When will human civilization be wiped out because of global warming?

Question

When will human civilization be wiped out because of global warming?

Answer 1

well supossing our natural fuel resouce supply is pretty much diminshed and at most we have fourty years..i give it fifty

our society still believes if we do nothing the problems we have created for ourselves will eventually disappear...

Answer 2

In 1 billion years when the expanding sun raises temperatures on the Earth to the point that life as we know it cannot exist.

Answer 3

Ive seen a T.V. show called 6 degrees. and it says that if the world's temperature rose by 6 degrees in an instant that both polar caps would melt putting all of Florida and Texas underwater. The guys above me said that there would be in increase in population: this is not true. Thousands of people would die or be left homeless.

Answer 4

When elephants can fly.

Answer 5

some humans are bound to survive pretty much anything like rats and roaches.

dunno about 'civilisation' tho'. i hope so.

there are many people preparing for our 'descent from peak oil', e.g. the transition towns http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNet...

and the permaculture movement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permacultur...

someone really knew their stuff writing that wiki, and loads of good links.

Answer 6

It depends on what you call civilization.  We've been at it around 8,000 years.  Prior to industrialization, it was a very different beast than today.  I doubt that industrial society can survive much longer, for a long list of reasons.  When it goes, many many people will follow.  What will be left will probably resemble the bronze age more than todays "civilization".

Answer 7

Because a lot of global warming is needed to set in motion conditions needed to start the next major ice age, We should mostly be looking for how long it will take to trigger that next major ice age.

In all probability close to 300 years after the time that the seas start to rise significantly. (NO, that has not happened yet, and will not happen until most of the precip falling on Antarctic Shores is rain.)

The initial stage after Antarctica starts to get mostly rain will be a major spread of very cold melt water over  southern oceans, with a lot of climate changes that will not be very comfortable, too cold.  But rising seas will not kill many people. We will back away from the seas.

What happens in this stage is that we have less land to grow food on, and yet we could conquer that problem if we have already stabilized population.

As the oceans mix, so that we no longer have a big covering of cold fresh water,  (about 40 years) we again see temperatures rise, but this is not the most significant change. Most significant is that our oceans start to warm up. This ocean warm up is the driver for our next ice age.

Warming the ocean moves along with rising air temperatures, so that some might expect increasing cloud cover. But contrary to that expectation warmer  air drives less cloud cover.

Less cloud cover in turn drives warm-up of the oceans.

We do not get a major ice age until we have enough heat in the oceans to drive evaporation despite cloud cover. So once we get to that level of ocean heat, cloud cover can suddenly increase and sustain itself while the oceans pour trillions of tons of snow onto polar glaciers, once again lowering our ocean levels, but also severely reducing the land we have to grow food on.

Can we survive our plunge into a new major ice age? Not all of us. Not Canadians, Not Russians, Swedes, Finns, Scots, Even northern China gets clobbered. So we have to expect people to do a lot of migration even if we have to fight wars to do so.

Answer 8

perhaps it can only be reduced - not wiped out

Answer 9

We'll hang on for a while in smaller communities that don't require fossil fuels for the production of food or the manufacturing and transportation of goods:

Ten Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Fr...

It may be a necessary adaptation due to the skyrocketing demand for oil in China and India, regardless of what happens with climate change.  

Climate change will simply add the extra burden of figuring out what crops will grow as the climate changes, and migrating as places become too dry to support agriculture.  Hopefully we won't lose key species along the way such as bees, needed to pollinate our crops.

Here's more on the "peak oil" issue:

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

The effects of even a small drop in production can be devastating. For instance, during the 1970s oil shocks, shortfalls in production as small as 5% caused the price of oil to nearly quadruple. The same thing happened in California a few years ago with natural gas: a production drop of less than 5% caused prices to skyrocket by 400%.

Fortunately, those price shocks were only temporary.

The coming oil shocks won't be so short lived. They represent the onset of a new, permanent condition. Once the decline gets under way, production will drop (conservatively) by 3% per year, every year. War, terrorism, extreme weather and other "above ground" geopolitical factors will likely push the effective decline rate past 10% per year, thus cutting the total supply by 50% in 7 years. Source

These estimate comes from numerous sources, not the least of which is Vice President d**k Cheney himself. In a 1999 speech he gave while still CEO of Halliburton, Cheney stated:

"By some estimates, there will be an average of two-percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three-percent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need an additional 50 million barrels per day." Source

Cheney's assesement is supported by the estimates of numerous non-political, retired, and now disinterested scientists, many of whom believe global oil production will peak and go into terminal decline within the next five years, if it hasn't already. Source

Many industry insiders think the decline rate will far higher than Cheney anticipated in 1999. Andrew Gould, CEO of the giant oil services firm Schlumberger, for instance, recently stated that "An accurate average decline rate of 8% is not an unreasonable assumption." Source Some industry analysts are anticipating decline rates as high as 13% per year. Source A 13% yearly decline rate would cause gobal production to drop by 75% in less than 11 years.

