EXTINCTION: The Climatic Time Bomb.
Contents:
There is no greater national security threat than climate change. Even the specter of nuclear war between great powers — the only thing that could remotely mimic the effects of climate change over time — is a much lower risk than climate change, which is already happening. Every year we fail to act the problem grows, and the solution becomes more difficult.
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As America dithers, climate change is sparking a slow-motion nuclear-scale holocaust. Instead, America is paralyzed by a lack of political will. Donald Trump and his allies in Congress — many of whom deny the existence of climate change — are making the problem worse. The president announced his intent to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement and is rolling back regulations that would have cut emissions.
Despite this dark reality, there is reason for hope. In , the world came together to negotiate the Paris agreement, which set the goal of limiting global temperature increases to well below 2C. Despite a hostile Trump administration, many US governors, mayors, businesses and private citizens are already leading the way.
So are other countries as they seize the economic and public health opportunity that comes with a clean energy future. The path ahead, to say the least, is daunting. The Chicxulub asteroid , for example, is theorized to have caused the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous. Small near-Earth asteroids are regularly observed and can impact anywhere on the Earth injuring local populations.
In April , the B Foundation reported "It's a per cent certain we'll be hit [by a devastating asteroid], but we're not per cent sure when. Extraterrestrial life could invade Earth [] either to exterminate and supplant human life, enslave it under a colonial system, steal the planet's resources, or destroy the planet altogether. Although evidence of alien life has never been documented, scientists such as Carl Sagan have postulated that the existence of extraterrestrial life is very likely.
It was removed in An article in The New York Times discussed the possible threats for humanity of intentionally sending messages aimed at extraterrestrial life into the cosmos in the context of the SETI efforts.
The ticking bomb of climate change is America's biggest threat
Several renowned public figures such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have argued against sending such messages on the grounds that extraterrestrial civilizations with technology are probably far more advanced than humanity and could pose an existential threat to humanity. Climate change refers to a lasting change in the Earth's climate. The climate has ranged from ice ages to warmer periods when palm trees grew in Antarctica.
It has been hypothesized that there was also a period called " snowball Earth " when all the oceans were covered in a layer of ice. These global climatic changes occurred slowly, prior to the rise of human civilization about 10 thousand years ago near the end of the last Major Ice Age when the climate became more stable. However, abrupt climate change on the decade time scale has occurred regionally. Since civilization originated during a period of stable climate, a natural variation into a new climate regime colder or hotter could pose a threat to civilization.
The Clathrate Gun Hypothesis
In the history of the Earth, many ice ages are known to have occurred. More ice ages will be possible at an interval of 40,—, years. An ice age would have a serious impact on civilization because vast areas of land mainly in North America, Europe, and Asia could become uninhabitable. It would still be possible to live in the tropical regions, but with possible loss of humidity and water. Currently, the world is in an interglacial period within a much older glacial event. The last glacial expansion ended about 10, years ago, and all civilizations evolved later than this.
Scientists do not predict that a natural ice age will occur anytime soon. This may be due to manmade emissions potentially delaying the possible onset or another ice age for at least another 50, years.
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A number of astronomical threats have been identified. Were this to happen, the simulations suggest a collision with Earth could be one of four possible outcomes the others being Mercury colliding with the Sun, colliding with Venus, or being ejected from the Solar System altogether. If Mercury were to collide with Earth, all life on Earth could be obliterated entirely: Another cosmic threat is a gamma-ray burst , typically produced by a supernova when a star collapses inward on itself and then "bounces" outward in a massive explosion.
Under certain circumstances, these events are thought to produce massive bursts of gamma radiation emanating outward from the axis of rotation of the star.
If such an event were to occur oriented towards the Earth, the massive amounts of gamma radiation could significantly affect the Earth's atmosphere and pose an existential threat to all life. Such a gamma-ray burst may have been the cause of the Ordovician—Silurian extinction events. Neither this scenario nor the destabilization of Mercury's orbit are likely in the foreseeable future. If the Solar System were to pass through a dark nebula , a cloud of cosmic dust , severe global climate change would occur.
