The Earth is getting greener
vox.com
vox.com
> So, yes, greening is complicated. It’s not inherently good. Sometimes it’s very bad. Context, it turns out, matters a lot.
The tone suggests they're afraid of the change, but the article can't articulate why since the reason for the change and result are both possibly good and bad, but we don't really know yet.
The NASA MODIS project is ongoing and produces data that people are using to measure "greenness" (which the article indirectly cites) and has been going for 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderate_Resolution_Imaging_Sp... - it's definitely an interesting dataset.
Didan seems to be leading the vegetation research for MODIS and the data set has been cited thousands of times (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TxQK6U8AAAAJ&hl=en...)
Must an observation have an easily digestible value judgement and tell you how you should think about it, or can it just be allowed to present the facts and list the pros and cons.
which one do you think leads to a healthier media environment
Did you yourself not also include a portion of your comment to respond to article based on its data with your own "it depends" based on other data?
> The tone suggests they're afraid of the change
What do you think they lay person would immediately think about 'the earth is greening' and would it be appropriate to address those initial perceptions.
the article offers multiple possible explanations for this and what their effects might be. it acknowledges those derivative outcomes are speculative.
Not once is a greening planet painted in a positive light in this article. Its as if the writer is afraid to say something positive about CO2 emissions.
This was done by the natural processes of the Earth, so recently even humans were alive during the Ice Age. Some scientists even say that we are due for another ice age, that we may be otherwise avoiding due to climate change.
Which is a quantitative statement. Altered conditions will not benefit every local species equally.
> Context matters
Hmm, apparently the answer depends!!!
What I believe is "healthier", e.g., for (1) my being informed or (2) click-bait headlines, eyeballs, ad revenue????
But, now, for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
there is a possibility, that is, from some changes from the Internet:
First, the basic ideas of click-bait, etc. go way back in the history of many decades of journalism publishers. They needed a lot of revenue: Printing plants, trucks to deliver literally tons of news print or magazines, ..., radio and TV studios, etc. were expensive. The number of publishers was constrained: Each major city had just two main newspapers, morning and evening. There were a few national magazines. Then, the number of large radio stations, TV stations, were similarly limited. Un, click-bait that works in one major city stands to work everywhere which creates the constraints on the number of national click-bait publishers.
> easily digestible value judgment and tell you how you should think
Well put. For the big publishers, that is what dominated.
For a good review and explanation going way back, see the ~1941 movie Meet John Doe.
Second, now the decades, 100+ years, of such journalism is also being attempted on the Web sites of the Internet -- thus, your well put objection.
BUT ...!!!! For an audience and a publisher for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
they no longer need be so expensive. A single tower case computer can send, what, 100+ Web pages a second?
Sooo, now the mass audience can have subsets.
Some simple arithmetic:
Assume 1 ad per Web page sent, revenue of $1 per 1000 ads displayed, sending a 24 x 7 average of 50 Web pages a second. Assume pre-tax earnings are 50% of revenue.
Then annual earnings would be
50 * 3600 * 24 * 265 / ( 1000 * 2 ) = 572,400
dollars.
Assume the business is worth 100 times annual earnings, and get
100 * 50 * 3600 * 24 * 265 / ( 1000 * 2 ) = 57,240,000
dollars.
A possibility for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
is the economy: A lot of data is available. Could present it in largely some simple X-Y graphs can do routinely with, say, Excel in Microsoft's Office.
Another possibility: For COVID, start with the crucial data in the report of the Phase III trials in
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389
COVID and medicine more generally are good subjects for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
Follow, say, common high school standards for term papers, e.g., careful references, hopefully to credible primary sources.
Get an audience that values credibility.
Then get a brand, a growing audience, and a successful business.
Hmm, yup, I have a related startup -- Web site code running as intended. Should go live this year.
If they had taken enough math to understand chaotic dynamic systems, they would need be as anxious as I am. It's less that I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, although there are definitely things that we are certain of, like riskier hurricanes.
