3 years & counting ...

 

It's just the beginning ... Intense sunset to the max.

3 years and counting, a guesstimate made by yours truly vis a vis GW whereby relative normalcy continues relatively unabated before the wheels start to fall off is now being supported by research done by scientists far more versed in this subject than I will ever be. 

Scientists enlisted the help of an AI to estimate how long it would take until global warming gets really bad. The AI's assessment? We might be screwed.

The resulting study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that global temperatures could reach the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius in just a decade. Exceed that, and scientists warn of increased drought, widescale die-offs of wildlife species and ecosystems, and famines, to name just a few drastic ramifications.

2050, transition 2/step or the notion phase transitions are NEVER linear.

A typical phase diagram. The dotted line gives the anomalous behavior of water.

As CNN notes, this projected timeline is largely in line with the predictions of other significant reports. But the AI study has a far grimmer idea of when the 2 degree threshold will be reached, estimating close to an 80 percent chance that the world will hit that mark by 2065 — and that's assuming we maintain net zero carbon emissions. Noah Diffenbaugh, co-author of the study and a climate scientist at Stanford University, told CNN that there's a 50 percent chance that 2 degrees will be reached even sooner — by 2050, if emissions stay high.

The timeframe equation ...

Image by Fokke Hassel via Getty / Futurism

On New Year's Day, several Stanford scientists joined CBS' Scott Pelley on the program "60 Minutes" to discuss the global mass extinction crisis. Spoiler: no one had any good news.

Tony Barnosky, a Stanford biologist whose work involves using fossil records to map changes in ecosystems over time, told CBS that his work suggests that extinction rates today are moving at roughly 100 times the rate typically seen in Earth's four-billion-year known history of supporting life.

According to Barnosky, such rapid population loss means that Earth is currently experiencing the worst mass extinction episode since the dinosaurs. And while Earth itself has repeatedly recovered from mass extinction events, the vast majority of the life existing on our planet at the time has not.

Unfortunately, that may well include us humans — or, at least, the trappings of our technological civilization.

"I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we've had it," Barnosky's Stanford colleague Paul Ehrlich, who also appeared on the show, told Pelley, "that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to."

That grim reality, according to the researchers, means that even if humans manage to survive in some capacity, the wide-reaching impacts of mass extinction — which include habitat destruction, breakdowns in the natural food chain, soil infertility, and more — would cause modern human society to crumble.

"I would say it is too much to say that we're killing the planet, because the planet's gonna be fine," said Barnosky. "What we're doing is we're killing our way of life."

Nature will handle gw but us ... not so much.