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Glacier crash into dam near Uttarakhand, India.

Discussion in 'News from the UK, Europe and the rest of the World' started by aposhark, Feb 7, 2021.

  1. John Stevens
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    John Stevens Active Member

    In England alone 421 species of plant and animal went extinct in the last 200 years and thats just one country i think we have already reached the tipping point
  2. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    We've probably killed off even more species that we had not even identified or classified over that period, in the whole world there are likely hundreds of thousands of species of creature that we still don't know about living on this planet.

    However in terms of tipping points that's tricky the earth could eliminate humanity in time to preserve a fair bit of diversity although it is more likely that the earth will eliminate technological humanity rather than actually make the human race extinct, we would not be knocked back to the stone age but we could be knocked back far enough to be unable to support the kind of population we have today and that would not be an ELE although it would devastate the human race and we likely could not recover to get back to a state of technological civilisation.

    Personally I felt that we had lost our chance to do anything about the major existential threat of climate change back at the turn of the century, since then we have been and are in mitigation mode we will not avert the catastrophe we just need to decide what kind of catastrophe we want to have.

    Electric cars will not save the planet at least not cars using Lithium batteries the revolution in power technology required is so huge that it is not going to happen in time, there are other posts on here where I highlighted the amount of oil we use and the equivalent amount of oil that would represent all forms of human consumption of energy, actual oil use is greater than 1 cubic mile of oil per annum, total energy use is over 3 of those the amount of renewables we have is a tiny little cube in one corner of one of those oil cubes.

    We are at a point of transformation and transition in terms of human domination and exploitation of the planet but we are not at a real ELE not yet, we could reach that point if we let the planet get hot enough to release the methane clathrates or if we got really unlucky and the Earth decided to have a flood basalt event in our lifetimes, the methane clathrates are more likely but I suspect this planet will still have living creatures 250 million years from now however by then it will be very close to its 'end of days' as increased solar activity (warming of the sun as it ages) will likely have stopped the ice age cycle and will likely be cooking the planet by then and I doubt a planet bound human race will exist by then, if we learn to live in space then there is a small chance that there could still be a intelligent life around the solar system by that time, but the odds are not good.
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