Opinion: What I Saw in Yosemite Was Devastating
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Beautiful piece, but that's hardly the whole story. Nature doesn't care about climate change and it couldn't care less about us. Sure, it might kill all the birds, trees, landscapes, but our planet will adapt. We, humans, won't be able to. What we're destroying is our own future, both the beauty in the world and the environment we live in.
We are by far Nature’s most adaptable creation, we live everywhere from the harshest deserts to the frozen tundra. I find the idea that we won’t adapt remarkably laughable.
People are also concerned about quality of life, not just survival.
The climate can change faster than we can, and we can destroy each other or set each other pretty far back technologically. Either way, there are myriad reasons that the relatively recent past need not be indicative of the future.
As for quality of life, those unwilling to adjust their expectations will filter themselves out. There are plenty of anti-natalists on Reddit proudly proclaiming they'll never have kids because the world already sucks too much. Well fine, but don't think everyone's going to go that route. Humanity got by for most of its existence with essentially no economic growth or quality of life improvements. Would suck to go back to that, but the species would continue.
See Easter Island’s history for an example.
It was tongue in cheek because the person I responded to wrote that.
> We pretty much dominate the Earth, it's odd you don't think we have been adapting every step of the way and will continue to do so far more competently than almost any other organism thanks to our reasoning power and its fruit, a highly capable advanced civilization.
Humans have been adapting, but not “every step of the way” was my point. It very well could be that we are living in a favorable span of a few million years out of few billion that are inhospitable to human life, with no guarantee of innovating technology to outmaneuver nature. The claim is humans’ survival has a large luck component to it.
> If the next pandemic hits and 7 billion people are wiped out that's adapting too because 1 billion survived.
That is not what most people mean when they say “adapted”.
> Please stop conflating improving quality of life vs survivability of our specie which is what the discussion about adaptability is always anchored in.
Again, the claim is that humans have been around for a microscopic amount of time in the grand scheme of things, and there are things outside of our control that could cause extinction level events at any time, to which humans would not have the time/intelligence to avoid. For example, asteroids/solar flare/disease/other things changes in the habitat that are greater than us.
For example, we can adapt to volatility in rain by developing irrigation, or volatility in soil quality by using synthetic fertilizer. But you cannot adapt to zero water, or extreme weather, or poor air quality, at least not without war, which also creates its own problems.
And yes, some will survive and "adapt" in that sense, but the notable difference is "adapting" in the recent past meant innovations that did not necessarily take away from others (at least in the short term). In the future, it would be more zero sum, and hence uglier.
Or to put it more harshly, the wealthy will be able to adapt. A lot of people will suffer and/or die.
The wealthy fleeing global warming feels like it will merely be a footnote in Chapter 1 of what will eventually play out.
I worry not simply for the planet but for my children, my grandchildren, and yours, all of ours, as well.
That said, climate change is going to force us all into rapid adaption as plant and animal life die off, glacial streams and rivers dry up for good, sea level rises, etc. It will be easier to survive if you can afford the more expensive food and water, can afford to install the most-effective fire break around your home, can afford the expensive land in still-habitable places.
Reducing (formerly) temperate-area population density to Inuit levels would be catastrophic.
Yes, humans as a species would survive. But that's about all you can say.
Sounds like evolution :/
"Here we analyse 35 years’ worth of satellite data and provide a comprehensive record of global land-change dynamics during the period 1982–2016. We show that—contrary to the prevailing view that forest area has declined globally—tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km2 (+7.1% relative to the 1982 level). This overall net gain is the result of a net loss in the tropics being outweighed by a net gain in the extratropics."
I moved away from California back in 2010. On a trip back home a couple of years ago, I visited Yosemite for the first time in many years.
I felt the same and couldn't believe what it was like. The valley filled to the brim with hours-long traffic jams—everything filled with smoke.
It was all very different from how I remembered it.
I enjoy being the literal one here - this is not aligned to what we observe. Nature can inspire, but most of the legwork is done by humans in labs and houses nestled in the largest of cities. Most of the pinnacles of human achievement (the law, heavier than air flight, undersea transport, the highway and rail networks, spaceflight, mastering radiowaves and digital communication) we have surpassed what nature could teach us by superior control of energy, theory and materials.
It isn't nature that propelled us into the modern era. It was cities. Pretty much everyone with the means chooses to stay in the heart of a city with rare visits to nature because cities are just more supportive of humans, more interesting and more prosperous.
There are people who get a lot out of going to visit nature. They are relatively rare.
Moving mass requires energy. Using energy results in an increase in entropy (heat). We went from 2 billion to 8 billion people in 100 years, each life moving exponentially more mass than the generation before it.
Absent the discovery of a miraculously efficient energy source, there were only ever 2 options. Either force reduction in consumption per capita and/or capitas, or live in the future we are living in now. The former was never going to be politically popular, and I suspect the author of the OpEd also would not like to be told she cannot take her child to see Yosemite from NYC via current methods of transport.
I work across the street from 6001 Bollinger and went to check it out on a whim. Looks pretty mundane. What exactly am I supposed to be looking for? Is it the fact that it's a Chevron corporate campus?