You joke, but I’ve seen those kinds of arguments, especially online.
Some time back, someone argued that global warming was a self-solving problem because the oceans reflect light and heat energy back out into space, so as the earth warms and the oceans rise, the ability to reflect that heat will increase and we could even go back into an ice age because of it.
That is, of course, not really how it’s going to go. Massive ecological collapse and possible human extinction would occur due to the initial warming, first off, even before you get to the arguments about… Everything else at the crux of that.
For a long time, one of the talking points of climate change denial wasn’t that it wasn’t happening but that it was normal for us to go through heating and cooling cycles, so just deal with it and wait it out, we survived the last ice age so we can survive this heat wave, right? But again, that’s mostly bullshit.
Well, the global warming is a self-solving problem. The nature will just make itself uninhabitable for humans.
Congratulations to the small, niche organisms, waiting to fill the gap left by the mammals!
Bad news to a lot of those organisms though, the Extinction Level Event doesn’t stop at humans. I’m not sure what’s resilient enough to survive. Cockroaches maybe? Rats?
I think snow and ice would be better at reflecting but we seem to get rid of those ice caps… But when the ice melts, it cools down the ocean so of course, problem solved!
There is indeed an upper limit for global warming, because hot bodies lose more energy by radiating heat than colder ones. I think the equilibrium of energy gained by the sun and lost by heat radiation from the earth is at something like +5K in average global temperature. I doubt humanity would survive this though, civilization definitely won’t.
