I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. The natural ecosystem adapts to ice ages, meteors, and other world altering events, and the planet without us would probably revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia.
I still cannot explain why, but shifting the perspective in my mind from "Humanity is Earth's savior" to "Humanity is Earth's abusive consumer" was a humbling epiphany, and helped me learn to revere nature.
I find it sad that the only two perspective seem to be the extreme ones: humans are either destroyers or saviors.
How about the middle ground? We are part of nature and like any other animal we are trying to survive and make our life better. And it's not that other animals are perfectly respectful of nature either. Remove predators and herbivores will graze everything to the point of creating a wasteland and dying of starvation.
Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. We are only conscious of what we are doing.
It's not that nature is not tough on us. Everything out there is trying to kill us. Nature provides our sustaining, but it's also harsh, something we don't seem to appreciate from our lives in safer-than-normal cities, with always available food, heating, transportation, medicine.
I think the best perspective is aknowledging that we can have an adverse impact on the environment, and try to address it, istead of hating our own species as if it was a disease.
You're trying to rationalize it (understandably). There is a word for what we've done, and it's the Holocene mass extinction.
Locust are part of nature, as are elephants. Locusts eat everything and then all die. Elephants slowly reach the carrying capacity of their environment. There is also a word for that each type of reproduction strategy: locusts with exponential growth are r-strategists, elephants with logistic curve growth are K-strategists.
r/K is slightly dated and it's not completely binary, but there is truth to it. And humans, because of technology, have all the population dynamics of a r-strategist. We have the collective intelligence to observe this, but not to act on it. Even though they are part of nature, the life of r-strategists individuals is brutal and short. And a locust swarm can be highly detrimental to life in their area. Since we are ubiquitous and the world dominant species by far, we are very, very badly harming biodiversity and it only has the chance to get worse.
I'm glad you are finding peace, but you definitely have the possibility of dying from global warming direct (famine) or secondary effects (war) in what would otherwise be your lifetime, as does everyone under the age of 50. That is perfectly natural and in tune with nature. Nature is brutal and amoral.
I don't understand how you can begin with a somewhat rational argument about overpopulation and then jump to the completely irrational conclusion that for some reason global warming (as a root cause) will kill us, rather than overpopulation. Do you really think like that, or are you just trolling?
I'm not trolling, it's not like overpopulation directly will kill us. Overpopulation is relative to the carrying capacity of an ecosystem. Global warming will reduce the carrying capacity of the world vis a vis human population faster than we can adapt to it (migration, crop changes, etc). The end result is jump discontinuities in populations, which is really just a polite/scientific way of talking of really significant numbers of people starving to death or killing each other over limited food and water resources.
edit: and to be clear, I view this as a problem for us, the current generation, not a future problem. I am personally taking small but real steps to prepare for this, right now.
Malthusian insanity. Population will decline globally w/in 75 years. Advances in natural power generation will make it economical for humans to align electric consumption with natural resources. As usual, even HN'ers are temporally ego-centric. Hakuna Matata.
And yet, all the predictions of climate catastrophe of the last 50 years never came true. According to some, by now Great Britain should be underwater.
Will they never be true? No one knows, because predicting the future is not our best skill. They might well be someday. But the track record, for now, is dismal, which makes me thing they are more driven by ideology than by science.
Growing up in California in the '80s and '90s, I recall seeing maps showing how rising ocean levels would flood the Sacramento valley with ocean water and turn the California coastline into a chain of islands by 2010 or so.
One has to wonder for how long these alarmists will be able to get away with these doomsday predictions which continually fail to materialize before they go back to the basics; let's keep the water and air clean because we gotta drink and breathe that stuff. Maybe you can't get the big research bucks with arguments like that, but I think you'll get far better results in terms of actually changing human activity.
Can you link them? I suspect they where showing 2100’s, but you are recalling them as 2010’s.
We are a little above the 1990 IPCC predictions for sea level rise, but 1-2mm per year was never going to produce drastic changes in 30 years.
PS: It’s actually CO2 releases that are significantly below projections. Considering this was in many ways an intentional change, it’s hard to call old CO2 predictions wrong, just pessimistic.
Some of the extremely dangerous sources of pollution actually get away with it due to the focus on CO2 and global warming, e.g. shipping - its CO2 emissions contribution is insignificant, but:
> Of total global air emissions, shipping accounts for 18 to 30 percent of the nitrogen oxide and 9% of the sulphur oxides.[2][28] Sulfur in the air creates acid rain which damages crops and buildings
Nobody thinks about this anymore when they buy their fancy new PV panels from China, or their organically grown tropical fruit.
