As climate warms, a rearrangement of world’s plant life looms
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Heck fusion might ruin the price of gold.
Humanity is too selfish to do anything about big problems (climate change), of course we're not going to do anything about smaller problems (localized impacts). We're not doing anything because we expect a magic solution to all of these problems to drop in our laps if we wait long enough. I'm very pessimistic about the future because we're not doing what we need to do today.
If a 1,000 year old tree suddenly can't survive in the now new climate in the same location, that's a little bit more than curious.
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[0] - Excluding shenanigans like horizontal gene transfer, that are mostly relevant to bacteria and archaea.
That being said, although climate and the makeup of life on earth changes on its own, and can greatly change over time, the big difference here is how fast this is happening. I feel quite confident that humans will never kill all life on earth, because life is very adaptable and resilient. However, rapid climate change could result in the loss of a huge amount of the biodiversity that exists now. Many species will die, and be replaced with more resilient ones.
I think what we're also likely to see, is that some of the most adaptable animal species are small animals (eg: rodents) and insects, things that are typically considered invasive species. Larger animals don't reproduce as fast, and there aren't as many, so they have a smaller gene pool that doesn't recombine as rapidly as with animals that can produce large amounts of babies every year. That makes them way more vulnerable to being killed off by climate change. So, yeah, I hope you like cats, rats, possums, mosquitos and cockroaches.
As we have developed, we have spent the majority of our human productivity on efforts to optimize ourselves, our cultures, and our infrastructure for the relatively static status quo climate.
This includes the placement of cities, the choice of crop cultivars in various regions, the effort put into irrigation systems and infrastructure, the planning of building codes and expected lifetimes of infrastructure based on regional climate, the kinds of diseases and pests we guard against in various regions, and on and on. Billions of people depend on those optimizations. A slippage of a percent in the effectiveness of those optimizations will be counted in the lives of millions.
What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war.
Past few hundred years has had the greatest change in temperature in the last 10 thousand years according to tree studies.
I don't think you can have it both ways here.
AKA roughly 3% of the times humans have been on earth. Or .0002% the age of the earth. But on the other hand, that probably doesn't matter much. The difference between human made and natural climate change is just the moral implications. If there was another (natural) ice-age on the horizon, it'd be in humanities best interest to try and prevent it.
I would prefer to not live a roaming hunter-gatherer life.
Edit: disclaimer—“first settlement” doesn’t seem to be a settled fact. How permanent must it be? How many families? Is purposeful agriculture a requirement?
Global ecosystems are also far more stressed from the load of humanity than they were 100 years ago. The regenerative capacity of biological systems responding to that system is not simply "barely at capacity", it is in a negative state. On top of that, we will be accelerating the rate of average temperature changes, in a time when access to weapons of mass destruction (ones that are orders of magnitude higher than what existed 100 years ago) are higher than ever.
The nature of exponential growth and what it does to fixed capacity regenerative systems is certainly difficult to internalize. Cracks form over time as stress is absorbed. Collapses happen fast. The transition between the two is hard to time.
Your whole timescale is wrong. We’re not talking about humans. We’re talking about settled civilizations.
Things didn’t fluctuate very much since 9000 BCE, when the Bering land bridge went away. All of recorded history is since then.
As for recent history it’s only really since 2000 we’ve burst out of that range. There was fluctuation before but within the post 9000 BCE norms.
That's the crux of the argument; zoom in enough and it looks fixed. Zoom out enough, there wasn't even plants. Framing is everything. And it is the best rhetorical device because it can be (ab)used to serve even contradictory viewpoints.
> What we are about to see is the most massive and abrupt, systematic disruption of every single one of those careful optimizations. This will lead to massive direct suffering, as well as indirect suffering as people invariably react to these changes, and engage in war over shifting and scarcer resources. The chance of these conflicts going large-scale nuclear will be far higher than it ever was during the cold war.
I don't deny the consequences of mistreating the environment, but more often than not we are making proportionality errors (both by underestimating or over-cathastrophizing it).
I am not trying to be mean to you but want to invite self-reflection; apocalypticism has also been a perennial tool in our "optimization" toolkit, ironically with catastrophic failure modes. Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
> Cool-headed rationality and straigthforward honesty don't have the same downsides of excessive demoralization or creating a credibility fatigue.
I'm confused as to what part of my commentary you found irrational or dishonest.