What keeps me up at night is that farmers have no idea what the next season will look like because we have altered the conditions of the function of climate, and therefore will enter a new state. We do not know where it will land and what it will look like getting there, and that very likely means reduction in food production.
Sometimes fear is justified.
I tried drinking copiously but eventually my insides started hurting. So I don't know either.
Not just accepting that it's 72 out and that it's nice, nothing to see here, move along.
Like you said, people aren't stupid and should be a bit more conscious of the actual implications of this.
I think what you're describing is actually denial because facing the reality is scary at first.
Also 40 Celsius is the new 30 in the past 15 years. This didn’t happen since we measure temperature. And 10 degrees are a lot, and the change happened in a decade.
Also summer wind patterns completely changed in the past 5 years, due to the weakening currents in Atlantic Ocean. This is something which is also highly unusual the past millennia. We know this for sure, because all of our towns were built wind from West in mind. We have wind from that direction less and less.
This is way over normal variation.
But looking at other examples, for example Norway. Thawing permafrost bogs are not something which can be explained by normal variation.
To me personally the loss of the seasons is one of the most tragic things I've witnessed.We've had 1/10th of the snow we usually have, it's almost all melted already and everything looks kind of depressing. But I know the lack of snow melt will have an impact on farming too, all this for for what? So resources companies were able to profit a bit more?
In Kyoto, Japan last year year, which is famous for the "red leaves" in Autumn which attracts huge swathes of tourists, had no red leaves. To me the loss of the beautiful spectacle is one thing, like, but also concerning as you said, we've tipped some type of scales but who knows how far...maybe it will be ok, maybe it won't.
I'm working out how to grow food hydroponically because I'm concerned food prices will just keep getting more expensive as this worsens and don't want to be left relying on "global trade" for my sustenance.
I'm no scientist, but I believe the current ecological disaster effecting the UK's largest lake may be an example of the type of bad outcome we could expect to see more of.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/19/like-the...
It appears that a large algal bloom might be the immediate cause. Apparently algal blooms benefit from higher CO2 levels.
https://www.epa.gov/nutrientpollution/climate-change-and-har...
I can't find it now, but I do remember reading some theory that previous extinction events on earth were driven by large amounts of organic matter breaking down anaerobically (i.e. underwater) which leads to a huge increase in some pretty nasty gases in the atmosphere. There have (apparently) even been times when some of the world's oceans were effectively large swamps.
Edit: My mistake, I didn't read about what I mentioned in that last paragraph - I heard it on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eM1aakTzMw
To give the general gist of what's covered in the above video/interview with paleobiologist Peter Ward:
03:00 - We need a little bit of CO2, but it’s easy to have too much CO2
04:20 - Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (co-written with Dan Brownlee)
04:40 - Excessive heat and mortality
05:12 - Volcanic activity responsible for past CO2 spikes
05:40 - Previous mass extinctions
05:57 - Non-animal mass extinctions
07:18 - Uneven atmospheric heating
and much more...
Well worth a listen if you have the time.
"we apply the CO₂ fertilization effect... backwards to 1940, and, assuming no other limiting factors, find that CO₂ was the dominant driver of yield growth
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29320/w293...
Pretty much every agriculture advancement since the tractor and other machinery has been getting around the limiting factors of plant growth.
"Increasing CO2 has driven global greening: over the last 40 years, half of the world’s vegetated area has undergone greening, of which 70% is attributed to elevated CO2 (Zhu et al. 2016)"
Seems this whole thing got rather confused.
That association has broken in the modern era:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268083/countries-with-th...
These are countries that are not limited by starvation, with plummeting populations.
The issue for humans isn't the "amount of green", it's high quality crop yields.
Increasing CO2 increases plant growth, but also lowers nutritional value.
https://cupblog.org/2023/04/06/the-truth-about-rising-co2-an...
We've got a long, long, long way to go before half the world is starving to death.
We produce ~77 million tonnes of beef, using (at the 1:25 ratio) 1925 million tonnes of feed.
Africa currently imports most of it's grains, let's take a generous estimate of ~75 million tonnes of grain. Add another 25 million tonnes for their local production.
