🌍 Is the planet Earth doomed?

Fair points, but they do openly say more research is needed.
I’ll bet they are correct.

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This year is only going to come in at number 4 on the all time list. Good news.
Until you look at the higher 3.
2015, 2016 & 2017, with 2015 topping the list, which happened to be an El Neño year(as will 2019).
This century has already the broken previous records in 17 of the 18 years.
2019 will break all records. Put money on it.

One thing I learned today is while the earth may be doomed we are more likely to be killed off by an avalanche of
Fruit.
Over here they are being buried in Plums, peaches & apples. Also looking like the family will have enough grapes to make a couple of gallons of wine for the 1st time ever.
Anyone else seeing My Ayung, Lombok and now Seminyak in Bali as precursors to another Krakatoa. Gaia plunges us into a post volcanic winter - might need all that plastic to insulate ourselves

Think we were lucky to get in and out of Bali when we did.

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You’re probably right but I don’t think earthquakes and volcanoes spell doom for us or the earth.

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They have certainly helped before.

End Permian, 251 million years ago, 96% of species lost
— Tabulate coral, 5 CM

Known as “the great dying”, this was by far the worst extinction event ever seen; it nearly ended life on Earth. The tabulate corals were lost in this period – today’s corals are an entirely different group. What caused it? A perfect storm of natural catastrophes. A cataclysmic eruption near Siberia blasted CO2 into the atmosphere. Methanogenic bacteria responded by belching out methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Global temperatures surged while oceans acidified and stagnated, belching poisonous hydrogen sulfide.

Does any of that sound familiar?
Then add the melting ice, which makes the earth shorter and fatter, which in turn slows the outer crust(but not the core) and this makes plates move, so causing more and more volcanoes and earthquakes.
We are wholly responsible for this and refuse to accept it, even when it’s happening before our eyes at an ever accelerating rate.
Hell, if we look, the evidence that we’ve already done it is there.

Hi @Saint-or-sinner.
I read the quote below from your previous post. I’ve never heard of this theory. Are you able to link me to anything about it? Thank you!

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Thanks @BTripz
That article confirms the idea of the world getting “thicker” but makes no mention of the link to earthquakes and volcanoes, which was the bit I am particularly interested in.

Yeah, I’m trying to find that bit too, logically it makes sense but something doesn’t feel quite correct.

@BTripz…ok, thanks for the link. However, although that says their may be a theory that says earthquakes will be more common, this is because of the earth’s rotation and not to do with the earth getting fatter because of ice melt.

The team was puzzled as to the root cause of this cyclicity in earthquake rate. They compared it with a number of global historical datasets and found only one that showed a strong correlation with the uptick in earthquakes. That correlation was to the slowing down of Earth’s rotation. Specifically, the team noted that around every 25-30 years Earth’s rotation began to slow down and that slowdown happened just before the uptick in earthquakes. The slowing rotation historically has lasted for 5 years, with the last year triggering an increase in earthquakes.

So, the changes to the earths rotation seemingly happen every 25 years or so this isn’t linked to ice melt.

Rather than guessing at where @Saint-or-sinner has heard about this theory, I’m going to wait to hear it from him.

There was a fair bit about it last year. What i said was just the bits that stuck. I don’t really follow volcanoes and earthquakes, but here’s some reading(idiots guide at bottom).

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4388

http://web.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/01/glacier37.html

Been a while since i read anything on this, so the best way to look at it is something like this(someone else’s words from last year).

This week the news came out that a minute slowdown of earth’s spin will cause a massive spike in earthquake for 2018. What they didn’t tell you is why the earth’s spin is slowing. It’s not that they don’t have an opinion, it’s just that they have careers to protect. Well, being as how I’m happily retired, I’m perfectly free to fill this void. So what’s the cause? The moon.

Three billion years ago, the moon was spinning so fast and close to earth that ocean tides were 10,000 feet high and travelled 500 miles per hours. These giant tides scoured the land like jeans in a washing machine. The winds on earth were a thousand times stronger than now. Many think that this ocean/wind chaos worked like a blender to churn land minerals so severely that they recombined to form the first life forms.

When the moon tugs on our oceans, they form a bulge on the earth’s oceans at the equator. When the moon lines up between the sun and the earth, the combined gravitational pull on our equatorial oceans is enough to prematurely trigger volcanoes and earthquakes that are already set to blow, much like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Sea level rise is compounding this stress because most of this water was once locked up away from the equator as ice on the earth’s poles.

But it’s not only the poles. Glaciers, snow cover and groundwater are vanishing in places like the American midwest , the Andes and Himalayan mountains. In fact so much groundwater has been lost in the American midwest, the Grace satellites could detect the resulting weakness in gravitational pull. And, so much ice has been lost from Greenland, they could measure the corresponding weakness in gravitational pull there as well. All this water ends up at the equator drawn by the moon increasing the gravitational pull on the equator.

All this water collecting on the earth’s equator is making our planet appear fatter. And, acts just like when a spinning figure skater extends out her arms to slow down.

The earth is not 100% solid, it’s more like an apple. It has a thin skin, a big soft middle and a solid core. When the earth’s spin slows, it’s mostly the crust that’s affected. The solid core’s spin is not affected, and speeds up compared to the surface. Again think of the blender, the glass container is earth’s crust, the juice is the liquid magma and the blades are earth’s core. Many think the earth’s core is perfectly round. This may not be true, and it may well be shaped more like the fidget spinning blades in your blender than a marble.

Since I’m purely a bullshit artist, and not a scientist, I can’t prove any of this. I don’t have to because some ideas seem to make so much sense that proof is secondary. What interests me is the idea that this magma churning by earth’s core is aggravating the weakening of our protective magnetic field.

The only thing you need to remember is that snow, ice and groundwater are disappearing from our poles and heading to the equator. This is causing the earth’s polar crusts to rebound up and outwards compounding the stresses we already face by ice mass displacement towards the equator. In other words, there’s no telling what it all means.

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Hmm, yet this (older) article seems to suggest the Earth’s spin is speeding up :-1:

https://www.livescience.com/53071-melting-glaciers-change-earth-spin.html

That’s the problem with things we’ve never encountered before. It’s all a bit of a learning curve.
The one constant through it all, is that every projection/model has proved to be so conservative it’s embarrassing.
It’s almost like everyone is scared of telling the truth. Have we regressed so much, or was our supposed intellectual progress just another story we told ourselves?

I would like to think very much the latter, everything we know (or thought we knew) is constantly changing as new things are learnt and discovered. Computers have made modelling the systems so much easier and has a side effect of showing flaws/holes in people theories, something that would have been put down to human error in time of yore!!

The computer models are always wrong about time scale/severity, but i suppose humans set the parameters.
Dumb humans :anguished:

Found a computer model that isn’t stupid.
Have to go back to 1973 as we seem to have lost the ability somewhere along the line. Wonder what caused that?
Just look at that graph :astonished:

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For the record, I am very anti single-use plastic

But, this got me thinking:

“…A consultation on how taxes could tackle the rising problem and promote recycling attracted 162,000 responses…”

Great, but who was consulted and when? I never seem to get asked to participate in these “consultations”

The article has a lot of comments that most people agree with and will find it hard to argue against but I came away with the feeling the Govt are just buttering us up to impose yet another tax.