Long before trees overtook the land, Earth was covered by prototaxites (2013)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
I think it is wise to understand that earth has been through many eras and is not as homeostatic as our narrowly imagined “natural” state we seek today. And I am not trying to build an anti climate change argument, just that static “naturalism” is a human construct.
Likewise, one ends up sounding like an anti climate nut, but the existential fear for the planet seems arrogant at best and massively over emphasises our place in the universe. See, I sound like an anti climate nut.
not sure what's arrogant about that, it's a bit of perspective
Most of this talk is unthinking affectation and empty emotionalism, I suspect, something you might expect a mopey teenager to say, but it does betray some degree of viciousness. Envy and pride come to mind.
No? Intelligence isn't needed for a stable evolutionary state to exist in an organism. You would have define what you mean by intelligence and then show evidence of that before it would be reasonable to make that assumption.
At the same time I think it's also worth pointing out that earth has likely never had as diverse an ecosystem as it has this millennium. The tree of life has become incredibly wide & complex.
The naturalist tendency doesn't have to be as static as portrayed here. Nature itself is such a dynamic & changing system death & population booms chasing each other around wildly. What, I think, is so scary about right now is how in jeapordy so much life seems. Insects & birds are disappearing at mass scale. Large life is hunted to breaking points. Many animals lack for habitat and access to essential food & water.
We see strictly worse coming & that has built a fervor for the worlds we are actively losing/destroying.
Don't worry, we can fix that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
We can continue to exist and learn without killing off the planet.
There is no natural state as defined by hyper static equilibrium. Only brief moments where we purport to control it — building up a chaotic momentum beneath it.
PS: Not suggesting anything about climate change, I'm just amused the comment parent makes.
One way you can play with a real chaotic system is to build one of the circuits in jc sprott’s papers and vary the control variable. You’ll see at some values of your control an “orderly” progression of the response variables, and at others a difficult to predict progression.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
Chaotic on the long timescale, but pretty stable given the much shorter timescale of known human history.
At one scale, it's chaos. 1 or 2 scales up or down (in time or in space) it's stable. It's like that all the way up and all the way down.
Oh, and not only are the scale levels not just spacial or temporal but both, but the number of levels is itself non integer.
But the point is that even chaotic systems often display order if you find the right place or perspective to stand and look.
You can't say "it's not stable". Not ever. Rocks aren't stable over aeons. Galaxies aren't. Protons aren't if you wait long enough.
But it is often possible to measure the rates of change and of complexity and say, look, given greater levels of complexity, then lower rates of change will probably hold...
Even given a famine or a plague that's currently devastating one region.
A lot of the series is about the belief that we could, with technologies predictive powers & neoliberal market ethos... And how it doesn't pan out. We have "New Economies" greatly bloom in the world. And about how instead we got the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We thought we were taming market complexity (via in part neoliberalism weirdly) but turns out not so much. We have the rise of cybernetic thinking & Limits of Growth (& it's limitations in assuming we cannot change human behavior).
"Sure everything is trending towards shit, but we're humans, we can definitely go create some genius machine that will fix this, right"
Curtis rarely comes out and makes broad conclusions, but the watcher is definitely left with impression of absurd hubris & folly & chaos-triumphant, in AWOBMOLG and in much else of Curtis's excellent excellent catalog of contemporary history documentaries.
Indeed; his films (and their titles!) are oblique and suggestive. They are about politics, but it's very hard to discern his own political posture clearly. I wonder what kind of a man he would be to meet.
Just my take, but I think the core concept is really that there is no one actually genuinely leading, no one left with a compelling believable vision in any position of power, and that total power vacuum keeps letting mad scenes play out across history.
The need for hope, to show a willingness to go in authentically good direction at scale, is a fuel that powers the public spirit, and we keep suffering long eras where it's simply unavailable.
The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
Margaret Atwood
Its a broader perspective that come with age I'm guessing.
Did you forget to update it?
Fill the room your in with dead-body clones of yourself, it will probably take well over a hundred.
Collect all the humans on the surface of the Earth, they'd all fit inside Rohde Island (thanks XKCD). Humanity is a tiny fraction of the mass and surface area of the world.
