Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
All wild whales, bears, lions, deer, moose, mice, rabbits, wild horses, camels, beavers, buffalo, elephants, tigers, rhinos, chimpanzees, pandas, goats, etc... are in that remaining 10%.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/29/17386112/al...
If beavers invented a lifestyle that enabled them to live at densities up to thousands per square mile they'd compromise a hell of a lot of biomass too.
The fact that there's more humans doesn't imply anything about the other animal population (though I suspect that it's not good for the other animals though).
b)There are about 50 people per square kilometer of land. Even adjusted for farmland humans are still gonna blow every other large predator out of the water. Even if you include commercial fisheries that still blows every other large predator out of the water. Maybe there's a couple seasonal localized concentrations of certain predators that are higher but nothing else comes close to that number.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8&ab_channel=Popco...
I worry quite a bit about the habitat distruction necessary to comfortably sustain 7–10 B people, but the comparisons to a virus and the implied moral judgment have always seemed off-base. Nature doesn't care if we destroy everything. I care.
Fertilizers get into water and decimate the life in there. Herbicides coupled with pesticides decimate insect ecosystems. The development of land gives larger animals nowhere to go.
I get why we farm like we do - abundant food for everyone. So much so that we waste so much. I just wish there was some way to develop effective farming that didn’t do all this. But it feels like a catch-22.
We've created our own vicious feedback loop by planting massive areas with a single crop that has been bred for size and shelf life more so than disease/pest resistance and nutrition. The monoculture is ripe for attack by pests due to lack of biodiversity. Our response to this problem has been to double down by spraying the crop with herbicides and pesticides. The chemicals kill beneficial fungi, bacteria, and insects which leave the crop entirely defenseless against the pests unless it is sprayed again and again. The bacteria and fungi that make soil "soil" and not "dirt" also die, and the only way to grow the next crop in dead soil is to till it (which kills even more soil life) and dump synthetic fertilizers all over it. The fertilizer runoff pollutes water sources.
Much like how large centralized computer systems make everyone vulnerable to massive failures (think Cloudflare or AWS outages), large monoculture farming makes our food system very fragile and the resulting food isn't even particularly nutritious. We need to use regenerative farming practices, but that means defeating the oil industry, among others.
Do you have examples of or references to regenerative farming practices? I ask because I'm curious about them to see if they scale like modern Ag which for all of its problems (many you pointed out), has been effective in many ways. I feel like in the end it will always come down to money.
I think looking for any solution to scale the way industrial agriculture does is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. The scaling of industrial agriculture is the problem. I don't think any one alternative is "the" solution, but rather that many alternative methods need to be applied where appropriate and at smaller scales. Smaller farms but lots more of them. Food needs to be grown in places that we currently don't think of as farmland: mass lawn conversion, urban farming, etc.
Okay, onto some references of techniques that I can think of off the top of my head:
Silvopasture is a way of combining tree crops with livestock grazing that sequesters carbon from the atomosphere. https://www.fs.usda.gov/nac/practices/silvopasture.php
Riparian buffers separate rivers from farmland. They filter runoff from the fields, guard against floods because healthy soil and vegetation act like a sponge, and, if many land owners participate, they create uninterrupted habitat for wildlife. This sacrifices some field area, but it means that a "100 year flood" that now happen more frequently due to climate change won't destroy a family's source of income by washing away all the soil away. https://www.extension.iastate.edu/smallfarms/what-riparian-b...
"No till" or "no dig" cultivation. Tilling breaks networks of fungi and bacteria, causing a short-term burst of available nutrients for plants, but done year after year reduces soil health (in other words: diminishing returns.) Sowing or transplanting with minimal soil disturbance and top-dressing with compost builds soil life over time and is less labor intensive. https://charlesdowding.co.uk/faqs/
Swales reduce pressure on irrigation systems on sloped land by storing water in the soil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swale_(landform)
Cover cropping means that the field isn't left bare. There's always something growing on it to keep the soil from eroding or blowing away in the wind. Cover crops act as a living mulch, and then as a regular mulch when they are slashed down when it comes time to plant the cash crop. Legumes are often used as cover crops because they are a natural fertilizer due to a symbiotic relationship they form with a special kind of bacteria that takes nitrogen from the air and deposits it in the soil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_crop
A book on the subject of carbon farming: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/the-carbon-farming-solu...
A book (more philosophical than technical) about a Japanese rice farmer who successfully rejected western agriculture and pioneered natural farming practices: https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-one-straw-revolution?varia...
It feels like a lot of people are doing active work here to change the way we think about Ag from a WW2 inspired industrial model to something that is sustainable, good for the ecosystems, and still affordable so poor people can eat food too. It just doesn't seem like it gets the media attention it should and it's something that effects everyone.
I only became interested in these things when I bought a home and had a lawn and decided to make it a hobby of mine. I started off buying various herbicides and fertilizers and applying them safely and responsibly. But started to read the labels a bit more and research the chemicals since it occurred to me that wearing safety equipment and staying off areas for 3 days means that I'm probably working with potentially dangerous things. And even if they are "safe" to be on after a day (they claim) it's still sort of weird to think about applying these things when pets and family and friends will be on it, oblivious to the chemicals that have been applied. Maybe with the limited use and reduced concentrations for home use mean they won't really harm anything, but it still makes me feel a bit uncertain about using them.
My wife maintains an organic vegetable garden (which is really tough so I now have so much more respect for organic farmers that bring to market pricy but delicious produce) and I wonder about these chemicals drifting to the garden in the soil. I've sort of found a balance of using organic fertilizers, compost we make, and good old fashioned manual weeding, etc so I don't have to use the herbicides so much. I still use them in areas where hand weeding isn't practical, like if a weed is coming out of a crack in the hardscaping, for example. But, it's a lot more work to be sure than using chemicals which were very effective.
I'm happy I never used any pesticides. We don't have a huge bug problem but it's nice to see butterflies, honeybees, etc even if you have to put up with the occasional mosquito.
The 1/2 surviving child/per person is derived from rational thought and evaluation of our planet’s existing resources. Children are expensive and everyone pays for all the children in one way or another. It’s not always about the money.
When we have a planet that doesn’t expand and most of our resources are not renewable, it’s a zero sum game. Someone in the gene pool who spends all their life making a dozen babies benefits proportionally more than someone who has 1-2 children.
Also..this need to keep having babies is a scam perpetuated by organized religions of all types because the state was always funded by religion. And more subscribers means more power. That’s the kind of bullshit that needs to be stopped in its tracks. Have a nice day!