A powerful solar flare or solar superstorm, which is a drastic and unusual decrease or increase in the Sun's power output, could have severe consequences for life on Earth. If our universe lies within a false vacuum , a bubble of lower-energy vacuum could come to exist by chance or otherwise in our universe, and catalyze the conversion of our universe to a lower energy state in a volume expanding at nearly the speed of light, destroying all that we know without forewarning.
The magnetic poles of the Earth shifted many times in geologic history. The duration of such a shift is still debated. Theories exist that during such times, the Earth's magnetic field would be substantially weakened, threatening civilization by allowing radiation from the Sun, especially solar wind , solar flares or cosmic radiation , to reach the surface. These theories have been somewhat discredited, as statistical analysis shows no evidence for a correlation between past reversals and past extinctions.
Numerous historical examples of pandemics [] had a devastating effect on a large number of people. The present, unprecedented scale and speed of human movement make it more difficult than ever to contain an epidemic through local quarantines. A global pandemic has become a realistic threat to human civilization. Naturally evolving pathogens will ultimately develop an upper limit to their virulence. However, this is not necessarily a safeguard against a global catastrophe, for the following reasons:.
The fitness advantage of limited virulence is primarily a function of a limited number of hosts. Any pathogen with a high virulence, high transmission rate and long incubation time may have already caused a catastrophic pandemic before ultimately virulence is limited through natural selection. In models where virulence level and rate of transmission are related, high levels of virulence can evolve. A pathogen that infects humans as a secondary host and primarily infects another species a zoonosis has no constraints on its virulence in people, since the accidental secondary infections do not affect its evolution.
A geological event such as massive flood basalt , volcanism, or the eruption of a supervolcano [] could lead to a so-called volcanic winter, similar to a nuclear winter. One such event, the Toba eruption , [] occurred in Indonesia about 71, years ago. According to the Toba catastrophe theory , [] the event may have reduced human populations to only a few tens of thousands of individuals. Yellowstone Caldera is another such supervolcano, having undergone or more caldera -forming eruptions in the past 17 million years.
When the supervolcano at Yellowstone last erupted , years ago, the thinnest layers of the ash ejected from the caldera spread over most of the United States west of the Mississippi River and part of northeastern Mexico. The magma covered much of what is now Yellowstone National Park and extended beyond, covering much of the ground from Yellowstone River in the east to the Idaho falls in the west, with some of the flows extending north beyond Mammoth Springs.
According to a recent study, if the Yellowstone caldera erupted again as a supervolcano, an ash layer one to three millimeters thick could be deposited as far away as New York, enough to "reduce traction on roads and runways, short out electrical transformers and cause respiratory problems".
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There would be centimeters of thickness over much of the U. Midwest, enough to disrupt crops and livestock, especially if it happened at a critical time in the growing season. The worst-affected city would likely be Billings, Montana , population ,, which the model predicted would be covered with ash estimated as 1.
The main long-term effect is through global climate change, which reduces the temperature globally by about 5—15 degrees C for a decade, together with the direct effects of the deposits of ash on their crops. A large supervolcano like Toba would deposit one or two meters thickness of ash over an area of several million square kilometers.
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If that happened in some densely populated agricultural area, such as India, it could destroy one or two seasons of crops for two billion people. However, Yellowstone shows no signs of a supereruption at present, and it is not certain that a future supereruption will occur there. Research published in finds evidence that massive volcanic eruptions caused massive coal combustion, supporting models for significant generation of greenhouse gases. Researchers have suggested that massive volcanic eruptions through coal beds in Siberia would generate significant greenhouse gases and cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
Such an eruption might cause the immediate deaths of millions of people several hundred miles from the eruption, and perhaps billions of deaths [] worldwide, due to the failure of the monsoon [ citation needed ] , resulting in major crop failures causing starvation on a profound scale. A much more speculative concept is the verneshot: Such an event may be forceful enough to launch an extreme amount of material from the crust and mantle into a sub-orbital trajectory. Planetary management and respecting planetary boundaries have been proposed as approaches to preventing ecological catastrophes.
