I think the real concern is whether or not we can elect someone who is smart. I am really tired of the idiots we have had. Need someone who can really think instead of repeating the stuff we know does not work.

We will see if we are smart enough to come up with a way to stop the rapidity of this. Personally I think we are smart enough to develop a means but it will probably cost to much, not be profitable enough, or just not allow for a balanced profit and loss statement.

It is an obscene reality that our greatest curse on this planet is Ourselves. We are the scourge of the Earth in plain numbers , and living conditions will get worse with little change in our behavior. We are a stubbornly insane species dooming ourselves. Tragic.

I think the Earth has a greater capacity to right itself than we presently imagine... but in order for her to get back up, we gotta stop kicking her while she's down. The forests during the carboniferous period were pretty epic. I mean, that was like 300 million years ago, but plants like greenhouse conditions. Presently we are destabilizing things too much for this to matter. I'm curious to know how those doing the math on this thing figured in the possibility of a resurgent forest growth (if we can just leave it alone and let it grow back!). CO2 stimulates vegetative growth. Anyone who has done any indoor cannabis cultivation knows about that. So long as we keep crushing the "lungs" of the planet though... this fact doesn't make a whit of difference. Isn't it Ironic that to a major extent, the pickle we are in today is a result of how we utilize 300 million year old compost? It actually makes a lot of sense. There was a saturated CO2 environment at that time as well... thanks to the prolific plant growth (and those ocean going cyanobacteria), that carbon was naturally sequestered and we get to live in an oxygen rich world. What is happening now, is directly link to event and conditions 300 million years ago. Wild!

Of course, we are.we infinitely breed and take from a finite planet.

Hmmm... it looks rough.

Applied science could change this cycle if the money was available to do so.

I don't care much, to be honest. I'll be dead before the planet becomes inhospitable to life, I'm sure. I just want to cause as little harm myself, and enjoy as much of it as I can, while it still exists in its current state. Not really concerned with what happens when I'm gone.

One can only hope that future leaders will be sufficiently powerful, educated and ambitious, and humanistically oriented enough to push scientific and corporate interests in a parallel direction toward fixing this. And soon.

We are frogs boiling in the pot much of the world is in denial of.

If man-made climate change wasn't real, it seems a certainty to me that we will all die out in not much time at all.

If, with the global technological reach our species has, we can't affect the atmosphere of our planet, then what hope would we have to protect ourselves from natural catastrophic changes to the global environment?

Without the ability to terraform, extinction in some future time seems unavoidable.

I suspect you're 100% correct. I give the human race about 200-years, but that's the optimistic side of me talkin'... it's probably more like 100-years. Glad I never had kids. Other life forms here will evolve in new ways after we're gone. 50-million years and the next intelligent life forms with opposable thumbs can try again.

It's the least we deserve. The Earth will heal itself after we're gone.