Perhaps I lack proper context, but drug-resistance terrifies me significantly more than global warming. Primarily, I think, because we are still speculating about the consequences of climate change - if not so much its causes. In contrast, we know what a world without antibiotics looks like, and it's pretty horrifying.
Assuming everyone understands that, it's an interesting case study in psychology as to why the second one might be scarier than the first one.
> Assuming everyone understands that, it's an interesting case study in psychology as to why the second one might be scarier than the first one.
It doesn't make sense to base decisions on a worst case scenario without taking probability into account.
I am also not aware of how climate change could lead to human extinction.
The last scenario talks about, if I recall correctly, the oceans becoming more welcoming to bacteria that produce hydrogen sulfide. Sorry, I don't remember the details, but will update tonight from the book at home if I remember.
Thumbnail sketch of the event: something (possibly massive volcanic eruptions near in time to a significant meteorite impact) deoxygenated the water enough to cause a substantial marine life die-off. The death of so much marine life in such a short time encouraged sulfate-reducing bacteria, which would have released significant amounts of hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. Hydrogen sulfide would have killed plant (and, therefore, animal) life and weakened the ozone layer, exposing the suriving flora and fauna to further UV radiation.
"96% of all marine species[5] and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct."
There is some concern regarding a risk (I have no idea how big the risk is) that anthropogenic global warming could "tip the scales" of the global ecology towards the conditions that allow for a Permian-Triassic-style cascade.
I'm sure you can find some individual scientists who want to get in front of a camera tot ell us it's the end of the world, just like you can some individual scientists who say it's all crap. I want to see what's in the IPCC's 99.9th percentile of things going wrong.
Antibiotic resistance, on the other hand, kills our wellbeing and lifespan by making common medical procedures/surgeries impossible, and does so permanently.
I don't buy that. Beginning of a new dark age with a breakdown of civilization and loss of advancements? Yes. Extinction-level event? No.
> The worst case scenario for antibiotic resistance is that people live with the medical uncertainties our grandparents and great-grandparents lived with.
No, actually the worst case is that the antibiotic period breeds superbugs that are both more virulent and harder to kill than those that came before. Antibiotic resistance comes about because of unintentional selective breeding of bacteria. We don't really know what other traits we are unintentionally selecting for. We could potentially be breeding a wordwide pandemic and not realize it. Which could bring about a new dark age with a breakdown of civilization and loss of advancements.
- Venus is about 3/4 the distance from the Sun as Earth.
- Venus has slow, retrograde rotation that leaves a given portion of the surface exposed to the Sun for 56 Earth days at a time.
- Venus has no magnetic field, which causes the loss of water vapor and other light gases due to the solar wind
>I don't buy that. Beginning of a new dark age with a breakdown of civilization and loss of advancements? Yes. Extinction-level event? No.
Extinction-level event is a scientific term which refers to the rate of extinctions and the associated loss of biodiversity, it doesn't necessarily mean that we all die. And if you think there's a meaningful distinction between "civilization ends" and "breakdown of civilization"... wow, okay.
By the scientific definition, I will agree that climate change can be an extinction event. However, I still stand by my assertion that it will not end civilization.
> And if you think there's a meaningful distinction between "civilization ends" and "breakdown of civilization"... wow, okay.
"Civilization ends" is total and permanent. "Breakdown of civilization" is partial and temporary. That is why I referenced a dark age. We have been through civilization breakdowns before, albeit not since we became globally connected.
If anything, antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria would generally be less fit in a world without antibiotics. E.g., sulfa drugs inhibit DHPS which is involved in producing what eventually becomes formic acid. Bacteria can resist sulfonamides by eliminating their dependence on DHPS, but then they depend on folic acid being present in their environment, and it won't always be available in human blood.
WHAT?? What kind of nonsense have you been reading?
The worst case is coastal flooding, some people have to move inland, and some plant and animal species go extinct. Perhaps some areas become desert (but people live in incredibly hot areas now, so those places will still be habitable).
Other plants and animals will move into the now vacant environment niches. Yes, it's a loss of a species, and yes, a loss of coastal land.
But civilization ends??
It really only takes one war to escalate too far to bring about a nuclear conflict, which could clearly have significant effects on the viability of civilization.
The distinction between "best case" and "worst case" is meaningful and I'm not sure you understand it.
What you're describing is a credible best case scenario - basically a very gentle extrapolation of what's happening right now into the future - and not the worst case.
Something like the clathrate gun effect playing out in one of the very bad ways that's hypothesized (or one of the many other hypothesized killers which we believe we've observed in the fossil records, in the earth's crust, in ice, and so on - there's too much to discuss here), and the subsequent effects of that on our environment and later on our politics as the bottom falls out of everything, represents a worst case.
If you just go ahead and decide all those hypothesis are bullshit, well, ok. In that case the notion of a worst case doesn't have a lot of meaning.
Otherwise things like: Atmospheric expansion from heat could increase the drag on the moon causing it to fall on us, could be considered worst case scenario too.
People really really love thinking of all possible things that could go wrong - the more disastrous the better (see: Hollywood; black holes from the super collider; or the atmosphere igniting from nuclear tests). But the earth is rather large, it's rather resilient, it's been through a lot and it's still here and working.
This is factually untrue. There is a greater scientific consensus on the origins of anthropogenic climate change than there is on the origins of many common diseases.
The climate change trends are very well known, the models that existed 15 years ago have worked extremely well at predicting current climate trends, and the impact in the food supply chain is being well documented, not to mention the myriad other observed changes in ocean acidity, coastal degradation, Arctic and Antarctic surface ice, Andean permafrost, and desertification, just to name a few areas studies by completely different specialties which are confirming the predictions.
You are misrepresenting my statement. I specifically referred to consequences, not origins.
Since you mention consensus (is that how to do science? Maybe we should introduce elections for new theories) - but still let's proceed; only 64 (or 0.5%) of 11,944 scientific abstracts published since 1991 state that most of the global warming since 1950 is manmade.
And at any rate, if we want to make it a war or words, at least all the statements that refute your contrarian assessment actually seem to get into the nitty-gritty details of their statistical analysis and comparison between multiple proposed models, instead of the purposeful misrepresentation of the climate denialist that say that there is a single unique IPCC model, when that is laughably false.
For the second statement, again: the meta-analysis performed on the research papers shows a 98% consensus rate.
From personal experience, I've spent 8 years in a University where exact and natural sciences are the main focus, and I have yet to hear a single climatologist, oceanographer, or physicist say that there is insufficient evidence of anthropogenic global warming.
The only people who seem unusually unconcerned about it are geologists, however there is an interest bias in them: A) they don't deny it, but they consider the global timescales and for them another mass extinction event like the one that is inevitably coming is just business as usual, B) there's an extraordinarily high number of geologists working in the mining and oil business and their bottom lines would be clearly affected more than any other industry of researchers.
[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa060775
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X02...