Is it Game Over for the 1.5 Degree Climate Limit?
Wherever you look, you'll hear headlines claiming we've passed 1.5 degrees of global warming. And while 2024 saw record breaking climate change, this might n...
No, it's not "game over". It will never be game over. Humans do not have the ability to destroy the planet.
What we do have is the ability of making it hard for lots of regions to sustain complex biodiversity and human activity. The more and the faster the average global temperature increases, the more people will be displaced and biodiversity lost.
Nature will always bounce back because nature operates in geological scale. But human civilization will suffer a lot. Vast areas will be progressively destroyed by droughts, floods, fires and encroaching sea, which will continue increasing migration to safer places, causing more and more unrest and war.
So, yeah. Never game over, just progressively crappier levels.
I'm sorry but we have so many nukes that your answer is trivially wrong. Also don't get technical with the "well is it really destroyed" like yes, if your house is rubble, technically all the mass is still there, a bunch of the walls are still intact, you can probably even still see the floorplan, but it's no longer a house. You tell someone to draw you an "Earth", and yeah humans can very much destroy the fuck out of that.
Nukes won't destroy the planet. All their yields combined don't measure up to a 1 km asteroid or an average supervolcano, and their radiation and dust is gone in 0.00005% of the remaining time Earth will exist.
The chemical pollution of all our industry washing out to sea will have a bigger impact. All ocean-based animals with shells will die out as oceanic acidity reaches critical levels, though in 0.01% of the remaining time earth will exist shell-based life from freshwater habitats would probablu repopulate them if non-shell-based life doesn't evolve to fill the same niches first.
There will be trees, flowers, mammals, shellfish, algae, fungi, birds, reptiles, and insects. The Earth from above will look like ocean, forest, desert, and glacier, though the forests may cover less of it for the first 0.01% of the remainder of its existence. We will produce a mass extinction event comparable to the other five, but Earth will still look the same at the scale of a simple drawing.
If you blow up all our nukes in the same place at once, you will make a bill hole and a hell lotta dust, but you certainly won't destroy the planet or kill all life. In that case you might dessimate a lot of large animal and plant species. But there would still be survivors, probably including humans. Their lives would probably be miserable for a long time too. But anyway, we're talking about climate change, not nukes, so I don't get why you're bringing that up?
Ice age is not a planet or life destroying event.
The headline is asking if its too late (game over) for staying below 1.5°C, which is a fair question given the fact that we have had years over that limit already.
Yes, I know. I think it's definitely game over for that much, but I want to expand that the game goes on much longer.
I think they mean game over for us. And yes, it’s game over for humanity on a global scale. Good, we suck.
It's not though. You an I would probably die if your civilization collapses, but millions of people live away from civilization. Humans will definitely survive this, but many modern societies won't.
Easy as hell to be a doomer. That's why I admire scifi authors that dare to guess the form a better world may take. And yes I'd appreciate any "hopeful scifi" media recommendations.