I don't think you appreciate the relative risk from CO2 pollution (or really, warming in general which then brings CH4 and water vapor into the mix).
Marine shipping uses the dregs of refining: bunker fuel. The have absolutely enormous two-cycle engines that run on something in the neighborhood of tar and motor oil. It is an inefficient combustion with trash fuel. NO2 and SO2 is bad, but it's nowhere near the danger of global warming, and shipping is otherwise extremely efficient in terms of carbon intensity/kg/km cargo shipped.
Would you do a rough energy life cycle (back of envelope) on the energy expenditures of a shipping tanker full of solar PV cells (ie, building local factories, the cost of time until they are operating, cost of building up upstream supply chains, and then more prosaic PV vs baseline grid carbon intensity per kwh consumed?). I think you'd find there is some nuance in what is optimal.
Shipping produce vs local and seasonal is a big waste, agreed. All of that is refrigerated multi-modal, too, and ships are hardly the worst offenders in that logistic chain.
I think non-CO2 shipping pollution tends to get pulled out as a distraction device in these discussions, though I don't think that's why you're bringing it up.
> Would you do a rough energy life cycle (back of envelope) on the energy expenditures of a shipping tanker full of solar PV cells
This has been done already here in Central Europe and for the CO2 emissions alone, PV panels from China are worse than local hydro plants (~50g vs. ~20g CO2/KWh over their lifespan including production). Naturally, adding the other pollution caused by shipping makes it even less attractive.
> I think non-CO2 shipping pollution tends to pulled out a distraction device in these discussions, though I don't think that's why you're bringing it up.
On the contrary, it's grossly neglected and many of the direct negative effects of human actions on the environment we've seen in the past decades are from other causes than warming/CO2. CO2 gets so much attention because it's also a convenient way for many industries to distract from their impact on the environment. You can poison the water and soil or bury even nuclear waste underground, but as long as you buy some CO2 certificates, you're good.
I mean, you just kind of proved our point, here. You immediately started talking about how CO2 will cause warming, and so many people like me are just gonna tune out from there because we're so desensitized from all this warming false alarmism. I'm sorry, maybe there really is some merit to your words, but the boy has cried wolf too many times.
Do you have any arguments about how and why we should save the earth that don't involve warming? Let's try one of those.
I'm going to focus on the phrase "false alarmism".
It is super foreign to me, since I look at IPCC reports, live temp/precip reports, I look at meta discussions around why reports aren't lining up to observations... everything there is mind-numbingly terrible. You literally have mental health problems emerging in related fields, like PTSD. The more you know about this problem, the more and more terrifying and depressing it gets.
I don't know that you have an accurate and fair history of the science of global warming, or appreciate the degree of knowledge we have built up - particularly in the last 20 years, as the urgency of the situation has become clearer.
I used the analogy of a Ford Pinto (1970s tech) to a Tesla Model 3 (current tech) to drive home the gulf between the knowledge we had 50 years ago and what we have now.
I will remind you that Steve Jobs, when faced with a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, chose alternative medicine and diet vs conventional medical treatment. I just think that anecdote is instructive.
Okay, perhaps you are seeing predictions that number X will increase by Y by year Z actually come true. I'm talking about the predictions that the Sacramento valley will flood, as I mentioned upthread, and various other doom-and-gloom predictions that clearly haven't come to be.
> You literally have mental health problems emerging in related fields, like PTSD.
The anti-vax movement shows us the danger of correlating things like global warming and PTSD. Do you have more evidence of causation than those people do?
Anyway, I'll ask again. Can you give an environmentalist argument that doesn't involve warming scares? I challenge you. One wouldn't think this would be that difficult.
"I'm talking about the predictions that the Sacramento valley will flood, as I mentioned upthread, and various other doom-and-gloom predictions that clearly haven't come to be."
What prediction? Who said this? When? You're entire reference upthread for this is "I saw a map back in the 80s". Without knowing who drew that map and why, we can't really know what to make of it, can we? For all we know it was made as a satire of global warming predictions, or was designed by a fringe group with limited understanding of the subject matter, or you're making it up to make a point. Unless you can find an example of actual scientists (and not just one, but a group of them) predicting inundation of the Sacramento valley then you have no case for claiming 'alarmism' in that regard.