If a 5% drop in production caused prices to triple in the 1970s, what do you think a 50% or 75% drop is going to do?

Estimates coming out of the oil industry indicate that this drop in production has already begun. Source The consequences of this are almost unimaginable. As we slide down the downslope slope of the global oil production curve, we may find ourselves slipping into something best described as a "post industrial stone age." Source

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As for climate change, Volcanoes have been the biggest issue for humans in the past:

"According to the Toba catastrophe theory, 70,000 to 75,000 years ago a supervolcanic event at Lake Toba, on Sumatra, reduced the world's human population to 10,000 or even a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution."

"According to Ambrose, this reduced the average global temperature by 5 degrees Celsius for several years..."

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"A few years ago, I published an article in Science,the American equivalent of Nature. In it, I considered what might happen in the 21st century. Perhaps we would go on slowly getting a little more crowded and a little more polluted, but still civilisation would be much as before. Alternatively, we could suffer any one of several catastrophes, such as a volcanic eruption no more severe than Tamboura in 1815 or Laki in Iceland in 1783. These two volcanoes put so much dust into the air that the sun's rays were enfeebled, the earth grew cool and there were two years without harvest. There were then far fewer people in the world, so there were famines, but not enough to destroy civilisation. Just imagine what would happen now. It is said that we have no more than 15-50 days' grain stocks in store at any one time."

http://www.ecolo.org/lovelock/lovelock-o...

Interestingly, it was not the volcanoes themselves, but the resulting slight climate change of 2 to 5 degrees that nearly wiped us out once already, and that cooling only lasted for a few years.  Global warming will not be limited to 5 degrees of change, and it will not be so temporary.

I don't know if we're due for human extinction, but even just a downward population slide from 6+ billion would involve a lot of ugly competition since every person on the planet will fight to be one of the few who survives.

Answer 10

Never.  

Man is a tough, resilient, adaptive species.  We've survived war, famine, pestilence, drought, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, plagues, depressions, and reality TV.  What makes you think that a little change in temperature will take us out?

Keep in mind that global warming may well make some areas even better for human habitation.  If that happens, why should the people in that area get wiped out?  The local population would probably increase!

Answer 11

That is a question that global warming alarmists cannot tell you, along with a few other things..

1) What the weather will be like tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade.

2) How CO2 even remotely contributes to global warming besides some spectrum light c**p, which it does not retain.  Wait I need sunglasses, too much CO2.... lol

3) What if anything will really happen, even if global warming is true.

4) Why so many more ice ages and warming trends occurred WITHOUT man's involvement.

5)  What CARBON TAX will do to effect ANYTHIING!!!!  You are paying money into an investment....  Take a look at the stocks falling the most...  YEP, you got it, alternative fueled technology..  Take a look on Etrade, Scott trade or any other stock website.

6)  Why Gore had to lie THROUGHOUT an inconvenient truth.

Answer 12

Never.

Global warming, even if as dire as predicted by the doomsayers, will only alter earth's environment, not destroy it or life on earth, human or otherwise.  Some areas would be inundated, others would be warmer than now (Siberia, northern Canada) and therefore more habitable.  And any such changes will happen very slowly, allowing any persons threatened by rising water levels or other changes to move to a different location.

The idea that "thousands of people would die or be left homeless" is ludicrous.  Populations shifts would occur, but the important fact is that these changes will happen VERY SLOWLY, allowing affected populations to adjust and adapt.

Answer 13

You should consider cause and effect. Our civilization was only made possible by global warming. If little ice conditions would have persisted for the last 150 years instead of global warming, it is a forgone conclusion that there would not be 6.5 billion humans on the planet. When global warming ends, which it will, it is not likely that we can maintain the current population, there simply will not be enough food.

Answer 14

Global warming is REAL believe it or not

you don't believe it well the day that the world almost at the end of the line there won't be time to go back never think about going either there's no going back.

it's not our civilization that has both us to this point but our use of fuel and co2 and all the pollution. we are so into money we look like people without hearts sometimes we never care about what we do to others. cutting down trees and building houses will just kill some other animal. don't forget that trees are also living things and so are animals.

if you have any thing to ask about global warming than you may ask on my site in the shout box which you will find around the site.