And we're still off by a factor of 19x.
Food production capacity is a non-issue. Availability to the people who need it is the real problem, and that is primarily about our willingness to aid those who need it and make some personal sacrifices for the greater good.
I wish people who say that would actually live in the overpopulated regions of the world for just 1 month.
People need to stop dragging 19th century nonsense into a globalized economy. Regional carrying capacity is certainly a thing, but the primary constraint in most areas today isn't food (which is, after all, rather easy to ship and process) but water. Anyway, you can apply the same reasoning to migration as I did to food. It's just not really an issue outside of political utility. The US alone could support literally billions of people if we gave a shit about anything other than money.
Tokyo? Seoul? Manhattan? London? Paris? All very dense. Also very economically efficient. All have great metro systems, so it is easy to move around.
Of the top ten on that list, at least 5 would be considered desirable places to live by most people. If the criterion is "better than most other countries in the region", it's more like 9 out of 10 (Gaza Strip is pretty bad).
By contrast, many of the lesser-populated regions/countries are considered to be horrible places to live. As I scan down the list, it looks like there is only a very weak correlation, at best, between population density and "would I want to live there".
Obviously, your mileage is going to vary. Nonetheless, I bet you'd rather move to The Netherlands (#33) than Afghanistan (#153).
The Earth has been far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations in its past and it was fine, but there were no humans then. It’s also been in an ice age fairly recently, but there was little civilization as far as we know and far fewer humans.
Environmental concerns are selfish. They’re about protecting our civilization and our quality of life. The Earth and its ecosystem will change and adapt as usual, but that doesn’t mean we will.
The biggest dangers I see from CO2 are ocean acidification leading to the collapse of ocean ecosystems that feed us, and insane heat waves causing crop failures or even deadly temperatures. Look up “wet bulb temperature limit.” There are heat conditions under which humans die without shelter and unlike cold you can’t fix it by bundling up and using simple tech. I could see heat waves where people without A/C die.
A good framing would also draw a link to fiscal responsibility. A renewable sustainable civilization is paying its bills fully. Fossil fuels and other non renewable processes are putting it on a credit card, and one with an unknown interest rate. Eventually you can’t do that anymore and the interest comes due. Right now humanity is still putting something like 75% of its primary energy use on credit.
The worst framing is the anti-human framing you see from radical greens or films like Avatar. If you really hate humans the logical thing would be to do nothing and let us crap where we eat until we render our environment inhospitable to us. If humans are the problem the activists should go home.
A good analogy with an under the table jab really. The worst of the ultra green policies are absolutely murder for financial responsibility.
There is no winning with the current “debate”, and double so with current “solutions”.
In some way, one animal causing the extinction of others extracting resources and changing the environment is as long as evolutionary biology itself. This is what all animals do. We're just doing it at a much bigger scale.
But I suppose it really depends on what you mean by the Earth being "fine" in the end. Obviously, as a large chunk of iron, silicates, oxygen, carbon, et al, the Earth will continue its journey through space for a long time to come. Some forms of life will certainly persist for a few hundred million years until such time as it becomes uninhabitable due to stellar evolution. But if we humans are to wreak our own destruction, we will be far from the first species we remove from this Earth; we've already set about a mass extinction that will register in the geographic record.
No worries, you did in fact read me correctly. I don't really think moral obligations exist at all, and I don't think anything has moral "authority" over anything else either. In my opinion we are all just acting on our own desires regarding ourselves and the state of the world in general, and any appeals to sacred ideas or abstract concepts or moral authorities or moral obligations is just an attempt to project our own desires out onto the world so we can pretend they are objective, to hide from ourselves the fact that everything we do and want is ultimately equally arbitrary and without justification or legitimation. E.g., I'm a moral nihilist, not even a moral relativist. So for me, it would be fine for environmentalists to say that they want to fight for environmental causes because they want to preserve humanity's standard of living and well-being, or because they want the environment to look and be treated a certain way because that's simply how they desire it and it makes them happy — and many environmentalists do phrase things in that way in which case I don't have a problem with them — but it annoys me when they try to project their desires outwards and pretend like they are objective.