And besides that, even if alarmism were an issue, that doesn't mean that there isn't a serious issue underlying it. You need to look at what the actual science predicts, not just the people who glom on to climate change as a cause célèbre, and you need to match those predictions to the outcome. The outcome of that comparison might surprise you.
For an analogy, if Bob told you that eating a single milligram of arsenic were to instantly kill you, he would be wrong and would be exaggerating its real effects, but that would not mean that arsenic is somehow not poisonous or that you can ignore its poisonous effects. People can and do die of arsenic poisoning.
you're getting confused by sensationalist reporting overblowing the short-term impact of our climate catastrophe.
the scientific predictions were always pretty conservative and the only thing they were off about was the time... as they alway thought we'd take longer to get to where we are now.
But yeah, you won't see the effect in your day-to-day life as an american nor european until its way too late to do anything anymore. but hey, most of us will experience it in a few years, so stay tuned until after 2050 i guess. though i'd wager we'll still discuss if we have impacted earth at that point. there is just too much money to make in denying it.
> all the predictions of climate catastrophe of the last 50 years never came true
What predictions? The predictions about ozone layer depletion and how to address it successfully? Those were accurate.
Predictions about warming and sea level rise? Those are accurate.
> According to some
Who?
Don't use weasel words[1] like "all the predictions" and "according to some"
You clearly have specific issues in mind, so why don't you let us know what they are so we can address them, and not have to rely on your interpretation of "all the predictions" and whoever "some" of these people are.
> Predictions about warming and sea level rise? Those are accurate.
Which ones? Satellite data projections, NOAA, IPCC estimates and wacko reporter/activists all say very different things. Looneys regularly say crazy things, like the Marshall Islands[1] won't be there any more. Al Gore used the words "20 feet" in his wacky documentary; that's certainly not right.
Intelligent people, with Ph.D.s in numerate sciences even, have exhibited horror when I bought a condo a kilometer from a shore (63 meters above sea level mind you; I like hills and ocean views); they really think I'll drown in my old age! The disinfo out there being put out by activists is at least as bad as that put out by oil companies or whatever. This isn't helpful. And the error bars on the scientific consensus don't inspire a lot of confidence (or sufficient horror, apparently) either.
People on here regularly confound weather (aka hurricanes and such, and what they experienced when they went to the beach), which always happens, and which doesn't even jibe with climatological predictions, with climate. Also political/military problems such as the ongoing nonsense in the middle east are confounded with "climate refugees" which is also not helpful.
The reason stuff like the ozone worked out reasonably well from a political point of view, and was eventually more or less mitigated is there weren't crazy people exaggerating things.
"People on here regularly confound weather" no they don't.
"The reason stuff like the ozone worked out reasonably well from a political point of view, and was eventually more or less mitigated is there weren't crazy people exaggerating things" There were, but they were the industry lobbyists against CFC regulation (https://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/ozone_skeptic...)
We've banned this account for obvious reasons. Could you please not create accounts to break HN's guidelines with? It's not hard to use the site as intended, if you want to, and it's in your interest to do that, since breaking down the threads with comments like this will just lead it to informational heat death.
I'm sure that all types of predictions have been made, including very bad ones. I'm not aware of something of the scale of the GIEC studying climate change 50 years ago. You are comparing hypothetical past predictions (when? from whom?) with a scientific effort of unprecedented scale.
> predicting the future is not our best skill
It depends. We can predict many future events very accurately.
> they are more driven by ideology than by science
I think that not listening the scientific consensus is ideological. I have no reason to believe that the GIEC predictions are less valid than those of some random dude on the internet.
Predicting some eventual outcome isn't quite as difficult as predicting its precise timing. This is common knowledge regarding market bubbles, but really applies to more than just economic questions.
We can't just shrug off past predictions because they failed to get the timing right when the trends they foresaw are clearly observed, just not quite as strong as predicted. The UK is still more united than underwater, but the poles are melting nonetheless.
First, how many satellites did we have 50 years ago? How many advancements have there been in sensors over that time? How much has compute capacity increased? Our level of data and observation has increased - trying not to exaggerate - a million-fold. With that, the algorithms and models have improved, too. It's like comparing a Pinto to a Tesla.