You've been alive for less than 100 years and only seen, heard, touched or felt the smallest fraction of the surface of the Earth. Met a tiny fraction of the people.
Time wise you're limited to 80? years of cognizant thought. Maybe 90? Humans have been around for thousands of years, and earth has been around for billions.
Yet, we as humans claim parts of nature as our own. My land, my country, my trees, my pet rock. All those things aren't yours and never were.
The poem just imagines what would happen if nature suddenly decided to reclaim what was always hers.
I feel like having Atwood, Ballard & Curtis in a thread deserves some kind of commendation.
What about the millennium or two prior to that, though? Hundreds of species have gone extinct since around 1900.
Lol, no.
Today is not in any way more/less special than any of the preceding 350million years. We obviously know more, because today's animals don't need to be dug out from the ground as fossils.
[citation needed]
I suspect it was considerably more diverse pre-humans. This millennium (i.e. 1KY), no.
1000 millennia ago, 1MY ago, yes.
In a time span of billions (even millions) of years, our planet indeed went through different eras.
For a duration of one human life, the state of nature is expected to remain quite static. The problem with climate change is that we started to witness the planet entering in a new era in such a small time frame - roughly 200 years.
Of course, going back to the climate the Earth had in the Cambrian era, for instance, probably would not be comfortable to humans at all, but still, humans have survived for a much longer time than is illustrated here. Human civilization, OTOH, occupies about half the time period shown here.
The thing that's most important about climate change is: how will it affect human settlements where they're located now? You can't just pick up whole cities with billions of people and move them, and many (most?) of the cities are close to water.
If you think going back more than 20k years would in any way change the entire point of the cartoon[1], then by all means do the research, draw the graph and show where it's wrong.
[1] hint: rate of change is important.
Anyway, it's not anti-science. It's well-known that the earth was hotter during the time of the dinosaurs. Sure, rate of change is important, but as I said in the end, the biggest problem for humans is rising sea levels, because of where humans live. Worse storms are also a big problem, though here again where humans live is a big problem since they tend to live on coasts and storms usually hit there.
It's classic climate denial to continue to harp that the earth was hotter in the past so somethingsomethingsomething look over there and ignore the fact that the rate of change this century, not looking back a million years, is the point of the comic.
But we do have recent examples of much quicker temperature changes. During the Younger Dryas the global average temp dropped about 5°C over a few decades and about 1000 years later, rose again just as quickly.
The intolerance of different views is driving the hostile and divisive atmosphere in the social media.
Let's say there's a person who's really anti-climate change. How is that person supposed to change their mind, if they get attacked every time they voice their opinions, instead of being approached in a civil manner? People can't be bullied people into agreement, only silenced and driven further away into their own echo chamber, at which point you lose any chance you had of ever changing their minds.
My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers.
Don't most studies show that fact based arguments only cause people with faulty beliefs to dig in further?
Some percentage of them? Yes. Unfortunately, there's no way to know when that happens, so it's very easy to assume it doesn't.
> My take is that by the time the poster goes through the effort to post, they have adopted [insert view here] into their personal belief system; they're not seeking answers.
If what you're saying is true, what's the logic behind censoring people? Nobody is able to convince anyone of anything anyway.
Because at some point, arguing the same topic over and over and over is exhausting. The impact of greenhouse gases and climate change, for example, has been established as 'a thing' for my entire adult life. And yet people still want to argue about it even existing.
Is that, by itself, a good enough reason to censor people?
Nobody is forcing anybody to argue.
I don't want to quash discussion (interesting and informative discussion is the main reason I use HN) but, yeah, it's not a bad thing to differentiate yourself from the climate deniers, if you want people to hear you these days.
Why are you sick of them? That's a fairly strong emotion. Do you hold resentment because they are the ones who are going to bring the apocalypse to the world? Is it annoyance from hearing too many incorrect opinions? Or something else entirely?
Honest question - why are you, personally, sick of them? I'd really like to know.
2. They form an unholy alliance with other anti-empiricist groups (e.g. anti-vaxxers, young earth creationists) to undermine reality-based policies, including in education.