Climate predictions are complicated but the negative valence coupled with the confidence in your predictions doesn't represent that. That is what I am calling out as proportionality error. It is a version of "this plane crashing would be horrible, even though the probability multiplier is likely to be very small, I can so vividly envision the horrible outcome that I will behave as if it is more probable and have a panic attack". There is a lot of affective/emotional (so-called) reasoning. Not only that, we don't know to what extend (not if) we are projecting our unconscious, personal, perennial problems such as fear-of-death onto a global wish of world not existing after we die for example. Human beings are deeply religious creatures, and in absence of a structured spiritual approach to these problems, we are prone to deify and mythify what is around us. (To be crisply clear, I am not calling anthropogenic climate change a myth by any stretch of imagination, but it is a certainty that our responses are not in 100% correspondence to the reality of it, including as you rightly point out "pulling yourself under the covers and hoping the monster goes away".)
> After all, wasn't this sentiment one of the reasons we collectively failed to address this issue using the reasonable mitigations that were available to us when it was possible? A belief that the "scaremongering" being done by climate scientists for decades was out of proportion?
It wasn't the sentiment, it was the act of humbuggery around the inflated immediacy and absurd dramatization of outcomes, from the likes of Al Gore to Hollywood, that either turned people into apathetic nihilism or burned out defeatism. I am not saying these are single handedly responsible for this response; post-WWII onwards especially during the Cold War people have been culturally trained for these types of thinking and today we are seeing their protracted influence.
You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm. Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes. Maybe you should give it a shot.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Normally I wouldn't want to honor your manner of discourse by responding to it, but I want to make the case that one can still discuss the contents of an argument despite emotionality;
> You turn to apathetic nihilism because your only alternative is panic. I myself have turned to opt-out nihilism—I try not to own stuff, don’t have progeny, looking to isolate on a small farm.
I personally am pretty optimistic and excited regarding the prospects of tackling this problem, because embedded in it a plethora of large scale multi-agent coordination problems we ought to solve, and we do have the capacity for it. Incidentally, I think individual level solutions don't necessarily have the strategic depth to address what is essentially a problem of scale. But if you think you're doing the right thing, more power to you, at least at your scale you couldn't harm things even if you wanted to.
> Greta seems to be on a much better track: trying to influence the people who can make the decisions that will improve the outcomes.
Does her influence look like a success to you? It doesn't to me. Maybe there is a self-fulfilling prophecy in talking down to people, or appeals to romantic emotionality, instead of bringing the best and the most rational in them. Maybe rampant consumerism and lack of higher-order thinking to maneuver climate change are sibling problems, both intimately related to the problem of stupefaction of the masses.
Maybe calling people names is part of the shame-politics that attempt to turn adults into temporary children. Hijacking our deepest fears of ostracism in the name of some ostensible "greater good", but inadvertently reducing people's agency and higher order thinking, both of which are deeply needed to steer out of the problem.
You seem to be making the mistake of assuming all predictions are similar in scope and nature.
To use an analogy: predicting the specific effects of how a blast of heavy radiation will affect a human body is _complicated_. But a prediction of "this is going to hurt you badly" can be made with high confidence.
There's a universality here regarding complex systems, and it applies to human bodies, buildings, economies, geologies, and natural ecosystems alike. Complex, self-reinforcing systems do not fail linearly. Pressure cause cracks and minor symptoms as the system absorbs the initial stresses, and at some point systemic collapse occurs rapidly.
Concrete spalls, metal rusts, and when the time comes the building collapses rapidly as the reinforcing mechanisms fail one by one. Cancers form, mild symptoms are felt, and eventually the body succumbs in weeks or days as the final metastasized stages shut down vital functions. The ground is silent as pressure build, tremors are felt, and in a matter of seconds heaves to spew its burning contents.
The stressors on our world's ecosystems are numerous and myriad and well documented. The seas and fish populations are strained by plastic pollution and overfishing to feed a population that is an order of magnitude larger than existed just 100 years ago. Insect populations are observably collapsing in many parts of the world. Water tables have been severely depleted in many agricultural lands, including in many parts of the USA, but also places like southern india. These are the observable cracks. The article of this subject contains more.
Modern agriculture, at the rate of productivity that it operates at now, relies on the existence and viability of sophisticated supply chains that mine, produce, and deliver fertilizer, pesticides, and other "high-level economy" products that themselves depend on deeper supply chains.
Climate change and the rapid increase in global temperatures introduces a steady grind of increasing pressure - a new stressor to this complex system that is already heavily stressed to unsustainability, and is already showing it cracks.
We know for a fact that the stress will increase steadily and inexorably.
