The problem is there is nothing we can do to save ourselves if we don’t prevent the current trends in climate change.

Becoming Morlocks, living underground and becoming C.H.U.D.S., is not a real option for the species. Living above ground with the hydrogen sulfide clouds after ocean death is not an option. Flying away to live in fragile bubbles on the moon or mars is not a real option.

If we don’t stop climate change before natural feedback loops overpower our ability to intervene (I think we are past that point today) we will not survive as a species or civilization, and the event will eventually likely rival the Permian extinction event for the title of worst extinction in planetary history.

Note- it takes approximately 100 gallons of gasoline to create 1 ton of CO2, so at $475 per ton you double the cost of gas to capture it all in a best case scenario with the cheapest carbon capture systems if you could build millions of them for free. Mechanical carbon capture is not a solution.

Not mentioned here is the fact that if acidification destroys the base of the ocean food web, the resulting masses of rotting dead sea life is expected to creat massive clouds of hydrogen sulfide that will poison oceans further and spread over most land masses again.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031104063957.htm

I expect this is just the beginning.
Populations of marine animals will migrate to new areas less suited for them (or try and fail), causing disruptions in their new location, spurring more migrations….
When this happens, local fishing industries collapse because their prey is gone and new invasive species either aren’t edible or aren’t caught with the gear they have (like Lionfish, inedible to most fish and mammals, and all but impossible to catch except by spear fishing).
Between ocean acidification, deep water warming, overfishing, invasive species, pollution, loss of ice packs, and other as yet unknown factors, the ocean’s ability to produce food is going to be severely limited in the near future. It already is, in fact.
The crab collapse isn’t the canary in the coal mine, it’s not even the first miner to drop dead. It’s like 1/4 of the entire night shift just disappeared….and they are all the engineers that keep things functioning.

This is like a massive corn blight on land. It not only kills the corn, it takes out everything that relies on corn too, like pigs, chickens, cattle, goats, pretty much any livestock, and an insanely large percentage of the calories humans eat too. A shitload of the ocean relies on crab meat, and more rely on crabs to keep the ocean floors clean….important if we don’t want clouds of hydrogen sulfide erupting from the ocean making all coastal states dead zones.

Almost as stupid as holding the producers of the toxic product AND the misleading or outright false information about it's hazards blameless. Because they actively misled their customers, I give them the vast lions share of blame, but maybe not 100%. There's plenty to go around.

You don't have to live in poverty to abandon fossil fuels.
Not.
Even.
Close.
I bought solar 10+- years back...it paid for itself in 8. It's lifespan is 20+-. I get 12 years of free electricity for abandoning that portion, with no blackouts, no brownouts, and no rate increases.

True, the video could be better at sharing the blame, but it stayed on topic instead, that topic being major polluters greenwashing their mage. I didn't take it as assigning ALL blame to one source, just not allowing the worst offenders to shirk all responsibility for their products.


Every one of these is the likely outcome of any anthropogenic rise over 2-3C because of feedback loops that drive us to 6-12C rise. Only the wars are likely this century, but I didn't put a timeframe on those outcomes. 140 million + will be displaced by just a 3' rise, which is all but guaranteed by 2100 under the most optimistic current projections.
That wipes out mangroves and other fish nurseries, further impacting the struggling ocean food webs. All the while it accelerates as our ability to cope erodes like the shorelines....it doesn't just halt at 3' rise.
The natural food webs on land are also struggling, and are unlikely to survive ocean collapse.

Not just from deforestation, but diatoms are near a point of collapse from ocean acidification. https://diatoms.org/what-are-diatoms. That's over 1/2....and the base of the ocean food web.


Since the IPCC (again, known for overly conservative estimates) now says at current rates we could hit as much as a 6C rise by 2100, and rates of emissions are rising as fast as carbon sinks are shrinking, they're not just a possibility, they a likelihood in the near future....but granted the hydrogen sulfide clouds are far in a worst case scenario future, far from guaranteed.

@newtboy,

Walking backwards to simplify, my main point is that simply blaming ALL fossil fuel usage on the company providing the fossil fuel is stupid and misleading in the extreme. We don't see millions of people willingly abandoning fossil fuels and living in abject poverty to save the world, instead they are all very willing and eagerly buying them and this video lets all those people off the hook. This video lets everybody keep using fossil fuels, and at the same time pointing the finger at Shell and saying it's all their fault. It's an extremely detrimental piece of disinformation.

