I was asking myself how long it would take the earth to
recover if humanity all went away right this moment and never came back.
Global Climate change would continue, except there would by
no new burning of fossil fuels so there is that, but the positive feedback
loops of climate are now self sustaining, and the global average temperature
would continue to rise. The glaciers
would continue to decline, wetlands would dry out, permafrost would thaw out
and methane would continue to grow. The sea
levels would rise, and the winter snow cover would continue to decrease. Deforestation would stop in the tropics, but
it would increase in the temperate zones as wildfires would continue. The oceans would continue to warm, but the
acidification rate would stabilize.
In the first 500 years, the world would warm to two to two
and a half degrees above preindustrial levels.
And then the world would stabilize, but the stability would be a
different world than when know of today, lots of powerful storms, sea levels
would max out, there would be no icecaps and the number of glaciers would be
greatly reduced. Cities would have
disappeared at first look. All the skyscrapers
and anything built with modern concrete will have collapsed into rocky chunks
the cities that were built up before the modern times would be more intact, but
they still bi rendered invisible by the hundreds of changes in the world. London, Paris and all the cities located on
the ocean or 10m elevation, would be underwater, Florida, Poland and Ukraine and
significant portions of Russia would be underwater. Forests would start to grow everywhere where
they could. Flooding land increases
Methane production as things underwater rot and decay.
Animals were devastated by humanity. Animals would continue to go extinct after we
left. The effects of climate change on
the world would continue and get worse and many animals would suffer and go
extinct. Not all though and many more
would rebound. Deer would explode in
population and deer would alter the environment as any animal left unchecked,
dogs would have a very short control on the population until only the unneutered
animals would form the bases of the population along with the coyote
populations, after 500 years the wolf population would have grown and animal
populations would have reached a balance, but only megafauna on the planet
would be elephants and giraffes would cows replace the buffaloes in America? Would cows be the heard animals of Eurasia?
How long would it be for the Earth to reach the point where
humanity had no footprint on it. Never. Besides the pyramids in Egypt not much else
would remain to be seen easily. Roman
structures would last too. the Carbon
cycle is millions of years long, for the carbon cycle to recapture all the
excess carbon dioxide and return it to the earth would take millions of
years. The oceans would eventually
return to a pH of 9, but that might not happen for tens of millions of
years. By then the solar output would
have increased and the planet would be warmer.
Formation of ice caps might begin, again but the glaciers would never
come back like the ones in the Antarctic and Greenland, as those are the last
of the last Ice age and the earth will never be cold enough for that to happen
again.
The one thing that is clear is that humanity created this
problem and humanity will have to deal with the consequences of this problem
that it created for centuries to come, but if we wanted to reverse the changes
that we have done to the planet it would be next to impossible, but we would
also be the only chance the planet has. Why
do I say that, because the Carbon Cycle works over millions of years, but if we
decided to, we could accomplish the same result with technology in hundreds of
years. We could build artificial coral
reefs that remove carbon from the air and the oceans, we would have to just
remove the carbon out of the air and stop the deforestation and the other dreadful
things we are doing. If we did that, we
would slow the changes happening to the world, but we would not stop them, because
it is too late to stop it from happening.
But by slowing the rate of change we could over 500 years return the
planet to close to what it was. How?
We could remove some of humanity from the surface. Orbital worlds or moon bases. Some of them would have to be orbital bases,
because if we were able to reduce the incoming solar radiation to the earth, we
could make an artificial ice age that would lower the sea levels, create
massive glaciers, and restore planet to preindustrial status, but that would
take a lot of time.
We could desalinate the substantial amounts of water from
the oceans and build forests to cover the world’s deserts. If all the major hot deserts were forested that
would suck a lot of the carbon that we have put into the air and oceans, but it
would also add a lot of water to the water cycle, maybe enough to change that
weather patterns to make them self sustaining—they could never be self
sustaining. The they would always have
to be irrigated because convection nature of the earth’s wind patterns. At best they would be self sustaining as
grasslands but not as rainforests. But the
growth of new great forests would remove a lot of the free carbon that we added
to the environment since the industrial times, but not all of it. To do that we would have to develop the soils
of the new forests and to have many generations of forests to increase the soil
carbon levels.
Remove humanity and the Earth will recover. Humans might do a lot of the work in less
time if they are inclined to, but the question that is unasked is does it
matter? If Earth is the habitat for
humanity and all the other animals, then yes, it is important. If earth is the just the place where humans
live and manipulate the world around them, then no, it is not as
important. If we like to live in a world
that is best suited for us and only us then we might want to heal the Earth, because
where it sits now, it is becoming more dangerous for us—the heat extremes are
increasing, the productivity of crops is decreasing, the ferocity of storms is
increasing and these reasons suggest that healing to world would be a good
idea.
It is important to realize that if we begin today, things
will get worse before they get better. If
we began forty years ago, we might have averted most of the negative side-effects
we are feeling today. We did not, so we
need to double down now, to get through the negative side-effects and stop them
from getting a lot worse, but understanding that they will get worse, because
we did not act when humanity should have.
