I don't believe that our current culture can cope with the climate change that's already in the pipeline. Billions will die, but no extinction.
Bruce is the only person I know of that is seriously exploring alternative food technologies, but he is assuredly not the only person learning and teaching new methods of feeding ourselves. He may not survive, and eating acorns may not be the path, but someone, somewhere will be able to subsist on whatever is left after the debacle, and he, or his followers will feed themselves, reproduce, and the species will persist.
Humans, cockroaches, jellyfish, & perhaps oak trees and piggies. Together into the future.
Terry
The biggest problem in this thread is that people correctly document catastrophic outcomes that are real threats, but they don't indicate how those lead to *extinction*.
So I want to make this point clear again: Extinction is the death of every single member of the species. If one mating pair survives, it's not an extinction. It's a catastrophe.
The major issue is not just climate change, it's the combination of climate change and radiation from the spent fuel rods from 450+ nuclear reactors melting down catastrophically and contaminating the entire globe. The dose of radiation that's going to be emitted into the atmosphere will most likely kill off anything on the surface that cannot burrow under ground and stay there for hundreds of years. The most dangerous radioactive isotopes have half lives that will contaminate the surface of the planet for hundreds of years.
Bunkers exist, and this is a major argument on this thread for the avoidance of extinction.
Let's just explore that option for a short period of time here:
1.
All it takes is one cataclysmic event in the bunker, like a virus to wipe out the rest of the species.Last time I checked, humans didn't evolve underground in bunkers. I already posted this but I'll post it again because apparently ppl don't read my posts: how are humans going to even survive a few decades underground and get all the required nutrients and vitamins from a diet of canned goods and meals ready to eat? Decades to centuries...that's a long time,
to date humans have NEVER lived underground in a bunker for even a fraction of that length of time. no experiments have been done, at least not in the public domain to prove that humans can survive that long in a confined place. Humans can barely survive in the international space station for a period of 6 months to 1 year, how do you expect them to survive in bunkers for centuries and centuries ? This isn't a science fiction movie, this is reality. In reality humans need to walk around, eat food, spend time in the sun and eat a variety of food sources in order to successfully breed. Without modern infrastructure to go to hospitals and heal bacterial infections and recover from viruses, they will slowly die from self inflicted wounds, malnutrition, disease, and injury.
2.
Due to radioactivity all over the surface of earth, it will take hundreds of years before anything that resembles food for humans is not full of cesium 134, cesium 137, strontium-90, and plutonium-241 (which decays into Americium-241), and the other radioactive isotopes that result from spent fuel rods melting down. I've already posted links in above comments regarding the isotopes that are released.
The radiation load from the spent fuel rod meltdowns is massive - it's not Fukishima it's fukishima X 1,000,000 - no one even knows how many millions of tons of this highly unstable waste exists on the planet. Do some research into spent fuel rod cooling ponds - many of these facilities are 5X at their recommended capacity right now, because there's no where else to put the stuff. They are maintained via deisel generators that can run out of fuel, resulting in catastrophic meltdowns that will make Fukishima seem like a new years eve celebration. The number of spent fuel rods is something in the order of multiple millions of tons of this stuff (that is metal that resembles lead in density - it's heavy and cannot be moved easily because it's thousands of degrees C), and once it gets hot it doesn't stop, sets the material on fire and evaporates water turning it into hydrogen gas causing explosions - then just a constant dose of radiation being emitted indefinitely from hundreds of locations all over the globe.
3.
I think a discussion regarding technicalities, like having a couple of small pockets of humans here and there in bunkers living off of vitamin pills and protein powder is missing the broader theme here - the truth is that climate change is happening so rapidly at this point that anything larger than a small rat is going to go extinct. With the radiation dose, small rats will die too.
Nothing can adapt quick enough to survive this extinction event......well - bacteria can, and small organisms like fungi, algae, and ...yes maybe jellyfish can as well - but nothing that humans would be able to identify as food. Certainly not pigs, unless they're underground - but pigs need sun, and without sun pigs will be using up the vitamin pills that the humans need. Pigs chickens, rabbits even - all require food themselves - how are you going to feed these things underground in a bunker with limited supplies of vitamins and minerals and food? Only the KT extinction resulted in climate change this rapid, and the result was 70% die off of all species, most of which were not much larger than moles and rats.
How do you expect something large like an ape to survive on a diet of radioactive cockroaches and radioactive jellyfish for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years, on an earth that continues to get warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer? The time lag for Co2 and temperature is hundreds and of years - the globe will continue to warm for a VERY long time, and that's not counting feedback loops.
4. I'm not going to lie and say I think every single human will die near term- there's going to be some idiots who go into bunkers and think they can outlast climate change. Technically, we won't be extinct until these idiots slowly die off over the decades and centuries (I doubt they'll last that long, but hey - you never know how perserverent humans can be - they might even breed and continue to propagate under these circumstances, but again it will all be for naught as the surface will remain radioactive for centuries, if not millennia).
I suppose it's theoretically possible that while in the bunker these folks may figure out some way to produce food, or just eat other humans in such a way that they continue to survive for decades, if not hundreds of years.
Climate change will outlast these feeble attempts at survival. This isn't a nuclear winter they're waiting for to end, it's the death of an entire surface of a planet. It took millions of years for earth to recover from the permian extinction, and that extinction event took thousands of years to unfold - not 250-300. The permian extinction also didn't include megadoses of radiation emitted in a sudden fashion. Does it seem possible that these bunker billionaires, military personnel, and politicians, etc etc - will be able to survive for millions of years, first underground for centuries, and then subsequently on the surface of a planet that resembles mars with no food sources other than other humans, red green algae, slime molds, and ...maybe, if they're really lucky - some cockroaches, nematodes, and poisonous species of jellyfish?
I think not.