It is indeed possible to make high confidence statements that this is going to hurt us badly. It is wishful thinking to hope otherwise.
What _can_ be hoped for is mitigations. We may be able to mitigate some of the damage, if we try hard and fast enough.
I am with you. This is called the criticality of a complex adaptive system.
It is the grain of sand that will collapse a sand heap into chaos.
The problem is we don't know where the criticality point is, nor we qualify the knowability of that point, nor we know if the critical point is the most important thing to focus on, e.g. incremental degradation could just as well saturate our harm tolerance without really reaching a phase-shift point. The reason I am bringing these up is not to use skepticism to induce apathy, but to underline the fact that all of these axes require drastically different policy responses.
There is a risk in trying to invest the entire political, psychological and moral capital into an all-or-nothing apocalypse-countermeasure-policy-A if the system at hand actually needed a set of incremental countermeasures with policies B, C .. Z. This is the main objective in focusing on proportionality, to ensure our response is the appropriate one.
Incrementalism doesn't make headlines the way apocalypticism does and over-salience of criticality might be distracting us in a way that brings us closer to it. Demonstrated time and again, it doesn't rally people to action, it doesn't seem to enchance our agency, and maybe even hurts it.
We know that given the inertia we have currently, we are almost guaranteed to hit it. We cannot stop on a dime, and even if we did, the existing inertial effects will continue.
> Incrementalism doesn't make headlines
It also doesn't really work, as evidenced by the complete failure of the incrementalist "reduce, recycle, reuse" campaign, which effected nothing and might well have acted as a safety blanket to prevent serious policy.
But the failure here lies more in a politically dominant demographic that was not ready to understand any reality that might involve policy that impacted material costs or the conveniences, combined with the fact that any relevant solution necessarily would involve those sacrifices.
Alarmism works just fine as a political tool, and it has worked to spur action on many issues - legitimate or not. In this particular case, the alarmism is certainly warranted. And generational shifts allow for a more receptive audience for that message.
You might be right. And that is the whole point; how do we make sure we are not making proportionality errors in either direction? What is the objective measure? What is the criteria to use to find out if and in which direction we are making such an error?
> It is perfectly possible to predict mass negative outcomes in a cool headed and honest way. Like predicting massive overspends on a major construction project.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but also can't ignore that the non-linearity and complexity of climate science is an unknown quantity more than that of a construction project. The reliability of predictions will have different upper bounds, and our conveyed sense of confidence should reflect that, not the romantically moving horribleness of the worst case scenario we can think of.
LOL, yah, I’d hate for the ocean to not have plastic, or CO2 levels to get back down, or to not breathe mercury from the local coal plant, or… gosh, any of those errors in the wrong direction, you know.
Whataboutism and analysis paralysis are not helpful modes of behaviour. Immediate action to begin remedying the obvious problems would be helpful. We can do that on an individual basis, and must also press those with more power to do the same.
A good practical tool we have is to just run a cost benefit analysis. But reduce your requirement for unproven benefit as the cost drops. So you require masks in a pandemic even when you don't know if they will work. Because the cost is low the loss is minimal if there is no benefit. This kind of decision is made all the time intuitively in things like renewable energy.
Ultimately the political system has to answer these questions. And it deals with such questions all the time. I wonder how predictable international power politics or economics is in terms of "non-linearity and complexity".
The article starts off with "Previous periods of rapid warming millions of years ago drastically altered plants and forests on Earth"
1. The greenhouse effect is very real
2. What that's going to do to ecosystems is largely unknown
Having been made to believe that it was going to cause the next mass extinction event, I found #2 fairly underwhelming. Never-the-less, this isn't a gamble worth messing with.
I also think we need to seperate out how humans are driving species extinct, and climate change. These two can be very different things, yet are always conflated in the media for hype.
Most species are going extinct because their habitats are actively destroyed by humans, or are fished to extinction, not because the planet is warming.
Think of climate modeling as saying that for a given species of trees, half of them will be dead at a given latitude in 50-100 years, not pointing at a specific tree and predicting that it will die on July 7th, 2047.
If the model predicts that a glacier disappears in 2050 and it disappears in 2070 instead?
Or if the lack-of-model makes a lack-of-prediction about glacier disappearance, and then it disappears in 2070 by surprise?