> But I suppose it really depends on what you mean by the Earth being "fine" in the end. Obviously, as a large chunk of iron, silicates, oxygen, carbon, et al, the Earth will continue its journey through space for a long time to come. Some forms of life will certainly persist for a few hundred million years until such time as it becomes uninhabitable due to stellar evolution. But if we humans are to wreak our own destruction, we will be far from the first species we remove from this Earth; we've already set about a mass extinction that will register in the geographic record.
This is certainly a very fair point, and a good response to what I was saying! However, I think the thing we have to remember is that mass extinctions have happened before, so if humanity wipes itself out and takes a huge amount of species with it, that's still well within the range of things the Earth has experienced before, even if it is happening faster than it would usually have done. After all, the actions of humans themselves are actions that are part of nature, and so we can consider ourselves fucking up the environment and extincting ourselves and a bunch of other animals as part of a natural cycle of adaptation just like any other species over hunting and starving itself to extinction or something. We just weren't fit to survive, in that case. Furthermore, independent of how we define earth being fine, I do think my point about moral obligations still stands from my perspective. I don't want people to stop caring about the environment, and I'll support that care, and honestly if some people even really want to enforce their Christian ideas of purity and virginity onto the environment then very well — they can continue fighting for that, and I'll just simply ignore them, but at least be truthful!
At least a tiny glimpse of morality, or would you name it differently?
Nobody can prove that there is. Lots of people have faith in a higher power of some kind, or objective morality. Nobody can provide scientific evidence for it. Far as a I can tell, natural is amoral and doesn't care. And humans have never agreed as a whole on what that something greater is.
Some people are definitely weird about it. Others just enjoy fish, or snow, or living without paying for AC. I'd argue it's pretty illogical to equate these, and outright dishonest to dismiss the latter due to the former.
The statements: "we're hurting Mother Earth" and "hot rocks are still rocks" are both true and both useless, and dogmatic adherence to either can be shortsighted.
I consider myself very much on the side of "environmental protection", but it's always been clear to me that our goal is protect humanity, and secondarily, other animal species (and that means protecting the plant species). Why else would we be doing this? I don't think anyone is pretending otherwise other than a few fringe people (there are always some fringe people no matter which way you look).
Of course what people mean when they warn about the destruction of the earth is that it is going to have profound and unpleasant effects on the climate system, which in turn affects which parts of the world are favorable to human and animal life. Those changes will cause large scale economic changes, population dislocations, and thus political stability.
That's overstating it.
Yes, life will go on. But it's not only us that will die - as you say, much of the marine ecosystem will die off, we're not the only animal that has problems with wet bulb temperature (most don't even sweat), and humanity isn't going to die of starvation before we make everything remotely edible out there extinct first.
Life is going to look extremely different, it's not just us.
"~90% of species are fucked": it's not the magnitude of the change, it's the speed. The climate is changing on a decades-long time scale, and that's too fast for most species and ecosystems to adapt.
The corollary there is that ~10% of species will be fine, and thrive. Like every mass extinction event the world will look a lot different pre and post-extinction but it will "survive".
Humans aren't fucked. We had pre-industrial humans living in both the Arctic and the Sahara. We adapt the environment to us, and we migrate quickly. If we destroy the environment we can grow food in greenhouses. It'll be crazy expensive, but we'll survive. The speed at which India is currently adopting A/C shows how all but the bottom billion of humans are already adapting to climate change. The bottom billion is fucked, unless the top billion stops whining and starts doing something.
The status quo is fucked. We're a bunch of spoiled brats that think 10% inflation and the end of the world are calamities of similar magnitude. If you want to get a good handle on what true hardship is like, talk to a refugee or a member of the greatest generation. (Do it quick, that means somebody ~100 years old).
Is civilization fucked? It depends on how well it adapts, and what your definition of "fucked" is. (see above).
OTOH your comment does apply to the second billion. There's no energy cheaper than solar power, and solar powered air conditioning is a great supply/demand match.
