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...
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.
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.
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).