HUGE CONTENT WARNING – APOCALYPTIC CLIMATE DESPAIR

It’s possible that humans, at the far end of this hellride (maybe a hundred years off), will have eradicated all life on this planet except the most intense extremophile bacteria and archaea.  I think even from where we stand now, assured of calamitous devastation, surfing the edge of an extinction event in progress, that does not seem likely.  The way that would happen is if the completely runaway global warming that is already too late to stop snowballs into temperatures that rival the Hadean Eon.  I don’t know how possible that is.

But it is surely probable for this heat to become globally devastating in a way we’ve never seen before.  It’s a pretty safe bet that all large mammals will go extinct outside of enclosed environments, and 90% of what else is living beyond the artificial spaces will go extinct as well.  That’s enough to make a nature lover miserably sad and some of us fit to suicide bomb a petrol exec or politician.  Looking forward to more of that happening, because this stuff does have me miserably sad, and I’d love to see the fuckers eat shit and die.  Zero qualifications regrets or backtracking on those words.  If you’re petrol or a political enabler, please, set yourself on fire on live TV for me.

But this post is about none of that.  I am inclined in this random moment to think about the life that will survive global warming.  Because unless we successfully turn Earth into Venus, this warmed world will settle into some kind of equilibrium eventually.  Birds and reptiles are much better at surviving heat compared to mammals, and despite the insect apocalypse going on at the moment?  You know those lil bastards will bounce back.  Again, huge numbers of species will be gone forever, but those that remain?  Will ultimately repopulate to exploit the niches that remain.

I know less about plants.  Obviously if they don’t make it through, the rest of life is in a bad way.  Goodbye to all tetrapod life if that happens, probably – no lizards no birds no rats.  But I suspect there are plants that will do well enough, even in a world that reaches a hundred sixty in the summer, choking in fire every year until the last scrap of tinder is mingled in deserts of ash.  The poles will not be quite that hardcore, some cool weeds will probably stick around and wait for a chance to spring back.  That will give a foothold for some insects and some kind of tetrapods.

If humans are lucky in all that, we’ll be living in tightly controlled environments with smaller populations.  Maybe underground.  We’ll be living off of vat-farmed algae and recycled garbage.  But what I’m most curious about in this moment of detachment is this – what animals will be the best survivors?  Who will be the lizards and bugs and weirdos that scrap back, diversify and repopulate the Earth?  If we’re lucky enough to still have dinosaurs, who will they be?  Ducks and chickens pulled off this feat once before, I bet they could do it again.

For the comments, I’d like to see people placing their bets on what animals survive this mess.  I, for one, believe that humans will be one of those animals – for good or ill.  But aside from eyebrow lice and gut flora, who will we be sharing the world with?

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