Second, 50 year old forecasts have held up remarkably well. I will just point to Exxon's forecasts, under "Select ExxonMobil documents": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont... They actually did a fair job in the 1970s and 80s of modeling the warming we've seen just based on first principals of measured CO2 greenhouse effects and atmospheric concentrations.
Third, we are actually quite good at predicting the future! We can predict where a planet will be in a million years. It's basic Dunning-Kruger bias to think these professional trained scientist building these models don't understand nonlinear systems maths and the ways these systems diverge, couple, and otherwise interact.
Fourth, "According to some" is the source of so many flawed conclusions. According to some, the world is flat. According to some, reality is based on the theory of the Time Cube. You can't go around quoting cranks to attack non-cranks. I don't know who or what you are talking about, but I have a very hard time believing a qualified individual thought GB would be under water in 2020 in 1970. And even if they did, times change and we know much more now.
I hate to be out ahead of the mass psychology of awareness of the magnitude and criticality of climate change. It is very hard to digest how bad things are. This is data driven, though.
> I don't understand how you can begin with a somewhat rational argument about overpopulation and then jump to the completely irrational conclusion that for some reason global warming (as a root cause) will kill us, rather than overpopulation.
Global warming is almost certainly already killing us. If a hurricane, flooding, heat waves, or drought is more severe than normal due to climate change, that means people are dying due to climate change.
In the decades to come, droughts, crop failures, and fishery collapses means people will starve. Extreme weather and sea level rise will create climate refugees. In unstable parts of the world, climate change-induced stressors will cause armed conflict and probable massacres. It also means previously stable parts of the world will become unstable.
All of those things means lots of dead people within the lifetimes of people alive today. Maybe we'll be able to change course and lessen the impact of climate change, but if we don't succeed the outlook is grim.
We're gardeners, and the whole earth is our garden. We aren't separate from the environment, it is our garden to manage, and to decide how beautiful or barren we want it to be. Every landscape on earth has been indelibly shaped by human beings, often before we were even aware of "humanity" or "the earth" as a concept in total. Some think even the amazon may have been in large part planted by us. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pristine-untou...
There is no pristine ideal of the environment to return to, or to preserve. But our impact is so large now that we can no longer afford to have it all be accidental. We have to be very deliberate now about how we want the earth to be.
Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. We are only conscious of what we are doing.
Someone fucking up the environment to garner an extra $100K or two on that annual bonus isn't doing it for survival. Wolves aren't taking down entire herds of deer they'll never eat so that they can say they have more rotting deer meat than the other wolf packs. Domestic house cats are the only animals that I can think of that demonstrate such behavior, with the modifier "domestic" being emphasised; i. e., we made them like us. (Yeah, that last bit is a stretch.)
I'm sure there exist other species that hoard, just because...well, we can't be the only ones. But we're the ones with the mechanized means to do at destructive scale.
You are wrong, there have been plenty observation of pointless killing across multiple other species. Look up surplus killing. We only differ in that we are far more effective compared to other animals.
In addition, we've also shown to be capable of far more empathy towards others of our own race and others, compared to any other species out there.
The simple truth is that if any other species had the destructive potential that we have, they would simply exterminate themselves without ever questioning their actions. So don't be so damn vindictive of humans when comparing us to animals.
Squirrels and birds seem to have a selected desire to horde nuts in a similar way to people hoarding extra resources for lean times. Cache Spacing or having various hordes of food spaced around in hidden locations seems like a rough analogy for having various Swiss bank accounts and the like. Ravens in particular are clever and will deceive potential raiders by moving caches, and raiders will try and appear disinterested.
As an aside cats are slightly odd for domestic animals as they're arguably semi-domesticated versus dogs or farm animals. African Wildcats look and act a lot like house cats in videos and are genetically similar, which I think is part of what makes them fun as pets.
Most squirrels are scatter hoarders: almost everyone's seen a squirrel bury a nut in a lawn. They bury their nuts all over their territory and remember the locations and retrieve them later.
What you might not know, is that in old growth oak forests, most trees were accidentally planted by squirrels.
The acorns that they forgot and didn't retrieve, sprouted and grew into oak trees.
So the analogy of a squirrel as ruthless acquisitor is not quite apt, because their manner of caching their hoard actually helps to plant the next generation of trees.
(Acorns do not sprout as well when the just fall to the ground.)
> Someone fucking up the environment to garner an extra $100K or two on that annual bonus
Nobody gets paid just to fuck up the environment. They get paid to increase sales or whatever and the consumers are buying their shit to help them survive in one form or another.
> Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different.
except we don’t really just maximize our survival. if we did or had the capacity to, we would do things much differently. instead we go well beyond just simply trying to survive. and yes, other ecosystems’ balance can be upset but that is usually due to human influence in the first place. we are different in our behavior.
Maximizing survival goes beyond "simply just trying to survive"
What we are trying to do is accomplish our goals we have for our short lifetime. We are certainly not the only species in the world who does things for pleasure that aren't neccessary for our survival.
> but that is usually due to human influence in the first place
That all depends on perspective. If you look at a big enough time frame- humans can be considered almost irrelevant.
> We are certainly not the only species in the world who does things for pleasure that aren't neccessary for our survival.
no, we’re not, but we are the only ones who so to the detriment of entire (and numerous) species and ecosystems. for example, we are starving and poisoning after we decimated and traumatized the population decades ago of southern resident orcas. however, we have abstracted our survival and pleasure mechanisms so much that we see this and other such scenarios as an inevitable or unavoidable byproducts.
> That all depends on perspective. If you look at a big enough time frame- humans can be considered almost irrelevant.
that’s a rather silly statement. what is your point? of course if you “zoom” out far enough, nearly everything becomes irrelevant. but with any timescale important to species and ecosystems, humans are certainly relevant and completely detrimental.
> no, we’re not, but we are the only ones who so to the detriment of entire (and numerous) species and ecosystems
That’s a pretty extraordinary claim. Have you considered that every time this happens (e.g. a new predator crossing a new land bridge) it completely wipes out entire species?
if it's extraordinary, can you provide evidence otherwise? can you provide examples of any other species that has wiped out entire species, multitudes of species, and at increasing rates? i didn't list any because i don't know of any.
that's a rather specific example that i personally don't think is relevant to the discussion. for one, fungi are not even animals. and it's a very specific disease tied to a certain class of species. humans have affected a greater number of species across all categories and are doing so at an increasing rate. there is no other event in history like this that was caused by a single animal species, that i know of.
although, i suppose if people want to make the comparison that humanity is as mindless as a fungus that causes disease, then by all means.
it's clear that that wasn't my point, and it's also clear that that wasn't my summary of their point. i answered their point directly, and in good faith, above that. i don't know why you're honing in on what amounted to a joke, although if one zooms out far enough, it might not be hard to think of humanity as mindless.
i don't, however, understand the point of your comment.
Years ago I began meditating. I’m by no means an expert, nor would I identify as “religious”. But any deep meditation can result the sensation of loss of self. Or a change in perspective, in seeing the impermanence of things. The piece that only recently became clear to me, was the role of “compassion” in all of this.
To me, yes, the universe in a sense goes on no matter what we do to the planet. Everything is impermanent. But is our current path the most compassionate one for all the various forms of life on earth? I don’t think it is.
Perhaps some will find this too “out there” for a HN conversation. But I think it’s relevant when we consider the impermanence of things, and the... morality of our actions, for lack of a better word — it’s important we consider what the most compassionate path is we can take as a species.
Morality and compassion are purely subjective concepts. There is no natural importance in either. The universe exists independent of your subjective conception of morality and compassion.
Yes, but the bigger question I think is if the majority of humans on earth will adapt and also "how well". A lot of environmentalists are misled by the promise to save endangered species: we won't.
But can we save humanity from destroying our own habitats? That's why environmental measures for cleaner oceans, air, and living conditions matter. It's for us, and the other dying inhabitants of earth will benefit from this too.
Edit: Okay, yes we've saved endangered species before. When I was growing up, Brown Pelicans were endangered along California's coast and we turned that around. But we won't save all the frogs, and we didn't save the northern white rhino. That's my point.
The vast majority of that first graph happened more than 1000 to 10000 years ago. Attention to endangered species seems to have only started 50 to 100 years ago.
But you are right that our impact on endangered species is poor; only 28 species have recovered out of ~2000 listed in the US (according to the Wikipedia page for the Endangered Species Act of 1973).
> I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. The natural ecosystem adapts to ice ages, meteors, and other world altering events, and the planet without us would probably revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia.
No. Depending on how bad warming gets, it will take on the order of millions of years for biodiversity to recover. The worst mass extinction was the Permian-Triassic where something like 95% of aquatic species and over 75% of terrestrial species went extinct. That took a long, long time to recover from.
