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Comment by fastbeef | Hacker News Reader

I find these articles terrifying, and yet unreal. Like it's not really happening. I guess this is what denial feels like.

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That's because it's an alarmist piece which aren't too difficult to find in The Guardian. They do sell papers after all.

I'm by no means claiming there is no problem and the situation is fabricated; However, using terms like “ecological Armageddon” really makes your amygdala go into overdrive and for what? To shock people into action or something?

That term is a quote from one of the scientists. It also seems quite appropriate. What would you use to describe this event?

Anthropocene extinction. I'm sure the ecosystem will finally stabilize with a fraction of current amount of species. It so far always did in the past.

EDIT: I did not make up the term. The term Holocene seems to be more current (but also more obscure). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

That seems highly obfuscatory for describing a catastrophic event to a nonscientific audience. Might as well call it an “unplanned existence deficit” or something.

Right, but having your species single-handedly cause a mass extinction event on a scale not seen in 250 million years and having it happen in the span of a couple centuries (which is like a millisecond in geological time) seems like a pretty big deal to me. Like the biggest of big deals that we’ve ever lived through. This is a “there is a three mile wide asteroid inbound that will hit the earth in 80 years” kind of big deal.

A couple centuries? The insect collapse (from the various articles I've read) is something that happened in the past couple decades.

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