Even if it is zero sum: if we all stopped eating meat, we could pretty easily sustain ourselves. Putting it on population size instead of how that population behaves is not useful and frankly fatalist.
You don't need to deny the facts because of some fringe-right boogeyman. There really are too many people. But there are perfectly-good solutions no more extreme than the center-left.
And yet you provide no logical refutation.
> We are not past carrying capacity.
Because... you say so?
> Population control is some ecofascist bullshit.
Because... you say so?
"Fascist" doesn't mean "someone told me what to do." Not everything you don't like is "fascist". The environmental movement even at its worse doesn't encourage nationalism, or venerate the military or industry, promote sexism, have an obsession with national security. - it simply has zero connection to fascism.
---
Population increases exponentially, and individual consumption increases exponentially. No one wants to stop having kids. No one wants to stop consumption. No one wants people to tell them what to do. So how is society going to survive?
The answer: it won't. The exponential growth will never stop until it all collapses. People will scream "fascism" at any attempt to stop any of this exponential growth... and we will devastate the ecosystem for all time to come.
This is a really dangerous line of thought you are pursuing here. "We need to control population" is a scary thought and I hope this never becomes a serious solution to the problems we have to solve.
Everyone will resist any attempt to limit their God-given right to reproduce as much as they want, to consume as much as they can afford, and to discard the waste wherever they please.
By the time humans figure out that this attitude is not compatible with a functioning biosphere, it will be far too late.
This 'who gets to decide' argument is sophomoric. Its an important issue, and we may have to face it, and we'll do something hopefully equitable.
Maybe if we start making pod babies that can gestate outside the female human body, it would be a free for all decision to make. I hope someone works on it.
fwiw, i think 'marriage' should be abolished entirely. it is the single most effective and likely the oldest surveillance tool upon the human species since ancient times. i have such a dim view of marriage or rather the need for it...in terms of why it was concocted.
marriage as a man made social construct is the end result of so many undesirables. our world would be a better safer equitable place without it. women, for example..would be free from the tyranny of ownership.
Of course, only those who can afford children should have them. The environment and the commons are for everyone. And there is a cost to bringing new lives and to make sure we have diversity in the gene pool, we ought to have everyone contributing to the gene pool. Otherwise it would just become an inbred mess like we have seen happen with animals and plants. It just makes us weaker as a species.
Population:
1600s ..500 million 1975s ..3.5 billion 2020s ..8.0 billion 2050s ..10 billion
1/2 surviving child per person or have them donate their DNA to a gene bank.
Stop incentivizing children.
Provide quality of life for everyone.
Also, forestation is going up in many rich countries (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS?end=2016...)
That doesn’t imply we aren’t killing the world, though. Agriculture in rich countries often needs fertilizer to get the higher yields it gets, newer forests aren’t as diverse and often never will be as the ones that were torn down, etc.
DDT was nearly a curseword. It's etched into my mind that way. (And then the Ramones didn't help that) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Use_in_the_1940s_and_1950s
I’ve read things about people that live near certain farms have higher rates of birth defects and diseases like cancer. I can only imagine being exposed to chemicals over and over for years is not only devastating to the local ecosystem but to the people nearby.
Also, not trying to be a grammar nazi - I just appreciate when people point things out to me so take it in that spirit.
Alluded to - eluded means you're evading/escaping something.
Nowadays fish are back everywhere, even in the canals in Amsterdam. There seem to be salmons swimming in the big rivers, this was unthinkable in my childhood. Species higher in the food chain such as otters are slowly returning to the Netherlands as well.
My personal impression is that there are way less insects than there used to be.
Edit: found an old HN comment about the relationship to Agent Orange production and Diemerzeedijk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9431741
I was actually searching an article about exploding chemical barrels now and then landing on fishing boats sailing in the area.
Unfortunately gains in some parts of the world are not seen everywhere.
Sockeye Salmon populations in British Columbia (basically the world HQ for "wild" salmon) are plummeting: https://twitter.com/raffertybaker/status/1293318721574801408...
There has been lots of progress.
The net result may be a win for the environment in developed Western nations, but considering how polluted China now is, I wonder if it's still a net negative for the world as a whole.
Today, the skies and rivers are noticeably cleaner. There seem to be more large wild animals (wolves, bears, buffalo, cougars, elk) in national parks and forests now than when I was a kid. And you can eat the fish in the Great Lakes now. Wild deer are, seemingly, everywhere around here and rise to nuisance levels. On the other hand, there seem to be less earthworms in suburban areas, somewhat less bugs and less birds. But that may just be related to where I now live (a much more urbanized area than that of my youth). Or it may be a harbinger of doom. I don't know.
Of course, my perspective on this is rather limited since I can only say what I've seen. Larger wild animal populations in Western Europe, for example, are essentially non-existent in comparison North America. I suspect that most or all of the decline described in the report happened in what were pretty poor regions of the world 50 years ago. But now that some of those nations are approaching the levels of wealth where they can start to care, I'm confident they'll start to clean things up over the next half century like most of the developed world did over the last half century.
The above depends on where you live of course. In their place they are good. Out of place they destroy the natural ecosystem.
Yet, clearly, the statistics in this article and elsewhere show that this is plainly not the case. We are killing off wildlife at an unprecedented speed.
Why the disconnect? Are all our efforts really directed towards feel-good efforts at home, maybe, which make the world look cleaner and better for nature, while obscuring the huge amount of invisible damage we're doing?
This is going to be increasingly difficult part of dealing with environmental damage. It will not be enough for North America and Europe to decarbonize. Somehow we have to bring the rest of the world along with us. But they haven’t enjoyed the benefits of all the environmental destruction over the last 200 years, as we have, and (understandably), they are trying to catch up.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1269-4
> Recent reports of dramatic declines in insect abundance suggest grave consequences for global ecosystems and human society. Most evidence comes from Europe, however, leaving uncertainty about insect population trends worldwide. We used >5,300 time series for insects and other arthropods, collected over 4–36 years at monitoring sites representing 68 different natural and managed areas, to search for evidence of declines across the United States. Some taxa and sites showed decreases in abundance and diversity while others increased or were unchanged, yielding net abundance and biodiversity trends generally indistinguishable from zero.
I live in Minnesota. I used to take trips in high school to the boundary waters area. The water was so clean, you didn't need a filter, you could drink right out of the lake. We didn't have to carry a ton of water, we just had cups that hung on the inside of our canoes. Thirsty? Just dip your cup and have a drink.
Nighttime was always an adventure. The bears and other animals out there were always vocal and nighttime is when a lot of animals came out and hunted. There were always an abundance of birds as well during the daytime. Hawks, bald eagles, falcons.
