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Up to one million species are on the verge of extinction, U.N. panel says

548 points by uptown 8y ago

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saleiva 8y ago
Here is the same story published in Nature (no paywall) - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4
- Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
  There seems to be no paywall in WSJ for this article from where I read (India).
devmunchies 8y ago
Is a globalized, industrial economy is still considered “progress”? I haven’t seen the stars in over a decade. We’ve lost so much. > We need to link it to human well-being, that’s the crucial thing. Otherwise we’re going to look like a bunch of tree-huggers God forbid someone thinks you love nature.
- crispinb 8y ago
  > I haven’t seen the stars in over a decade I'm planning to get up in the wee hours tomorrow to check out the Eta Acquarids. We have a magnificent night sky on clear nights here, but there's always a creeping edge of sadness knowing half the world's human population is denied it, and that the cool starlight falls on a dying planet. > God forbid someone thinks you love nature. Yes wouldn't that be terrible. I wish though we could ditch the word 'nature' (as if there could be anything else). Similarly with 'the environment' (as if we had another home).
- basetop 8y ago
  The biggest cause for environmental destruction and species loss is globalization, habitat destruction and consumption/production. The UN along with every major political and business international organization has been the pimps of globalization since ww2 ended. The idea that the UN cares about the environment is laughable to me since they want more globalization. The UN is run by the US, China, Russia, Britain and France ( the 5 permanent security council members ). It's an institution that cares about the environment as much as it cares about human rights. But I'm sure they'll use the environmental destruction they helped create to argue for more centralized control and power in the name of "human well-being".
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  The current forms of government we have in most countries seem to reward only economical success. Any attempts to tackle any environmental issues are invariantly watered down, postponed, or downright dismissed because enacting them has consequences for the electorate, and a large part of the electorate is willing to vote for parties or people that don't quite feel the urgency, or even downright deny the need to act. Slowly, very slowly, society as a whole, worldwide, may move towards greener choices (eat less meat, improve home insulation, fly less, waste less, recycle more, consume less), but it's not fast enough is it?
  - titzer 8y ago
    > The current forms of government It's not the form of government, it's not the form of society, it's a psychological vulnerability that has been exacerbated by the invention of agriculture, currency, paper money, and now digital money. It's about accumulation of goods as a hedge against future insecurity, when the irony is that the pursuit of the accumulation of goods and earthly wealth is exactly the thing that has given rise to constant change, from which insecurity arises. It's literally because we cannot collectively chill the fuck out. There's a game theoretic problem in that defectors from the "chill" have a leg up on the chillers and get more money, wealth, goods, social cred, sexual mates, etc. The more humans there are, the worse it all gets. And it will just go boom. Planet scale.
    - jlokier 8y ago
      I agree, and I think that was well articulated. Do you have any ideas for solving it?
      - titzer 8y ago
        Well, short of most humans becoming monks? :)
samdung 8y ago
Looks like HN has become a lucrative hunting ground for paying users for New York Times, Washington Post, and other news agencies. The number of paywalled articles hitting the front page is tmth.
- yupppppp 8y ago
  Yeah, HN is over. For a number of reasons, but mostly a combination of shit moderation, laughable karma manipulation and heavy eternal september/bot influx. Most of the voting is probably bots operating the ranking model. Most of the moderation is pretty ineffective begging and blunt rule twisting by sctb, dang, et al.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  From the FAQ page: Are paywalls ok? It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
  - samdung 8y ago
    It's just my observation. I did not say paywalls are 'not-ok'. The headlines make me want me to read but trying to by-pass paywalls make me feel like downloading a torrent.