The most vocal whiners I know still drive a giant 4Runner and get new skis every year.
> We're a bunch of spoiled brats that think 10% inflation and the end of the world are calamities of similar magnitude.
What's the point of this statement? What solution are you suggesting that will directly lead to inflation? Reduced employment? Carbon taxes?
> fucked. fucked. fucked?
Lay off the John Oliver.
Carbon taxes, yes.
> > fucked. fucked. fucked?
> Lay off the John Oliver.
Just echoing the tone of the comment I'm replying to. And they were going Carlin, not Oliver.
This is stating the obvious. Of course we're concerned with our own survival and being able to live comfortably in it. I don't see much of a problem them.
As far as the ecosystem adapting, yeah, eventually, but at the cost of thousands/millions of species, as in the previous extinction events.
I don't see how this comment connects with what you're writing in your own comment. How is it selfish to want to avoid needlessly suffering, as you're describing yourself ("heat waves where people without A/C die")?
Obviously the earth as a habitable planet will be fine in the long run, and some people have said some exaggerated, even hysterical, things about this. But that doesn't mean the concerns aren't valid. And everything will be fine "in the long run", so it's also one of those discussion-stopper arguments you can apply to almost everything.
GP's point is more about intellectual honesty, but there's also a pragmatic bent to it. Many of the people who most reject climate change interventionism might be swayed by a line of argumentation that goes "You care more about the economy than the environment? You won't have an economy if the environment is disturbed enough."
There are self-reinforcing loops of climate change that can cause runaway warming.
The IPCC maintains that a runaway greenhouse effect which turns the earth into say Venus has basically nil chance of being caused by humans:
I think the whole environmental movement have/had no power against the whole industry movement, and the "save the earth" call was the only accepted by the dominant class (aka industry and its leaders). Also Mr. Nobody don't wanted to give up his car, his investments, and his overall lifestyle for some pessimist hippies that love trees or scientist that don't know the real world.
Things are changing because of a single reason: industry and economy is affected a little bit by the climate change.
I think this is somewhat plausible, since the "winter side" of a wood ring is the harder bit and the ratio of hard to soft wood may change due to increased summer growth.
Iceland is the prime example of a place, which lost its trees a bit - and then lost its trees for real, as a consequence. That is, because of wind erosion after humans started cutting down most of the island's forests for lumber.
Thanks, for coming to my TED talk.
There are a lot of "greener" things, the article talks only about a few of them, and some particular consequences. For example, greening in northern regions because losing permafrost is not positive, and lowering albedo (compared with not so dark colours) also increases warming. It is not something even across the whole planet or land regions, it may or not lead to sustainable CO2 level reductions, and when depleted water sources falls down, it could lead to more emissions.
It should be part of a bigger and complex process that is happening, it might slow down some bad trends in some particular regions, but the whole picture matters, and the trends of the big problem seem to not be affected, or at least seem to keep going strong(er) in the same bad direction.
Also check out “Explored” and “Spirit of ‘76” before it, just because they’re cool :)
There's little doubt that the planet is heading back to Pliocene conditions at a steady clip, and of course life was abundant back then - indeed without fossil fuels the planet would be on a steady cooling trend back to another ice age (it would take some 70,000 years though to reach another ice age maximum), so if you want to celebrate that achievement, go ahead - but note, you don't want to overshoot the target so immediate elimination of fossil fuel combustion as an energy source is the only rational conclusion.
Here's a paper on the issue of how to link satellite color data to photosynthetic production, see Figs 5 / 6/ 7 for estimates of very moderate increases from 1982-2017 (satellite collection only began c.1982) across the northern hemisphere (but steep declines in the Amazon):
"Improved estimate of global gross primary production for reproducing its long-term variation, 1982–2017", Zheng et. al 2020
Atmospheric CO2 accumulation increased from ~1.5 to ~2.5 ppm/year over that period, coinciding with a rough doubling in global fossil fuel consumption since 1980 (plus a lot of nitrogen fertilizers), along with a +0.2C per decade (5yr running avg) temperature increase.