I've gone back through college and after college in the early 2000's. Everything has changed. Now we have a TON of ugly cell towers because people can't spend 5 min away from their phones. Less birds, the nights are a lot quieter, there didn't seem as many bears as I remember, and the nights have this eerie quiet to them.
Never mind now you have to haul in your own water, or bring a decent filter to filter the water now because its so polluted and not safe to drink. It used to be crystal clear, now its just mucky mud filth.
The other depressing thing is the trash. It was hammered into my brain when I was young the idea of "leave no trace" all through high school by my guides and in college all my roommates who were loyal to the idea. We took it on ourselves to self police each other. You leave a wrapper, a beer can? We all got on each other. It almost became a game, but it also taught us the importance of leaving an area as prestige as you found it. The last two times I was in the Boundary Waters (2008, 2014), I spent a LOT of time picking up others trash - beer cans, plastic bottles, cardboard boxes, you name it, I picked it up. There were two articles recently in the local paper saying it was getting worse now too.
I'm not sure if its a generational thing, people just don't care anymore or I've grown older and have no patience for people leaving their campsites a mess when they leave. Either way, the changes over the past decade have soured my attitude on going there anytime soon.
...but the outer suburban areas and rural areas have far less wildlife because they are so much more developed than they used to be. There has been some recovery of species in those areas too because many species were widely hunted at the turn of the 20th century and populations have rebounded but that mostly only effects the big visible species.
I remember in my last trip seeing a pile of garbage and being mad about why people would do that. Then when I got back I happened to look it up and see that the dump was on the guides as something to notice - loggers left it there in 1800s.
I honestly feel that if I were to have grandchildren they would not believe me describing them or at the very least thing that I was greatly exaggerating.
I know they still exist but I haven't seen a yard filled with fireflies in a long time.
They do seem fewer to me, but who knows, I'm comparing my memories to a kid's from decades ago. I wonder if anyone keeps track of this stuff. I did notice less bumblebees this year, in fact I don't think I saw a single one, but that's my own experiences and not anything scientific of course. Miss those chonky little guys.
Also snow... we had cross-country skis and used them almost every winter (northern Germany) 15 years ago. Today they are basically useless and you would certainly stand out if you used them here. Some birds that usually migrate with seasons just stay or are only absent for a few weeks.
No data, but it certainly looks that way.
People telling us that we live in an age of mass extinctions seem to be correct.
They are just the larger, more peaceful versions that somehow aren't interested in humans the slightest. Sadly, they move every year and this time around the wasps are back.
I'm careful to approach only lone foragers and not nests, and I have yet to be stung while taking pictures of any wasp, something I typically do from as close to my macro lens's six-inch minimum working distance as I can manage - usually within 12 inches (30cm). Hornet, yellowjacket, paper wasp, or solitary, they all seem about equally willing to leave me unbothered, so long as I don't bother them first. Happily, having a camera lens and flashes going off nearby doesn't seem to count as bothering!
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/509080.Coming_Up_for_Air
In my rural area, though, there are much more animals, of a much varied type than ever before. I saw a badger this year for the first time, ever. I think this is partially because of conservation efforts actually working, and partially because animals are being displaced by humans/climate change now.
We have armadillos now, too. Midwest Illinois/Iowa area. We should not have armadillos.
My childhood in the South was spent in a cacophany of frogs, birds, and cicadas. We'd have to yell at each other on the back porch to be heard over the treefrogs. Everywhere you looked was a reptile, bug, or other critter. Throw a hook in the water with a piece of bread or worm on it, and you'd have a bite nearly instantly.
Today, here in the Pacific Northwest, the forests are beautiful but almost entirely silent aside from a bird here and there. The last time I went camping, I didn't see a living thing larger than a banana slug. Much of that is surely the temperature difference, but I'm never sure if that explains all of it.
However, no one I asked had seen a horned toad or armadillo in years. And these are definitely the kind of folks that used to. Cicadas used to deafening on summer evenings, but now they were barely audible. Sample size = 1, but the numbers seem to bear out these anecdotes too.
It's totally possible for both of these to be true. Pollution can go down at the same time that animal populations are suppressed for some other reason.
I also remember more snow as a child. I found a source once that had yearly snowfall in DC and it's gone down a fair bit in the last 30 years.
2. Habitat loss to humans
3. Climate change
4. Bugs have decreased, many birds rely on bugs
5. Pesticides and pollutants harm birds directly
Suggest we have fewer children for a few generations and consume less and it's absolutely impossible, against human nature. The One Child policy proves it.
We idolize people who change the world as entrepreneurs but say one person can't make a difference in changing culture.
Yet many cultures have chosen to lower birthrates through peaceful, voluntary means resulting in prosperity and stability. On a personal level, I've lowered my footprint by about 90 percent in a few years according to online calculators and every change improved my life. I figure most westerners could drop 75 - 80 percent with just the low-hanging fruit, improving their lives -- buying less junk, wasting less food, living closer to family, camping instead of visiting Timbuktu.
Changing course is a matter of belief and choice far more than technology. While it's not monolithic, this community seems to choose to believe living sustainably is harder than space travel. I'd argue space travel is more attainable when we aren't pushing the Earth's limits to sustain life and human society.
The big problem is the 3rd world. People there don't a have a choice. They don't want their family to starve. Women are largely forced into a reproduction role only. But we know that the way to reduce birth rate is to educate women and give them jobs and careers. We know that if we can create stable jobs in the 3rd world, they will stop clear cutting forests. To me, that is where the billionaires should be putting their money. If we raise the global standard of living enough, our high population problems will slowly revert.
We know how to stop that. We don't have to sentence people to subsistence agriculture. When you know better, you do better, and we know better.
We can farm in ways that build high carbon soils. We can do this even in the 3rd world. Teach people the proper techniques.
It's nonsense to claim that we just have to accept this kind of collapse.
I read quite a long article once, it was about efforts to teach Iraqi farmers how to use modern techniques and modern equipment.
The main problem they encountered wasn't conservative mindset. No, the farmers were willing to try something new.
It was missing infrastructure. Once you start using any sophisticated equipment, you need repairs, distribution of spare parts, good documentation in local language etc. Such a system is not easy to set up in a really foreign country, much less so if security is problematic.
The population cycles occur in both large and small ecosystems. The process is slow and steady. Often it seems like the embers of life have gone out. However, something always comes back from the ashes.
Humans are just another animal in the food chain.