3. Their denialist opinions are typically held in bad faith. That is, they are held because if they were true they would confirm some pre-existing belief (e.g. that scientists are tools of a global elite cabal), not because an independent evaluation of the facts has led them there. This reinforces their hostility towards whatever group they think is lying.
4. Denialists typically engage in a perverse form of virtue signaling. The greater and more well evidence a claim is, the greater the "cred" they get for denying it. This creates a fertile field for sham experts to sell lies to members.
climate change isn't
it could also be a non-belief that turned out to be true, so that kind of shoots down that theory
yep, "belief" is definitely the wrong word to use here, "truth" or "reality" would work since climate change is true & real, and having "different beliefs" is definitely not the same thing as having your own truths and reality, which is why climate change deniers generally get mocked by people
First, I want to make it clear that I don't think of "climate deniers" as a group per se like a race, creed, or nation. There's a lot of detail and nuance in the world and I want to explore that, not abrogate it.
I just want to elucidate on that a little before I get to answering your question.
You have folks like the people in the oil companies who knew about the science of the greenhouse effect and still spent lots of money casting doubt on it in public to protect their profits.
You also have people who have honest doubts and questions. I'm even one of them. I've heard that global warming and climate change might have more to do with changes in the Sun's energy output than human chemical emissions, and I'd like to talk more about that, but ooo yeah not in public, eh? You would have to be all like "but I'm not a climate denial-ist" like OP.
So, just to repeat, I'm not being tribal here. (For instance the Chinese Communist Party creeps me out, but I still give them credit for e.g. fixing the Loess Plateau, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537409 ) I'm not against a group, I'm sick of certain behaviors.
To answer your question "why [am I], personally, sick of [certain behaviors]?" It's simple.
When I was a kid in high school I found my parents' copy of the Next Whole Earth Catalog which was a kind of hippie how-to guide from the 70's. I have no idea what happened to the people who made and bought and read this thing. My parents didn't talk about it or anything like that. But it became, for awhile, something like my bible. I left my textbooks in my locker and carried it around instead (it's like four feet wide and weighs six or seven hundred pounds!)
In it I learned about people like Christopher Alexander, Bucky Fuller, and Bill Mollison, and I began to see, or think that I saw, a better world. A world where humans and nature were in harmony, and "no one had to get nailed to anything."
That was about thirty-five years ago.
So, from my POV, everybody has been running around enacting "Idiocracy" instead and, yeah, I'm sick of it.
I understand you in some manner - I grew up watching Captain Planet and similar eco-oriented shows that have instilled in me some feeling of "importance" of the whole subject. And seeing other people trample upon what are some of our most sacret beliefs, developed for decades, can make us sick of them.
The only criticism of those beliefs I would have is that they come from sentiment, not (only) reason - so, in theory, if instead of eco-literature, you read, say, the Bible, you would most likely have equally strong beliefs towards Christianity, and they would be supported by more-or-less same number of arguments derived from years of studying.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), it's really hard to separate ourselves from our sentiment. I guess that the world is doomed to stay a divisive place, because humans are, in their essence, emotional creatures with reason added.
I like to point out (usually in a different context) that ecology is a science, and it's applications are technology.
I wrote a comment a few months ago about my beliefs and "the similarities and differences to religious apocalyptics as I see them" that you might find interesting? In sum (if I may be so gauche as to quote myself) "Ideally environmental apocalypticism is self-extinguishing." That's the primary (psychological) diiference (IMO) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32065654
> I guess that the world is doomed to stay a divisive place, because humans are, in their essence, emotional creatures with reason added.
I dunno. The most powerful emotion is love, eh? And I think the newfangled talking computers will make really good cheap therapists.
Humans are social beings and the spectre that someone could be outcast for sounding like they are from the wrong clan is an innate phobia.
From a US perspective - In the past, social shunning and ostracizing was used as a way to norm the culture for the predominately white, christian culture. Cancel culture was literally being run out of your town, and/or excluded from social and religious events. This had a huge chilling effect.
Now, the power belongs to a previously marginalized group (lgbtq/minority individuals) to 'cancel' people.
It's not new; the only difference is that the people who used to have to power are pissed that their views aren't the popular views anymore. It's a symptom of a massive societal change that has occurred and the subset of people who refuse to let go of their outdated ways.