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perfunctory 8y ago
We keep hearing that individual actions don't matter and that we need a system change instead. I used to hold the same opinion for the very long time. However, since recently I started to turn around. For the last 30 years governments and politicians have proven incapable to do anything about global heating. What makes us think it will be any different in the coming years. Scientists keep producing report after report after report. Every one grimmer then the preceding. And nothing happens. I begin to believe individual action is the only option left. I don't know the circumstances of every person on the planet and therefor don't know what they can do. But I think I know what HN crowd could do. - Stop flying to conferences. Go to a local meetup. It's fun. And cheaper. If you really need to get out of town, take a train. - Start working part time, and part of that part time remotely. Reduce your commute. If your boss won't let you, find a job that will. In the current job market you can negotiate almost anything, and remote work must be the easiest thing to negotiate. - Reduce your meat consumption as much as you can. Don't go all the way vegan, but make meat a special treat not a commodity. - If you have any investments shift them from fossil to green. - Don't upgrade your phone. Seriously.
- crispinb 8y ago
  "Individual actions don't matter" would be overdoing it, but spontaneous "lifestyle" change can never be more than a minor contribution to change. The reason people emphasize system transformation is because it really is needed. That it looks unlikely to happen doesn't alter that fact. I agree it's unlikely, but if it were to happen it obviously wouldn't be initiated by 'governments and politicians'. It would come from populations, or significant portions thereof, pushing them in the right direction. Hence Extinction Rebellion, the school strike etc. I suspect though that the last century or so of corporate propaganda has captured enough people to make it all too little too late.
- c22 8y ago
  If the system isn't working that implies that there aren't enough committed individuals to change it. If we can't get enough people to work on fixing our relatively simple human-built systems it seems unlikely that they will have sufficient impact on the much larger and more complex natural systems of global health. So while these suggestions are great, I do think we should continue to focus on, explore, and advocate for broader systemic change. If the politicians of the world wont take these problems seriously then we have to vote in new politicians that will or else our failure is ultimately assured.
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seahyc 8y ago
What would be the likeliest outcome in 2050?
matz1 8y ago
The article wasn't very clear, how does extinction of one million species affect my well being?
- java_script 8y ago
  They majorly buried the lede in this article and species #536,112 is "human".
  - matz1 8y ago
    But referring from the title, human is not among the one million species.
    - alltakendamned 8y ago
      As humans, we are dependent on our ecosystem for e.g. food production. So a collapse of the ecosystem will lead to challenges for humans. You can't eat bitcoin once the bees are gone.
      - matz1 8y ago
        So bees are important, quick google search reveal the bee is important for pollination. So can't one of the solution be find alternative way for pollination. Maybe even robotic bees? With the advancement of robotic technology, its not far fetched to think that this is possible right ?
        inflatableDodo 8y ago
        >quick google search reveal the bee is important for pollination. I suspect that you might not be the best informed person out there.
        matz1 8y ago
        Ok, can u elaborate ? you mention about bees. I response that bee might be able to be replaced by some other method.
discreteevent 8y ago
Two anecdotes: 1) There was an area of marshland close to where I live. A small part of it was drained for agriculture. Immediately after this, the insect population in the area went way down. You didn't have to measure it. We were swamped with insects, then there were virtually none. Habitat seems to be a big thing but I'm not sure how it compares with pesticides. 2) I saw a documentary once about a guy in India growing roses on an industrial scale. But he didn't use pesticides or herbicides. His roses were the best and he could command a high price. It took a lot of work, but more importantly, he emphasized, it took a lot of knowledge. Just listening to him your had no trouble appreciating his intelligence. Unfortunately this may not scale up that well as there are not enough people of his calibre in agriculture. It's just not as sexy as tech or finance or law or whatever.
- legitster 8y ago
  There was a Planet Money where they interviewed people about the Dicamba murder, and one of the farmers said something along the lines of "yeah, we can farm without pesticides. But it's a lot of work!" The future may be in de-automating farming. Food is already a negligible cost in the US (compared to housing and healthcare). Create job programs for the heartlands! How is this a not a huge political opportunity! Do farm owners have that much rent-seeking influence?
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  > there are not enough people of his calibre in agriculture. It's just not as sexy as tech or finance or law or whatever. You might be surprised by how much is going on in Ag tech.