First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead rats. This plague, however, had descended from above. After the owls, of course, the other birds followed, but by then the mystery had been grasped and understood.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
One of the major themes in the story are animals; most species have been wiped out and people own artificial versions instead. Decker himself is motivated by a desire to own a "real" animal. Interesting that they mostly left this out of the film version (Blade Runner) and only vaguely mentioned it. In general, the book is very different, but discussion of animals takes up at least 1/4 of the narrative.
— Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest
I think that'll be a pretty hard book to adapt. The story goes off the rails in the later books. Especially the 3rd, it's just a random tour of interesting scifi ideas.
I'm also wondering if the de-emphasis of individual will make it harder to make a show. There is no through line of character.
While the book has some great ideas, I personally wasn't a huge fan of how they were strung together. First book was great detective noir book. Second book had the great concept of the wallfacers and one amazing badass. And then you can just see disaster coming with the change of the guard, the story is just as bad as the end of the rama series from there.
Or to say it another way, if it makes it to the screen it will be heavily altered imho, but that's par for the course, and I've come to enjoy other people's interpretations on things I've already read when they bring new stuff.
https://twitter.com/terrythethunder/status/13038804594498969...
Ecology is a huge theme through the whole thing. It is not a happy-go-lucky franchise isolated from the troubles of the world.
It is if you consume it on a surface level, as (I would argue) most people do.
Folks who are into Pokemon Go have no idea of the ecological messages in the other games/media.
What I think you miss is that individual works can be contrary to certain negative trends or values, without posing any real opposition to them. A Pokémon game can embrace a pro-environmental narrative, while the material reality of the franchise in the context of Capitalist exchange involves all kinds of ecological destruction. Just think of all of the Pokémon tchotchkes, bought and discarded, since the series began.
I’m not trying to single out Pokémon as some especially bad actor, but indicative of how the widespread fetishization of these imagined ecosystems might result in a future not dissimilar from the one described in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? PKD wrote that book in the 70s, contemplating trends in the world he inhabited. It makes sense that we do the same in engaging with it.
Isidore. Religion vs TV. Shared experiences. The movie is cut down, probably so it didn't turn a Novella into a trilogy.
Dial 800, the desire to watch TV, no matter what's on.
When Deckard Cain meets Rachael for the first time, she has an owl, and she claims it's real. He says "I thought they were extinct." She says no, you just can't buy them on the open market. He then tests his humanity detector on her, which she fails. They explain that she grew isolated on a spaceship leaving Earth which turned around and came home after the war, so she grew up without a sense of empathy. He is horrified to learn his detector may be flawed, and he may have killed real humans thinking they were androids. They then offer him the owl to cover it up. He finally realizes that they're lying and she's an android after all. He then says "And the owl?" "It's robotic, of course. Owls are extinct."
In the movie? He shows up and says "Nice owl, is it robotic?" Rachael goes "Yup, and so am I". Welp, there goes like 50 of the best pages of the book.
Another example, which really shows just how unnecessarily shallow the movie is: in the book, Rachael and Pris are identical model androids, and sex with androids is forbidden. The whole conflict Deckard experiences is based on the fact that he becomes infatuated with Rachael: not only is it extremely taboo, but his feelings start to interfere with his mission of killing her identical twin Pris. In the movie? Completely different replicants, and Pris is a standard-issue sex-bot. There's just no internal conflict at all.
Seriously people, read this book. It is fantastic.
the whole fake police precinct full of androids thing was probably also better removed from a cinematic standpoint.
on edit: at any rate we should probably take into account that Phil Dick seemed to appreciate the movie https://screencrush.com/philip-k-dick-blade-runner/
Imagine how I feel!?
http://web.archive.org/web/20120610184707im_/http://www.phil...
Yet, after recently re-reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I came away thinking that the movie could have been so much better. They left a lot of the interesting details and Phillip K. Dick weirdness out.
Indeed. It's one of my favorite films as well, and consider that I'm a PKD fan: I don't think it's even a companion piece to the book. It hits some of the same themes, but Blade Runner is more neo-noir with smoke-filled rooms, and Do Androids is more PKD exploration of ideas, religion, anxieties, etc. PKD loved what he managed to see of the movie before dying, mind you.
I think what makes Blade Runner engaging is that it's not trying to be a direct translation of the book. It even reverses some of the book's characterizations: "Rachael" is in the book manipulative and a liar, but in the movie she's naive and the one being lied to. The androids from the book are cold and callous, almost completely unempathetic even for their own kind. The replicants from the movie are way more empathic -- Roy Batty is arguably an antihero rather than a villain. I've watched Blade Runner many times, being one of my favorites, and there are times I consider Roy the true protagonist of the movie.
It does hit some of the same themes of PKD's works: what is real and what is fake? What is human, and what deserves to live?
Sometime it takes a while to grasp the significance of a poem.
But I need to give the book a chance if it's quite different to the film.
If it's any consolation: I'm an absolute fan of Blade Runner but hated the sequel. In my opinion, it fails to capture the neo-noir feel of the original, has no interesting characters, Jared Leto's acting is distracting, and the villains/antiheroes... compare Roy Batty's "tears in rain" dying speech with Luv's "I'm the best!". It makes me cringe.
Also, why on earth they changed jihad to crusade in new movie?!
Do you really have to ask or do you not believe words have associations that aren't their exact dictionary definitions?
Dune was written well before the word was associated with religious extremism in modern times, the word didn't have the associations of terrorism and caliphates and 9/11.
So changing this term gets massive thumbs down from me.
Have you been in a coma since 1984?
Harrison Ford’s involvement in the movie was tragic. He acted lazily, his character had very little to add to the storyline. Inexplicably he was into Elvis can you imagine your grand children, when old, being huge Elvis fans? It was all so lazy.
The only saving grace was the concept that creation of life is a continuous, inescapable circle, that creates a hierarchy alongside the risk of oppression and servitude.
God created men, men is subservient and inferior. Men create replicants, same thing. Now replicants have “holograms”...
I thought the first half was magnificent. The scene with Ryan Gosling having the intimate moment with the hologram made me weep, it was so sad because that’s all he could get.
The movie became terrible once Harrison Ford was introduced and kept diving. Everything about it was horrible. The scene in the water looked like a sound stage. Absolutely terrible.
In my opinion, Deckard and Rachael's story was over at the end of the first film. Let them have their moment, be happy for an instant, and forget them.
If the sequel was even necessary at all, it should have moved on without sullying old characters.
[0] http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=9...
And therein lies the problem. The people making the rules and pulling the strings don't have a bleeding, burning pressure to change course. And they won't until it's too late.
Complain all you want about climate and biodiversity and pollution, but nothing is going to be done until we've stunted the lives of the people at the top. That's just how the short-sighted, hill climbing algorithm called humanity works. We're like an ant colony, and we can't optimize for things happening outside of an N x (human lifespan), where 0 < N < 1.
