yeah; lol 5 or 6 breaths then shock and death due to asphixiation; what is really strange is that humans can only breath atmosphere with 19 to 23 percentish of oxegen; much lower; your dead; much higher; your dead as your lungs erupt and burn away. Thank goodness for nitrogen.
Well, I think that it will be the effects of climate change - if you deny that change, you might as well bury your head in sand. Even now, we have over here in germany temperatures more fitting for june, and had it for several weeks now. There has been a lot of storms, heavy rainfall, far to warm seasons averages for years now.
This will lead to rapid desertification, which in turn upsets the ecosystem and will start huge migrations - Europe has already started to build walls and fences against african refugees.
Either that, or the crappy TV program - it kills the mind, at least.
Stefan
Food is not the problem; the problem is drinking water; the amount of clean drinking water is rapidly shrinking every year; is quite startling; not just by contamination of various impurities; but salt and chlorine are key factors; this more than anything will limit our ability to survive
Hopefully I, and/or my fellow hydrogeologists, can help stave off that day.
When I say bees are disappearing and that has a devastasting effect on the food supply for a growing population, I can assure you that I'm up to snuff on the latest skinny surrounding the likely flood/drought/dirty water models, and the global warming, and the other twenty world-ending factors to come... but I'm intergrating it all holistically in a mental picture that looks like Dali meets a Detroit crime photo. I'm just mentioning the bees because they hadn't been mentioned.
I don't think minimizing any one of these 'apocolypse factors' constitutes a worthwhile pissing contest, considering that in concert they ensure a Planet of the Apes type result sans the nifty talking simians.
Cornelius: (reading from the sacred scrolls of the apes) "Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death."
|
According to stats currently the earth has the resources to sustain 300 million homosapien individuals. Basically within 20 years or so we'll be out of oil, in the next 50 years over 1/3 of all animal species will be extinct. So what will be will be. And as for the 2012 thing y2k will take care of us long before that o yeah that was full of crap too.
|
According to stats currently the earth has the resources to sustain 300 million homosapien individuals. Basically within 20 years or so we'll be out of oil, in the next 50 years over 1/3 of all animal species will be extinct. So what will be will be. And as for the 2012 thing y2k will take care of us long before that o yeah that was full of crap too.
YEAH! I'm gonna get to live in a post-apocalyptic setting!
...
TWO MEN ENTER! ONE MAN LEAVES!
Exit Mundi has a great collection of apocolyptic ideas.
yeah; lol 5 or 6 breaths then shock and death due to asphixiation; what is really strange is that humans can only breath atmosphere with 19 to 23 percentish of oxegen; much lower; your dead; much higher; your dead as your lungs erupt and burn away. Thank goodness for nitrogen.
You're thinking of the planet as a whole. Lower than about 20% oxygen, humans and animals get sleepy, and fires get harder to burn. Above it, and fire becomes impossible to control.
But I'm a scuba diver. I regularly breathe over an atmospheric pressure worth of oxygen. Your lungs handle it just fine. It's not really toxic until you get up over 1.5 atmospheres.
Dragons. Eating all the crunchy bis of humanity. Cattle will survive, though, McDonalds would go out of business if they did not.
oh yeah starting now....
A. The poles will switch, irradiating us all. Those killed by planetary upheaval will be the lucky ones; the rest will die of famine and cancer.
B. Mankind will reach for the stars, colonizing first the moon, then a terraformed mars. At same later date, society will reintegrate, and heretofore unknown mutated virii and bacteria will wipe out everyone.
|
|
It has been estimated that sometime between last year and 2018, we hit this thing known as the oil peak.
This is the point when approximately 50% of all the oil available in the world has been drawn up. Now, before anyone goes 'So what, it's only halfway!' let me point out the following:
The oil we've tapped to date has largely been the 'light and sweet' type, which means that when they hit the field, it basically emerges under pressure by itself, and is relatively low in impurities such as sulfur and the like; it's cheap to refine because it is, essentially, nothing but petroleum. Most of the remaining oil is a lot harder to get at, being locked away in tar sands, shale oil, and the like, or it has high degrees of impurity, making it a lot more expensive to refine. And there's less of it to be pumped up, which makes it harder to get it pumped up.
Demand for oil is climbing steadily as more and more nations industrialize. Every day the total global oil consumption is creeping upward. While we like to think of oil as being a synonym for fuel, in actuality about 90% of what we use in daily life in any industrialized society has had an oil-based product involved somewhere.
The 'oil reserves' that people like to bandy about amount to nothing. Oil companies are openly admitting that they are failing to restock their reserves due to decreased yield from their fields.
