Mammals’ Time on Earth Is Half Over, Scientists Predict - eviltoast
A new model suggests that in 250 million years, all land will collide into a supercontinent that boosts warming and pushes mammals to extinction.
  • BananaTrifleViolin@kbin.social
    251·
    1 year ago

    This is the problem with believing too much in models. A model can show you anything you want - it’s output is only as good as the parameters and algorithms you set it.

    Modelling the climate in the next 50-100 years is already extremely difficult and fraught with inaccuracies but we have lots of models and data to extrapolate from, so we do have a crude idea where we’re going. But we can’t model next years weather with accuracy, just the base trend. Crucially important warning for climate change but limited otherwise.

    Modelling out to 250 million years is basically a crock of shit. The tectonic movements are predictable and gross predictions that a pangea arrangement might be warmer may have some validity but modelling the climate and evolution and status of mammals is pure conjecture.

    Good thing about modelling that far is you will never have see you model’s accuracy being tested. Publish a paper, play into current fears around climate change with an irrelevant prediction about 250million years away, get an article published in the New York times and egos massaged all round.

  • Rand0mA@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    That fucking website with its 3 quarter screen popup forcing registration. Fuck new York times and it’s bullshitty bullshit.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    111·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Alexander Farnsworth, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Bristol who led the team, said that the planet might become too hot for any mammals — ourselves included — to survive on land.

    Dr. Farnsworth enlisted Christopher Scotese, a retired geophysicist from the University of Texas who had crafted the Pangea Ultima model, and other experts to run more detailed simulations of that far-off future, tracking the atmosphere moving over the oceans, the supercontinent and its mountains.

    Thanks to the turbulent movements of molten rock deep in the Earth, the volcanoes may release vast surges of carbon dioxide for thousands of years — blasts of greenhouse gases that will make temperatures rocket up.

    If global warming continues unabated, biologists fear it will lead to the extinction of a number of species, while people will be unable to survive the heat and humidity in large swaths of the planet.

    Wolfgang Kiessling, a climate scientist at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, who was not involved in the study, said that the model did not take account of a factor that might mean a lot for the survival of mammals: the gradual decline in the heat escaping from the Earth’s interior.

    As scientists begin using powerful space telescopes to peer at planets in other solar systems, they may be able to measure their continental arrangements to infer what kinds of life might survive there.

    The original article contains 1,031 words, the summary contains 231 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • dangblingus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      We’re not supposed to leave Earth. We evolved to survive and interact with Earth’s systems. Death is inevitable. Entropy is our God.

    • MBM@lemmings.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      As long as there are still animals that can live on Earth it’s the most habitable planet in our solar system

      • MonkderZweite@feddit.chEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Okay, maybe graphen + light circuits will have infinite cycles of operation and be fine with passive cooling…

        And there’s experiments with surface-only electron waves tech (what’s it’s name?), which could work on the potential difference of wind blowing over it.

  • Chickenstalker@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    1 year ago

    In the geological timescale for the supercontinent to reform, we and mammals would have evolved as well. Humans would evolve into Xenu™©® for all we know.