Toddler throwing a tantrum? Your being way to generous - Monkey with a machine-gun
I hear you. Just don’t try to get into PEI at the moment. They are checking everyone who crosses the bridge and even turning back Canadians who don’t live on the Island…
Well, no. Not that PEI isn’t pretty strict about who gets in and since they’re an island with only three points of entry, they do pretty good at it. But the Maritimes have ‘bubbled’ so, as long as you can prove you live in one of the four Maritime provinces you can go to PEI (and Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, and Newfoundland/Labrador)
What’s that old saying? When America farts, Canada smells it first?
Okay, I made that up, but you get the drift.
If we think coronavirus is bad, well, it is. But it’s not nearly as bad as the ecological hell that we’re about to be confronted with.
No shit: we’re quite literally recreating a lot of the same conditions that led to the Permian Extinction. Long before that kind of self-induced mass extinction even becomes a possibility, we will see major metropolises like Las Vegas or Phoenix run out of water. They’ll probably have a few months of warning.
The possibility of real scarcity will play right into the hands of all kinds of brutal ideology.
All of these nightmare scenarios aside, there’s still a chance we can undo this. But we have to replace the worst traits of individualistic capitalism with collectivist capitalism. We have to do this before people become so desperate that they beg for a ruthless strongman or radical cult figure.
In significantly hotter times than we have now or reasonably expect from global warming, life on Earth was utterly thriving. Oceans and shallow seas teeming with giant fish, marine reptiles and shelfish. Lush forests from pole to pole filled with giants like nothing in the world today. Life on today’s half-frozen Earth is pale and empoverished in comparison to the hotter past.
This is pretty much what I was planning to say after the very first post. I think the current pandemic is a fast motion look at what is going to be the slow motion disaster of climate change over the next century (or less). Not merely denial of graphs and sciencey stuff, but Black Knight level denials of observable reality. “The entire East coast is under water.” “Tis but a scratch.”
I think much of the denial over climate change and Covid-19 is really wishful thinking. If I wish really hard it isn’t real, and if I act like it isn’t real, then it will go away. Kind of like reverse prosperity gospel. I’m not going to wear a mask because I really, really want to live in a world where I don’t need to wear one. I’m not going to cut fossil fuel usage, because I really, really wish I lived in a world where I could use as much as I want without it mattering to the environment.
You know what gives me pause about this whole discussion? The idea that, for way too much of the world’s population, there really never was a time of actually having hope for the future, or at least never a time when a desperate struggle for survival wasn’t the predominant emotion,
It’s sort of like me realizing how naive I was when I thought the 90’s was this time of relative racial harmony (major riots aside). Maybe it was, relatively, but things were still pretty crappy on that front then; I just didn’t know it.
Though it does bother me a bit; I know everyone here is just venting, but as I’ve expressed elsewhere, fatalism just sounds to my ears like an excuse to not do, hope for, or achieve anything, and that “offends” (in quotes, because I’m not sure it’s the right word) me on a visceral, instinctual level. Which is weird to me, considering my usual mindsets and deeds, but there it is. Maybe it has something to do with the mindset that gets meat eaters so defensive?
Anyway, world sucks, I wanna die, woo hoo.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. An uncharitable interpretation would take this to be some kind of denialist blather. A routine denialist talking point is to ask why anyone would think there is some “ideal” average temperature for the earth, and why wouldn’t a warmer earth actually be more conducive to life.
The answer is that the ideal temperature, and the distribution of climate systems around the world, is precisely the temperature and distribution to which life has adapted over millions of years. The trouble with global warming is not the warmer temperature in itself, but the fact that the rate of change is so extraordinarily and unnaturally rapid that it greatly exceeds the ability for life to adapt, and at the same time is destabilizing and permanently changing global climate systems, which is already leading to great losses of diversity, extreme weather, and the possibility of global mass extinctions in an ecosystem in which all living things are intricately inter-dependent.
The article you linked talks about a sudden and brief cold snap during the Cretaceous period, 145 to 66 million years ago. This “brief cold snap” lasted just 6 million years over the nearly 80 million years of the Cretaceous. In comparison, most of the damage we have wrought on the climate and the acceleration of global warming has occurred over just the past 50 years. The climate is unforgiving and is beginning to react accordingly.
I’d like to join you, too, if I may. Though my preference would be a nice Cabernet or Pinot Noir. I bet those are heavenly over there, and free!
And speaking of free, it will also be a Trump-free zone. He and his cronies will all be in That Other Place. His pardons are worthless over there.
The point I’m trying to make here is comparing the projected global warming to the greatest mass extinction in the last 500 million years is eye-rollingly hyperbolic. The Earth has gone through multiple large swings in temperature in just the last few million years. Life as a whole will do just fine on a warmer Earth in the long run. It is the bloated population of sedentary humans that are going to be most inconvenienced. And–I can’t stress this enough–the more humans are killed as a result of global warming, the more better it will be for the rest of life on Earth. Species going extinct from global warming are dwarfed by the number going extinct by habitat destruction for human occupation and hunting/fishing. A 10-degree warmer planet with no humans would be vastly better for life on Earth than a current temp Earth infested with billions of us.
