The world once oil starts drying up.

You... uh... do know that all the fossil fuels came from atmospheric carbon, right? Mainly decomposing plant matter.

We know exactly what the atmosphere looks like if every last fossil fuel is burned and released into the atmosphere. The answer is "roughly what it looked like when dinosaurs roamed the world".

I don't think dinosaurs could survive on Venus.


It would be a warmer world, no doubt. It might even be hot enough to prevent humans from safely living near the equator. But it's a big world, and there's a lot of area that even at the most extreme points of the ancient past were still what we'd consider temperate environment.

Humanity as a whole would survive.

 

A few thousands years ago, when mankind was thriving, the global temperature was so high greenland was overran with forests.

If anything, looking at things historically, we are in a dip of the lower end of temperature trends.

 

Okay fine I was being hyperbolic, but none of us want to live on a world at 2000 ppm. We'd still be living in shipping containers eating bugs, but we'd all be doing it in an alien world that our civilization isn't prepared for in the slightest. If more than a few million humans survived it'd be a miracle.

Try 125,000 years ago

There weren't 8 billion people back then.

 

That’s funny, considering the Interconnections Seam Study found we could reduce energy costs and switch to renewable energy sources. You know, before it got suppressed. Or how petroleum lobbyists have been fighting to both increase fees and reduce chargebacks on solar to keep it from becoming a viable competitor.

But let’s pretend that’s accurate. Even in that case green technology - as it is right now - would still be significantly more profitable than oil and coal. It’s just that the companies in charge are receiving billions of profits they shouldn’t receive because they get to force everyone else to bear the costs. If they weren’t being protected from bearing the damages they inflict, they’d be out of business a long time ago. It’s like saying ‘this company is more profitable than any of its competitors, because we’re legally committing tax fraud.’

 

Let us hope that nuclear fusion will pan out. ITER is supposed to begin operations in 2025, hopefully they will not move the date again. If nothing goes wrong we could see first commercial fusion plants in the 2040s.

Otherwise...

Oil is no longer the most important problem for people these days, water is. In the last 4 decades the sweet water reserves dropped significantly. In a few decades people will wage war to get access to water, and then oil.

On the other hand if we finally crack commercially useful fusion, that would solve many of our problems. Desalination to get water, irrigation of previously useless land for farming, things like that.
Even population density could become less of a problem with people choosing to work remotely from home, preferably located outside of a city. If you have fusion you do not need to worry about powering the small settlements.

In theory fusion would make construction materials cheaper. Also food. The only area where fossil fuels would hold supremacy would be transportation, barring the adoption of fuel-producing algae or synthetic oil. The ones I wrote about earlier in this thread.
Wow, it has been three years since then already.

 

You might be.

If civilization collapses... I plan to live in a house made mainly of wood (naturally sourced atmospheric carbon supplied trees!), subsisting on plantlife (fun fact- as atmospheric carbon goes up, so too does the growth rate of plants... lots of greenhouses and hydroponics farms actively get CO2 pumped in to improve growth) and woodland critters.

More or less the same way I live, today. Just... less voluntarily...

Not having the internet would suck for a while, but probably be better for all of us in the long run.

 

So no people around and the weather was way warmer that it is now? Thanks for the correction, good to know humanity is pretty inconsequential in affecting the weather.

All of our industry can't even challenge trees simply rotting in the forest, stands to reason we can't influence the weather in any meaningful way.

'Increase fees' and 'reduce chargebacks on solar'? Meaning reduce 'billions in subsidies and numerous laws favoring them' I was talking about? Thanks for proving my point, I guess.

I also want chargebacks for gasoline. I mean, let's make it fair, if solar gets chargebacks, I should get some for my gas, instead of being taxed up the ass for cooking with gas or heating up my home.

 

Ah, you must live in a city your entire life and have never lived in rural areas. Yeah, the world will be completely alien to you then, particularly if you're not willing to prepare yourself to farm.

