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by lproven·3mo ago·view on hn ↗
Short term (low single-digit decades): rapid sealevel rise. When (not "if") the Thwaites Glacier goes and the West Antartic Ice Sheet floats (not melts, just gets seawater underneath it) then we're looking at circa 5 metres, stabilising globally in about 12 days.

Goodbye every single coastal city, air or sea port, industrial area, power plant, transport infrastructure in the world.

Medium term (high single-digit decades): rapid global warming pushing the habitable zones to the poles and sub-polar regions. Note, critically, that means agriculture, as there are no established ecosystems to hunt/gather from at the poles.

We are heading for ~7º C by the end of the 21st century. Never mind 4º, double it.

Long term (millennia): another mass extinction event, much as the previous ones. We're 75-80% of the way through already, though.

Geological terms...

Hundreds of thousands of years: if humans go extinct, the planet will recover in 100K years or so, with plentiful but severely species-impoverished ecosystems.

Tens of millions of years: lots of new species, new rich ecosystems form.

Hundreds: if another sentient species evolves, it will have a hard time bootstrapping an technological civilisation, as we've extracted most of the the easy-to-access resources.

1 comments
> Short term (low single-digit decades): rapid sealevel rise. When (not "if") the Thwaites Glacier goes and the West Antartic Ice Sheet floats (not melts, just gets seawater underneath it) then we're looking at circa 5 metres, stabilising globally in about 12 days.

where do you get that from? The wiki page of the glacier states 42mm rise in sea level in the next 100 years, worst case scenario. The wiki page of the ice sheet states 3 to 5 meter over the next 500-13 000 years.