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
So? Isn't this just evolution in action? Isn't this what's supposed to happen? We kill off 1M species, we eat the planet, humans eventually go through a winnowing process, from lack of resources, or nuclear war, or AI, and in a couple hundred million years, everything adapts to fill out the prevailing ecology again. What makes us think we're so special? I'm only being partly sarcastic here. With 500 MILLION years of change and adaptation -- to a climate we know to have been WILDLY different in times past -- through <checks watch for latest count> SEVEN mass extinction events -- why is RIGHT NOW the PERFECT moment in planetary evolution which must be preserved exactly, no matter the cost? To me, it's all Horizon Zero Dawn territory.
- tehlike 8y ago
  Because we like to believe we are intelligent animals that can prevent its own extinction.
  - TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
    It's becoming increasingly clear that greed is beating intelligence. And, like, badly. Looks to me like nature will (eventually) have to balance the scales for us.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Its perfectly normal for hunter and prey populations to oscillate. The hunters hunt a lot of prey, multiply, overhunt, prey population goes down, many hunters starve, prey population recovers and the cycle repeats. You see that a lot in animals, and humans are not immune to this. But as a species we might have overdone it, and nobody wants to see the crash as the ecosystems we rely on collapse. It won't be the end of the planet (whatever that even means), it won't be the end of life on earth's surface, it likely won't even be the end of humanity. But it might mean a lot of human death and suffering that could be avoided.
- Tepix 8y ago
  The speed of change and extinction is vastly different this time. We know that a massive loss of species also threatens ourselves. We know that a rapid climate change also threatens mankind. Sure, you could argue that we're not worth saving. The human will to survive and its adaptability means we might be able to hang on, miserably vegetating on a poisoned world.
apoph3nia 8y ago
Memories of http://ziron.extinct.ly http://ziron.extinct.ly
kilroy123 8y ago
I have a theory, and I have no evidence to back this theory up. The increases in anxiety in the general public over the last decade or so is in large part to people knowing we're on an unsustainable path. We're all collectively marching towards the edge of the cliff to jump off together. More people than ever have anxiety because we subconsciously (or consciously) know this. We're unsustainable with how we pollute and how we treat the environment. How we overfish the oceans. Income inequality rising. Political and cultural polarization widening. It's all so unsustainable.
- samirm 8y ago
  What's the theory? So far you just stated a premise...
  - probably_wrong 8y ago
    > The increases in anxiety in the general public over the last decade or so is in large part to people knowing we're on an unsustainable path. That's the theory, or at least that's how I read it.
  - bob_doggo 8y ago
    when someone on the internet says "theory", they usually mean it in the "everyday speak"-way, not in the "scientific definition of a theory"-way. But somehow I guess that you already know that?
    - samirm 8y ago
      regardless of what "definition" of theory I used, the post is still without conclusion. It started off somewhere and then never made a point.
- C14L 8y ago
  The "Club of Rome" report[1] was published in the early 1970s. We've known for a long time. Still, most people probably still don't know, because they are too busy shopping for the latest shoes or cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
ww520 8y ago
Is there a link to the actual paper for categorizing the number of species going extinct?
- uptown 8y ago
  A 40-page “Summary for Policy Makers” of the forthcoming full report (expected to exceed 1,500 pages) was released May 6 in Paris.
- _rpd 8y ago
  It is based on a report by this group: https://www.ipbes.net/ https://www.ipbes.net/ The report will be published "later this year." You can access a "summary for policy makers" from this press release: https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment Edit: The summary for policy makers indicates that species extinction estimates are based on data maintained here: https://www.iucnredlist.org/ https://www.iucnredlist.org/
kmlx 8y ago
Hopefully this will make us ditch the planet and finally look towards the stars. But I fear it will actually lead us towards an "Interstellar" future: where our inter-planetary progress is hampered by this single planet that we want to save.
- The_Stone 8y ago
  You can't migrate every person on the planet to another one. And we still haven't found any planets remotely as habitable as our own, nor solved the problems related to long-term space travel or terraforming. And above all else, why the hell would you be content with throwing away Earth, the most livable planet we know of? The idea of saving the human race by just going somewhere else is laughable.
