Hacker News Reader

Yes, these things will be rendered insignificant in the fullness of time, but as a human's with limited lives, it's still important to maintain empathy towards the human suffering of the here-and-now, and the very near future. It will be painful, it will be stressful, and we need to brace ourselves for the reality that many of our fellow humans will die from famine, regional war, and refugee crises whilst we struggle to adapt to and mitigate the worst of it.

Well at least we are unlikely to starve: satellite imaging shows very significant greening of the planet in many areas previously barren. How so? As the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs puts it,

“The benefits of carbon dioxide supplementation on plant growth and production within the greenhouse environment have been well understood for many years. For the majority of greenhouse crops, net photosynthesis increases as CO2 levels increase from 340–1,000 ppm (parts per million). Most crops show that for any given level of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR), increasing the CO2 level to 1,000 ppm will increase the photosynthesis by about 50% over ambient CO2 levels. For some crops the economics may not warrant supplementing to 1,000 ppm CO2 at low light levels. For others such as tulips, and Easter lilies, no response has been observed."

But this means more carbs in plant and less proteins, the diluted nutrients is said to be cause of bees dieng off, as they eat pollen for their protein needs and pollen has less protein, because plants dillute it with all that extra carbohydrate productions caused by more co2 in atmosphere

Do you have a source or any information you can point me to? Thanks,

That's my way of thinking about it too. At any rate getting nearly 200 independent nation states to agree on anything when they all individually benefit by flouting the rules - that's madness. We'll burn oil and coal and gas until it doesn't make economic sense. I very much doubt politics will change the outcome. Technology will hopefully save us from ourselves on that front.

A bigger problem is positive feedback loops. Melting ice means more dark water to absorb sunlight, and more melting. Melting permafrost releases CO2 and Methane and causes more warming. And somewhere around ~5 degrees warming the frozen methane on the ocean floor will bubble up and cause the mother of all feedback cycles. We'd be in for about 10 degrees warming and a mass extinction that would wipe out 90% or more of all species on Earth. From what I've seen of global warming predictions we won't get there - but I'm mentioning this because at some point warming temperatures doesn't just mean major changes and flooding our cities - at some point it means a terrible calamity like the Earth has only occasionally seen.

A bigger problem is positive feedback loops.

Historically we've had much more CO2 in the atmosphere than we do now. Why didn't the methane bubble up and kill everything then?

The methane was primarily caused by decaying biomass falling to the ocean floor. It didn't exist at the time the CO2 levels were higher.

It did. That was part of the sad chain of events causing one of the biggest mass extinctions ever 250m years ago. Its one of the theories anyway.

But will we be able to eat the different organisms that will thrive in this environment? What happens when today's staple crops no longer produce the yields we need to sustain our civilization?

During the little ice age, people ate things that grew in colder climates, like potatoes. We will find a way to survive, and we have more technology now to help than we did then.

Get ready to enjoy eating things made from jellyfish. Like, a lot of them.

I would venture that seaweed or algae is more likely.

I don't think so, if only because seaweed isn't very calorie dense - 4 calories per 2 tablespoon according to Wikipedia (well, the google card that gets all its info from Wikipedia at least).

I think it's much more plausible that we'll go the route Asimov predicted in "Caves of Steel" - genetically modified and processed yeasts, which are much more calorie dense than seaweed, and much better suited to the sort of industrial process that feeding 10+ billion people requires.

As a Korean, I'm glad we're prepared. Jellyfish salad and seaweed soup, anyone? :)

I specifically cite jellyfish, because they're one of the few creatures that will thrive in the increasingly acidic oceans. As so many other species — including those we currently enjoy eating to the brink of extinction — die off, jellyfish will abound.

My response to you is "what right do we have to usher in these changes?"

You might argue the "might makes right" perspective that anything within our capability is acceptable and appropriate but I don't agree with that sentiment. I feel that we, as sentient/semi-sapient beings, must be as custodians for this world and all the life within it.

We are actually the least among all, until we begin to serve the rest of this planet that has seen us to this point.

It's very difficult to derive 'ought' from 'is'.

The changes are already ushered in. Our responsibility now is to manage the consequences as well as we can.

He's not saying this is all fine and dandy, hes saying its not an apocalypse, just a global catastrophe from which both the earth and humanity will recover.

The odds are a bit longer on humanity surviving this mess than the planet.