Error accumulation makes sense to worry about if you're planning a voyage and worried that dead-reckoning navigation will leave you kilometres off course. But if you're on the voyage already, out on the open ocean, you can argue with the navigator's math but you still need to navigate -- you won't do better by just blindly insisting the boat never left the harbour.
basically everyone agrees that the climate is changing, has always changed, and will always change. there is debate over how much of climate change is anthropogenic, but this is irrelevant to the point that predictive climate models are functionally useless, due to the complexity of the thing it's modeling.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clouds-may-be-the...
downvoters: I would appreciate an explanation as to how my understanding of this situation is inaccurate. my views are never set in stone, I'm always open to learn new things. I just don't see how, short of a complete holistic Matrix-style simulation of the planet, one can obtain meaningful predictions from a data-driven climate model. I'm wrong about a lot of stuff all the time and I'd like to know where my understanding of this situation is incomplete or inaccurate.
That is false. Although you’re correct that climate is very complex and it is impossible to model every detail. The notion that you cannot make valid conclusions from modeling because a set of observations do not match models is fallacious because it discounts the correct conclusions that climate models have achieved. For example, the first climate models from the 1960s predicted that the mesosphere will contract and cool as a result of increasing co2 concentrations, and this conclusion has been backed by empirical observations. Furthermore, modeling from the 1970s by scientists at Exxon Mobile found that by 2020, net warming would reach an average of 1 degree centigrade, which we’ve since exceeded.
A clock that is stuck is a poor model of time because it does not model the progression of time, even though it is still correct twice a day.
We can make a very simplistic climate model that would be valid. We have a sphere of radius 6,357km, which is illuminated by electro-magnetic radiation centered at wavelengths of 0.6um. When the light hits the surface, it is absorbed and is re-emitted as black body radiation with a wavelength centered at 10um. It has an atmosphere, which contains a gas, which blocks the escape of wavelengths at 4um and 15um. This reflects some of the black body radiation back to the sphere, causing it to warm. In 2009 for the earth, this lead to a net accumulation of 0.6 W/m^2 of energy absorption [1]. If accumulated over the entire area of the sphere and accumulated over time, this would lead to an increase in temperature. Although the model does not take into account land formations, ocean currents, air currents, seasons, etc, it still models the underlying process of the earth’s energy balance and can answer the question of whether the planet will warm and can provide estimates at how quickly this will occur.
I think you’re hinting at systems being so complex that they can vary based on minute changes in initial conditions, you’d be correct to say that climate is chaotic. Not all chaotic systems are the same though. A double pendulum will swing in eccentric motions, but if you look at something like the stock market, there’s a lot of short term variability with long term certainty. I cannot tell you what my stocks will do next week. But markets generally converge on a doubling of money in 10 years. In fact that’s reliable enough that I’m willing to have a 401k. With the pendulum, I can tell you with a lot of certainty that if it’s damped, it will settle to its lowest energy state and stay there permanently.
A climate model will not predict the weather. But in the same way that I can tell you that winter will be cold, I can also tell you that Arctic amplification and Hadley cell expansion will lead to very different weather patterns that civilization has not seen before, such as much more extreme swings in temperature and weather.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_energy_budget#/media...
Conclusion
Climate models published since 1973 have generally been quite skillful in projecting future warming. While some were too low and some too high, they all show outcomes reasonably close to what has actually occurred, especially when discrepancies between predicted and actual CO2 concentrations and other climate forcings are taken into account.
At large scale climate change isn’t that complicated - sun hits earth, heats it up, some energy escapes. We can get a pretty good picture from models and the details just add to that.
no—I, knowing basically nothing about climate science and having been taught to more or less blindly trust climate models as accurate predictors of the future, read an article that said we have no idea how to model clouds with anything resembling accuracy, because clouds by themselves are crazy complex things. this led me to realize that this should have been intuitive knowledge without even reading the article, which led me to truly consider the scope of the climate system w.r.t. how it could possibly be modeled by computers, which led me to realize that the idea that it's possible for a data-driven computer model to predict anything about the future with any kind of reliability is pretty silly to begin with.
A couple counterpoints from former climate skeptics:
- Richard Mueller is a prominent physicist who founded an institute to debunk anthropogenic climate change, only to change his mind after thorough examination of the data. https://youtu.be/Sme8WQ4Wb5w
- Jerry Taylor is a libertarian and former climate debunker for the Cato Institute; a noteworthy pivot moment was speaking to a risk analyst for a financial institution, whose job it is to make bets on complex systemic risks in the context of uncertainty. He claimed that from a financial lens, AGW was a slam-dunk case for mitigation, not because of the certainty of any one model, but of the full probability distribution in aggregate. https://www.reckonings.show/episodes/17
But as good Bayesians, we also have to consider the opposite case: crises and "black swan" events do happen. How do we filter signal from noise? We probably could have benefitted from more "enlightened alarmism" re: COVID in Jan/Feb 2020, when billions in preventative measures could have saved trillions to world GDP (and millions of lives).
