Loss of biodiversity follows directly from and is a much bigger deal than typical "climate change" headline
— Franklin Degraaf, The Expanse S1E3
In the books, Holden says that not a single blade of grass grows outdoors on the surface. But Earth, despite its pollution and massive population, still grows tons of things that don't grow anywhere else. It's hard to understand just how fertile our planet remains. Bobby is dazzled sitting by the polluted harbor, hearing a sea gall flying overhead. Mars only has underground zoos and farms.
We're on the clock, humans have to get life off this planet before it is destroyed or everything dies forever.
Terraforming or even just permanently living self-sufficiently on Mars is many orders of magnitude harder than stopping global warming, and you see how well we are doing there.
Mars is more hostile than earth even after a long time of humans fucking it up.
Oil will simply be more expensive and that's what will trigger change. People vote with their wallets, only a tiny proportion of the population has the luxury of doing anything but. Foolish to try to appeal to morality when most of the world lives paycheck to paycheck or worse.
On Mars we actually do want to create global warming and a greenhouse effect, so it's good that we know how :D
Unless humanity completely erases life on earth I'm sure it'll bounce back. There's still time ahead, although not as much as there was behind. However, I'd rather we destroyed less and restored more, at least in my lifetime, so we could enjoy its existence.
And which usually happens on a time scale which most of us would consider "long"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Triassic
> Early Triassic faunas lacked biodiversity and were relatively homogeneous due to the effects of the extinction. The ecological recovery on land took 30 million years.
I guess it eventually works out if you are willing to wait very, very long.
People often seem to think the whole climate change is worrying about the earth and all the animal life. The earth will be fine, individual animals will hardly notice (they have much more immediate concerns most of the time, like being eaten).
It's humanity that is going to suffer, with the risk of many of our highly optimised systems becoming unsuited to task (think many cities and food production needing to shift, leading to starvation/conflict).
Which is fine until you realize kill most biodiversity may include humans. Even if the earth survives doesn't mean we will.