You are correct that life will probably go on without us. But what I think a lot of people fail to realize is that we're looking at the collapse of human civilization somewhere on the horizon, and human extinction after that if we don't change course.
"By 2050, between 350 million and 601 million people [in Africa] are projected to experience increased water stress due to climate change"[1]
"Climate change is projected to decrease freshwater availability in central, south, east and southeast Asia, particularly in large river basins. With population growth and increasing demand from higher standards of living, this decrease could adversely affect more than a billion people by the 2050s."[2]
I understand this may not affect you personally. But don't just dismiss it as "some humans will potentially suffer". Billions will suffer, most of whom (being from developing countries) aren't at all responsible for the catastrophe that will befall them.
We are already in the middle of a mass extinction caused by human activity. Even in the wikipedia article you linked it talks about extinctions of 40% of species if we get to 3 degrees of warming.
There is high variance in estimates about loss of biodiversity, but if you start looking at what happens to plants and animals with climate shifts there is a tremendous and almost unfathomable risk there. Many species depend on certain temperature ranges for key parts of their life cycle. Fruits don't develop in the temperature is too hot or too cold. Many animals that depend on that fruit, end up starving if those fruits don't develop. Then there's the fact that any organism can only take but so much heat. In heatwaves there's a temperature beyond which is lethal for many organisms. And if heatwaves arrive during breeding season, the young of many animals will be particularly hard hit.
When you get to the oceans, increased acidity due to carbon absorption will lead to fisheries collapse and the extinction of corals. Ocean acidification will prevent many forms of plankton from forming their shells, which undercuts many open ocean ecocystems. Something like a billion people depend on fish as their primary protein source.
As for humanity, people are really focused on where climate will be in 2100. But what happens in 2200, 2300, 2400 and on if we don't get things under control? CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years. So if humanity doesn't curtail emissions and temperatures rise by 3 or 4 degrees, it's going to stay at least that hot for millenia. But even worse, all the methane that will get released by thawing permaforst will accelerate warming even beyond that. Melted glaciers and sea ice means less sunlight will be reflected back into space, which will cause even more warming.
You can't "revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia" when species go extinct, you need something more along a geological timescale to undo that damage. Previous extinction events have taken dozens of millions of years to reach a similar level of biodiversity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_biodiversity_...
I think this sort of thinking represents a sort of defeatism that frees the viewer from having to take any action to make things better (or less worse). Rebecca Solnit has a great quote on this about hope:
"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."
Evolution is not slow and steady. If the conditions are right it can take hold very quickly. Most of evolutionary history is equilibirium with small bursts of rapid change when the environment shifts significantly.
It didn't take us a few hundred millenia to turn grey wolves into chihuahuas, and with the right stimulus nature could do it too.
I didn't say they couldn't be thousands of years, but suggesting hundreds of millenia ignores many observed events that have taken place on a much, much shorter time scale. The numbers referenced in the wikipedia article aren't even in their supposed citation, which is definitely not written by a supporter of the theory.
I choose grey wolves into chihuahuas because it's an example of a complex mammal undergoing significant genetic change over a much shorter time period than 100ky. For less complex animals there are even more dramatic examples.
I'm talking about evolution of different species, a much more significant change than variation within a species. Despite morphological and behavioral differences, wolves and dogs are still the same species. It took millions of years for fungi to evolve into decomposing wood.
Evolution of new species may not be necessary to survive all environmental changes, and not all speciations are similar in terms of genetic difference. Coyotes can still breed with wolves and dogs.
I don't know why but your view and the gp commenter's view makes me more angry even than the deliberate liars on the other side of the climate change. It reduces us all to passive pawns in something beyond our control. It is not, and we are not. Human beings have all the technical ability to be the dominant species on Earth until the Sun transitions to a red giant - billions of years. Then we probably have what it takes to colonize within the solar system. We have that level of intelligence and capability. People just need to have some personal responsibility.
When I take a step back and consider everything, I'd say there's a solid resemblance to an aggressive form of viral infection as well, in respect to planetary timescale.
It seems to me that the vast amount of water on Earth acts as an insulator against extreme temperature changes. I imagine that most of the issues surrounding climate change are going to be centered around us having to adapt to the new normal - costal cities flooded, mass migration across political boundaries, shifts in arability of land areas affecting food production, etc.
> I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life.