 

Warming also produces extreme weather, which kills crops and destroys wooden houses. It destabilizes entire countries and causes people to become refugees.

It's a bigger problem than you're acknowledging.

Hopefully nuclear winter cancels out global warming

I live in rural Iowa.

I mean "alien" in terms of extreme weather. 1000 year events every summer, you know?

 

Now that is inaccurate.

The thing is... trees rotting in the forest don't actually change the average composition of the atmosphere. That carbon came from the air within, at most, a century or two ago... and returns to it... and gets sucked back into other plants.

Something something I'm sure there's a Disney song for this...

Something the dumbfucks who want to charge farmers for the 'methane emissions from cows' fail to realize.


Meanwhile, the carbon released from coal and oil hasn't been present in the atmosphere for tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

It is making the planet warmer, and will continue to make the planet warmer. Until, presumably, such a point as our average atmospheric temperature equalizes somewhere around that of the Jurassic period. At absolute extreme.

Thing is?

The Jurassic period wasn't that bad, really.

Don't get me wrong- the tropical regions would be hell for our ice-age adapted asses. Like "the hottest, most humid day Florida has ever known while humans have existed would be a record-setting cold day" levels of hell.

We may as well consider everywhere within about 10 to 20 latitude of the equator all but uninhabitable. I'm sure Florida will somehow find a way to thrive regardless.


The UK, New York... would get weather not unlike modern day Florida. Assuming, y'know, rising waters don't completely submerge them. That's a separate topic.

Meanwhile... Montana, Canada, Russia... would all enjoy remarkably comfortable temperatures. The nicer end of the temperate spectrum.

And everyone in the southern hemisphere will just have to kill each other colonizing the suddenly comfortable continent of Antarctica.

 

Oh that reminds me! We achieve thermoregulation through sweating, which stops working if it's hot and humid enough. You could lay down naked in front of a fan in the shade and still die of heat stroke. Lethal wetbulb temps aren't something that exist on Earth yet, but they did before and they will again.

... this thread bummed me out. I shouldn't have posted.

 

You can’t be this obtuse. Chargebacks the fees people get to charge the existing power companies are when their solar panels overproduce energy during peak hours, then send it back to the grid to alleviate other energy use. So the existing power companies are fighting to get to pay a pittance of what this electricity is worth, while charging them more for power during low solar hours, as well as additional fees. It’s not reducing subsidies, it’s actively making the technology more expensive and less beneficial for the consumer.

And how, praytell, is your use of gas benefitting anyone? Aside from not using electric to cook with or heat your home, which already means lower electric bills for you.

 

Eh, I wouldn't be too worried.

Our ancestors have survived similar hell in the past.

Spoiler: Because our planet's temperature the last couple million years looks like an EKG during a seizure.

As you can see, we're nowhere near as bad right now as the prior warming period... about as bad as the one before, and again not as bad as the one before that.

We're pretty average right now... gonna need another century or two without slipping back into cooldown mode to rival the record setters...

Still, humans managed to live through all of them. At least those on this chart... the crazy temperature swings began about two million or so years ago, but I can't in all honesty call the austro line 'human' quite yet. Half a million? Yeah, sure, we see evidence of crafted weapons, the taming of fire, protecting and caring for our elderly and wounded, the burial of the dead (after eating parts of the body), bestiality porn drawn on cave walls... you know, all the stuff that makes us human.

So if nothing else, we know we've survived worse before. And before we didn't have access to biotechnologies.


I'm sure someone will extract some gene from some lizard that makes us able to enjoy the unspeakable hellscape days the way at least a few of our ancestral lines once managed to do. Presumably to keep the Great Empire of Florida alive. As well as the gene to gain superpowers from meth.

... Which still isn't as impressive to me as how we know for a fact that at some point humans managed to survive living through winter... in the Himalayas in Siberia DURING THE ICE AGE!!!

I'm pretty sure I'd die of hypthermia looking at a picture of that. Yet, somehow, our ancestors survived.

 

My mistake then, I thought the word meant something else.

