Climate change or no climate change: do you believe in human adaptability?

Question

Do you ever wonder if climate change debate is pretty much pointless. Lets face it, regardless of how much of climate change is human fault there are no volunteers to sit without their lights and internet on. If anything growing middle class in China and India will increase the demand for energy in geometrical proportions - none of our mitigation methods can curb that.

Gates is one of his speeches mentioned that more money is spent of baldness cures that malaria. Perhaps the problem not the availability of resources or understanding on the problem but plain lack of motivation. 100 years ago people claimed we'd all be starving by now and our cities would be under tons of horse crap. Yet we're still here.

So would you agree with me on that, sheer number of human population and the availability of resources to coordinate operations on a massive scale can mitigate pretty much any disaster. If all of a sudden a comet flew into solar system heading for earth, I'm pretty sure within a month we'll have kamikaze crews flying out to drill into the comment and blow it up or install an engine on it to divert it. Same goes for any other problem, if there's a lot at stake people will allocate resources to fix the problem.

Answer 1

It's not that humans are adaptive, it's that we have driven so far off the path of nature, and how to actually survive in nature, that we have set ourselves up for a major catastrophe.



Global warming, whether man made or not, is happening. The evidence is quite clear. All you have to do is look at the ever decreasing size of the polar icecaps, and the fact the glaciers are melting away at an astonishingly alarming rate. And they're melting faster in the past 20 years than ever before in recorded history.



Global warming will cause rising oceans to drown coastal communities, agriculture will be disrupted, water supplies will be salinized, storms and flood waters will reach ever further inland, millions of environmental refugees will be created, droughts to wither crops, new diseases to cause epidemics and fires to consume our forests. And the list goes on and on and on.



It is predicted that the average annual temperature, if it continues to increase in rate has it has been the past 20 years, will increase as much as 2 degrees in the next 40-100 years. I know this doesn't sound like much but, the average annual temperature difference from the last ice age and our annual average temperature in the 1990's, was only one degree cooler.



Now, just imagine what would and could happen if the annual average temperature actually increases by TWO degrees. This is very, very, very alarming, and quite disturbing since this will be our children and grandchildren that will be facing this very real threat that could cause major crop shortages, thus more cattle will die, thus millions, if perhaps not billions of people that weren't otherwise going hungry... will starve. Why should this matter? Well, because the world is populating faster than ever before and just how is everyone supposed to be fed?



If we don't stop and analyze how we are living as a species, if we don't reconnect with nature and teach ourselves how to survive, then the ramifications of such is quite dire and unpleasing to the thought. I'm not sure if any of this will actually happen, but it's actually starting right now, and we better stop and think for a moment and realize what we are actually doing to mother nature....for maybe only a moment more we only have.

Answer 2

Our environment is going to change whether we actively change it, actively prevent its change, or not.



We will either adapt top these changes or we will die, just like every species that has ever existed on this planet has had to do for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed here. That's a pretty good track record that, regardless of whether we survive or not, we are incapable of eradicating all life in this world.



I feel the jury is still out on this one. We clearly do not have all the informatino on climate change, and being part of a chaotic system, we very well may never be able to do so.



The laws of unintended consequences comes to mind here. Sometimes, you actively do something for a reason, and you are successful, only to find out your activity has made some other problem more drastically critical.



I diasagree that humans will automatically divert any disaster, and/or will adapt to any and every change.



No species is exempt from extinction.

Answer 3

No I don't. History is full of horrible catastrophes caused by humans' inability to effectively deal with their circumstances.



The current global situation has billions of people dependent for their food supply on a massively developed and coordinated agricultural system that's running at top speed, and still unable to keep up with the incessantly growing demand. Anything that goes seriously wrong with this situation will have grievous consequences in less than a year.



Yeah sure people are adaptable too. But that just means some of them will probably survive no matter what happens. Even if they have to live in holes and eat garbage. But hey you go be as optimistic as you want.