A better solution might be to increase human lifespan to the point where people begin to worry about a hundred years from now. Because they're just not going to care enough to act otherwise. Everything else is more immediate, more pressing.
When's the last time you turned off your electricity? Or started a coup to remove the policy makers?
Humans aren't equipped to solve this. It's because of the algorithm of society.
Maybe that's the Great Filter.
Do people honestly believe "nothing" is being done? We are chipping away at these problems, otherwise you wouldn't be reading about it in a mainstream newspaper article. People (especially younger people) are more conscious about these issues than at any time in my lifetime. It's not like you can flip a switch and change a society that has developed over millennia.
No, "we" are not. Some people are chipping away at some of these problems, but "we" (in the global, UN-sized scheme of things) are still adding and exacerbating these problems much faster than the solutions are being developed and/or deployed.
It's not like you can flip a switch and change a society
Our response to the Corona virus suggests that yes, if the will is there, we can manage to flip at least some switches. But yes, I do realize that these measures are considered temporary, and Covid is a much more immediate threat than the implosion of society.
What is being done? Nearly every "green" initiative is much more marketing than reality when you look at the details. Renewable energy sources are widely supplementing not replacing hydrocarbons. Decreased emissions are largely from a financial switch from coal to natural gas and offloading your CO2 production to somewhere else. Global emissions are still rising.
Consumer capitalism is the largest driver of our CO2 usage and we have done worse than nothing about changing the way our economies operate. Consumer spending has been a perpetually increasing part of the US GDP. Currently 70% of the US GDP is consumer spending. We have a pandemic which has forced that to drop and everyone with political power is doing everything they can to get that back up.
> It's not like you can flip a switch...
Well unfortunately we don't have time. Historically every major sudden climate change period seems to have reached a tipping point where positive feedbacks initiated rapid temperature increases. We don't entirely know what these feedback are (we have some guesses that they might be methane hydrates and melting permafrost) but once we hit these it's over, it doesn't matter if you reduce CO2 emission to 0. It's worth noting that IPCC projections typically do not include feedbacks, which may explain why 'faster than expected' is the new norm.
We might see a blue ocean event before the decade is out. That will have immediate impact on the entire global climate.
There’s a lot of time to do damage by then.
I also stopped worrying about COVID and wearing masks and keeping social distance. If humans are weak and die from a begnin virus then it's part of the circle of life. Keeping everyone alive through unsustainable measures only harms our planet due to over population and further exploitation.
I stopped eating meat in 2018, don't own a car and I've started to book 15h train journeys when I travel to Europe instead of going on a 3 hour plane.
There is a lot we can do, but I agree the most effective way would be to start civil unrest and force leaders into their knees to enforce more measures to everyone and not rely on people's good will like myself.
“I also stopped worrying about COVID and wearing masks and keeping social distance. If humans are weak and die from a begnin virus then it's part of the circle of life. Keeping everyone alive through unsustainable measures only harms our planet due to over population and further exploitation.”
Benign?
Other viruses that we control for with vaccination regularly have much more severe long-term effects than we now know from COVID, like causing birth defects (Rubella), deafness (Mumps), immunocompromization (Measles) or cancer (HPV).
Source? Seems highly implausible (in general).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage
Deaths at sea definitely occurred. Credible accurate records don't seem to be available however, as this article's abstract notes:
Farley Grubb, "Morbidity and Mortality on the North Atlantic Passage: Eighteenth-Century German Immigration" (1987). https://www.jstor.org/stable/204611
The earth is currently overpopulated for the system we have in-place to feed it. We are very inefficient in resource usage and waste over 1/2 the food we produce each year. COVID isn't the answer to this problem, but your point is valid.
The part I object to is the lack of masks leading to spreading CoV2 to those who haven't volunteered to get out of the gene pool.
Besides that, when I was 10 years old and I asked at that time 30-40 year old people to not smoke cigarettes indoors because the passive smoking was damaging my young lungs and can lead to severe cancer and early death I was told that this is none of my business. Those people voluneered to damange their own health and knowingly also damanged my and other children's health. Now the same people are in their advanced age and demand from me to wear a mask because they don't want to bear the consequences of their earlier decisions. They essentially harmed themselves, and now they want to harm me again so that I have to carry the burden on my shoulders for their own wrongdoing. No thank you very much. I had COVID and my body fought it off in no time and I feel great. Other people have got their own immune system to deal with it. It's none of my business after all, like I was told.
Does that prove it's unsustainable? No. The way to prove it's unsustainable is to have a massive die-off, which is not a way I'm interested in proving anything.
> that is, be able to keep feeding it - is also something we care about.
This is disingenuous. In general, no one cares about the famine in Syria except starving Syrians. When's the last time you heard that on the news over a Trump tweet?
Enforcing population limits in theory sounds like a great idea - in human practice, it will just be an excuse for genocide. The only ethical way to do it is to bring all of humanity out of poverty - which rich people do not want to pay for.
Nor am I talking about enforcing population limits.
Bringing all of humanity out of poverty isn't going to do it either, if they all want to have an American diet.
> I'm talking about world-wide famine. If the way we feed the world isn't sustainable, then there's going to be a global problem eventually.
That's not how it works - the world has enough food for current population P + x offspring. Whenever food supply starts to dwindle P+x will go down. Less people will survive at the fringes - the poor will die, much like they do now, hence I brought up Syria, which no one on here talks about, because they don't care.
A worldwide famine would be the result of catastrophic failure. Catastrophic failures you're suggesting will impact any population size regardless of its sustainability. Sustainability is about maintaining resources without depleting them - it's inherently different than catastrophic events destroying most of the system. No amount of sustainable farming matters if, say, a meteor impacts the earth, or global warming renders most land un-farmable. There is no sustainability fix here.
> Bringing all of humanity out of poverty isn't going to do it either, if they all want to have an American diet.
It's the only proven way to reduce birthrate without war and disease.
Edit: clarified.
The arguments start from bad faith attempts to sabotage mass adoption of renewable energy. Some people aren't using them in bad faith, but are just useful spreaders of them.
And when we talk about birds, let's not forget the devastating effect of light pollution, which seems to get only worse with the availability of cheap, power-efficient LEDs...
I didn't take that angle, so why bring it up?
Solar and wind are diffuse, low-density, energy sources. This is why you need to use a lot of land to collect that energy and therefore a lot of panels and turbines. This also implies a lot of land for mining the necessary metals, and a lot of land when they are inevitably decommissioned. There are costs to this in a world which has a growing population numbering in billions and growing per/capita energy needs and which is going through environmental collapse already.