It's a double-bind politically: given a non-trivial long-term risk, how does one frame its urgency? A calm and measured tone spurs little action (the unsqueaky wheel doesn't get the grease); a tone of urgency and panic bypasses badly-needed rational faculties, and/or flips the "bullshit detectors" based on the history of proverbial boys crying wolf.
While I'm not opposed to FDR-ish green infrastructure plans, the answer from economists is undramatic and uncontroversial [0]: tax the externality to establish a price signal, and return the dividend back to citizens, whose consumption behaviors then change in response to those signals [1].
Of course, we've had to contend with decades of FUD from vested O&G interests, no different than the tobacco cancer debacle [2], despite having had credible evidence for AGW since the late 70's. I'm happy to concede the potential for scientific groupthink and perverse Big Government incentives on the green side, so long as we're also acknowledging the enormous financial incentives for muddying the waters (uncertainty = inaction = status quo = profit).
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/economists-statement-on-carbon-...
I am under the impression that the worst-case scenarios in most models have pretty much all come to pass, often earlier than expected. Seems to me that they’ve been very predictive. It would have been nice had the media more accurately delivered those predictions; perhaps it would have prompted some early action.
Our current CO2 levels, ocean temperature & acidity, glacier melt, and global temperature are in excess of all “good case” predictions. We failed to rein in CO2 production and now we’re pretty much living the worst-case scenarios… as predicted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
And regarding your second point, we know it won’t do anything good, but we don’t know exactly what (nor could we ever!).
So no, there is no possibility of anything positive in this.
I think the central problem is that the way they divide the atmosphere / oceans into 100km square grids is too large for local weather, but if they shrink the grids it takes way too long to run the simulations, so they are in a bind. I am of the opinion it's better not to risk increasing the amount of CO2 because we don't know what will happen. But I wouldn't consider any of our models even low-confidence. It is impossible to solve given how chaotic nature is, the number of variables, and how slow our super computers currently are.
Rainfall pattern/acidity, humidity, average temperatures, extreme temperatures, animals living the the area (providing nutrients through body waste and decomposition), insect population, &c. are all factors, and most of these factors are interdependent
Trees, like animal, migrate, this migration isn't a matter of months, or years, but centuries, since the lifecycles of trees are very long and their locomotion speed is ... limited
If plant kept up with our co2 production we wouldn't get a graph like this when we look at atmospheric co2 level: https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/CO2_emissions_vs...
Arguing that "the greenhouse is good because we get more plants" is extremely reductive, and factually wrong
Please see : The Biggest Little Farm
But if you were to pose that question in the context of a discussion about a Holocaust survivor's fund, for example, then that's definitely not historical research you're engaging in.
Likewise, when you interrupt discussion about global warming with "maybe there are good sides", without providing any actual evidence for your supposition, then your actions have the effect of redirecting the conversation away from the scientific consensus and casting a shadow of doubt, on the basis of nothing more than speculation.
This kind of absolute confidence about an extremely unpredictable change in an extremely dynamic and complicated system is not remotely scientific. We can predict (reasonably) that the changes will be overall worse, but it would IMO be pretty shocking if there were _no_ positive effects:
- Growing seasons are longer in near-arctic regions - Higher CO2 means plants photosynthesize easier, requiring less water in desert regions - The arctic passage means shorter cargo vessel trips
This doesn't balance out the overall crisis, but there are going to be a lot of changes both directions.
It's not because the status quo is globally optimal, but because humans have invested a lot in the way things are.
We happen to have built cities on coastlines, put farms where food grows, put bridges where the rivers are, and so on. We can shake things up and get unknown results, but most random changes will be for the worse because we've molded our civilization to the planet we already have.
And this goes not only for humans, but even moreso for other species, who are much slower to adapt to changes.
TL;DR climate change isn’t necessarily an extinction-level event. It is just possibly an extinction level event. I would argue that if you’re looking at it and saying “meh” then you’re not assessing risks properly.
http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/impactfromthedeep.pd...
Page 6 helped grow my imagination. The ice ages are not the worst it ever was.
Technological civilization isn't a balloon or a tower, it's a pyramid. In order for the peak to climb higher, the base levels -- a stable and inexpensive supply of food, air, land, and water -- need to grow as well. Undermine that foundation and you can't expect the upper levels to float.
