Well, first off, MY BUTT is not a good measurement. The temp of the ocean is what we need to worry about. Why?
We've got several critical issues there:
1) Water expands as it warms. More water, less land.
2) Melting ice dilutes the saline in the oceans and thus breaks the natural pumping process that creates the ocean currents.
3) Frozen methane hanging deep our oceans will warm, rise into the air, and kill every living thing that breathes it in.
So this isn't about my cold butt or the temp outside. It's all about the rising ocean temps.
Do I actually think our factories and cars are causing this? Based on the charts I've seen of PRIOR burn and crashes in Earth temps, I don't.
The advent of humans have actually seemed to create a plateau in the cycles of burn and freeze.
(Note little change tween 10K and 0 yrs compared to prior 500K years)
And while I'd like to think humans can come up with solutions that will extend this temp plateau we currently enjoy, given we can't even agree to pay our bills, I've no hope we will achieve something truly amazing.
I'm pretty sure our time on earth is going to be far less than the dinosaurs. The fact we might be smarter than T Rex hasn't helped at all. All we do is fight and squabble over religious and political differences.
If we really want to survive as a species, space exploration should be our #1 priority.
Our telescopes have made great advances in seeing planets. (Two decades ago, we couldn't find anything.) However, we've made little progress with actual space exploration.
Thanks, to our telescopes, we've discovered space is packed full of suns and planets.
The Keplar Telescope has been so kind as to find over 104 planets that are the appropriate distance from their suns to be 'a survivable temperature'. We require a little bit more than that, but it's a good start.
Now we just need to seriously work on the getting off this doomed rock.
Unfortunately, when we attempt to find a new home, it's possible it will be occupied with life who does NOT want us. It's possible they've already checked us out and found we fight constantly, refuse to pay our bills, and don't share well.
It's very likely they'll want nothing to do with us and will not allow us to land when we make the amazing 170 generational trip to their planet.
And maybe they are right. Maybe we don't care enough about the 'right' things to warrant surviving.
But perhaps the Keplar telescope and those telescopes that come after it can inspire us to stop our squabbles and focus on the survival of humans. The more real the planets become, perhaps their importance to our survival will increase as well.
Otherwise, in a short thousand years from now, we'll have mostly died off. What the methane doesn't kill, burning heat and the ice age that follows will. (A few may have hunkered deep within the earth hoping to survive the 200 million year ice age that has set in. But since we tend to fight and not share, that probably won't go well.) Even if we chose benign-sharing people to save, what will they be after 200 million years underground? Tiny blind grub eating moles?
Sorry, I appear to be depressing you.
How about this view:
Our telescopes continue to improve and eventually we are able to see not just a blue green planet, but our scientist will learn to talk to their scientist and they'll tell us how to build a ship that won't kill us before we arrive on their planet far into the future. And when we finally arrive, they'll welcome us as long lost relatives and like the Indians did, they'll share their food with us.
(And maybe this time, we'll be a bit more gracious.)