This is NOT a bad faith argument. Wind and Solar may never be viable outside of niche areas. Wind and Solar may not even be that great against climate change given that they are not viable without fossil fuel base-load (natural gas companies are some of the biggest proponents of wind and solar these days).
Nuclear just so happens to be an energy source that doesn't release carbon into the atmosphere, doesn't need fossil-fuel base-load, and has minuscule land-use requirements. All I argued is that it is inevitable that we will have to rebuild our nuclear infrastructure because there aren't any other options.
The salient point was that manufacturing millions (billions?) of panels and turbines has a huge toll on the ecosystem - regardless if rare metals are used - and they are used in components of solar panels and wind turbines.
I think we're all in agreement that coal is terrible and we don't want to use it anymore. Having said that, the one benefit it has over solar and wind is that it doesn't actually need to be backed-up by any other power source. As in, it doesn't need an alternate base-load to be provided.
But again, I take your point ... coal is bad.
The question is, given the environmental impact of solar and wind, coupled with significant limitations (like needing base-load to be provided by fossil fuels) can we do better? It turns out nuclear is much better in every respect. That's all I argued.
Nuclear is probably a bit overrated (very capex heavy, carbon intensive at build time) and still ultimately not renewable. We should and do have a massive investment in non-PWRs, for current baseload replacement, right? At some point you have to ask if there was an obvious nuclear solution, why nobody picked up the dollar bill on the ground. Gen 4s have been around for 20 years and the underlying ideas have been around a lot longer.
It's not just nimby or irrational phobia, nuclear has a lot of drawbacks that routinely get ignored because they are a small component of generating portfolios. Ironically, the best thing for them would be a high carbon tax credit system, but sometimes the same people arguing nuclear are against that for some reason.
Like what? Because I'm seeing Germany sign massive multi-decade contracts for natural gas, at the same time as they are investing in wind energy.
>At some point you have to ask if there was an obvious nuclear solution, why nobody picked up the dollar bill on the ground.
We know why. Nuclear energy is highly regulated and therefore very expensive to build. But we know it works. There's also a dedicated anti-nuclear lobby that does spread anti-nuke FUD.
By the same measure, given how 'cheap' renewables are (I've heard for the last decade that renewables are cheaper than almost anything out there), why aren't renewables powering any economy? Maybe price isn't the issue with renewables. Maybe they just can't do the job.
And there is a bait-and-switch going on. Anytime you hear about some nation powered fully by renewables it's always Hydro (Hydro and Geothermal are great and better than nuclear ... but only if you have the geography for it)
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-much-conventional-energy-is-used-t...
Everything has an impact on the ecosystem, is your point that nuclear has less of an impact than solar?
> and they are used in components of solar panels
Which rare metals are used in solar panels?
Yes. That was my point. Much less.
The other argument I would make is I'm not seeing any evidence that solar actually solves any problem for us. It can't replace fossil fuels, and in fact needs fossil fuel back-up because there is no battery technology (today or upcoming) that can store enough energy to, say, power a city overnight. The global population continues to grow and with it energy needs. Worse, energy/capita is also growing. This means that as bad as solar is today on the environment, it is only going to get worse.
I see no evidence that solar and wind can actually replace fossil fuels. I think they are great in niche areas, but I see no evidence that they are even a partial solution to climate change. The nature of solar energy and wind energy is such that it is diffuse, and therefore needs massive number of collectors, and that requirement is directly proportional to population size, and per capita energy use (both of which are going up). This also means that you need to over-provision because solar and wind output varies daily, seasonally and even inter-annually (there are years when wind output is high, and years when it is low). And there is no battery technology now, or upcoming, that is capable of even storing that energy to even bridge daily variability at city-scale (for even a moderately-sized city).
Occasionally you'll see an article about some small country X getting 100% of their energy from renewables. In every case, that 'renewable' is hydro or geothermal (and hydro/geothermal is great and better than nuclear ... but only if you have the geography for it). It is never solar or wind. Every week for the last decade we have an article about how cheap (and getting cheaper) solar and wind is, and yet no country or even region is powered solely through these renewable. Germany is investing heavily in wind, while at the same time building pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades - WHY?!?!
Maybe renewable just can't do it and we should be honest about that. I think solar and wind are a distraction and they've become a religion.
By the way, here's a live view of the energy mix of my home province of Ontario (pop ~15 million)[1]. Because of nuclear and hydro we're pretty much at 85%-97% non-carbon power any given day ... and yet there is an irrational push for solar and wind (which also requires investment in natural gas) - what does solar and wind do for us? As a bonus, Ontario is one of the few places that you can make a credible argument against nuclear because we could sign long-term contract to ship hydro from Quebec ... but that's not the argument being made. The argument being made is that we should decommission nuclear in favour of ... can you guess? ... wind and solar - guaranteeing that we would need to build up natural gas for baseload. Insanity.
>specifically with regard to baseload
They need fossil fuel baseload. That's a fact. There is some talk about bio-fuels (i.e. burning wood!) but that's a disaster for the environment. We'd literally be clearing land to grow things that we then burn. And did you ever imagine that the energy technology of the future would be burning wood (or corn, or garbage)? And outside of biofuels, there is nothing else. In some cases, if you have the geography for it maybe you can build a pumped-storage reservoir, but that's the best you can do.
1) Generations of nuclear engineers either told big lies or made huge errors of engineering; resulting in staggering disasters in Russia & Japan which will mark our planet for a period far longer than current human history.
2) The main use of nuclear plants was to create refined product for nuclear weapons, now we have vastly more of that stuff than you can imagine lying around. We don't need or want any more. I believe that a single facility in the north west of england has sufficient plutonium for 40,000 nuclear weapons.
3) They are wildly expensive compared to other forms of "clean" power - solar, hydro and wind are just far far cheaper in terms of both invested carbon, $ and collateral environmental damage.
Apart from that fission is just fine.
The insane project duration and nonsense cost overruns for nuclear construction are their own problem.
And you get a lot of people who don't understand and don't want to understand the safety aspect.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/comed-bribery-s...
I am sure you know the answer but because you ask for it: Radioactivity is nasty. Example Germany: When I grew up my parents couldn't pick mushrooms and I couldn't play in a sandbox because a few thousand kilometers away there was a reactor incident and the wind blew it over. Today people living near a power plant receive free jodium tablets in case there will be an accident. The government spends endless years looking for places to store the nuclear waste because nobody wants it in their backyard, obviously. The waste in the old starage, designed to last 10000 years, leaked already and noone knows how to handle it. France built most of their power plants directly at the border so that hopefully we will receive all the fallout. Uranium mining is said to be desastrous for the environment. Probably there's a lot more.