Humanity will become extinct long before the biosphere. You need to think more inhuman [1]

"It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. […] Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity. This is not a slight matter, but an essential condition of freedom, and of moral and vital sanity.’

[1] http://dark-mountain.net/stories/books/book-1/the-falling-ye...

> might makes right

This is false.

I believe that this assumption was addressed accordingly by Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian war around 400 BC.

If you believe that might makes right the time where you will find yourself in a situation of disadvantage will come and then the precedent you have set might come back and haunt you in ways you never had thought possible.

ps. ofc here we're talking about nature and believing that we're might against nature as a species is blasphemy. The earth (the planet) will survive, our species will not :-)

> different organisms will thrive

Like mosquitos, ticks and other disease-carrying insects that kill 1 million humans every year.

Welcome Zika et al

You are correct. As long as this does not mean we will hit severe resource scarcity that starts one or several wars that turns so bad that nukes starts flying.

> just means that different organisms will thrive

Like non-human fauna.

This is very human-centric point of view. How many species will be lost forever as a direct cause of this event ? Sure, it happens all the time, but typically over a much longer period meaning other species can evolve to fill the gaps. There is no time for evolution to work over the 200 years this last change happened.

Another thing to consider is that the less diversity exists the harder it is for life to continue.

> This is very human-centric point of view. How many species will be lost forever as a direct cause of this event ?

Actually, it's your view that's human-centric. Species? Diversity? These are human concepts and mores.

> There is no time for evolution to work over the 200 years this last change happened.

Evolution doesn't "work". It's merely the process of natural and sexual selection. The flora and fauna are constantly being sculpted by the environment, even a rapidly changing one. And there is no evidence to suggest similarly rapid shifts haven't occurred in the past. In fact, there is evidence that they did and life went on.

I find it odd to see people criticizing each other because their comments are too human-centric. I happen to be human, and I believe the same is true of most of the commenters here. I don't really care very much about what happens to the Earth as a whole, but the survival and prosperity of humanity matters a great deal to me.

> the survival and prosperity of humanity matters a great deal to me

Just curious about what drives that particular viewpoint. Why do you care about the survival of the species? When you die, the world ends. It doesn't really matter what happens after that, does it? You could be dead two milliseconds and then a big rock hits the Earth and everything is gone. Still it doesn't impact you, because you are dead. And I am asking for the sake of discussion, purely.

I'm going to be around for a while, probably, and living in a better world makes for a better life. After I'm gone, I still want a better life for my child.

I suspect this kind of thinking is an innate evolutionary reflex. Similar to why people love having kids.

Sure. All live will grow until it consumes all available resources. There is no such thing as voluntary growth control in "natural systems". Agent Smith was wrong when he claimed all other life seems to find a "balance". Balance emerges from mortal competition between species.

Only humans have this: http://www.vhemt.org/

I find it odd, that you don't care what happens to the Earth as a whole, given that is the only place you can live as a human :)

And the thing is that the prosperity of the human species in the last century has been made largely at the expense of the Earth as whole.

I care about the Earth as far as it affects humanity. If white rhinos go extinct, that's sad, and the loss of biodiversity is harmful, but it's a fairly small thing. If, say, wheat were to go extinct, that would be a huge disaster.

The fact that our recent prosperity has come at the expense of the Earth is only bad in so far as that harm to the Earth is harmful to humans too. The two are linked, but not identical. The only way to eliminate human-induced harm to the Earth would be to eliminate humans, so the goal needs to be mitigation of harm and where possible moving harm to the Earth into areas that affect humans less.

No, its a systems viewpoint. And it can only be held by an organism that can appreciate the system. All other organisms breed util the systems natural capacity is exhausted and continually competes against one another.

You know exactly what I mean by "work". The current 6'th mass extinction (Holocene) is currently ongoing. The species responsible for this has no natural enemies against which we compete and will therefore continue unabated until all resources have been consumed and the system collapses. Just like it always has.

> The species responsible for this has no natural enemies against which we compete and will therefore continue unabated until all resources have been consumed and the system collapses.

This isn't remotely true. There are tons of bacteria and viruses which are parasitic towards us. We compete against them.

Nevermind the fact that the greatest competition always comes from your own species. The greatest check on human expansion and prosperity is humanity. We kill, maim, and restrict each other on grand scales.

There is also no historical evidence that a single species has ever been responsible for a mass extinction, so I find it odd that you're assuming we'll be the first when there is a historical record that spans billions of years. That's just arrogance.