The “Dying Seas” of the Anthropocene

Human beings spend a lot more time perceiving the social structures they are in (even when they're not aware that they are doing so) than they do reacting to "objective" reality or nature. A lot of people in the world see themselves as being cast aside or outside the current dominant social structures. Convincing them to make sacrifices for the future when the present already seems irredeemably shitty is a losing political argument. Casting nature as yet another political constituency that they need to pay deference too is foolish.

Messages of hope are the only ones that will work to build consensus (even if hope seems irrational at this point).

Edit:

Personally, I think the only rational message of hope right now is that we should be ploughing as much money into science and technology as we can. We certainly shouldn't take our eye off the ball for dealing with climate change, but it seems obvious that we're going to need some pretty amazing technological breakthroughs if we're going to survive as a species.

The relationship sounds more parasitical than symbiotic. I see how we benefit at its expense. What do we do that benefits it, and do those benefits outweigh how much we trash it? I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem close.

Measured in biomass, this is equivalent to losing 100% of the redwood forests, and it is directly attributable to man-made climate change.

Nature is not cute and cuddly. Nature has always been dangerous to humans. The Ice Age almost wiped out humanity. And this was before any modern industrial developments or pollution. Plagues have been ravaging humanity for millenia. Mothers and infants died by the millions. Even for other species, most members end their lives either starving to death, or being eaten, many times while they are still alive and sensate.

It is humanity learning to control and harness nature that has made us what we are. We learned to get more food that nature would naturally give. We learned to treat diseases. We learned how to control plagues. We learned to control maternal and infant mortality. We learned to fly. We learned to go to space. We learned to tame and control nature for our benefit.

For the future, we are going to have to go all in on science and technology. It is our only hope. Harmony with nature is life that is nasty, brutish, and short.

Uh-huh. Why should I take that more seriously than an evidence-based assessment that there's a pretty good chance that it's too late and we're fucked? The latter at least has the advantage of not being gibberish.

Most people get that talking about a "dying" ocean isn't an animistic assertion of some new form of hive life. They understand that it's a metaphor, and a particularly appropriate one. People who read and study in this field should be perfectly comfortable with models that treat complex systems like ecologies and economies as having many similarities to organisms. Those models account for reality better than static ones. Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis wasn't based on some hippy religious creed. It was based on his criticism that existing climate models did not account for the fact that earth's biosphere was perfectly capable of modifying climate, and that it reacts when disturbed. You might recognize that as a fundamental principle in modern Climate Science.

The article doesn't seem to offer much but a call to police each other's language and avoid appearing pessimistic. That's a difficult challenge given the nature of the problem and our success thus far in addressing it. James "the earth and I are both in the last 1% of our lives" Lovelock developed the Gaia Hypothesis in the 1960s. James Hansen made his first forecast about these issues thirty-two years ago. That's enough time to redevelop the US Space program, from Sputnik through Apollo, more than twice. Yet we have done nothing substantial to address it. As our scientific understanding of these complex systems improves, we don't apply it to ameliorating the problem---as near as I can tell, we primarily use it to demonstrate that earlier estimates lowballed the problem and that it's really going to be much worse and sooner.

When promoters of a 'Green New Deal' and Al Gore---the mightiest unexamined motive in Christendom---agree that nuclear energy must be excluded without examination because "nuclear bad, sun pretty", I find it pretty hard to take the whole thing as anything but theatre. The problem isn't that we're being too pessimistic---it's that it's becoming increasingly clear that our most pessimistic projections might be wildly optimistic.

Staying optimistic in the face of a difficult project to solve a problem might be productive. Staying optimistic in the face of a problem that no one is doing anything to solve is more of a learning disability than a strategy. Maybe the best path for a solution is less "hey, we need to stay upbeat and positive" and more "it's time to start slapping some sense into some of these people."

My parents' generation went to the moon. My generation decided that we'd rather get rich and then let our kids choke to death on our waste products. At least we'll deserve whatever happens to us.