I think this is an extremely skewed perspective on the whole issue.
It's not us vs. them - cancel culture was, and still is, driven by ignorance and sensationalism. People like the rush of a good story, regardless of whether it's true or not - that's what makes cancel culture so unjust.
Whether it's a gay person being called a Satan's spawn, or Richard Stallman being called a pedophile, or any other case - all cases have one thing in common: exaggeration for the sake of sensationalism, and punishment being completely out of proportion with the crime (note that by "crime" here I strictly mean "the act that is condemned by the group doing the cancellation", regardless of its actual criminality).
If you're a member of the previously-oppressed-now-powerful group, you may rejoice at the thought of retribution on those that caused you (your group) so much injustice in the past, but I hope you realize how hypocritical that makes the whole "tolerance" story that your group has been pushing for the last few decades. But I guess that power corrupts, no matter who's wielding it.
Are you seriously suggesting that could happen before social media?
Perhaps you're quite young and don't realise quite how different the world has become over the past 10 years.
But.
Yes, these things could happen before social media. Like most things, social media has absolutely amped up the effects, but this existed before.
Hell, go all the way back to the Red Scare and the various black books that existed in the, what 1940's and 1950's? Say the wrong thing in the wrong place and you were immediately labeled a commie and shunned.
That's what I'm saying. It has always existed. I just think it's a "bigger problem" for people now and there is more push back on cancel culture today than in the past because it's the previous mainstream that is being cancelled instead of an already at-risk community.
But usually that ignore the speed of climate change
but I am always amazed at how much 'nature' has been interrupted by humans laying concrete (streets and buildings etc)
Manhatten Island was once a sanctuary and now is a concrete cemetary.
Edit: I looked it up. Estimate is 20,000,121,091,000,000,000 or 20 billion billion animals. “Vastly” was clearly an understatement.
The vast, vast majority of animals are insects.
Some primitive form of life will probably thrive for another billion years till Earth is slowly sterilized by Sun, but not complex life like us.
That happened with trees because cellulose was new, but I don't think there would be an issue with plants which cells have been around for a long time.
But maybe I'm missing something in which case I'm happy to learn.
https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/lack-fungi-did-not-lea...
Why does it always have to be "it's complicated".
But philosophically speaking or as hypothetical interestellar gods who live for millions of years then yes, worrying about what’s “natural” as we currently conceive it is narrow-minded.
I don't see how airplanes are even going to exist for mass transit and cargo 200 years from now or how we will ever escape Earths gravity again without building some kind of space elevator before we run out.
That's to say nothing of how all the oil fields we've tapped are the easy to get ones, and the deep sea holds a ton of oil.
(This is not how most people sell it, but it's true.)
Of course it's important and it's inevitable but calling it an "emergency" would by hyperbole and cause it to be taken less seriously.
So instead of hyping up things you're going to do, you need to hype them down. Ideally, you'd just go around saying you're doing absolutely nothing. (Also, don't raise gas prices.)
The US is a little under 15% of the world economy, and a little over 15% of the worlds energy use. It’s going to take a lot more than just the actions of one President to solve climate change.
Eh, I think lots of living things "presume" today's state of things --and involuntarily evolve and try to adapt when things change from what is now to what will be then. But otherwise, I agree.
This implies two things:
- Insofar as we want to keep the Earth a good place for us to live, we can measure our success by the number of our evolutionary cohort of species that stick around;
- Insofar as we plan to live in space, terraform other worlds, etc., it's only animals of our evolutionary cohort that will be able to comfortably survive in the places we optimize for our own well-being. If we increase global CO2 levels here on Earth to such a point that species on Earth that like our current air mix begin dying off, and we see an evolution of replacement species that prefer higher CO2 levels (and we ourselves retreat to dome cities or something to avoid that fate); but then we later terraform Mars to have the environment of Earth ca 5000BCE; then the species that inhabit Earth by that point, won't be able to be transplanted to Mars. Only the species we had conserved — keeping them in the dome-cities with us — would be able to be transplanted.
(Another way to say that second one, is that if we screw up the Earth's environment, but later fix it, we'll lose biodiversity twice — we'll have killed off our evolutionary cohort with the screw-up, and we'll kill off the newer-evolved species with our "fix.")