And it's no a one-time catastrophe result, but everyday operation.
Basically people live to a hundred even with pollution, but life expectancy and quality of life is much lower near a meltdown site.
That said, if you look purely at numbers, nuclear (assuming it doesn't explode) is better for humanity than coal.
That said that said, loads of countries recognize how bad coal is, and it's being phased out in favor of gas and renewables.
Im my country (Poland) over 20 000 people die yearly of lung cancer. Significant percent of them never smoked cigarettes and the main reason they got that cancer was smog. Which in Poland is almost exclusively seen in winters and caused by burning coal.
Chernobyl caused up to 4000 victims according to the worst estimates (including cancer developed later).
Every year in just one country there's more victims of coal energetics than victims of nuclear power in the whole world over all time.
That's leaving aside the problem of them inevitably breaking, which they absolutely will. Even if it only happens very few times, that's enough to ruin a very large swathe of environment. The risk is low, the impact is very very high.
Yes it has. You just store it. It takes up minuscule amount of land. The argument I hear is: "You can't store waste safely".. why? "Because you just can't".
>That's leaving aside the problem of them inevitably breaking, which they absolutely will.
Inevitably? I'm not sure about that. Right now that's not an issue and it hasn't been an issue for the the 60 years we've had nuclear power.
>You can tell this is the case by looking into how these storage facilities actually do in practice.
Sure. How many times did you hear about nuclear waste from commercial reactors leaking and causing damage to the environment?
>Even if it only happens very few times, that's enough to ruin a very large swathe of environment.
No. That's not true. That's not how radioactivity works. The longer the half-life of a radioactive substance, the less potent it is, and as you spread it over a larger area the potency goes down EXPONENTIALLY. Waste from commercial reactor is tiny - if you spread it, you dilute it to the point where it is engulfed in background radiation. There is no chance that waste from a commercial nuclear reactor will ruin a 'large swathe of environment'.
People with young kids what are your feelings about this?
What do you do when seasonal heat makes Pakistan and India uninhabitable for large parts of the year? We're not prepared for that kind of migration, we didn't even deal with Syria well.
Farming and other activities often require decades to truly show a profit. When rainfall patterns are changing on short timescales, you will not be able to plan for food production given the underlying churn in fertile locations.
That was a real eye-opener when I first saw it. Talk about Anthropocene...
https://www.rexweyler.ca/ecologue/2018/7/18/how-much-of-eart...
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58ed5944e6f2e1...
Krill biomass alone is significantly bigger than humanity's. Insect's and bacteria too.
This article discusses a study that claims humanity is ~1/10000 of total biomass, including plants. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000...
In general large animals have been already devastated by the last ice age and then changes resulting from that. Even without humans large animals would be significantly less diverse than in many periods before.
Of course human's killing spree is not helping either.
The xkcd article is probably about large animals, but that's a kind of large animal chauvinism. Why do the small guys not matter? Yes they're in decline too
Remember how they are mocking the Green New Deal?
Remember Dominionism, making fun of "soy boys", and everything else?
You should remember this when they try to pretend they do everything they could to remove environmental regulations and delay dealing with global warming until it was too late.
Also remember a good percentage of them believe in End-Time Theology (ever wonder why Evangelicals care so much about a Jerusalem embassy?)
edit: California is burning down just like Australia did earlier. So is Siberia. Pay attention to methane emissions from permafrost and shallow clathrates. This article is a different facet of the same problem. We are beyond the Earth's carrying capacity and it's because the wealthiest wanted to keep getting wealthy and because some religious fanatics believe in the Rapture (including a fair number of the top members of the current US administration).
Between Obama + Antichrist and Trump + Antichrist alone there are over 7 million results on google including a ton of kindle books.
Of course a lot of species will be extinct forever, but so is the natural cycle of life. Almost all species that ever existed has already gone extinct and it's foolish to think that we won't have the same destiny, especially how we're treating our food chain.
It's very much not settled how balanced the mantle vs surface carbon cycle is. How much carbon is in MORB? Is subducted sediment actually entrained into the mantle?
A major store of CO2 is sedimentary dolomite. We did't even really understand how that formed! (Last time I checked but I'm no sedimentologist so that might have been solved.)
Speaking as a geologist your statement is dangerously naive. I'm not saying Venus and the end of all life is definite but it is the worst case scenario of a situation that we don't understand and that will soon be (maybe already is) out of our control.
I'm skeptical of you being a working geologist because I haven't seen any credible claims that there is any reason to believe Earth could turn into Venus. But even outside of that, scaremongering with incredibly unlikely scenarios is also dangerous and detrimental to fighting climate change, because somebody is going to call bullshit on you and will result in your and even the general credibility of climate scientists, to be diminished.
Will the Earth definitely turn into an out of control hothouse with a Venus - like climate? Very probably not there are many differences between Earth and Venus.
Can we be sure than some positive feedback mechanism might make life as we know it untenable on Earth? I'm not sure myself and I don't think anyone can know.
There's a presumption that man is somehow an unnatural creature divorced from nature here.
If only we had multiple Earths to experiment with. One without humans as a control, another with humans as we are now and a third with humanity following whatever dictates the warmist technocrats prescribe.
Hypothetically speaking, I wonder how one would measure the utility of humanity existing at all? Some environmentalists may suggest that the Earth without humanity is the "best" of them all. There is a proximity between warmists and population control advocates.
Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury. From my perspective the "spanner in the works" analogy better fits with the economic centralization & suffering the warmist dictates may cause.
I'm inclined to agree that climates change. Whether the weather is wrong, correct or otherwise undesirable due to immoral actions of men seems like a separate issue. As you mentioned, we don't fully understand the systems involved. Consequently, I prefer to err on the side of humility rather than judgement.
That said, responsible forestry management and storage of carbon in the form of cut lumber has a profit incentive. For those inclined to accept the premises of global warming, this is a solution which respects freedom. Interestingly, it is downplayed and dismissed as untenable. Even further afield are environmentalists who oppose logging and propose regulations which set the stage for CO2 emitting forest fires.
I'm not sure that we can grow and store enough trees to bring CO2 levels down to non dangerous levels in time. If we could it would certainly be worth doing. Can you point me to any calculations?
Even if this specific solution isn't viable, it is an example of what we need to do to solve this problem. Fundamentally we need to scrub a huge amount of carbon out of the atmosphere as soon as possible. Everything else is just moving the deckchairs.