Any good source for this? I must admit I don't know enough to know whether I should be terrified of a runaway green house effect or not.
I have the exact same feeling. I used to feel concerned and sad about the destruction of the environment. It takes place at such a rapid pace that we can witness it in our lifetime. There is something depressing about seeing things changing for the worse in a seemingly irreversible manner.
The reality is that this is just very temporary. The next generations of humans won't have it as easy as those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world today. But it's not like the human fate has ever been really appealing. The depressing thought is our own mortality.
That being said, I think it will take more than a few millennia to undo to the recent changes. For one things, exctinct species will not reappear so fast.
> The next generations of humans won't have it as easy as those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world today.
Do you really think so? We continue to make great strides in improving availability of food and clean water and reducing disease and war across the world. Yes, perhaps in ten generations, and for whatever reasons, humanity will be living in a climate 1 degree warmer than what we have adapted to today, but they will be capable of their own adaptation. They will look back at the quality of our lives the same way we look back at the quality of life ten generations before us.
I do. I recommend "The Limits to growths"[1]. As much as I'd like to, I find it hard not to be convinced by their simulations. Pollution is increasing globally, non-renewable resources are getting depleted, renewable resources are consumed faster than they renew. All of this happens at an exponential pace, it can't last forever. Climate change is just a symptom. The whole system is bound to collapse somehow. It just can be otherwise for very fundamental reasons. We live in a unique time of fast growth, it seems natural to think that things will go on just like they've be doing in our lifetime, but they can't.
> They will look back at the quality of our lives the same way we look back at the quality of life ten generations before us.
"In 2016, a report published by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth concluded that "there is unsettling evidence that society is still following the 'standard run' of the original study – in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards".[45] The report also points out that some issues not fully addressed in the original 1972 report, such as climate change, present additional challenges for human development."
Also Al Bartlett: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
>The next generations of humans won't have it as easy as those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world today
I find it an odd perspective to be both deterministic without realizing the cause of "not having it as easy", while at the same time being provably claiming it is luck to live in the developed world. This is not meant as a personal think, but it is a very schizophrenic or psychotic, inherently detached and disconnected perspective.
The developed world is directly and provably a function of the cultures, values, people, and genetics of the particular group that produced its outcomes; built, iterated, and compounded advancements over many generations, which they passed on from generation to generation to the reborn embodiment of themselves that their children represented. Of course all of that has been utterly dismembered and deconstructed and been disassembled to possibly a mortal degree now, but luck had absolutely nothing to do with any of that; it was all deliberate and conscientious string of centuries and millennia old choices … all now being ruined by people who have been psychologically abused into self-destructive submission.
On a related note, the only reason that "humans won't have it as easy" anymore, is solely due to both the above described psychological abuse that has triggered a self-destructive suicide that will end up destroying thousands of years of human progress, but the very reason people will not have it as good as in the past, is that they have been conned into destroying themselves and continuously making poor decisions that only compound the self-harming spiral.
It is easy to make the mistake to claim that people are far better off today, but reality is that regardless of inevitable improvements that were within the outer bounds of the trajectory, the measure of how well a society is doing, has nothing to do with a quantitative temporal change ratio, but rather with the state of qualities of society, culture, family, relationships, community, and engagement with each; which are ALL majorly rotten and damaged, as essentially every single measure shows.
All of that of course will only get worse, because as yet another team of researchers just showed out of a Danish university, that ALL … not some, not many, not most, but all research into social cohesion and trust shows that they are majorly damaged through multiculturalism and diversity; the very tyrannical imposition that is singularly being forced on only the white people of the developed world which leads to things like the subsequent generation being worse off than the previous.
You know, reality is that in the past of western culture, actually not even that long ago, it was actually the now Christianity that has now been conditioned through pavlovian propaganda to be hated by probably most here, which provided people with a sense of foundation or guide rail so as to not get lost in the cavernous void that atheism leaves behind, which most humans are simply not strong or powerful enough to deal with. No Christian western white person was depressed into suicide before they started abandoning Christianity and the cardinal direction it provides in life.
I feel similarly. But I find that giving an inch means losing a mile. It is a terrible truth and it can make the argument for being better citizens of Earth feel hopeless at times.
I still cannot explain why, but shifting the perspective in my mind from "Humanity is Earth's savior" to "Humanity is Earth's abusive consumer" was a humbling epiphany, and helped me learn to revere nature.