[LINK] o/t End of Days

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

David writes,

> > Whatever i like to hope that humans wont kill us all. It's nature that
> > we've screwed with too much which might extract its inevitable revenge
> ....
>
> The worst-case scenario to which I alluded in an earlier post sees 
> temperatures rising to a point at which evaporation exceeds 
> precipitation, globally. Water vapour being a powerful greenhouse gas, 
> that triggers a feedback effect. Eventually, all of the water is in the 
> atmosphere. At that point, surface temperatures rise to something over 
> 200 degrees Celsius. There's something about atmospheric pressure more 
> than 90 times what it is now as well.
> 
> Oceans don't evaporate overnight; it takes millennia. Humanity would go,
> slowly and miserably, extinct. It would take centuries.
> 
> Nobody really knows where the tipping point lies, but minds like Sagan 
> and Hawking have warned that we shouldn't assume that it can't happen. 
> In at least one talk, Hawking raised the possibility that the tipping 
> point has already been passed; it's just that we're going to Hell so 
> slowly at present that nobody's noticed.


Douglas Adams "Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This 
is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find 
myself in, it fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me 
staggeringly well, and must have been made to have me in it!' This is 
such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats 
up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still 
frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be 
alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to 
have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by 
surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out 
for."

Cheers,
Stephen