It will always be many orders of magnitude easier to terraform Earth, even after we screwed it up, than trying to terraform Mars.
It's many orders of magnitude easier to afford a $100,000,000 home if you make $10,000 per year than if you only make $1 per year.
But you're never going to afford that home either way.
I had never heard that. More info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_River
We increased CO2 concentration by about 200 parts-per-million (a factor of about 2x), and increased the average temperature by about 1-2°C. Rain patterns are slightly different. Ocean PH levels dropped by about 0.04 .
Sure, given how delicate the biosphere is, these small changes have a significant effect. However, if we look at Earth on the same scale as any other object in the solar system, the environment on Earth today is almost identical to the environment on Earth 1,000 years ago. The atmosphere is about 1023 millibars; 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, and 0.04% everything else. Liquid water covers most of the surface, with an active water cycle causing water rain to occur periodically over much of the planet.
The temperature change is so small, that we would not notice it if it were on any other planet in the solar system, and it is far below the noise floor of day-to-day variance
We also eat an extraordinary amount of the fish and seafood in the world from the ocean. “The global per capita consumption footprint in 2011 is estimated at 27 kg. Our estimate is higher than the 18.6 kg reported in FAO statistics for the same year, as it also takes into account the indirect use of capture fisheries production by the fishmeal sector.” “the conversion of wild-capture fish that would not be used for human consumption into fishmeal and subsequent use as aquafeed, results in an overall increase in human consumption of fish”. “31% of the world's wild fish stocks are estimated to be overfished, 58% fully exploited”.
And don't forget that the Earth is more than willing to enter a negative feedback loop -- she will take that 1-2 degree increase in temperature and say "I heard you like warm weather, so I'm gonna release all this trapped methane and CO2 from my frozen parts and let you have it too."
Attempts to terraform Mars allow humans to try some things and to see what happens. It will allow to make our models of climate more precise.
For now our understanding of a climate based on observational studies. Not a controlled experiment. So when we start to do something having some climatic goals in mind, we'll start to learn a lot. And it would be better for Earth if we started with Mars.
Though we have no time, but it doesn't seem a sufficient reason not to try get at least some experience from terraforming Mars. It may reduce risks.
I interpret this as you misinterpreting the opinions here, confusing them with the opinion of unrelated colonization-fanatics, via an unknown mechanism; I will not attempt any defense of either perspective right now.
I don't agree with the logic that we cannot focus on two things at the same time. It's like saying, "People focusing on making movies when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world." or "People focusing on curing fibromyalgia when we have such an immediate problem to address TODAY are delusional and actively endangering the most vulnerable people in the world."
The bottleneck to reversing climate change is not money or manpower, it is politics. We cannot force other people (especially in other countries) to do the right thing for the environment. We can, however, do our best to improve things on our side and pressure others to do so as well. And while we are putting our best effort towards that, we shouldn't stop making art, researching medicine, or even, trying to colonize mars.
Also, the research and development needed to colonize Mars may very well yield scientific discoveries that allow us to reverse climate change. And even if it doesn't, and Earth is ruined despite our best efforts here, we won't have all our eggs in one basket.
My point is, I just do not believe that researching colonization of Mars will do anything to thwart our efforts to improve the Earth. Quite the contrary, it may help those efforts.
This times a million. I see it all the time on social media when it comes to news stories too, and it's as ridiculous there as it is here. People have different interests and skillsets, and they don't all need to focus on the same thing at the same time. The folks looking to explore Mars colonisation/space exploration and those working to slow down or prevent climate change are usually entirely different groups, who have studied what they're interested in for years. You can't just chuck them all at a single 'project' and refuse to allow anything else, in the same way we can't pause the rest of human civilisation because your pet issue isn't being sorted quickly enough, or have the entirety of a media organisation reassigned to a single story.
We live in an environment that's we're so conveniently adapted for us that it's easy to take for granted. You can spend your whole life doing damage to this precious thing we all got for free and die before the consequences of your actions catch up with you. It's all too easy to just miss ecological thinking altogether.
