhabitable by humans if the average temperature goes up by 4-6C. It doesnt

sound like a lot because were used to the temperature changing 15C overnight, but the thing

that is not mentioned enough is that even a 2-3C average increase would give us temperatures

that regularly surpass 40C (104F) in North America and Europe, and soar even higher near

the equator. Human bodies start to break down after six hours at a wet-bulb (100% humidity)

temperature of 35C (95F). This makes the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed over

70,000 people seem like not a very big deal.

Factoring in the increase were already seeing in heat waves, droughts, wildfires, massive

storms, food and water shortages, deforestation, ocean acidification, and sea level rise some

are seeing the writing on the wall:

Were all gonna die!

If you want to freak yourself the fuck out, spend a few hours trying to refute the mounting

evidence of our impending doom heralded by the man who gave the Near Term Extinction

movement its name, Guy McPherson, on his blog Nature Bats Last. McPherson is a former

Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the

University of Arizona, who left his cushy tenured academic career and now lives in a straw-bale

house on a sustainable commune in rural New Mexico in an attempt to walk away from

Empire. There are a lot ofinterviews and videos available of Dr. McPherson talking about

NTE if you want to boost your pessimism about the future to suicidal/ruin-any-dinner-party

levels.


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be on a clear path toward extinction now that its probably too late to do anything about it (hint:

suicide or shrooms). As Drumright points out, the entirety of human philosophy, religion, and

politics doesnt really provide a framework for processing the psychological terror of all of

humanity not existing in the near future.

Outside of the official NTE enclave, there are a lot of scientists and journalists who would

probably try to avoid being labeled as NTE proponents, but are still making the same sort of dire

predictions about our collective fate. They may not believe that humans will ALL be gone by

mid-century, but massive, catastrophic population decline due to human-induced rapid climate

change is not out of the picture.

James Hansen, the former head of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the

worlds leading climatologists has recently retired from his position after 43 years in order to

concentrate on climate-change activism. He predicts that without full de-carbonization by 2030,

global CO2 emissions will be 16 times higher than in 1950, guaranteeing catastrophic climate

change. In an essay published in April of this year, Hansen states:

If we should succeed in digging up and burning all fossil fuels, some parts of the planet would

become literally uninhabitable, with some times during the year having wet bulb temperatures

exceeding 35C. At such temperatures, for reasons of physiology and physics, humans cannot

survive it is physically impossible for the environment to carry away the 100W of metabolic

heat that a human body generates when it is at rest. Thus even a person lying quietly naked in

hurricane force winds would be unable to survive.

Bill McKibben, prominent green journalist, author, distinguished scholar, and one of the founders

of 350.org the movement that aims to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels to 350ppm in the hopes

of avoiding runaway climate change wrote a book in 2011 called Eaarth: Making a Life on a

Tough New Planet. In it he highlights current environmental changes that have put uspastthe

predictions that had previously been reserved for the end of the 21st

century. He emphasizes

that the popular political rhetoric that we need to do something about climate change for our

grandchildren is sorely out of touch with reality. This is happening now. Were already living ona sci-fi planet from a parallel universe:

The Arctic ice cap is melting, the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with

disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans are distinctly more acid and their level is

risingThe greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more

powerfulThe great rain forest of the Amazon is drying on its marginsThe great boreal forest

of North America is dying in a matter of years [This] new planet looks more or less like our

own but clearly isnt This is the biggest thing thats ever happened.


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Climate Change protesters in Melbourne. via Flickr.

Peter Ward is a paleontologist and author whose 2007 book Under a Green Sky: Global

Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What they Can Tell Us About the Future,

provides evidence that all but one of the major global extinction events (dinosaurs) occurred due

to rapid climate change caused by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This time

around, the carbon dioxide increase happens to be coming from humans figuring out how to dig

billions of tons of carbon out of the ground and releasing it into the air. Ward states that during

the last 10,000 years in which human civilization has emerged, our carbon dioxide levels and

climate have remained anomalously stable, but the future doesnt look so good:

The average global temperature has changed as much as 18F [8C] in a few decades. The

average global temperature is 59F [15C]. Imagine that it shot to 75F [24C] or dropped to

40F [4C], in a century or less. We have no experience of such a world... at minimum, such

sudden changes would create catastrophic storms of unbelievable magnitude and fury...lashing

the continents not once a decade or century but several times each year...For most of the last

100,000 years, an abruptly changing climate was the rule, not the exception.

Far from being a Mother Earth lover, Ward has also developed an anti-Gaia hypothesis that he

calls the Medea Hypothesis in which complex life, instead of being in symbiotic harmony with

the environment, is actually a horrible nuisance. In this hypothesis, the planet and microbial life

have worked together multiple times to trigger mass extinction events that have almost

succeeded in returning the earth to its microbe-dominant state. In other words, Mother Earth

might be Microbe Earth and she might be trying to kill her kids.

Scientists are putting out the warning call that rapid, life-threatening climate change lies ahead

in our near future but most are drowned out by the political arguments and denialist rhetoric of

climate change skeptics. The well-funded effort by free market think tanks, energy lobbyists, and

industry advocates to blur the public perception of climate science should come as no surprise.

The thermodynamic forcing effects of an ice-free artic by 2015 dont seem so threatening if you

stand to gain billions of dollars by sending drill bits into the potentially huge oil reservoirs there.

It may not be the case that the southwest US will be uninhabitable by 2035, or that all of human

life will be extinguished in a generation, but we should probably start to acknowledge and

internalize what some of the people who have given their lives to better understand this planet

are saying about it. Its depressing to think that humans, in our current state, could be the

Omega Point of consciousness. Maybe sentience and the knowledge of our inevitable death

have given us a sort of survival vertigo that we cant overcome. As the separate paths of


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By Nathan Curry 2 weeks ago

Tags: climate change, extinction, human extinction, near term extinction, Global Warming, world, planet, Heat

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