John
I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000
Because within that little perplexion - people thinking the problem was a hoax because it was fixed before it destroyed shit - is an encapsulation of the current era of Western politics, including COVID mitigation, lesser evil politics, fascism, and crime rate hyperbole
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@__Styx__ @johnzajac what civilization ending event? with no ozone layer at all we'd have to deal with significantly more skin cancer and cataracts. an issue but not at that scale
Styx
@johnzajac and the fucking ozone layer with the Freon and fluor based home and industry gases that had a swift global ban and recycle ! !
This is world civilization ending event that we tackled "well" , and because it doesn't have a 10 episodes docu series in Netflix, it never happened or either is a hoax by big "science"
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@geos @__Styx__ @johnzajac no, i just see civilizations as pretty resilient (especially if the countermeasures are well understood and easy to manufacture)
George Saich
@whitequark @__Styx__ @johnzajac
You might be glossing over the seriousness of skin cancer.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@__Styx__ @johnzajac i would be much happier if that page provided citations for the impact on even the (better-studied) terrestrial plants, but my own search turned up a range of conclusions from "the plants we studied are unaffected but we don't know if it generalizes" to "this will require certain cultivars". i do agree though that the result will be somewhere in between the two extreme cases you listed
Styx
@whitequark @johnzajac it negatively and in a large but difficult to estimate amount, impact the basis of land and marine food chain.
Plant grows bad or not at all
Phytoplankton diminish or die
https://www.epa.gov/ozone-layer-protection/health-and-environmental-effects-ozone-layer-depletion
Would it kill all living things in 10 years ? Probably not
Will 9 billion humans stay alive and well nourished for centuries ? Probably not
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@__Styx__ @johnzajac while not detracting from your larger point: the research I was looking at was examining _existing_ African cultivars of rice and looking at what can be done to other ones to make them more UVB-resistant. so in this particular case the adaptations were already there
Styx
@whitequark @johnzajac yeah, doesn't have a good study or climatologist on hand to have more recent + documented source in English
But the main problem of rapid global atmospheric disruption is that
1) we cannot test it in a lab or a representative setting of every land type on earth
2) Once it's set in motion, it's often an unstoppable inertia that may be too quick for nature to adapt
Your example of cultivar is a good one, but some take decade to grow(even more to cross breed, like trees)
And to me if a subset of the population can survive in underground complex on fungi without large animal life above ground
I personally classify it as post apocalyptic
✧✦Catherine✦✧
@johnzajac @__Styx__ have you or anyone else you know done a study on what happens to terrestrial plants when they're hit with a 100% incoming UVB (as in pre-ozone-layer) level? I have not found an answer to that question and what I found for lower UVB exposure levels was inconclusive
John
The ozone layer absorbs roughly 98% of incoming UVB light from both the sun and cosmological sources. Space is, not to put too fine a point on it, *anti-life*. The Earth's atmosphere (the ozone layer being a key part of this) and dynamo molten iron core (which creates our unique magnetic field) are literally the only reasons life exists *at all*.
One of the reasons "colonizing Mars" is nonsense is that it doesn't have either an ozone layer or a strong magnetic field.
MidgePhoto
@whitequark @__Styx__ @johnzajac
Perhaps do some botanical reading!
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