  - inflatableDodo 8y ago
    >You can't migrate every person on the planet to another one. I completely agree, none of them are suitable. On the other hand, space habitats built from asteroids are a practical possibility. >"If the asteroids are ultimately used as the material resource for the building of new colonies, and if by constructing new colonies near asteroids relatively little reaction mass is wasted in transportation, the area of land that is made available on the space frontier can be estimated. Assuming 13 km of total area per person, it appears that space habitats might be constructed that would provide new lands with a total area some 3,000 times that of the Earth. For a very long time at least mankind can look toward resources so nearly inexhaustible that the current frustration of limits to growth can be replaced by a sense of openness and the absence of barriers to further human development." From the NASA report, 'Space Settlements: A Design Study' - https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Contents1.html https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Conte...
    - kaybe 8y ago
      We cannot damage the Earth enough for it to be a worse option than space habitats. We simply can't, even if we bomb all of the surface to oblivion, triple the amount of CO2 or even add more toxic gases.
kzjwr 8y ago
Racism is natural and, most importantly, technically correct.
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
  WTF happened to this thread?
  - inflatableDodo 8y ago
    Well, you began by saying that this is all ok if we take a 100 million year longview. You might as well have sent out a personal invitation to the deranged.
mcdramamean 8y ago
We need to do something; and that's heal our psychology. We can't just save the planet because all the thing that are killing it are things that we make "to feel good". Most of our economy is based on consuming things we don't need. Most of the pollutions comes for the energy sector and all the containers that get shipped across the ocean. Ocean Cruises are pretty bad also. We need to focus on how to get the entire planet to execute on the same actions. That is our only hope. If 80% of the planet goes green, but 20% is still emitting pollutions, we are still in the same boat (just not sinking as fast). Getting individuals to do what is necessary will simply take pricing things correctly and making laws; most humans don't want any trouble and will easily be able to live a more sustainable life just through peer pressure. FOCUS ON INTERNATIONAL CONSENSUS. This will serve us in all problems, not just global warming. To put it another way, if you have a cold, you don't solely focus on making the cough go away. Just drinking cough syrup isn't going to fix it. Global warming is the "cough" to our "cold". If we just "fix" global warming, we still have soooooo many other psychological issues as a species that it's not going to "save the planet". We can't even agree if humans should live or die. There is so much nihilism that there are lots of people who are content on doing whatever; until they die. Lo, they prolly want death and are just to scared to do it themselves. This is a legit problem; that many humans (either through religion or personal belief) don't WANT humans to live; or don't think we deserve to live. How are you going to solve that by solving global warming? We can't even agree that, regardless of our impact on the climate, we should be as clean to our environment as we can. Half the population only cares about GDP. Go back to first principles and let's SOLVE THIS. We all watch the Avengers, but don't come out wanting to BE THE HERO. We can solve this. We can't save all the animals; but we can solve this. So stop bitching, let's come up with solutions. Until the last second on the game clock ticks, you are in the game. Make a friggin' play. (YES YOU!)
- MiroF 8y ago
  > If 80% of the planet goes green, but 20% is still emitting pollutions, we are still in the same boat (just not sinking as fast). I'm not sure this is actually representative of the facts. We don't need 100% of the planet to go green to stabilize our temperature below a threshold and there are negative feedbacks on carbon emissions.
wcoenen 8y ago
Someone else commented: > If you have any investments shift them from fossil to green. I'm interested in ideas about how to do this. There are some MSCI indices along these lines like the "low carbon" ones[1]. But these still include fossil fuel companies, just with a lower weight. There are also "ex fossil fuel" indices[2], but these only exclude companies that dig up the fossil fuels, and not necessarily those that emit. There is no weighting based on emissions in these. Are there any broad equity indices that exclude fossil fuel companies and heavy emitters entirely, and then weight-adjust the rest based on emissions? [1] https://www.msci.com/low-carbon-indexes https://www.msci.com/low-carbon-indexes [2] https://www.msci.com/eqb/methodology/meth_docs/MSCI_Global_Fossil_Fuels_Exclusion_Indexes_Methodology_May_2017.pdf https://www.msci.com/eqb/methodology/meth_docs/MSCI_Global_F...