This is true, but is also a bit of a red herring. All hierarchical organizations from the individual to the country is optimized to the environmental condition they are situated in, and any level of uncertainty at that scope should alarming in of itself.
Just two examples of our optimization and as a consequence, our lack of resiliency to disturbance: Suez Canal and the Ever Given, chip shortage, cargo container mis-allocation in shipping that is happening at the moment.
If the poster boy of efficiency, the market is so easily impacted, what do you think will happen to lumbering and lethargic political institutions that we like to rail about so much?
Turns out, when scientists say that, they literally mean it.
Cue 49°C heat wave at Canada.
"We don't really know" should be considered an absolutely terrifying phrase out of the mouth of a climate scientist - and we'll be hearing it for years to come.
Who cares? Folks who depend on food from these ecosystems. They have to eat every day/year. They cannot wait for reefs to regrow in 100 years, etc.
We can probably react. But will we? We let Cambodian people die in the '70s rather that lift a finger. Our track record is very poor. Hard to care about people dying halfway around the world.
But politics is very affected. The Cambodian famine created the Khmer Rouge for instance.
Imagine refugees from starving countries, looking to settle elsewhere. First thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, then hundreds of millions. The outcry from 1000's of Syrian refugees rocked nations. Now multiply that by 100 thousand.
Trees are really good at managing stress from heat, however stress from moisture much less so.
You just restated what I said. What am I wrong about?
The idea, that we can protect the world from change is misguided.All that we can do, is save a maximum of Eco-diversity, by offering it transport from closing niche to opening niche - or storage, if all niches should vanish.
She lives in New York.
Also, what is up with all the perfectly relevant comments getting downvoted here?
In the arrogance of being higher than all things we forget, we are but a line item in the larger excel sheet of planet earth.
The threat is not to mother earth - worrying about her is above our paygrade. The world is not ending - Its going to get by just fine. It will evolve and thrive. What will happen to humans, well, that's another story, we'll have to live with the seeds we sow.
I care about humans and want them to survive and prosper. I care about wildlife and don't want species to be killed. And as humans we can use culture to go beyond our in-built programming. Ideas can spread. That does make us different to other species. That is not arrogant, it is just the truth.
I absolutely agree that understanding life is amazing and even essential to our future. That in itself is an idea that couldn't possibly have existed without the distinctive ability to communicate I mentioned above.
This entire school of thinking that has derived from a George Carlin bit never ceases to annoy me.
For starters the "world" as some abstract ideal that we find comforting only exists because our human minds perceive it and imagine it as such. Our planet is just a rock out in spaces with some complex chemical reactions fizzlingly along on the surface. There is no "mother Earth" that will still be around to enjoy the life that reemerges in millions of years.
And there really is no guarantee that it is "going to get by just fine". Are you familiar with the current hypothesis behind the End-Permian extinction? It's believed by some to have been caused by a super volcano that ignited massive coal veins around what is today Siberia. Now the scale of CO2 emitted in the End Permian was much more dramatic than even current worse case scenarios, but we're emitting about 10x faster than lava burning coal was able to do back then. The End Permian nearly did wipe out life on this planet.
We don't fully understand all the possible CO2 feedbacks. We're already in one of the top 6 extinction events on this planet and that has little to do with climate change.... yet. CO2 has played a surprisingly big role in most mass extinctions.
Now it's certainly a low probability scenario, but it is not inconceivable that the end result of our insane release of CO2 in the atmosphere could lead to an unrecoverable extinction event.
At the very least a startling percent of the current species on this planet will go extinct (because a startling number already have). Corals which have survived plenty of extinction events might be replaces with green slime.
We may be turning this planet into a lifeless rock. Other planets like Mars and Venus are "getting by just fine" by that measure. We may not be able to induce a total runaway greenhouse effect but killing off the oceans and making much of the planet inhospitable is still on the table. Really though, environmentalism is more about saving ourselves than our planet.
Our sun won't last forever and eventually the Earth will be totally destroyed. The less we have to struggle with survival due to what we've allowed to be done to the Earth the more we can work towards finding new homes.
I'm probably forgetting a few things myself.
And that's on top of the vast reduction in wild spaces, logging and burning of rainforests, urbanization, and conversion of prairies and grasslands to agriculture.
This is probably the least "green" the world has been for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, modulo ice ages.
[1] https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/gtr-nrs-p-108papers/02car...