shiels
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How afraid are you and what are you doing about it? @thirdform
Climate change and death of the earth
- Thread starter shiels
- Start date
sus
Moderator
Most likely? A non-trivial part of the global south will see dangerous disruption, basically everyone on this board will be fine and largely unimpacted, by 2100 most of the effects will be managed and stabilized through climate engineering, and in a thousand years it'll be a blip in humanity's history—as forgotten as the little Ice Age that hit Europe from the 14th to 19th centuries
sus
Moderator
It's possible that the hysteria/panic I see among in a lot of 20-somethings (including siblings, good friends) helps catalyzes... I dunno, international response? Is plausibly upstream of political changes? It also seems like that hysteria brings a lot of negative knock-on effects for the memetic hosts. I'm not willing to claim it causes mental illness but I think it all creates an ambient stress that a lot of people are sensitive to. Maybe comparable to living under the bomb in Cold War?
sus
Moderator
The general trend of technological advance outpacing our ability to coordinate/adapt/manage it worries me far more than climate change in particular. Global warming and nuclear armageddon are connected insofar as their the result of man's power growing. Biotech and bio-engineering and bio-terrorism this century could be a bloodbath. It's possible that a foreign actor is behind the fentanyl epidemic, and our ability to synthesize narcotics is improving. We might see some really ugly homegrown stuff pop up. I'm not apocalyptic about AI, I don't think we're as far down the road to AGI as many claim, but there's a non-zero chance that it becomes a similar sort of danger—bad actors being able to affordably do real damage, and set adversarial super-intelligences on the world.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Leaving aside the ethics of saying "Well yeah, people in Africa, India and South America are fucked but everyone here, in proper countries, will be OK", do you not think hundreds of millions of climate refugees trying to get into our proper countries might have some kind of impact?
luka
Well-known member
politics are already geared towards this eventuality. Gus is a |Californian Utopian.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Irony being that California is ecologically fucked as it is and is only going to get worse.
sus
Moderator
Posture harder.
sus
Moderator
The title of this thread is "death of the earth" and a massive proportion of Western educated liberals think that's what's happening right now. It's not; there's not a shred of science that indicates anything like that; there have been far more dramatic and fatal changes to Earth's atmosphere several times in earth's history; and it's laughable that libs who posture and crow over "listening to the science" are just as distant from scientific projections as their conservative strawmen.
I'd like for this board's discursive waterline to be a head above your average London lib-arts yuppy flat. If you're gonna have a whole prissy fit over my wording, and use it as an attempt to virtue-signal-dunk for a webforum fifteen weirdos large, then clearly we've got a long way to go.
I'd like for this board's discursive waterline to be a head above your average London lib-arts yuppy flat. If you're gonna have a whole prissy fit over my wording, and use it as an attempt to virtue-signal-dunk for a webforum fifteen weirdos large, then clearly we've got a long way to go.
sus
Moderator
One thing people don't know is that on about half the continents, definitely including North America, I believe including Europe and def in the UK, speciation is moving faster than extinction. We're trending to more species and more biodiversity rather than less.
Chris D. Thomas's Inheritors of the Earth is a fantastic read on (1) the rapid adaptation and hybridization we're seeing in response to the Anthropocene (2) how many extinction forecasts are less dire than they're made out to be (3) the problems with an environmental movement that wants to freeze some "pristine" natural state.
Chris D. Thomas's Inheritors of the Earth is a fantastic read on (1) the rapid adaptation and hybridization we're seeing in response to the Anthropocene (2) how many extinction forecasts are less dire than they're made out to be (3) the problems with an environmental movement that wants to freeze some "pristine" natural state.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
We've done the whole "what use are polar bears really, when you get down to it?" argument to death, I think, so I'm not taking the bait here.
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droid
Well-known member
Gus here is a fascinating case study in how seemingly intelligent individuals can be catastrophically wrong about literally everything.
To take just one example:
It is true that there have been many dramatic and disastrous changes in Earth's atmosphere, but other than rapid catastrophic events such as asteroid impacts, none have been as fast as anthropogenic global warming. The Great Oxidation Event took about 200 million years, the Late Ordovician mass extinction took about 1.4-3 million years. Most relevant perhaps is the End-Permian extinction event which was probably caused by natural carbon burns and volcanic eruption, resulting in feedback loops and rapid methane clathrate release and a 8-10 degree increase in warming. This took place over around 100,000 years and killed 90% of life on earth.
Modern industrial civilisation is currently emitting carbon at many times the rate of the End Permian.
To take just one example:
It is true that there have been many dramatic and disastrous changes in Earth's atmosphere, but other than rapid catastrophic events such as asteroid impacts, none have been as fast as anthropogenic global warming. The Great Oxidation Event took about 200 million years, the Late Ordovician mass extinction took about 1.4-3 million years. Most relevant perhaps is the End-Permian extinction event which was probably caused by natural carbon burns and volcanic eruption, resulting in feedback loops and rapid methane clathrate release and a 8-10 degree increase in warming. This took place over around 100,000 years and killed 90% of life on earth.
Modern industrial civilisation is currently emitting carbon at many times the rate of the End Permian.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
You got schooled, again
Take it with a degree of grace for once, instead of distraction/screening attempts at obfuscating your ignorance like a child might
Something something London libs (Londy to you, *shakes head), overall fantastic word play exhibited, looking forward to more
Take it with a degree of grace for once, instead of distraction/screening attempts at obfuscating your ignorance like a child might
Something something London libs (Londy to you, *shakes head), overall fantastic word play exhibited, looking forward to more
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
sus
Moderator
Couldn't have described my experience of the board better