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  It's been discussed elsewhere, it's hard to find indices that are fossil-free that are also performant in the market. A lot of these supposedly fossil-free indices have some sketchy companies in them as well. Probably the best way to invest in green companies would be buying stocks of single companies you believe are making a difference. Outside of that, supporting bonds that encourage low-carbon products/behaviors, or making personal changes in your energy use and lifestyle and taking the financial trade to lower your carbon footprint there. Things like buying an EV, lowering heating/cooling use, biking more, reducing waste, increasing efficiency, these may cost you in comfort or convenience but will pay the planet back.
- kpennell 8y ago
  SPYX was a simple one to get for me: https://us.spdrs.com/en/etf/spdr-sp-500-fossil-fuel-reserves-free-etf-SPYX https://us.spdrs.com/en/etf/spdr-sp-500-fossil-fuel-reserves...
  - wcoenen 8y ago
    That's similar to the "ex fossil fuel" indices I mentioned. It does not eliminate or lower the weighting of big emitters. For example, airline companies are built around the burning of kerosene, but they don't own fossil fuel reserves so they will be fully present in that index.
dfilppi 8y ago
How many are on the verge of creation?
dkarbayev 8y ago
One thing that I fail to wrap my mind around: aren’t all those corporations executives, politicians, and poachers living on the same planet Earth as all of us? Don’t they ever think that they’re actually destroying our planet and there’s no other place to live? I can imagine that they don’t believe pro-climate change people, but they could simply hire an independent group of researchers, don’t they? And I mean actually independent researchers, not those who will produce any outcome you demand from them.
- TheBeardKing 8y ago
  All that matters is having enough money so that you end up better than everyone else. Environmentalists, social democrats, those people are concerned about the welfare of society and the world at large. Too many greedy capitalists care only about themselves and their own family and are unwilling to sacrifice their own comfort for the preservation or betterment of anything else. As long as you can bubble yourself off from the worst of it for a few generations, and afford the necessary survival solutions, things aren't that bad.
  - DamnYuppie 8y ago
    It would be more accurate if you replaced "greedy capitalists" with "humanity". I have been all over the world and materialism that is so denounced as a US/capitalist vice is actually prevalent EVERYWHERE. The desire to improve ones life and acquire material is universal to all people regardless of the ruling structure of their country. It is my opinion that what we need to focus on is a reduction of consumerism that prioritizes short term gratification; the "greedy capitalist" can't make money if no one is buying.
    - TheBeardKing 8y ago
      Of course it's a spectrum, but on one end you have people with a sense of fairness, a social conscience, a conservationist attitude, and actually weigh the environmental impact of their decisions. On the other end, you have people who choose comfort, convenience, and greed in all aspects of their life. Capitalists who weigh profit over every other criteria in their decisions are the people who I'm talking about.
dingo_bat 8y ago
Let's face it, all this doesn't really matter to us. Some people will die earlier than normal. Others will survive. Life goes on. Change is inevitable.
cmurf 8y ago
The current U.S. administration is hostile to the environment in general. All Republican administrations are, but this one is notably much worse. It's rolled back nearly all the regulations that were intended to prevent another Deepwater Horizon incident. All those pesky regulations that cost corporations money! As if regulations do zero good. Well here's an example of where they do good and yes that absolutely costs corporations profits. That's the point. Quite a lot of those profits come from exploitation, and externalities. Inhibit them, and profits go down, not a surprise.
holoduke 8y ago
Unpopular to say, but people as a group will not change. it won't just happen. We will destroy part of earth and as a consequence we will engineer a fix for it. It is maybe an unfortunate thing. But that's how we people work. We mess up first and clean after. It's quite unrealistic to expect the world to look the same in 100 years from now. We will slowly take control over every single square feet on this planet. That goes not without troubles.