"explain what, specifically, I claimed that's not supported by the science."
-Complete collapse of the food web
-Wars over hundreds of millions or billions of refugees
-Loss of most farm land and hundreds of major cities to the sea
-Loss of well over 1/2 the producers of O2
-Eventual clouds of hydrogen sulfide from the ocean covering the land
-Runaway greenhouse cycles making the planet uninhabitable for thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of years

No sir.
I even mentioned one group in America that never adopted petroleum...Amish...and I would counter your assertion with the fact that most people on earth don't live using oil, they're too poor, not too fortunate. 20-30 years ago, most Chinese had never been in a car or a commercial store bigger than a local vegetable stand.

Both customers and non customers are the victims.
Using (or selling) a product that clearly pollutes the air, land, and sea is immoral.

Yes, it's like our business is predicated on rebuilding wrecked cars overnight which we do by using massive amounts of meth. Sure, our products are death traps, sure, we lied about both our business practices and the safety of our product, sure, our teeth and brains are mush....but our business has been successful and allowed us to have 10 kids (8 on welfare, two adopted out), and if we quit using meth they'll starve and fight over scraps. That's proof meth is good and moral and you're mistaken to think otherwise. Duh.

Yes, we overpopulated, outpacing the planet's ability to support us by far...but instead of coming to terms with that and changing, many think we should just wring the juice out of the planet harder and have more kids. I think those people are narcissistic morons, we don't need more little yous. Sadly, we are well beyond the tipping point, even if no more people are ever born, those alive are enough to finish the biosphere's destruction. Guaranteed if they think like you seem to.

Um, really? Complete collapse of the food web isn't catastrophic?
Wars over hundreds of millions or billions of refugees aren't catastrophic? (odd because the same people who think that are incensed over thousands of Syrians, Africans, and or South and Central American refugees migrating)
Massive food shortage isn't catastrophic?
Loss of most farm land and hundreds of major cities to the sea isn't catastrophic?
Loss of corals, where >25% of ocean species live, and other miniscule organisms that are the base of the ocean food web isn't catastrophic?
Loss of well over 1/2 the producers of O2, and organisms that capture carbon, isn't catastrophic?
Eventual clouds of hydrogen sulfide from the ocean covering the land, poisoning 99%+ of all life isn't catastrophic?
Runaway greenhouse cycles making the planet uninhabitable for thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of years isn't catastrophic?
Loss of access to water for billions of people isn't catastrophic?
I think you aren't paying attention to the outcomes here, and may be thinking only of the scenarios estimated for 2030-2050 which themselves are pretty scary, not the unavoidable planetary disaster that comes after the feedback loops are all fully in play. Try looking more long term....and note that every estimate of how fast the cycles collapse/reverse has been vastly under estimated....as two out of hundreds of examples, Greenland is melting faster than it was estimated to melt in 2075....far worse, frozen methane too.

You can reject the science, that doesn't make it wrong. It only makes you the ass who knowingly gambles with the planet's ability to support humans or other higher life forms based on nothing more than denial.

Edit: We are at approximately 1C rise from pre industrial records today, expected to be 1.5C in as little as 11 years. Even the IPCC (typically extremely conservative in their estimates) states that a 2C rise will trigger feedbacks that could exceed 12C. Many are already in full effect, like glacial melting, methane hydrate melting, peat burning, diatom collapse, coral collapse, forest fires, etc. It takes an average of 25 years for what we emit today to be absorbed (assuming the historical absorption cycles remain intact, which they aren't). That means we are likely well past the tipping point where natural cycles take over no matter what we do, and what we're doing is increasing emissions.

Diatoms, and other phytoplankton, are incredibly sensitive to ocean PH and CO2 levels. This can be another feedback loop already in action.
As fewer diatoms photosynthesize, more CO2 goes unused, raising the concentration, lowering the numbers and health of phytoplankton, allowing more CO2 to go unused, raising the concentration, .....
Every molecule of CO2 added to ocean systems removes one molecule of carbonate, which is necessary for the uptake of iron among other processes. By 2100, surface carbonate is expected to decrease by up to 50%. That may well be below the levels diatoms can tolerate.

