The sooner we get away from burning fossil fuels and using vast quantities of them to make plastics, the better. We can and must do better. As individuals, we need to install solar panels when and where we can, choose electric or hybrid-electric cars and bikes, and help humanity master the production and carbon cycles. When we do we'll see the (blessed) shrinkage and decline of the monster fossil fuel energy companies that have grown up in the 20th Century and cannot die soon enough in the 21st.

The very future of humanity depends on it.

The Ends of the World By Peter Brannen is amazing, can't recommend it highly enough.

I'm glad to see your positive review of Brusatte's "Rise and fall of the Dinosaurs", it's on my shelf of books to read.

The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen.

Just came out recently. Eminently readable.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0062364804/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503059644&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=the+ends+of+the+world+by+peter+brannen&dpPl=1&dpID=61odL1i6CtL&ref=plSrch

I read this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Ends-World-Apocalypses-Understand-Extinctions/dp/0062364804

And learned there was multiple epochs of life.

How do you explain this by biblical reckoning, unless you are a liberal Christian that just sees the OT as metaphorical, how can you believe in some ancient rites of "blood sacrifice" anymore as being mandated for humanity? [Jesus is an advancement, a proxy for the past human sacrifices] It is odd with that much scientific knowledge and understanding which past generations had no access too, you still believe this creator needs "blood" to even the system out and "forgive sins". I am not an atheist, in fact I believe there could very well be a higher intelligence, or "creator" of some sort but Christianity is too limited in it's description of it, and sticks to barbaric human found beliefs and practices like human sacrifice. I am technically agnostic, but I find it stranger that Christians believe I will go to hell, for rejecting the god of their definition. The 6 Epochs book told me that the human understanding of this universe is very limited and well Christianity even more so.

With regards to humanity not finding any alien life [YET] some believe disclosure is coming and that they HAVE already but it's been suppressed. Others of course explore the Fermi Paradox. It is possible the life is farther away then we could imagine.

http://formerfundy.blogspot.com/2009/10/human-sacrifices-and-death-of-jesus.html

Disclaimer

Some of the following is based on older data and describes the effects of some fairly extreme climate change models. These worst case events may certainly still occur, but know that, by 2100, around a 4 degree C temperature increase is the most likely result of climate change (if we continue to emit CO2 at our current rate). These two posts look at the current situation and the most likely future scenarios. Also, the article I link to that says it'll take nearly 400 years to overhaul our planet's energy system is incorrect (I'm currently looking for better data).

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The Situation

YOU SHOULD BE VERY AFRAID. This link deserves to be read in it's entirety because it contains factual information that is legitimately terrifying. However, I have pulled out many of the goodies below (i.e., all sections before What's Happening Now in the U.S. are essentially a summary/partial copy of the Daily Intelligencer article The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated Edition by David Wallace-Wells, which is what that link points to). This will affect you, if you haven't already been affected. Fear is the correct response to a global catastrophic risk (which climate change most certainly is), but if you intend to survive until the tail end of this century, or if you want family members or friends to live past 2100, you must pair that fear with hope, drive, and action. This massively tangled cluster-fuck of a problem will require you personally to act. Vote for politicians that promise to go above and beyond the guidelines set forth by the Paris Agreement, because the Paris Agreement isn't enough. Don't have kids (adopt if you want kids), drive less, don't fly in airplanes, eat less meat, and don't buy anything you don't need. Reduce, reuse, and recycle; but focus on reducing waste. Those are all great things to do, and you should do them all, but significant change in carbon emissions won't occur until strong enough government policies or big enough technology breakthroughs are made.

Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

The most credible prediction of the effects of climate change comes from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which issues regular reports synthesizing the latest science. The IPCC’s median business-as-usual projection for warming by 2100 is about four degrees, which would expose half the world’s population to unprecedented heat stress, according to Steven C. Sherwood and Matthew Huber’s landmark study on the subject.

“It looks to me that at that those numbers — four to six degrees — you’d start to see the tropics evacuating, because people wouldn’t be able to live there. It might be less than four degrees. But around four degrees or five degrees, would be the point where people would be finding it unbearable.” It wouldn’t just be heat stress driving people away, he said. “A combination of heat stress and other things. I think you’d start to see crop failures, damage to the biosphere. Keep in mind, in the tropics, two or three degrees takes the environment outside the range of natural variability.”

As Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University told David Wallace-Wells,

"...under rapid emissions, by the end of the century, 40 percent of the ability of people to work outside would be lost.”

How likely is this median, “business-as-usual” outcome? It’s difficult to say, but Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton, estimates our chances of staying below the Paris accord’s goal of two-degrees warming at 10 percent. In my interview with Wallace Smith Broecker, of Columbia, he said, “...the mean was about 3.5 degrees Celsius of warming, but it showed there was something like 15 percent probability that it’d be more than four degrees, just on these model runs.” And in their book Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet, Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman estimate a 15 percent chance that we overshoot six degrees.

In the winter of 2016, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded (just a little bit) by climate change less than ten years after being built. Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two decades, it is 86 times as powerful.

Because we are dealing with a planet-wide system, the reaction time is very slow. We are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past. The IPCC projects four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, but that's just the median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees. The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (the most recent finalized report) doesn't fully account for permafrost melt. By many counts, the IPCC report also doesn't fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract carbon from the atmosphere). The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.