- primroot 8y ago
  I am not so sure about the "as a consequence" part. If people engineer a fix, it is because the problem is grave enough that it calls for a fix, on the other hand it might be so grave that engineering anything beyond simple stick and stone tools might become impossible. The problem we are talking about here is in the geologic scale of things (250 million years without a precedent perhaps, going back to the Permian-Triassic extinction event), which means our mental models and analogies become dubious. And as for people messing up first and cleaning after, I'm not so sure either. That's not the way things turned out to be with the Ozone Layer Hole.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    > And as for people messing up first and cleaning after, I'm not so sure either. That's not the way things turned out to be with the Ozone Layer Hole. I'm not sure what you mean? We switched from CFCs and the hole has been shrinking ever since.
    - primroot 7y ago
      I had in mind what you are saying re CFCs, and more specifically that the approach was not "messing up first and cleaning after." The harmful practice was discontinued early enough to allow natural recovery processes to take place. So this is a counterexample to the claim that people "mess up first clean after." I still agree that, unfortunately, Climate Change so far does not seem to provide such counterexample.
- thangalin 8y ago
zuluwill 8y ago
serious question: what things should you work on that can have the greatest impact and compound positively (I.e go beyond changing just your personal habits)?
- kmlx 8y ago
  imo space tech. why? because we need space colonies and because there are currently nations which can’t wait for global warming to come soon enough (russia has a whole new income stream they plan, and starting to, exploit)
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  The flip question is interesting too. What should you not work on, or at the very least strive to not work on or use?
malcolmgreaves 8y ago
Isn't this an off-topic article for HN?
zuluwill 8y ago
Serious question: what things/science/technology should you work on that can impact this and compound positively over time (outside of just changing your own personal habits, but not to say you shouldn’t do this as well)?
- tsuresh 8y ago
  This has been mentioned on HN before and is a good place to start IMO - What can a technologist do about climate change? http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  This is an issue of politics, not technology. Same with climate change. It could become an issue of technology if we discover some breakthrough, but wishing for that to happen isn't enough. We need to make use of the tools we have available today. And it needs to be done via legal means, because individuals alone cannot fix The Tragedy of the Commons.
  - option 8y ago
    Exactly. Global emission due to power generation can be cut by a lot (and become insignificant in long term) if we (planet) start switching to nuclear power instead of demonizing it for political gains.
- pureliquidhw 8y ago
  Gathering trash, and not participating in the creation of it, is a good place to start. Help this project or those in a similar vein: https://www.theoceancleanup.com https://www.theoceancleanup.com As much as I am against Zoo's, they do a lot of conservation work, as do many museums. They have boards you can serve on to help guide investments. Saving the rain forest. Engineer a disposable, insulating material that's actually biodegradable vs breaking down into microplastics to replace Styrofoam. Similar to the above, for forks/knives/spoons/plates/bowls. Support a healthy GMO movement that creates sustainable crops that use less acreage. Shorten your commute, plant trees, don't mow your lawn, turn your computer off at night, potty train kids ASAP, drink water, cut back meat, carpool, don't burn anything. Find ways to make the above easier for everyone and push for them. Acting locally will free up another motivated individual with better answers to act regionally, and that will trickle up. When the whole world is on fire, it's hard to focus on picking up that stray napkin. But if enough people pickup the coffee cups, we can focus on the next level up.
pvaldes 8y ago
To put things in context; If we wipe from the planet ALL vascular plants, all flowers and trees and ALL vertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, the full pack, plus SIX major phylums of invertebrates including all molluscs, snails, clams and squids, ALL corals and jellyfishes, ALL starfishes and sea urchins, ALL sponges, ALL flatworms, parasites and free living, and every one tunicate described by science... ... after killing all of those, we would have still to wipe 366.000 extra species to reach one million.
