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or other event that will cook Earth below the crust
…kinda what we’re talking about tho.
explain
I mean, shit, no one in this conversation has done me that courtesy - all I’ve gotten so far is a Jurassic Park quote, a chain of false equivalencies, and a hundred downvotes… and I’m not even the one making a claim (other than “we don’t know enough to make a claim”).
But fuck it, here ya go:
We’ve set off positive feedback loops that are warming the climate at a rate that keeps catching us off guard because we don’t know what the fuck we’re dealing with. Because we don’t know what we’re dealing with, we don’t know what will end those positive feedback loops, so the extreme end of worse-case-scenario is Earth gets better and better at soaking up the sun’s energy - heat increases enough and things like oceans evaporating start to happen; more heat, the crust start to melt.
There comes a point in all of that where even the most resilient of life finally dies off. You can’t just count on adaptation/evolution when the planet is made of boiling iron.
…people keep talking about things like nuclear war scrubbing the surface and extremophiles eventually emerging as the next batch of life to take the reigns… Earth’s combined nuclear arsenal is barely a spark compared to the forces at play here - which is a literal star, and a planet’s increasingly efficient ability to soak up that star’s rays.
This is unlike any previous mass extinction event we’re aware of - the only data we have is what’s unfolding in real time, so there is no basis to any assumption, good or bad.
That worse case scenario is as much speculation on my part as the prevailing “life, uh, finds a way” sentiment, but I’m having a hell of a time convincing anyone here that NONE of us knows shit. People seem to think life will prevail no matter what, but that’s just blind optimism.
tldr,
My take: things might be bad.
The rest of Lemmy’s take: things will be fine.
Well, you are correct that Earth’s nuclear weapons are literally a poofing fart compared to the energy we could potentially get from the sun, and we do have precedent for the sun creating extremely hostile conditions due to greenhouse gasses in one of our nearest neighbors, Venus.
But we need to examine what we’re talking about here specifically. I am not a geophysicist so I don’t have the numbers, but in order for your “concern” to have teeth you would need to show that there’s anything we can do here and no or even in the next thousand years that could change the nature of Earth’s atmosphere enough to replicate the kinds of conditions that created Venus’s current conditions.
And not only that, you need to compare what we could possibly do, even intentionally, that would come remotely close to some of the other greenhouse heating events that we’ve experienced in the past, and we’ve had some real doozies. We’ve had Earth heat up to scorching conditions from the planet turning inside-out several times, we’ve had Earth become a giant ice-ball. We’ve had impacts in the distant past that make the Chicxulub impactor look like a bottle-rocket misfire. And still, Earth regained equilibrium enough to support life. Over the last 4.5 billion years or so it doesn’t appear we’ve experienced anything that turned Earth’s surface and subsurface hostile to all forms of life, so it’s pretty safe to say that unless we start deliberately steering planetoids into our crust, which isn’t out of the question knowing our warlike ways, we’re probably not going to unintentionally create Venus-like conditions on Earth.
And of course we have to address the fact that we’re not even sure if Venus is sterile, there are increasing signs of bacterial life in the atmosphere so it’s quite possible that once life gets a foothold it may be incredibly hard to dislodge.
This isn’t an argument against the serious threat that we pose to the ecosystem, or to say that we’re not in extreme danger of ruining the current biosphere of the planet, we are in fact in the middle of a human-made mass-extinction. It’s not good. Our worst-case scenario sees a planet completely devoid of ice, no clouds, an atmosphere that consists of a hot haze that heat can’t escape from for thousands of years and an ecosystem collapse killing off most land animals. But it won’t be the end of life. Just another setback.
This is important to make clear because truth is important, speculation is not helpful when it points out unlikely extremes, it gives ammunition to deniers when you proclaim factually improbable extremes. Things are absolutely going to get bad, but there’s no reason at all to hype it to an extreme or you shoot yourself and your cause in the face.