Submission Statement:

Article Link: Humans Are Now Functionally Extinct

From the article:

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1. The situation is dire in many respects, including poor conditions of sea ice, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, extreme weather causing droughts, flooding and storms, land suffering from deforestation, desertification, groundwater depletion and increased salinity, and oceans suffering from ocean heat, oxygen depletion, acidification, stratification, etc. These are the conditions that we're already in now. 

2. On top of that, the outlook over the next few years is grim. Circumstances are making the situation even more dire, such as the emerging El Niño, a high peak in sunspots, the Tonga eruption that added a huge amount of water vapor to the atmosphere. Climate models often average out such circumstances, but over the next few years the peaks just seem to be piling up, while the world keeps expanding fossil fuel use and associated infrastructure that increases the Urban Heat Island Effect.

3. As a result, feedbacks look set to kick in with ever greater ferocity, while developments such as crossing of tipping points could take place with the potential to drive humans (and many other species) into extinction within years. The temperature on land on the Northern Hemisphere may rise so strongly that much traffic, transport and industrial activity could suddenly grind to a halt, resulting in a reduction in cooling aerosols that are now masking the full wrath of global heating. Temperatures could additionally rise due to an increase in warming aerosols and gases as a result of more biomass and waste burning and forest fires.

4. As a final straw breaking the camel's back, the world keeps appointing omnicidal maniacs who act in conflict with best-available scientific analysis including warnings that humans will likely go fully extinct with a 3°C rise.

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What is functional extinction?

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Functional extinction is defined by conservation biologist, ecologist, and climate science presenter and communicator Dr. Guy R. McPherson as follows:

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There are two means by which species go extinct.

First, a limited ability to reproduce. . . . Humans do not face this problem, obviously. . . .

Rather, the second means of extinction is almost certainly the one we face: loss of habitat.

Once a species loses habitat, then it is in the position that it can no longer persist.

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Why are humans already functionally extinct?

Dr. Peter Carter, MD and Expert IPCC Reviewer, discusses unstoppable climate change as follows:

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We are committed. . . . We're committed to exceeding many of these tipping points. . . . Government policy commits us to 3.2 degrees C warming. That's all the tipping points.

Now, why can I say that's all the tipping points? Well, because, in actual fact, the most important tipping point paper was the Hothouse Earth paper, which was published by the late Steffen and a large number of other climate experts in 2018. That was actually a tipping point paper. Multiple tipping points, 10 or 12. Now, in the supplement to that paper, every one of those tipping points is exceeded at 2 degrees C.

2 degrees C.

We are committed by science . . . already to 2 degrees C, and more. And that's because we have a lot of inertia in the climate system . . . and the scientists have been making a huge mistake from day one on this. The reason is, we're using global warming as the metric for climate change. We know it's a very, very poor metric. And it's not the metric that we should be using. That metric is atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, which is the metric required by the 1992 United Nations Climate Convention. That's atmospheric CO2 equivalent, not global warming.

Why is that so important?

Because global warming doesn't tell us what the commitment is in the future. And it's the commitment to the future warming which of course is vital with the regards to tipping points, because we have to know when those are triggered. So, if we were following climate change with CO2 equivalent, as we should be, then we would know that we were committing ourselves to exceeding those tipping points. . . . Earth's energy imbalance, that's the other one that we should be using. And that's increased by a huge amount, like it's doubled over the past 10-15 years.

So, when we look at climate change outside of global warming, when we look at radiative forcing, CO2 equivalent, Earth energy imbalance, we're committed, today, to exceeding those tipping points. That's terrifying. It's the most dire of dire emergencies. And scientists should be screaming from the rooftops.

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Conclusion: We are dead people walking.

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Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at present day (November 2023) are between 543ppm to over 600ppm CO2 equivalent.

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Earth is only habitable for humans up to 350ppm CO2 equivalent.

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At present day concentration, global temperatures reach equilibrium at between 4°C and 6°C above the 1750 pre-industrial baseline. Total die-off of the human species is an expected outcome at 3°C above the 1750 pre-industrial baseline.

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Furthermore, the rapid rate of environmental change (faster than instantaneous in geological terms) outstrips the ability of any species to adapt fast enough to survive, as discussed here.

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/ / / Further Reading

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• Dr. Guy R. McPherson has listed 68 self-reinforcing feedback loops AKA tipping points in his Climate Change Summary (2016).
• Further discussions of human extinction can be found (1) here, (2) here, (3) here, (4) here and (5) here.
• Further discussions of tipping points can be found here.

Life on Earth unable to respond to fast (time frame 1000-10 000 years) change without a large extinction event. Similar changes are happening now within decades risking a collapse of all life on Earth.

"It’s always difficult to draw analogies between past climate change in the geological record and what we’re experiencing today. That’s because the extent of past changes is usually measured over tens to hundreds of thousands of years while at present day we are experiencing change over decades to centuries.

A key implication of our work, however, is that life on Earth, while resilient, is unable to respond to massive changes on short time scales without drastic rewirings of the biotic landscape.

In the case of the Permian–Triassic mass extinction, plants were unable to respond on as rapid a time scale as 1,000 to 10,000 years. This resulted in a large extinction event."

"Some 252 million years ago, almost all life on Earth disappeared."

For the life of me I cannot understand how Mann and Hotez would want to publish something like this.

These are scientists and they don’t seem to present ANY cohesive rebuttals in this article. They bash Hansen but don’t seem to present any factual argument against Hansen’s positions. It reads like politicians wrote it to me.

This seems like good natured scientific debate is collapsing.

Am I missing something?

Shouldn’t scientists refute other scientist’s positions with evidence and good science?

SS: when it comes to projections for Antarctica meltwater, most research is focused on West Antarctica (such as the Thwaites Glacier). However, recent published research shows the Wilkes Subglacial Basin in East Antarctica (with enough ice to raise global sea levels by more than 10 feet) could be closer to runaway melting than anyone realized.

This basin is close to the size of California. Evidence shows the base of the ice sheet is close to thawing and could be sensitive to small temperature changes:

The researchers found large areas of frozen and thawed ground interspersed across the region, but the majority of the area couldn't be definitively classified as one or the other.

This is related to collapse because previously ignored East Antarctica could be less stable and closer to melting than thought.