 

Tell us you know nothing about climate "science" without saying it outright...

Anyone unironically arguing for an ideology that has not worked in even one country that has implemented it in history without immediately hybridizing to state capitalism is usually like that...

Adding to this, the world, right now, is probably at one of its coldest points that still allows wide ranges of habitation and weather cycles (additionally the planet right now is actually JUST above the minimum CO2 level needed to sustain life) in its recent geological history (which is several 100 million years, or the entire cycle since the last Snowball Earth).
Additionally, seeing as climate alarmism has shifted to blaming cow farts after CO2 failed to deliver its purpoted warming potential and instead caused the Earth to become greener (that is, increase non-algae plant biomass around the planet by a significant margin), I'd say nobody will have any problem with CO2 in the future. Or with Methane, despite the reported greenhouse factor. No, I don't believe the clathrate gun hypothesis. Actually, I have reason to believe that all the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, in all their massive digesting might, were probably producing more fart-methane in aggregate than all the agricultural animals in the world and leaking polar methane combined.
Back on the warm Earth thing: The planet was overall warmer during the classical and medieval periods than it is today, in all regimes and measurements. If Bronze and Iron age peoples survived and thrived to the point of creating the foundations of our current civilization then I really can't bring myself to believe that a warming Earth would be as much cause for alarm as megalomaniacal technocrats trying to scare entire countries into surrendering their sovereignty and dignity in fright. Religious terror dressed up as secular terror went out of fashion sometime around 1796...

And at the same general time, the Sahara was covered in sparse forests and steppes, before some unknown calamity (possibly connected to the cause of the Younger Dryas) quite literally washed it all away and turned it into the IRL inspiration for Arrakis that we all know and despise today.

Slow the revolution, Lenin, we're not even above 420ppm in spite of China doing everything in its collective power to pump the atmosphere with the combustion products of carbon-based chemicals.

Not living in the "developed" world has its perks.
Like not being fed dystopian propaganda 24/7, being inoculated against said propaganda by half a century of communism, being far away from the center and strongholds of the playing card tower built by the End-Of-History crowd and the fact that my country's economy is heavily agrarian to the point where we could be self-sufficient at 1950s technology levels with little imports aside from the most heavy industrial apparatuses.

This isn't even taking in account the massive cyclical algae blooms and dieoffs caused by massive amounts of artificial fertilizer washed out onto the sea by freshwater streams

Aaaand you went for it before I could.
But agreed. Urbanites talking about the environment is a proven recipe for losing braincells.

Posadist Moment.

Ah yes.
Like all the acid rain predicted in the 70s.
Like the global cooling predicted in the late 70s and early 80s.
Like the nitrogen buildup predicted in the 70s that will kill all life on the planet.
Like the lifeless oceans and rabid killer bees predicted in 1970.
Like Manhattan being foretold to be completely below sea level by 2015.
Like the Super Hurricanes foretold two decades ago.
Like the 50 million climate refugees in 2020 that we were told will exist back in 2005.

Did I ever tell you... the DEFINITION... of... Insanity?

 

Thinking that regulations tackling problems are unnecessary because they were successful at slowing or preventing the problems they were designing to handle?

Like, you might as well be arguing we don’t need environmental regulation to protect the Cuyahoga River because it stopped catching on fire coincidentally when said regulations were put into place and/or enforced.

New York isn’t underwater because we’re taking baby steps towards keeping the ice caps from melting. If we don’t keep working on it then it’ll eventually get there, but saying partial efforts don’t yield partial successes is a form of insanity.

 

Is it misusing caps-lock while failing at punctuation?

 

Only if there are three or more exclamation points.

 

Context. I said that in response to someone else suggesting we turn coal into petroleum products like they did during WW2. That would absolutely put us past any pssibility of human habitation on 90% of the Earth's surface. That would literally put us back in the Jurassic period, 2000 ppm

 

First: if it did put us at Jurassic levels, it would be less than 10% of the world's land being denied to us. Because the equator doesn't actually have that much land in the first place right now, and a good chunk of that is a desert the size of the continental United States that is already basically uninhabitable.