Question about this: where does the extra carbon it emits come from? Is it already in the land beforehand?
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acd5e8
It’s a one-off trick that would buy us some time (assuming we can implement it).
I think it's rather beautiful that the earth is compensating and creating a reversing effect. It's like a scab over a wound to give us time to heal it.
For example, the permafrost thawing leads to a lot more greenery, but it would require willful ignorance to see this as a positive thing.
It's pretty much the same as the legion of people who say "the climate has always been changing", without looking at it in context (though a simplified graphic, which Randall probides here https://xkcd.com/1732/ should theoretically be able to show the problem to anyone willing to listen).
Even if you ignore the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climat..., you must realise that climate change has already led to the extinction of a huge number of animal species, and that less biodiversity can lead to lasting problems in ecosystems, that take millennial to stabilise to a new equilibrium.
Not to mention the fact that it's kind of insane to kill of an absurd number of species, destroy a shitload of habitats, and then say "don't worry, some day this will be balanced again". Even if it did, that does not make it okay. If you say to someone "don't worry, your nose will heal" that doesn't mean it's acceptable for you to hit that person in the face.
Alternatively and hopefully, we're wrong in our predictions and the earth will do something we don't expect.
Where the statements are coming from makes a huge difference in their reception.
“The earth is greening” is a popular argument from climate change deniers as “proof” that we’re not currently living in a catastrophic upset of species diversity (we measurably are).
The problem with “the earth is greening” is that, while it is true that the earth is green for longer, and that the brown is around for less time, this is measurably not a good thing, and it also completely ignores that desertification is also measurably occurring at staggering rates.
The green parts are more green than brown, but they’re also shrinking. Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency.
So be a "good person" and you can tell any "jokes" you like. Happy Black History Month!
“Getting away with it” for bigoted jokes has a lot of nuance and context sensitivity.
For comedians including bigoted jokes in their set, it’s usually surrounded with self deprecation, self awareness, not the whole set, and is extremely careful about how they go about crossing the line, they know that they crossed a line and bring it back.
This is contrary to bigoted people telling bigoted “jokes”. It’s usually their whole set. They keep the set over the line. There’s no self reflection. It is bigotry coming from a place of bigotry.
I know that you on the alt-right tend to lack the capability to process nuance, and that you’re going to completely latch on to that single byte. So further explanation of why there’s a difference means nothing to you, but hopefully others see that being able to get away with a bigoted joke now and again is absolutely not the same thing as it “being okay”.
One of his oft repeated ideas is: "Why should you believe what some guy on youtube is saying about climate change? You shouldn't! But if an idiot like me (potholer54) can read and understand the source material, you can too." Not only does he provide sources, he is very good about following up when people point out mistakes in his videos.
Anyway, here is a two parter where he responds to the attitude that CO2 is good for plant growth and so it is good for us.
Part 1: https://youtu.be/ZqA4bDVmBB8?si=TjwFJFR4QzFCXfGR Part 2: https://youtu.be/VJoijPh2i-A?si=wUc0gfnQynZXWdHJ
One of the key points is that yes: if you hold everything else equal and increase CO2, it does increase plant growth -- but in the real world, climate change isn't just increasing CO2, it affects temperatures and rainfall too. Also, some plants use "C3" photosynthesis and benefit significantly from increasing CO2 while "C4" photosynthesis crops (like corn) don't. But there is a lot more in there.
The fact that nuances make it good for some plants, for some people, is true and there for those who want details. The problem is that mitigating details are often used to rebut the first order problem. As the brilliant marketing people in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes put it, “giant tomatoes mean bigger pizzas!”
But overall the picture is bad. There are regions where things will benefit, and climate research has said so for decades. But overall this rate of change is going to have bad long term consequences for the biosphere (including humans).
a) CO2 levels have been below 200PPM for millions of years, and life on the planet was fine.
b) Over 140 million years, CO2 has been dropping 0.00001 ppm/year. We are adding 2 PPM/year now, 200,000x faster. This rate of change is unprecedented.