There's several of these if you look. I believe one outlines how much land exactly needs to be used.
I see it as a philosophical issue. For me the warmist perspective is incoherent.
A bug's lifetime is measured in weeks. He cannot see beyond the next tuft of grass. His world is few meters in diameter and inches in height. If the aforementioned beaver floods the meadow, is it "unnatural" for the bug? Does this qualify as "sticking a spanner into a natural system"? Clearly the bug would be justified in doomsaying from his perspective.
Luckily, we are not bugs. We have the ability to adapt and gain larger perspectives than just looking at the next hedge. What we don't have is an omnipotent ability to understand the complex details of nature. Thus, we are ill qualified to make statements like, "putting a spanner in the works". Who are we to say that man's activity is worse or somehow different than nature's?
There's so much doomsaying. As you admit, we don't understand the complex systems of the Earth. A warmer period might be better for us all. We don't know. If you ascribe to the apocalyptic vision it is hard to claim that controlling other's consumption habits is not a moral issue. Either they follow the advice of their betters or are complicit in manifesting the climate apocalypse.
If we start with the moral premise that men are free, then restrictions upon that become a moral issue.
Maybe I'm just a cynic, but "cui bono" provides a more coherent explanation of the warmist agenda. It also explains why solutions like tree planting are not more popular. Carbon credits issued by a supranational entity raises alarm bells for me.
Maybe you should be a little braver? As in, let your work be actually scrutinized by your peers (isn't that what tenure is for?) instead of scaremongering anonymously and accosting others for not understanding the science you are not willing publish? Seriously, what is the public supposed to take away from that kind of statement? Especially given that the public cannot ascertain the truth value of your Earth-will-turn-to-Venus theory. Are you trying to convince the public (on this forum no less) that this is a reasonable hypothetical situation to worry about? Come on. Put it to your peers and if they agree, then sure, let's talk policy.
>Will the Earth definitely turn into an out of control hothouse with a Venus - like climate? Very probably not there are many differences between Earth and Venus.
Didn't OP say that? Didn't I say that? What is it that you're arguing? Saying that we don't understand fully how our climate works and how many of the systems that drive it works is reasonable and nobody will dispute that. But you can't just use a lack of knowledge around an low probability event to drive global policy that could potentially be disastrous in all kinds of other ways. That's all I'm saying. We have a well-defined problem of ecosystem collapse and climate change, such as it is, don't muddle the water by coming up with new hypothetical problems.
I think I get what you are saying but maybe you could reformat it in a civil way rather than berating me.
I listed some very simple examples of places where we don't understand the Earth's carbon cycle fully. No one will publish a study saying, 'Hey guys we don't understand this yet'. We know we don't! That's why we do research to chip away at the problems.
> But you can't just use a lack of knowledge around an low probability event to drive global policy that could potentially be disastrous in all kinds of other ways.
The way I think about it like this. When I do an experiment I (am supposed to) do a risk assessment. If a proceedure has a low probability of causing a huge hazard like death I should take steps to reduce the risk of that hazard occurring as much as possible. Similarly climate change has a none zero possibility of causing humans to become extinct (and a much more than none zero chance of cause society as we know it to breakdown). Shouldn't we lower that probability?
I'll try to put it more clearly.
1. We don't really understand how these systems work. (The evidence for that is basically a lack of evidence and the type of thing we are still working on...) 2. Certain outcomes in the system could be very very very bad. 3. We are changing part of the system massively. 4. Because of (1) we don't know what (3) will do.
I'm not alluding to any hiden knowledge here. I'm not a climate scientist. My published work is related to other parts of the Earth's carbon cycle.
The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.
> The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.
I can't think of any comparible examples where human activity is known to be causing massive problems... Various forms of pollution maybe? But I would argue for action there too.
People still believe there can be life on venus in it's clouds, most likely bacteria or something like it but it's not impossible that life will find a way.
There has been extinction events where the surface of earth pretty much became uninhabitable, but bacteria lives in the earth and underground and life spirals back as soon as the surface or oceans are habitable again.
There is virtually no chance of this happening on Earth until the sun gets significantly larger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect#Eart...
A rise of 5-8C make large parts of the Earth uninhabitable and would collapse food production and global civilization. Billions dying is not scaremongering, but is a very probable outcome of business-as-usual.
Our civilization, and our population of 9 billion, takes an immense amount of resources to maintain, and it will collapse if the Earth can no longer supply it.
The IPCC report is rather out of date at this point.
There's a number of positive feedback mechanisms such as cloud cover and methane clathrates that are still poorly constrained and could credibly lead to a rise like that. It's not the most likely scenario, on the high end of current projections, but it should be planned for.
You buy fire insurance for your house even if you don't think it will catch on fire. I wear a seatbelt even though the vast majority of times I'm in a car, I don't get in a crash. We rationally prepare for unlikely but severe events all the time. With climate change, people have this blind spot with thinking about risk.
Here, it's the planet and our civilization. We should take existential threats very, very seriously.
We should definitely take existential threats seriously, but part of that seriousness requires us to be rigorous about what we call existential. If we go around calling things existential threats when they're merely bad, the truly existential threats won't be taken as seriously as they deserve or get the attention they require. Temperature rises in particular are strange to present as an existential threat, because we have pretty solid ideas (see https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/06/22/seeding-t... for a general review) for how we could quickly force the temperature down if we absolutely had to.
"In addition to the warming from rising CO2 levels, this instability triggers a surface warming of about 8 K globally and 10 K in the subtropics. Once the stratocumulus decks have broken up, they only re-form once CO2 concentrations drop substantially below the level at which the instability first occurred."
edit: There are also a tremendous amount of problems with all proposed geoengineering solutions. They are uniformly an emergency backup, not something we should ever choose.
The most realistic option, sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, needs to be maintained continually to avoid a sudden onset of warming. It also does nothing for ocean acidification from CO2 or the cognitive problems higher concentrations cause.
Thinking that we can just tech-magic our way out of this is very dangerous. This will require hard choices. It would have been 100 times easier if we just started 30 years ago, but it will be 100 times harder if we wait another 10.
Also, government websites like climate.gov typically don't have the most current information.
It seems clear to me that rural areas are far less populated nowadays - small rural farms the world over, are being run by parents (or now, grandparents!) in their 80's it seems - the younger generation are in cities. From my school class no one has more that 3 children, and most have none. That should bode for a crashing population, but instead we are told it is increasing drastically.
So, while cities may feel busy, I tend to think the population is in decline. And that if lots of rural areas are in decline, that animal populations are probably on the increase, only there's no one there to see it.