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/key-biological-mechanism-disrupted-ocean-acidification

If phytoplankton goes, so does the food web. They are the base. If the ocean food web collapses, eventually the bacteria that eat dead sea life will create huge clouds of hydrogen sulfide that cover the land, poisoning any still living organisms there. This has happened before, but on a much longer timescale, with near life ending results for earth.

Hydrogen Sulfide, Not Carbon Dioxide, May Have Caused Largest Mass Extinction. ... "During the end-Permian extinction 95 percent of all species (and >98% of all biomass) on Earth became extinct, compared to only 75 percent during the KT when the dinosaurs disappeared,"

A better title might be "diatoms, the tiny glass shards that support all life on earth, are struggling".

"In the next few decades"?! More like "a few decades ago".
Perhaps if we had started population control in the 80's with the goal of cutting global population in half by 2000 AND did the rest of what he suggests we might have a chance...we did not.

By the time we understood there was a problem there were less than a few decades left to solve it...that was around 40 years ago, and we've done everything possible to accelerate the damage we do on every front since then.

Ocean acidification is happening today, it's getting worse, it's slow to react to change so will continue to get worse even if humans disappeared tomorrow, it has built in feedback loops that have been triggered like melting methanehydrates and sequestered CO2 that are being released faster every single day, and we are increasing the man made causes every year. There is a point where it reaches critical acidification, the point where diatoms can't form their skeletons, and then the entire ocean system dies. That's far worse than the apocalypse it sounds like, not just because 50-60% of our oxygen comes from the ocean, but also because the rotting biomass creates huge amounts of not just more methane, compounding the greenhouse problem and further acidifying the oceans, but also immense amounts of hydrogen sulfide, which spread as huge poisonous clouds around the globe.
We are on our way to a man made Permian extinction, when >95% of all species went extinct and near 99% of all biomass was lost. We will not survive it as a species....and we don't deserve to.

Granted, the earth will be fine....but people and other higher life forms probably won't.
Population thinning will come too late, because these effects of overpopulation will last far longer than one generation....unless you mean it will thin out to zero and self correct, which is likely.

What you don't seem to get is that when the ocean acidifies enough, the dead sea life sinks and bacteria causes massive levels of hydrogen sulfide which can then come out of solution and cover land in toxic gas clouds, leading to another "slime world" of slimes and bacteria like happened after the end-Permian extinction.
I wouldn't characterize that as "all is well" myself.

Idiot narrator/narration. The gases discharged there are dominantly sulfur dioxide - not hydrogen sulfide. There is a difference - and each has a different physiologic impact on human health. Clearly these people are being impacted by the sulfur dioxide...
These so-called science videos should really try harder to get their science correct.

Solution, no. Semi-mitigation....possibly if it could be done, but there would be tradeoffs, it wouldn't be a simple 'now it's only CO2' solution....as if that was a solution, there's still too much CO2 too.

I'm intrigued by the engineered bacteria idea...at this point it couldn't be much worse than just releasing all the methane (OK, it could), but it's like that one time I went to the lake to bone my girlfriend, but the mosquitos were going crazy and she said there is no way. By the time people decided it was worth the risk and started developing them, it would be too late anyway, but we might mitigate the extinction event for the insects....who knows?

Um....uninhabitable for 100 years? How do you figure? It's likely that when the ocean temps rise enough, and are acidic enough, most sea life dies, sinks, rots, and releases massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide killing anything that's left.
(WIKI-Kump, Pavlov and Arthur (2005) have proposed that during the Permian–Triassic extinction event the warming also upset the oceanic balance between photosynthesising plankton and deep-water sulfate-reducing bacteria, causing massive emissions of hydrogen sulfide which poisoned life on both land and sea and severely weakened the ozone layer, exposing much of the life that still remained to fatal levels of UV radiation.)
Along with all the other damages of climate change, and the apocalypse that >7 billion people will cause on the way out, it's going to be way longer than 100 years before humans can live off nature if ever....way way longer.