On a spacecraft though, or a Martian colony, the f-around-find-out cycle is gonna be deadly short. You're gonna need everyone in board with doing what they need to to stay alive.
Again, something we desperately need on Earth.
So let them fail to colonize Mars. Let them fail 100 times. Because what we learn from those failures just might save us at home.
https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/
On what are you basing this statement? I would argue that entirely depends on the complexity of the species and the time per generation. Bacteria certainly can adapt to extremely different conditions within years, if not even quicker. And these "simple life forms" are arguably much more important for the ecosystem than more complex ones like mammals.
When it comes to changing climate (and some degree of pollution) instead of newly evolved adaptations you get migrations or selection for particular alleles. Adjust up and back down and you can end up with diversity constraints on both ends.
This is a very cool idea; I haven't heard of it before, and I'm not finding much on this concept on the 'web.
Anything you can point me to? :)
What's gone extinct: Virtually all of South America's marsupial megafauna (much of this prior to the arrival of humans, triggered by the rising of the central American ithsmus), mammoths, mastodons, native horses (the species was reintroduced by Europeans), giant ground sloth (Megalonyx), short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, tapirs, peccaries, giant tortoises, the American lion, Miracinonyx (the American cheetah), siaga antelope, several species of llamas, Camelops (a giant camel), and more, all in North America alone. Very nearly the American bison ("buffalo") and California condor, amongst others.
In Europe there were also several species of mammoth and mastodons, native straight-tusked elephants, lions, cave bear, Irish elk, woolly rhinocerous, aurochs, and more.
Australia saw two phases of human-driven extinctions, one triggered by the aboriginies roughly 50kya, the second by Europeans, beginning about 250 years ago.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_megafauna>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_animals...>
It was about what has survived
Large land animals only really survive in Africa
However it might be charitably interpreted along the lines of "of the prehuman megafauna extant on the multiple continents, the greatest degree of survival to the present day is found in Africa, where those species co-evolved with humans rather than experiencing humans as a suddenly-appearing invasive species".
Which is what the sources I'm familiar with generally suggest. Though not a primary source, Wikipedia reasonably summarises the situation:
Sub-Saharan Africa is the region of the world with the highest amount of Pleistocene megafauna surviving to the present day. These surviving species include the African bush elephant, African forest elephant, black rhinoceros, white rhinoceros and the hippopotamus. All of these species maintained populations in sub-Saharan Africa even after many of them were extirpated from Eurasia during the early Holocene.[58] This means that all of the largest herbivore genera present in Pleistocene Africa are still present today.
Citing:
Stuart, Anthony John (May 2015). "Late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions on the continents: a short review: LATE QUATERNARY MEGAFAUNAL EXTINCTIONS". Geological Journal. 50 (3): 338–363. doi:10.1002/gj.2633. S2CID 128868400
Stuart, Anthony J. (1991). "Mammalian Extinctions in the Late Pleistocene of Northern Eurasia and North America". Biological Reviews. 66 (4): 453–562. doi:10.1111/j.1469-185X.1991.tb01149.x. ISSN 1469-185X. PMID 1801948. S2CID 41295526
Which would strongly support the original statement by maxerickson above.
And thus Toxoplasma gondii, from our ever present felines, gains awareness and rules the universe as a hivemind protozoa.
I see some potential for a movie deal here.
That is another important source of aligned biodiversity
We've created varieties, variants, races... no species. They can still interbreed.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2016.060...
From the Review article “How humans drive speciation as well as extinction”
The very reason we care about the ecosystem in the first place is because we depend on it. That's the most important point - environmentalism is first and foremost about our own survival. Nobody gives a shit about plants and animals for their sake.
I think you are somewhat strawmanning environmentalism and climate-change concerns here (not with malicious intention or anything) because I don't think that many argue that things are or should be static - though they mostly appear to be static from our short viewpoint.
Instead the concern is that the changes are too fast. It's more akin to consciously bringing a meteor down on the planet than it is to "the world is changing and always have and humans are a tiny blip in the existence of the world".
Also, Darwin wrote a lot about the extreme variations that we see in the 'balanced' ecosystem. He tallied up the birds near him and found that ~4/5ths of all the birds would die every winter. He remarked that a 10% death rate illness in humans would be considered a huge event, but that every year, nearly all the birds near him just up and die. This was in a passage on how the 'balance' that we see is really just a lot of species furiously competing with each other and trying to eek out minuscule improvements in the deadly chaos.
