Does our planet have a future,considering the fact that global climate change is taking its toll on us?

Question

Does our planet have a future,considering the fact that global climate change is taking its toll on us?

Answer 1

According the best scientific minds studying the issue, the planet has a future of approximately 7.5 billion years.  At this point, the aging sun will have expanded to the point that it will have engulfed the Earth's orbit.  The additional drag imposed on the planet by the solar atmosphere will cause the Earth to fall into the solar core where it will be consumed.

Life as we know it on the planet has a much shorter future.  In approximately 1 billion years, the increased energy from the expanded sun will have heated the surface of the earth to a temperature approaching that of boiling water, and life as we know it will be extinguished.

Answer 2

It has a future for at least me, I think global warming is a hoax.  What toll  has it taken on us?  If you werent "told " there was global warming, would you know it was going on?

Answer 3

It is only by human intervention that Life (not the planet) is at risk.  It will be only by our intervention that it gets out of harms way.  I refuse to throw in the towel on something so valuable, with having put up a better  fight.  It is a matter of our species learning to clean up after itself, as all others already have.

Answer 4

of course! Humans will probably kill themselves off, but the earth will live on. Nature has a way of regenerating itself.

You question should be "Do HUMANS have a future,considering the fact that global climate change is taking its toll on us?"

Answer 5

I find it amazing that we have become such a fatalistic society when our ancestors struggled through much more difficult time and yet survived. We have made life so easy that every issue that comes up is a monumental thing, we may have progressed in technology however I wonder if that lack of struggle has weakened us as a people.

Answer 6

What arrogance, to think that we can destroy a planet.  You know nothing, because the people you listen to either know nothing about the planet's history, or worse, they don't care, and are using the ignorant to get money and power.

No one will ever say it any better than Michael Crichton did in his prologue to 'Jurassic Park'.

"You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time.

It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive gas, like fluorine.

When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. Hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. "

Answer 7

Sure.  And so does man.  We're tough and the planet is even tougher.

That doesn't mean global warming won't be really bad, if we do nothing.

It won't be a Hollywood movie style disaster. Gradually coastal areas will flood and agriculture will be damaged. But it will be very bad. Rich countries will cope, but it will take huge amounts of money. In poor countries many people will die of starvation, but not all of them.

Really good website for more information here:

http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/f101.a...

Answer 8

Taking its toll?

In what way?

Answer 9

Global warming is one-half of the climatic cycle of warming and cooling.

The earth's mean temperature cycles around the freezing point of water.

This is a completely natural phenomenon which has been going on since there has been water on this planet. It is driven by the sun.

Our planet is currently emerging from a 'mini ice age', so is

becoming warmer and may return to the point at which Greenland is again usable as farmland (as it has been in recorded history).

As the polar ice caps decrease, the amount of fresh water mixing with oceanic water will slow and perhaps stop the thermohaline cycle (the oceanic heat 'conveyor' which, among other things, keeps the U.S. east coast warm).

When this cycle slows/stops, the planet will cool again and begin to enter another ice age.

It's been happening for millions of years.

The worrisome and brutal predictions of drastic climate effects are based on computer models, NOT CLIMATE HISTORY.

As you probably know, computer models are not the most reliable of sources, especially when used to 'predict' chaotic systems such as weather.

Global warming/cooling, AKA 'climate change':

Humans did not cause it.

Humans cannot stop it.

Answer 10

Worldwide population continues to grow...what toll are you in reference to?  I've become more prosperous within the last 10 years, and my wife and I have spawned 3 little evans_michael_yas.  Life is good.  Live a little!

Answer 11

nope