this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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The runaway greenhouse effect causing a collapse of the biosphere would take out more than just humanity. It's already killed a huge number of species and it's not going to slow down as it gets worse.
Don't worry. The cockroaches will evolve and take over.
While they're better suited to hostile environments, they too are affected by global temperature increases. Their metabolic rates increase significantly in higher temperatures, causing them to need more food and more O2, both of which will be significantly reduced in a runaway greenhouse scenario.
That said, the Earth's biome is more than capable of self-repair. Even we lack the capacity to sterilize every crevice of the Earth, life overall is too hearty for that, there's innumerable species thriving where our technology barely lets us see that relies on geothermal vents more than solar radiation to keep entropic decay at bay.
Earth will rebuild when the dust settles, as it has done many times, even from one other time that we know of aside from ourselves when a costly, destructive mistake of evolution caused a mass extinction, the Devonian period, where trees captured too much carbon because the efficient means of their decomposition hadn't evolved yet, causing the opposite of what we're doing leading to an ice age.
We have already summarily executed swaths of entire ecosystems of species to build strip malls, parking lots, and oil refineries. And we've effectively ended many species we lock in cages for our amusement, wholly dependant on us breeding them having destroyed their natural habitats. Those species are ghosts, dead already, living trophies.
Long term, the species we take with us in our seeming dedication to self-annihilation will be a small price for the Earth to either be rid of us or more likelihood diminish us back to warring tribes having to subsist in a far less hospitable era of the world than the one we crawled out of and played pretend that we owned and could bend to our will. Most species that have ever lived came and went long before we arrived. Long periods of abundant life thriving in interconnected, interdependent ecosystems is whats important. Maybe it will one day birth something as remarkable, noble, sapient, and intelligent and we told ourselves we were one day, who knows? As long as theres life, there's hope.
Am I supposed to feel bad for the bully in this story?
It's capable of self repair up to a certain point. A fully fledged runaway greenhouse effect is well past that point. The atmosphere would begin to be actively hostile to carbon/water based life. I mean just look at Venus, it experienced a similar runaway greenhouse effect and while we don't know if it ever supported life, it certainly never will now.
I give Earth more credit than that. The Asteroid that killed the dinosaurs cut the earth off from photosynthetic solar radiation for 15 years and filled our atmosphere with toxic dust and ash, life suffered greatly, but it was nowhere close to the end for Earth life. There's literally bacteria that makes it's habitat in pools of acid. Humans are a weak, fragile species defended only by our ability to discern and invent the tools to do so, but Earth life in general is Amazingly robust, it grows in just about any crevice you show it. I just recently saw a story about worms that have adapted to shrug off the radiation of Chernobyl. Have you seen what a fucking tardigrade can be exposed to without dying?
Even our mother will eventually die, most likely from changes in our sun's life cycle, and the universe will eventually suffer heat death, but our species will take itself out in fairly short order. Just smart enough to be dangerous to itself, and too stupid to know better.
Nothing can survive sulphuric acid rain and 500° air temperatures. The 15 years of darkness don't even come remotely close to the level of changes a runaway greenhouse effect would bring.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC251830/#:~:text=Oxidation%20of%20elemental%20sulfur%20by%20Sulfolobus%20acidocaldarius%2C%20an%20autotroph%20which,essentially%20quantitatively%20to%20sulfuric%20acid.
These single celled organisms literally take in elemental sulfur gas and excretes sulfuric acid.
I think it's the height of arrogance to believe that an ever evolving, ever changing chain of complex life that has existed for we estimate 3,700,000,000 years can be truly done in by one of those creatures that has only been here for about 200,000 years, and has only developed the technology to play recklessly with the environment at scale for about 200 years. As I said before, we aren't even the first macro-cancer to evolve from it that then dares to threaten the whole organism.
There have been catastrophic events in that time from within and mostly without that make our hydrogen bombs we're so proud of seem relatively cute. Maybe you're right. Maybe there is a specific pedal we're pushing on that is a secret kill move that no massive asteroid collision or geological event could ever trigger in its wake, but I also think you have to look at the record of what life on Earth has endured. This bowl has hosted a lot of fragile little species of dependent little fish like us that came and went, but the bowl is as of yet undefeated if winning means life goes on.
They still require things like oxygen and liquid water, neither of which will exist in appreciable amounts under a venus-like runaway greenhouse scenario. The earth, since life existed, has not ever experienced anything close to that.
It's a scary concept to be sure. It does make me wonder, however how it wasnt triggered when the Earth was still highly geologically active with volcanoes constantly spewing the Earth's contents into the atmosphere.
If that didn't make it occur, what prevented it? If it did occur, then it was clearly a temporary state that Earth has some mechanism to mitigate to return to something resembling its current state on a massive enough timeframe. Interesting stuff.
The earth was still a primarily molten ball and hadn't cooled yet. Much of the gases that contribute to the effect are trapped in permafrost and ice at the poles. There's also, of course, the matter of all the previously trapped carbon being pulled out from underground that otherwise wouldn't ever have a chance to reenter the atmosphere. The atmosphere of the early and geologically overactive earth was also much less dense as much of the water and gases came after that period on comets.
oh yeah peer at the biodiversity we observe in venus.