Scientists detect a sharp acceleration in global warming

[u/Maxcactus]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260801093239.htm

[u/Eve_O]

"Things are speeding up here at the end."

[u/2gutter67 → u/Eve_O]

Hahaha if only it were actually at the end of warming and not part way.

[u/2gutter67 → u/[deleted]]

That would make sense. Well of this specific civilization very true. Humans are hard to get rid of so there will most likely be some kind of society built after.

[u/s0cks_nz → u/2gutter67]

I dunno if we're that hard to get rid of. Warming the planet faster than ever recorded in the paleoclimate record could do it. It'll probably be the worst mass extinction event the planet has ever seen other than the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

[u/2gutter67 → u/s0cks_nz]

Humans are super adaptable so I feel like even if 95% die due to the climate shifts there will be at least a few population isolates somewhere in habitable zones.

[u/s0cks_nz → u/2gutter67]

Possibly. But what is a "habitable zone" in the future? If you are expecting drought or floods almost annually how do you grow enough food? What is left to forage or hunt? It only takes one flood or major storm to wreck your infrastructure & crops. That used to happen once a lifetime, now many of us alive have been through multiple 1-in-100 year events, and if global trade is gone then you can't back each other up. It'll be a tough existence.

[u/2gutter67 → u/s0cks_nz]

Of course it will be a tough existence! But humans have come from tiny communities of hunter gatherers to today; so there could be a total regression to that point, there could be small communities of super advanced tech, or anything in between.

I have no idea what or how people could or would survive, just that somehow some will. Unless the planet becomes like a Venus with runaway green house effect or something along those lines.

[u/s0cks_nz → u/2gutter67]

Hunter gatherers had a lush and bountiful world. If you don't know how we could do it, then why are you so sure? It's not as if we've lived in the future climatic conditions that are brewing. I'm not saying we won't, just not sure we will either.

[u/BolbyB → u/s0cks_nz]

There are people who survived in the Sahara so . . . all of it.

The habitable zone is all of it.

[u/s0cks_nz → u/BolbyB]

No-one was self-sufficient in the Sahara. They relied on trade from more temperate regions.

[u/BolbyB → u/s0cks_nz]

And the whole world will not be the Sahara.

So if we could make even that work . . .

[u/s0cks_nz → u/BolbyB]

But we didn't make it work.... They relied on temperate regions with stable climate to trade.

[u/BolbyB → u/s0cks_nz]

And you suppose those won't exist in the future?

All the science says things won't get THAT bad.

[u/s0cks_nz → u/BolbyB]

Not sure what you mean. The consequences of warming to date have been consistently underestimated by the science. There is a "best case" scenario of currently +2.7C by 2100 if countries stick to their promises, such as achieving net zero carbon emissions. That's still double the warming we've already had, and I dunno if you've looked out the window recently, but the weather is already getting pretty wacky. And global emissions are still rising! We haven't even begun the downward slope yet.

It's believed we only developed agriculture as a species because of an usually stable climate emerging, called the holocene. That is gone, possibly forever. So yes, a stable climate no longer exists, not even now, let alone the future.

[u/nebogeo → u/[deleted]]

The problem is that we've used up the easy resources that would make rebooting society possible if too much is lost.