> For decades, about half of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that human activities have emitted to the atmosphere has been taken up by natural carbon sinks in vegetation, soils and oceans. [...] On land, it is mainly the vegetation that captures CO2 from the atmosphere through plant photosynthesis, which ultimately accumulates both in vegetation and soils. As more CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, plant carbon capture increases through the CO2 fertilization effect in regions where plant growth is not limited by, for instance, nutrient availability. Climate change affects the processes responsible for the uptake and release of CO2 on land in multiple ways. Land CO2 uptake is generally increased by longer growing seasons due to global warming in cold regions and by nitrogen deposition in nitrogen-limited regions.
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/faqs/IPCC_AR6_W...
First, to frame carbon dioxide as "a pollutant but also a fertilizer" is, it's fucking incredulous. You are made of carbon dioxide and water. You can classify it as a pollutant when it has negative impacts, but that is what is secondary on this planet. Are they being disingenuous, or do they expect that their readership is naive to this fact?
Then, to frame the obvious consequence of increased carbon dioxide being a greener world as potentially bad, and those negatives are things like ecosystem destruction, lack of biodiversity, that the plants decompose eventually (not a consideration when you're talking about greening in aggregate), runoff... I thought the big giant problem we need to be solving is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Will they address the negative impact of ocean greening, a far more consequential increase in biomass with regard to climate that they mention but don't address? Is there one?
All I see is a good thing dressed up as a bad thing because can't have good things happen to the planet as a result of human beings, ever.
Panic --> Clickbait --> Ads --> Money
She should consider getting checked for dementia.
"'Everything is on fire, but at least this guy is not cold anymore!'; Cool, at least somebody is saying the truth, not everything is black".
There's no middle. There are projections, and there are what we are already seeing.
Of course reality is complex. Of course increasing CO2 levels might have some benefits. But there's no way, all things considered, it's a net benefit overall. Why would you need to point out that look, there are benefits? It doesn't matter. We still need to fix this and for that, we need more concern about climate change, not less (and above all, the relevant people to be concerned).
All this assuming that the planet going greener is a good thing at all. The second sentence of the linked article is literally "Scientists are worried".
This seems like a very dogmatic statement to make. Especially when weighed with benefits of cheap energy and economic growth. A wealthier world can build the infrastructure to handle potentially negative effects of climate change.
The more extreme environmentalists and marxists say we should be engaging in degrowth, which would just result in a kind of feudal and static society, even more vulnerable to climate change. It should also be noted that the Little Ice Age in Europe was associated with scarcity and famine, while the Roman Warm Period was associated with golden ages of several civilizations across the world.
> This seems like a very dogmatic statement to make
Do you think climate change could have a net benefit? I don't think that thinking that's false is dogmatic.
It's too late for "we'll manage". Time to go for "We need to manage now" because...
> A wealthier world can build the infrastructure to handle potentially negative effects of climate change.
... has not happened. The wealthy civilization needs to want it and make it a priority now.
Anyway, I'm replying to someone who speaks about potentially negative effects of climate change. Wake up! It's not "potentially" anymore, it's already started!
"Technology will save us" is a tired trope at this point.
A wealthier world building the infrastructure to handle the negative effects does not look how you think it does. It doesn't look like a unified concerted effort to hold back the tide in a figurative sense. It looks like communities that live on shorelines building levees, to hold back the tide in a literal sense. What you want and what need to be done are not the same things. You can't say we have failed just because the solution isn't what you wish it were. The world is changing and people will manage.
Always? Really?
Please, list all the advantages and nuance for leaded gasoline, paint, and other uses of lead. Or maybe all the nuanced advantageous effects that asbestos has on your lungs?
And if we move beyond environmental issues things get even more ridiculous, but let's not get too side-tracked.
Leaded paint was better than non-leaded paint. Leaded solder also. Asbestos was the wonder material.
Yes, the negatives outweighed the positives. But the truth was absolutely in the middle in these cases.
The materials were great. The unintended/unexpected side effects were bad.
Leaded gasoline, leaded paint, leaded solder, and asbestos are all still used today where the conditions are suitable, because the material is superior for the application.