We are hard to kill, but we aren't extremophiles. We'll die, or become mole people, but some other life will continue.

Sadly I'm right there with you.
When the international climate agreement was made public recently and I saw that what they were pleased and proud of was an agreement to somehow (they didn't say how) stop the rise in CO2 at almost exactly the level that's agreed on is the point of no return/the level that they think will start all the feedback loops making mitigation or survival impossible, which somehow no one seems to understand means they agreed to do NOTHING besides drive us directly over the cliff. If that's the best we can hope for, a non binding agreement to wait until it's too late to do anything that might save the species/planet, we might as well just say screw it and enjoy the little time we have left. How much comfort will driving a Prius give you when the clouds of Hydrogen Sulfide rise from the ocean?
This is from a guy with an expensive solar system who grows most of my own food.

'Too early to start drinking?' Never! I understand all those words, but not when you string them together like that....and I don't drink.

New, just released ocean temperature data has shown a dramatic increase in temperatures in the Northern Pacific, and a dramatic decrease in surface temperatures in the Northern Atlantic. As I understand it, those readings are not consistent with normal 'El Nino' patterns. Could this be the beginning of the end of thermohaline circulation? If that happens we'll be facing unavoidable, unpredictable, worldwide, disastrous climate change in short order.
Without the current created by the thermohaline circulations, the oceans die. Equatorial waters become much hotter...fast...and arctic and Antarctic waters become much colder...fast. Ocean organisms can't live through that kind of change, not in any sizeable way anyway. Without the oceans, the entire food web dissolves and we die.
On top of that, without the currents bringing oxygen to the lower oceans, they become anoxic. The bacteria that live in those deep waters will feed on the dead sea life and create toxic gases (hydrogen sulfide) which have, in the past, completed the extinction events by wiping out nearly all life. Once that starts, it's unstoppable and is the end. Let's hope these readings are just an over active El Nino.

What we do today has little to no effect for 50-100 years. That makes us at least 50 years too late to solve this problem, and we are still exacerbating it rather than solving it to this day.
We're hosed.
If you plan on having children in this climate, you are a child abuser IMO, and are adding to the problem with that one action more than almost any other action normal people perform. Your children will most likely not survive to old age, and absolutely won't experience the same quality of life you have.

Really really good vid, certainly gives a very good overview of the chain of events that cause global warming to be life ending.

From what he's explained, it seems to be - less ice at the poles -> less difference in temperature between hot and cold areas -> less ocean currents -> ocean anoxia -> hydrogen sulfide.

Many of the other issues would cause local crises, but living on a planet with no ocean life and with poisonous gas everywhere seems pretty nasty.

I think you missed the part about focusing on victims, punishing the guilty, and leaving everyone else alone.

I think you'll find that most people that kill others, are already doing something legally prohibited.
Focus on fixing/dealing-wtih those offending individuals.

I know people just want to "do something"... But leave me, my community, everyone else out of it, please. We didn't do it. Thanks.






side note :
Deadliest school killing in the U.S. was done without a gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

The alternative to a gun is not merely 'a stick'.
You should read about the lethality of hydrogen sulfide. (Mixing 2 common household cleaners that you probably have right now)
1 breath can hospitalize. The gas commonly kills whoever is exposed, whoever finds them, and 1st responders, and it raises no alarm.
I would /not/ say that's /less/ harm than a gun.
Now think for a second about how much more damage one of those school shooters could have done with a simple super soaker from wal-mart.

Btw, you're already prohibited from owning a gun if you have mental health issues.
Check out ATF form 4473, and the electronic background check (granted some states don't have good records in the check).

Gun control still has 2 flaws.
1) It doesn't get gangsters/criminals to turn in their guns (essentially the entire 'problem population')
2) It puts non-violent people who have prohibited arms in jail - having done no harm.

With 1/3 of a billion people, something extremely rare will seem common if it's constantly reported.
You would live many many many lifetimes before you ever meet someone who knows someone who was shot.
We live in the least violent era of human history.
I feel very safe.

Since you mention an AR15, here's a stat :
In the U.S., more people die each year falling out of bed (~450), than are killed by all rifles combined (including an ar15 with massive 'clip'). The danger isn't as large as people imagine.

-scheherazade