On 09 Mar 2014, at 19:47, Jesse Mazer wrote:
And take a look at the temperature at zero years ago, does it look
colder or hotter than the average for the last 600 million years?
Of course in the long term, life will be able to adapt to whatever
rise in temperature is caused by global warming, but sufficiently
fast rises may be too much for most species to adapt to (see http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/miomap/RESULTS-MIOMAP/BarnoskyJMamm03.pdf
for some paleontological evidence that faster changes cause more
extinctions, and that the rate fof change over the next century is
likely to exceed anything in mammalian history), causing mass
extinctions followed by a gradual expansion of surviving organisms
to fill vacant niches. If we are worried about what life will be
like for our descendants in the next few centuries or millennia, the
fact that life is likely to bounce back in 10 million years wouldn't
be much comfort to people living in the immediate aftermath of a
mass extinction. And that's not even considering all the specific
impacts on human society which aren't specifically connected to mass
extinction, like the flooding of huge numbers of coastal cities, the
decrease in freshwater supplies, etc.
That's the main point. We have to handle the planet with some
cautiousness for the sake of our descendants.
Eventually we have to abandon the produce-ever-more philosophy of
life, as we are more and more numerous on a finite planet for still
some number of years.
Good, the time has come to contemplate, and move a bit less.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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