Oh definitely, Sagan forbid someone cast doubt on the Consensus and the Science!
Time. It's deep.
Obviously life will just keep evolving. There have been times in the geological record when there has been little to no polar ice and times of “snowball Earth.” Life existed during all these times but both these extremes would be more hostile to humans than the current epoch.
Largest by area. By mass you need to go a bit south, to the faint grove of Aspens in Utah known as "Pando".
ofc, Aspens are weird enough that they may be thought of more like a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies rather than trees per se.
I read the page you kindly linked but I'm not seeing anything about Aspens being considered a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies..
But they exist in a large underground network of roots, and spawn trunks upwards over that large area, not unlike how many funguses do. Convergent evolution of an approach to life.
I'm definitely a layman here, but I lived in Utah about 10 years ago and did some reading on Aspens, which is when I came across that comparison. I was hoping to find a direct citation to post here but haven't managed to do so yet.
A fire (or clear cut) can take down the entire overstory of trees, but that living root system will survive & send up more "suckers" that become new trees. It's this "the real life is underground" vibe that makes them particularly fungi-like to me. I wonder if any other trees are like Aspens in this regard...
>Weighing 13 million pounds, Pando is the world’s largest organism by mass (Oregon’s “humungous fungus” spans a greater distance). Quaking aspens can reproduce by disseminating seeds, but more frequently, they send up sprouts from their roots and form a mass of trees aptly known as a “clone.”
and I was able to find
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
Quaking Aspens were my Spirit Tree and I loved being around them.
I didnt know at the time that the groves of Aspen were acually all the same tree.
But they had a profound effect on me as I hiked and built stuff from them.
I used to chop them down and build tee-pees with pine bows as walls... I was like 13 or so. If you got caught in any of my booby-traps, I am sorry...
And yet everyone complains when you say whales are fish.
More https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sa=1&q=Prototaxites
https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2015/5/21/ancient-equ...
When prototaxites ruled, the next tallest thing was ~6cm.
Related: I dreaded looking into this thread because titles like that (I mean the original one) almost always provoke shallow-sensational-reflexive responses. There are a few such subthreads here but for the most part the hivemind didn't derange itself this time. Well done hivemind!
It's like taking an article that says "dinosaurs are related to birds" and changing it to read "the ancestors of birds are related to birds." It reduces a new, interesting claim to a tautology which is not, in any way, what the article concerns itself with.
Here, the descriptive, sensible word 'mushroom' is replaced with 'prototaxite', a word that is meaningless to (let's be honest) most casual visitors to this site.
Accessibility and meaningfulness are casualties in the war on interestingness.
[0]: https://techraptor.net/sites/default/files/styles/herobanner...
That is all :)
Lichen is a symbiosis between fungi and single celled chlorophyll owners. Forests are multicellular lichen. Like the cyanobacteria, trees can often function without their host, but they do better things with them.
Suzanne Simard was one of the first to draw attention to it. She has a book now, as does Paul Stamets, but there’s also The Secret Life of Trees and a few others. Healthy forests are a network, the fungi arbitrage sugars and water, and sometimes minerals between the trees. But in addition some of these fungi can still degrade stone to make minerals accessible to the plants. There was a study where they found nano holes in forest sand particles that are consistent with the dimensions of mycelia. No direct observation yet that in know of, but the pathways exist so it’s “worth further study” as they say.
Biological weathering of rock, as in lichen, was critical to how plants got a foothold on land.
I think we’ll find that it was also critical to the development of mega flora, and that fungi and trees are a case of coevolution, where the fungi take a less overt role in the partnership.
Which might be interesting but not exactly as evocative as implied.
Throw in a turtle invasion and a time traveling plumber, and you've got yourself a movie.
> Before 2005, fossil findings indicated that grasses evolved around 55 million years ago. Finds of grass-like phytoliths in Cretaceous dinosaur coprolites from the latest Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) aged Lameta Formation of India have pushed this date back to 66 million years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae
For reference, dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.