I don’t wish for this to happen, mind you, but we are clearly living in the dumbest possible timeline, and so it is the only solution that makes sense

With how bad its going a summer without winter might give us another 10 years.

Because absorbed light is excess energy.

Also due to reduced water vapor and ice cover lol. It’s a conclusion that can be drawn without much reliance on the article, which focuses a lot on specific climate model improvements and not the obvious concern: given our desire for the earth to reflect more of the sun’s rays and cool off, reflecting fewer and warming up is not good

It’s pretty big leap from the Earth absorbing slightly more energy from the sun to “the extinction of all life on Earth.”

“The extinction of all life in Earth” is not a reasonable conclusion to draw from this

This must be what people have meant when they say we’re headed for the Dark Ages.

I assume its the opposite. It’s absorbing light as heat vs reflecting and cooling down.

Here’s the ad I obtained from that link…thinking what I’m thinking? Yes. Yes I am!

Yes, it is, I was just making a bad joke. I am actually surprised that didn’t mention that the decrease in some air pollution was also a factor. See: https://www.science.org/content/article/clearer-skies-may-be-accelerating-global-warming

how is that horrifying?

Daisyworld.

Less albedo -> more heat -> ice caps melting -> less albedo and more greenhouse gases -> much more heat, and so on.

It’s a vicious cycle, and there doesn’t seem to be any viable solution. We could put shades between us and the sun, but that’d probably reduce light too much and kill most plants, leading to even more carbon being released.

We’re fucked, and probably way beyond any chance of unfucking ourselves. We let those pass by years ago.

Oh. Well… Good day to you and yours

My friend, it really is not.

We’re not going extinct. FFS, we survived at least one ice age. At another point, scientists studying our DNA think we were down to as a few as a thousand individuals.

Humans are the AR-15s of the animal kingdom. Not the greatest* for strength, speed, vision, etc., but excellent at multipurpose roles. Like insects, we survive in any climate outside Antarctica. We can walk endlessly. I’m 54, not in great shape, pretty sure I could spend my entire waking day walking, stopping only to eat.

We’re social animals who stick together when the going gets tough. We love fucking and we can make babies every month of the year, no waiting to go in heat.

No animal comes close to our dexterity and advanced tool use. Stone Age man was more adept at tool use than every other animal combined. We’re stupid reliable, smart and tough as well.

* OK, we can throw and catch like nothing else on Earth.

global warming at this rate absolutely does have the potential to extinct us, no matter how cool we think we are. Tenacity and versatility will only carry you so far when you fuck up nature so badly that all the things you’d eat for food are themselves extinct or almost extinct. At the point we were down to a few thousand individuals, I should imagine that the climate not being super hyper mega fucked helped immensely in ensuring those people had adequate food – you aren’t going to be running down a deer (or a rabbit, or any other wild game) in the post-climate-apocalypse world if all the deer are dead because the food chain supporting the deer population collapsed. You aren’t going to be farming because extreme weather variations will make it impossible, you might be in for a drought or a monsoon and you’ll certainly not have accurate weather forecasting to go off of by that point. Foraging? I sure hope none of the various food chains and water cycles supporting the growth of forage-able food has collapsed either (they probably will). Fishing? Ocean acidity, microplastics, and global warming are all fighting to be the thing that kills that off, take your pick.

Life is incredibly resilient, a ton of life is going to survive and adapt just fine. You think marginally increased global temperatures are worse than the Chicxulub impact? It’s crazy that in the face of environmental catastrophe people can still find ways to irrationally catastrophize

Yeah, loss of snow reduces albedo, this increases temperature reducing snow. It’s a known factor in how stable climate positions are stable.

Yeah, between extremophiles that will probably outlast the atmosphere and the mesozoic having been pretty balmy, life finds a way. That said, complex life is about to have a very bad time, especially specialists that can’t handle wide temperature ranges. It’s an extinction event, and our species is gonna have to really try to survive it.

Oh, right. I barely clock exaggerations of that sort anymore. People reach straight for the top shelf with their words. Especially in this case I think it works in environmentalists’ favor. Maybe I’m wrong and we should be more concerned about pushback when people overstate the case, but even within the left I’ve encountered few people who seem to profess that much interest in biodiversity or wild plant/animal/fungal rights to existence, so misunderstanding the issue in exaggerated terms at least evokes concern rather than apathy. It’s not like the conservative’s real issue with climate change is that akshually “life” in the broadest sense will find a way to adapt.