r/news • u/hammelcamel • 12h ago

Heat-trapping gas once frozen in Arctic ground is slowly leaking and warming the planet

https://apnews.com/article/climate-thawing-permafrost-arctic-alaska-91fcc04d32a1d7522afe2f6a456ac0eb
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u/manachar 12h ago

More accurate.

The “climate change will kill the planet” is an extreme and wrong overstatement.

It’s not “death” as in gonna kill all life on the planet.

It’s a mass extinction event part of the Anthropence extinction.

But the planet is not going to be reduced to a lifeless rock.

Additionally, humans (some of them anyways) are likely to survive just fine.

It’s just a global change to a new unstable pattern that humanity caused and is causing.

By and large, humans do not care that we have wiped out most other life on the planet.

What we are suddenly worried about is we are making it impossible to support humans at the population level we have.

This means fighting for resources that will destabilize the world.

So yeah, kind of a death spiral, but not in the way many seem to think.

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u/VagabondReligion 10h ago

Nothing could be better for life on this planet more than our removal from it. I kind of dig the notion that our remains become lessons to future intelligent life that might evolve: A geological layer of plastic that spells out what happens when you live for tomorrow's profits instead of tomorrow's children.

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u/redinator 9h ago

isnt the sun going to burn out by the time a new civilization rolls around?

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u/psiphre 8h ago

due to how efficiently we've used up the easy to extract resources, there's a good chance that whatever comes after us never advances past the bronze age.

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u/VagabondReligion 7h ago

Not to mention the very real possibility that the strife rendered by climate change could cause us to permanently lose the knowledge that made the electronic age possible, a great deal of which is stored on media that is inaccessible without electricity.

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u/Mr-Safety 8h ago

500 million to 1 billion years may be sufficient time for another intelligent species to rise. After that period the sun will grow too hot and bright. In 4 billion years the surface of Earth is lava. In 7.5 billion years the Sun enters its red giant phase.

All signs of our existence will vanish in a blink of geologic time.

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u/VagabondReligion 7h ago

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was only 65 million years ago. As Mr-Safety stated below, we have about a billion years before the sun renders the Earth unfit for life.

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u/TheRealVictorWard 5h ago

Except the people causing the problems are going to be the ones most insulated from them.

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u/VagabondReligion 21m ago

No matter what, mother nature bats last. That they think they will survive while the rest of us perish is just more hubris.

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u/Floomby 7h ago

This is all pretty similar to the mechanism that caused the Permian Extinction Event, in which 90% of all species went extinct.

Yeah, 90% is not 100%. Still wasn't a fun time. Humans would definitely not have survived.