In fact, I think I'm more worried about if my dog is getting enough cheese. And I don't even own a dog.
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Variable says:
I have no political agenda on this, but I do work in the resource extraction business.
So I gather you flip burgers?
Our carrying capacity is well over our current population and will remain so for throughout your grand children's life.
Clearly we have just long enough for alarmists to make the most politically expedient prediction. If they say we just have one year or if we are already too late, people will just say to heck with it. If they give too long a period, people will say, "well we can wait a few years." That is why we are always told we have 5 to 10 years. In the real world, we have as long as we want, at least as Raisin noted, we have about 5 billion years left when we will be incorporated into a red giant sun. Either that or we could make a rational argument and provide a realistic risk evaluation with real risks and real costs to our CO2 emissions.
We certainly will go extinct from global warming, assuming we are still here. At some point the sun will become a red giant and seriously warm the Earth.
Oh, you mean AGW??? Oh sorry, I thought you were talking about science. Clearly catastrophic AGW is just a load of BS that ultra-liberals use to justify over-taxation and increased big brother gov't.
BUT, I do agree with Variable 46. It is very possible that due to gov't trying to control the masses and attempt a global governmental monstrosity, that WW3 could result and cause extinction due to nuclear war.
Edit:
Variable 46, perhaps you should look into the UN figures for future population. They project that we will hit 0 population growth around 2050 and 2100 we will have less people then we do now. Why? Look at the population growth of first world countries.
Venus has a good head start on Earth. But why does global warming have to be the end of the world? Some earthquake kills 100 people, and no, I don't blame global warming for earthquakes, people talk about such an earthquake as if it is the end of the world. Sea level rise will be much worse, but it won't be the end of the world.
A 1 m rise of sea level will inundate 1,810 square km of land in Gujarat, 1,220 square km in West-Bengal, 670 square km in Tamil Nadu, 550 square km in Andhra Pradesh, 480 square km in Orissa, 410 square km in Maharashtra, 290 square km in Karnataka, 160 square km in Goa, and 120 square km in Kerala
http://interestingnewsfromallover.blogsp...
Madd Maxx
You blame realists for moving your questions around, accusing them of being afraid of the truth, which is a laugh, because you block everyone who tells the truth when they answer your questions.
In about 2 or 3 billion years time, when the sun expands and the solar wind blows away all Earths water.
The Earth has been frozen and hot and it still seems to be here. People forever have loved to say the world is ending. I think people hate their mortality and hate to think the world will go on without them. Therefore they predict its demise.
As for environmental factors, those at present (even global warming) do not threaten humanity's existence...but they do threaten humanity's numbers. The biosphere has a definite "carrying capacity" for species of our type. If we exceed that capacity, or alter the biosphere in such a way that that capacity is reduced, then our population will be reduced too... probably along catastrophic lines involving starvation and maybe some rampant disease.
The danger of extinction comes from the geo-political unrest that will result from this crisis. If it leads to widespread wars as nations struggle to survive, it becomes increasingly possible that nuclear exchanges will result. That event would further reduce the carrying capacity of the biosphere...possibly below the ability to support any human life at all.
Unless we can get a handle on our runaway population growth, I think events will start to unravel in 50 to 100 years.
@RAISIN CAINE...Interesting you have no confidence in the scientific consensus on global warming, yet you have confidence in UN population figures. This demonstrates that "we believe what we want to believe." I'm old enough to remember when the UN projected ZPG near where we're at now in the year 2050...to no avail. Projections for the population to grow from 7 billion now to 9.6 billion in 2050 reflect an increase in 37%...more than 1/3! We will be lucky if we limit it to that over the next 36 years, because it only took 30 years to DOUBLE the population from 1970 to 2000...in spite of what various projections were saying in 1970 that it would be far less than that.
I have no political agenda on this, but I do work in the resource extraction business. This is the business that converts the biosphere into things we eat and drink, and I'll just say we're getting pushed more and more towards the carrying capacity for what we can provide for humans, as a consequence of things like changes in the weather, breakdowns in infrastructure, geo-political unrest and...fundamental to everything...our ever-increasing population.
@DARREN...you're right in that the temperature has fluctuated for thousands of years. Millions of years, actually. But the big difference that people ignore when they make this comment is that we haven't had 7 billion people living at the same time before. RIGHT NOW we have a climate that enables us to feed and clothe most of those 7 billion. THAT is the difference.
As for CO2, you are also correct. I grow things for a living. I facilitate the conversion of carbon in our atmosphere into things you eat and/or use. There is such a thing as "too much of a good thing" and there can be too much carbon in the atmosphere to facilitate good plant growth. As for the statement about technology raising the carrying capacity of the world...we already rely on technology to do that and there is a break-even cost to that. Over-fertilization and the drawdown of aquifers are a couple examples. Blind faith in technology saving us is just groping in the blind.
@JIM ... there's no need to attempt to be insulting. A burger flipper is in the "service industry." The resource extraction industry in which I work is the forest products business (a traditionally conservative industry), where I am a forester...a position that requires a multi-disciplinary college education. I'm used to looking at planning horizons that stretch 100 to 120 years into the future...and also used to looking at dendrochronological events that stretch centuries into the past. Based on my 30-plus years in this profession, I feel both comfortable saying, and alarmed to say it, that we are indeed pushing the limits of the carrying capacity for our species. I attribute this primarily to my experience in watershed management but there are other issues in which I'm involved too that have led me to this conclusion.
The sun has been causing fluctuations in temperature and this has been going on for thousands of years. Technology can overcome the so-called "carrying capacity" of the world. Also, plants use carbon dioxide. Why should we be hatin' on carbon dioxide? We need carbon dioxide for the chain of life.
the earth will remain , humanity will turn to dust in , at best , 2 or 3 decades .
Many people believe mans destruction of the environment, the growing so-called "global warming" issue, and the plundering of resources has set the planet on an inevitable course towards extinction. How much time do you think before human actions cause humans to become extinct?