Within the scope of these approaches, the field of geoengineering encompasses the deliberate large-scale engineering and manipulation of the planetary environment to combat or counteract anthropogenic changes in atmospheric chemistry. Space colonization is a proposed alternative to improve the odds of surviving an extinction scenario. Food storage has been proposed globally, but the monetary cost would be high. Furthermore, it would likely contribute to the current millions of deaths per year due to malnutrition. Some survivalists stock survival retreats with multiple-year food supplies.
It is designed to hold 2.
The conference report cautions that the results should be taken "with a grain of salt". The USGS puts it like this: Scope insensitivity influences how bad people consider the extinction of the human race to be. Burning another billion tons would be a disaster. A global pandemic has become a realistic threat to human civilization. Retrieved May 5,
More speculatively, if society continues to function and if the biosphere remains habitable, calorie needs for the present human population might in theory be met during an extended absence of sunlight, given sufficient advance planning. Conjectured solutions include growing mushrooms on the dead plant biomass left in the wake of the catastrophe, converting cellulose to sugar, or feeding natural gas to methane-digesting bacteria.
Insufficient global governance creates risks in the social and political domain, but the governance mechanisms develop more slowly than technological and social change. There are concerns from governments, the private sector, as well as the general public about the lack of governance mechanisms to efficiently deal with risks, negotiate and adjudicate between diverse and conflicting interests. This is further underlined by an understanding of the interconnectedness of global systemic risks. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists est.
It studies risks associated with nuclear war and energy and famously maintains the Doomsday Clock established in The Foresight Institute est. It was one of the earliest organizations to study the unintended consequences of otherwise harmless technology gone haywire at a global scale. It was founded by K. Eric Drexler who postulated " grey goo ".
Beginning after , a growing number of scientists, philosophers and tech billionaires created organizations devoted to studying global risks both inside and outside of academia. The Global Challenges Foundation est. University-based organizations include the Future of Humanity Institute est. It was founded by Nick Bostrom and is based at Oxford University. The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk est. All are man-made risks, as Huw Price explained to the AFP news agency, "It seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology".
He added that when this happens "we're no longer the smartest things around," and will risk being at the mercy of "machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don't include us. The Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere is a Stanford University-based organization focusing on many issues related to global catastrophe by bringing together members of academic in the humanities.
Other risk assessment groups are based in or are part of governmental organizations. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Hypothetical future event that has the potential to damage human well-being on a global scale. For the book, see Global Catastrophic Risks book. Existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence , AI takeover , Friendly artificial intelligence , and Technological singularity. Effects of global warming and Runaway climate change. Grey goo and Bioterrorism. Grey goo and Potential risks of nanotechnology. Malthusian catastrophe and Human overpopulation.
Global catastrophic risk
Asteroid-impact avoidance and Impact event. This section does not cite any sources. It is the only known mass extinction of insects. Because so much biodiversity was lost, the recovery of life on Earth took significantly longer than after any other extinction event, possibly up to 10 million years. I implore you to watch the BBC Documentary video The Day the Earth Died, which brilliantly describes the search by geologists throughout the world to discover the cause of this mass extinction event millions of years ago.
At first they thought it was a giant asteroid, similar to the event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago due to the after-effects of an asteroid impact off the Yucatan Peninsula. They then postulated that global warming led to a 5 degree increase in global temperature which led to a massive release of carbon 12 from the Methane Hydrate which led to a 10 degree increase in Global temperature which then literally wiped out life on Earth.
It is a must see 48 minute BBC video. No one is taking into account the consequences of rapid Methane build up and resultant carbon 12 increase. No one is considering what will happen if the Methane emissions from the Arctic permafrost continue to accelerate. The sad realization for an apathetic world and main stream press is that we may already be beyond the point of no return- and many others agree.