You know what happens if the Sahara fucking Desert gets ten degrees hotter? It becomes a dead and barren sandscape the size of the United States. Which it already is.


While opening up about 30% of the world from 'barely habitable' to 'quite nice, actually'. Northern Canada and Siberia aren't exactly known for their vast, sprawling metropolises, you know.

... But, with enough extra CO2 in the atmosphere, they could be.

Second: Only if all the available material was converted. It won't be. Graphite, for example... not exactly a great fuel source, makes up a pretty large percentage of the carbon captured from the ancient atmosphere.

And then there's the various forms of shale that are basically worthless for any commercial or industrial purpose. Chalk and other calcium-carbon bonded materials.

We would need to not only burn through all estimated coal and oil reserves on the planet while turning precisely none of it into plastic or other long lasting uncombusted material and then sit around for fifty or sixty Mount St. Helens tier explosions to get us to 'dinosaur' levels of atmospheric carbon.

As it stands... we're going to run out of oil before we get to 800 ppm. Let alone 2k.

 

Trash soil with no nutritional value that could only be made useful with the application of artificial fertilizer. Artificial fertilizer that gets a lot harder to make without oil. You aren't going to grow corn in Siberian gravel and Canadian podsol, no matter how warm it is.

Next problem: we'd have to basically rebuild civilization farther North, which would be a tremendous undertaking never before seen or accomplished by humanity.

40% of humanity lives in the tropics. The Sahara is irrelevant, this would basically destroy Southeast Asia! If I accept the premise that everywhere outside of the tropics will be habitable, we're still talking about billions of refugees. They won't die quietly.

I'm standing by my stance, if we burned all the coal we could we'd reduce humanity to several million survivors.

 

I'm only talking about the tropics! That's well within our ability to destroy simply by burning all the available fossil fuels, even without ridiculous nonsense like coal liquification.

 

That much... more plausible. Still no certainty, mind, but far more plausible.

Unfortunately, it's China causing the overwhelming majority of the problem that's going to kill them right now.

... But that's kinda been China's thing for the last... four, maybe five thousand years at this point?

 

Honestly, arguing about how bad things are going to get is kind of missing the real problem, which is how fast things are going to get bad. Sure, the earth’s climate has been hotter before. But previous catastrophic warmings are usually over centuries or millennia; the only one close to as bad as ours was the Younger Dryas event, otherwise known as the thing which killed off most of our megafauna.

In other words, trying to extrapolate based on previous events is like trying to extrapolate the results of a house getting demolished - while people are living in it - based on the natural process of wear and tear.

 

Commit suicide.

 

More like extrapolating a house getting demolished based upon observations of earthquakes.

Because this has happened before. Several times in the last half million years.

And it's never been pretty, but we've made it through as a species, and we're better positioned to do it again now that we were any previous time.

Helps that we're distributed across six continents this time instead of three or less. And measured in the billions rather than tens of thousands.

 

The vast majority of rapid climate change took place in glacial periods, which are obviously very different from what we’re in now. In interglacial periods, it’s still catastrophic even over the aforementioned centuries or millennia. The rapid climate change we’re looking at outside of a glacial period? You can count instances on one hand, and one of them is the Permian-Triassic extinction, otherwise known as the Great Dying.

 

Well, I don't think this strays into the climate change derail but there's also another form of synthetic fuel manufacturing that's had successful experiments run on it so far. Thermal Depolymerization. Take a bunch of wet organic material and apply heat and high pressure with catalysts depending on what your end product is and you end up with various hydrocarbons. That's merely hydrothermal liquefaction. Hydrocracking can be done to plastic waste to end up with liquefied petroleum gas, ethane and all sorts of different chemicals. Again, with a catalyst you can get other things like naphtha. We literally cannot run out of oil until we either run out of viable biomass (unlikely as all hell) or plastic waste (lol, lmao even).