Both of those statements are arguably false, depending in how you define “eye-rollingly hyperbolic” and “large swings in temperature”.
There are certainly many experts who believe that we are already experiencing the sixth mass extinction in the last 500 million years:
As for “multiple large swings in temperature in just the last few million years”, the average global temperature change between ice age minima and interglacial maxima were not that much bigger than the temperature changes we may be forcing on the climate at more than 20 times the rate of warming at ice age terminations, where it took at least 5000 years or more for the average global temperature to rise 5°C; we may reach or exceed that by the end of the century. Furthermore, at no point in the past two million years have CO2 levels exceeded 300 ppm, and they more typically peaked at about 280 ppm, creating interglacial warm periods roughly every 100,000 years. We’ve managed to considerably exceed 400 ppm since the beginning of industrialization when it was around 280, most of that in just the past 50 years, and it continues to rise with alarming speed, putting unprecedented forcing on the climate system.
If your point, however, is that humans have been extremely damaging to the environment and to the earth’s ecosystem, and that habitat destruction has been a multi-faceted factor in that respect, then no argument there. An optimist would say that we still have the potential to use our brains and leverage technology to do much better than we have been, but alas, there is not much sign of that happening.
This morning I saw a thread titled something like, “Please explain the Martian Conspiracy to me”. It turns out it was about a comic, but for just a brief moment I thought there was another huge news event and I’d missed it.
Chances are, something will survive another mass extinction; chances are, it just won’t be us, and we’ll also take a lot of other species with us on our way out.
Yes, you’re correct that there were once dinosaurs and large ferns that thrived when the earth was much warmer. But those only came after the earth’s climate changed and wiped out massive numbers of other species.
Whether the next mass extinction event becomes as bad as the Permian event or something benign is known unknown. But what seems fairly evident is that species don’t do well when you radically transform their environment within a short time frame.
Unfortunately he’s only part of the problem. Removing him won’t get rid either of this pandemic or of the conditions that make us liable to have additional pandemics; nor will it fix the climate; nor will it get rid of prejudice; etcetera.
We need to get rid of him, because he’s standing in the way of doing anything to help, and is trying his best to push us down all the wrong paths. But just getting rid of him isn’t going to be anywhere near enough.
First, it’s necessary to decide what’s productivity and what’s destructiveness. Because an awful lot of what’s called “productivity” rests on destruction.
Yes. We need to watch out for the counsels of despair. We might be screwed even if we don’t despair; but we’re sure as hell screwed if we do.
Full disclosure: I don’t really like beer, except that first cold sip on a hot day… I’d prefer a G&T or a Jack Daniel’s and 7-Up. I’m pretty sure the bars and cellars of heaven are well-stocked. When the ice melts, it doesn’t water down the drink.
That is the BEST part!
If only.
In my next life I plan to be a large fern. Or, maybe later on in this life.
This - I think - is key.
I think fears of an apocalypse are overstated. Tho it is VERY likely that MANY aspects of life will become MUCH MORE challenging for MANY if not MOST/ALL people at some point in the reasonable near future, I’d still bet against human extinction - at least at any time over the next couple of centuries.
But tis should come as no surprise to any of us. What stage of the west’s society over - say - the past 200 years has been globally scaleable and sustainable? Consumption? Energy use? Environmental? Labor? Wealth distribution? And America has consistently led the way in terms of unsustainable practices. We are just nearing the point where our historical rapaciousness and greed are bumping up against global limits.
The question is - are humans capable of reining in their greed, and scaling back their preferences to more equitable and sustainable levels? I won’t hold my breath, but there is at least hope that future generations are more sensible than the past few.
Here’s an interesting and approachable explanation of the difference between historical global temperature “swings” and the current one: xkcd: Earth Temperature Timeline.
As Darren_Garrison says, the biosphere will survive in some form. Whether anything resembling 19th-21st Century human civilization survives is a very different question.
Under pressure humans have always done dumb short-sighted selfish stuff. In essence, being smarter, more generous, more Progressive, more long-sighted, etc., is a luxury available only to the well-off in relatively benign circumstances. Such is the cussedness of human nature.
That doesn’t alter the value of each of us working to make the future as good as it can be. But it does argue that we aren’t going to succeed at making it “good”. All we can do is make it less bad.
Consider for a minute the analogy of personal health and the jokey aphorism: “Eat well, exercise daily, die anyway.” We can read that as an argument to live on beer & potato chips while glued to netflix SDMB on the couch. Or as a call to action to live so as to maximize our health, not simply surrender to entropy.
If human life is to “mean anything” ISTM it’s that unlike the brute beasts, we’re not simply social critters who can mutually groom a la the other apes. We can actually think and actually decide and actually act beyond the end of our arm’s reach.
Be the change you want to see. It’s all each of us can do. It’s also something all of us can do.
Maybe. But the worst case scenario with global warming isn’t temperatures rising ten degrees and the entire Earth turning into Florida. The worst case scenario is temperatures rising three hundred degrees and the entire Earth turning into Venus.
LSLGuy - Be the change you want to see. It’s all each of us can do. It’s also something all of us can do.
We need to “Be the ball!”