Even better? We don't have anything capable of taking the place of oil as a fuel. Nothing else even comes close in terms of energy returned on energy invested. Solar power is inefficient, although getting better. Wind power is a joke; you'd have to surround the UK with a windwil park a kilometer wide all the way around the island to produce enough power, and even then it'd fail whenever the windspeed fell too low or went too high. Biodiesel is a farce; if lucky, it returns a thin trickle more energy than it takes to produce it, and more often consumes more energy than it produces. Nuclear power, if you actually measure it from the point of mining the yellowcake clear through the D/D of the plant after 20 years, consumes two to six times more energy than the plant itself ever produces, and releases greenhouse gas during the refining process than is on the order of a thousand times more potent than CO2. Hydrogen fuel cells are a comedy due to the fact that you have to separate the hydrogen out before you can use it, which sucks up energy; more, hydrogen tends to make the material of storage tanks brittle, and it has a tendency to be rather explosive. Of all the energy sources I've looked into, oceanic thermal energy conversion is the most promising, and you can't exactly use it to run a car, and I expect it'll be way too late before you convince anyone to give up the beaches they want to sunbathe on.
Then there's the little detail that the economy across the globe is essentially backed by the oil trade. As things currently stand, if the oil market crashes, the global economy crashes.
People of course say things like, "So what? I'll ride my bike instead of driving." Ride it where? Are they gonna hook their bikes to those huge convoy freighters to haul crops across the continent to the market? Or how about running them to deliver time-and-temperature sensitive medications?
Will it be the end of humanity? Maybe, maybe not. It will be the end of industrial civilization, though. There are already groups working to get communities prepared for the 'post-carbon era'.
(Provided we don't melt the ice caps enough to release all the methane deposits in the seabed and turn the atmosphere into an essentially oxygen-free wasteland first, of course... Or get creamed by a Near-Earth Orbit object...)
...But then again, I don't really care. I don't intend to breed, I have very little empathy for the rest of the species, and I'm about as amoral and unethical as you can get, being driven by a sense of enlightened self-interest and personal long-term planning. The fate of the world after my death isn't something that I care about, because nothing of importance to me is likely to survive me into it.
Kassil: We do have something capable of matching Oil as a fuel. Coal. The United States has several centuries worth of coal reserves, at least for its own power needs. It's just that coal has it's own problems. It's filthy, for one. We'd need to build many new coal powerplants, and switch cars and freight over to electrical systems so that they can be powered by coal (coal liquefaction could be a stopgap, but it's far less efficient than just using coal-fired electricity). Coal is also cheap to mine, because you can strip mine it. But strip mining utterly destroys the landscape.
So the oil peak won't mean the end of civilization, at least on its own. People will switch back to coal, just like they did during the Industrial Revolution. It's just that we'll absolutely murder the environment by extracting and mining the coal, and kill ourselves off that way.
There are ways to mine coal responsibly, and burn it relatively cleanly, but those cost more. They won't happen if we wait until we're desperate for the energy to expand to coal infrastructure.
I think I'll base a religion on it.
You wouldn't be the first.
The world will end right now.
Why? Because a kender just found a wand of plane shift.
|
|
Kassil: We do have something capable of matching Oil as a fuel. Coal. The United States has several centuries worth of coal reserves, at least for its own power needs. It's just that coal has it's own problems. It's filthy, for one. We'd need to build many new coal powerplants, and switch cars and freight over to electrical systems so that they can be powered by coal (coal liquefaction could be a stopgap, but it's far less efficient than just using coal-fired electricity). Coal is also cheap to mine, because you can strip mine it. But strip mining utterly destroys the landscape.
So the oil peak won't mean the end of civilization, at least on its own. People will switch back to coal, just like they did during the Industrial Revolution. It's just that we'll absolutely murder the environment by extracting and mining the coal, and kill ourselves off that way.
There are ways to mine coal responsibly, and burn it relatively cleanly, but those cost more. They won't happen if we wait until we're desperate for the energy to expand to coal infrastructure.
Coal liquification also requires approximately five times as much coal as the resulting amount of oil. More, those reserves may sustain the USA, but if the entire world is energy-hungry, those borders aren't going to stay untouched for very long unless we're selling the coal for a very 'reasonable' price.
You could make the same argument about orimulsion, which has been termed the world's dirtiest fuel; there's *vast* reserves of it, but it happens to be so sulfur-rich that even trying to use it results in serious acid rain.
Out of curiosity, what reserve figures are you basing the several centuries of coal on? The largest coal estimate I've seen is most of a century.
Out of curiosity, what reserve figures are you basing the several centuries of coal on? The largest coal estimate I've seen is most of a century.
I double checked my figure (US Department of Energy, by way of Wikipedia). I was in error. The US has more than 200 years of reserves, but that's assuming that consumption stays constant and no coal exports. If we were to replace our oil use with coal use, it would be much less than that.
Ah doomsday
My feeling is that yes, climate change is bad, and it might redraw the map and end the world order (such as it is), but it probably won't kill off humanity.
Personally my two favorite scenarios are the Supernova Apocalypse and the Gray Goo Scenario
|
|
I double checked my figure (US Department of Energy, by way of Wikipedia). I was in error. The US has more than 200 years of reserves, but that's assuming that consumption stays constant and no coal exports. If we were to replace our oil use with coal use, it would be much less than that.
Ah. Yeah, that'd make a definite difference. I was wondering at that...
|
According to Strong Bad, the zombie uprising will happen on March 31, 2046. At 2:03 PM.
Until then, we are safe. After that - not so good...
I will be fifty four years, four hours, and 1 minute old.