- spurgu 8y ago
  That's just... crazy.
  - pvaldes 8y ago
    Can turn crazier. Selecting carefully and with "1 million of nethack scrolls of genocide" we could probably wipe all extant life beings known heavier than 1 Kg, except fungus, macroalgae... and not much more. I hope that this article is wrong. If not, one million of species is a lot of biodiversity about to jump by the clift in the next ten or twenty years.
    - CobrastanJorji 8y ago
      Not if you begin by blessing the scrolls.
    - crispinb 8y ago
      > I hope that this article is wrong Time (and further research) will tell, but truth be told nothing in it surprises people who have watched specific local nonurban areas for decent spans of time. Ecologies are collapsing. It's visible and obvious; scientific reports describe and quantify what we already see and experience daily.
- njarboe 8y ago
  Or about the estimated number of beetle species[1]. Not that I don't like beetles. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle#Distribution_and_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle#Distribution_and_divers... Edit:Link to the Assessment Reports this article discusses [2]. [2]https://www.ipbes.net/assessment-reports https://www.ipbes.net/assessment-reports
return1 8y ago
Alarming articles like this raise more questions than answers. The number of species on earth apparently ranges from 2 million to 1 trillion (??). One question is whether this biodiversity is needed. Life on earth has survived significantly larger extinction events and in the grand scheme of things "preservation" is not an optimal condition for anything. It just feels good for humans to preserve the planet. More importantly however, evolution has found a clear winner in its path towards (whatever she was trying to do): humans. We are already beginning to alter evolutionary trends and this will only keep accelerating. It's worth considering whether evolution is now obsolete and whether indeed most species serve a purpose. With brains taking over, life is on transformative path which will lead to it becoming extraterrestial and generally way more transformative than evolution has ever been.
lorenzorhoades 8y ago
I'm confused on why people actually care about global warming. That planet is in whats called a 'glacial age' on the historic time table of the earth. Yeah, we are rapidly depleting the ice caps (So what?) Yeah, we are slowly warming the earth. (So what?) yeah places like south florida are going to be underwater, and will potentially cost hundreds of billions (So what?). The point is, growth sacraficed now will have tremendous impacts on the future, as the law of compounding returns rings true here. It's pretty obvious that electric cars are much better than internal combustion, oil is a finite resource with tremendous political turmoil and complications sourounding it, and not to mention the costs of logistics while renewables are getting cheaper and more efficient by the year. People in the future will laugh at what we debated as a non-issue. Also, to be honest who cares about all the other animals? The same people who complain about climate change killing the polar bears are the same people who eat other animals. It's all rather laughable.
- EB66 8y ago
  > I'm confused on why people actually care about global warming. If you accept the premise that biodiversity on Earth is intrinsically valuable, then one ought to care about global warming. > Also, to be honest who cares about all the other animals? The same people who complain about climate change killing the polar bears are the same people who eat other animals. If someone eats, for example, farm-raised chicken, it does not logically follow that they ought not to care for the well-being and survival of other animals.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  This reads like the most uneducated comment I could ever conceive. Do you honestly believe anything you just said? One simple google search will invalidate everything you say.
- dean177 8y ago
  We are not warming the earth slowly. We are heating the planet faster than it has been heated for as far back as we can measure. Rising sea levels will not only cause trillions in immediate damage, they will displace huge population centres. That will lead to poverty and ultimately war.
mooseburger 8y ago
The U.S. and Europe can't actually do much about this though. Look at this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States#/media/File:CO2_emission_pie_chart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th... If everyone in the US and Europe dropped dead, that would be about a 24% decrease in global GHG emissions. Said emissions need to be 40% to 70% lower by 2050, according to the IPCC (https://www.climatecentral.org/news/major-greenhouse-gas-reductions-needed-to-curtail-climate-change-ipcc-17300 https://www.climatecentral.org/news/major-greenhouse-gas-red...). Bottom line, you're not getting anywhere without a truly formidable effort by China, and likely Central/South America and Africa as well.
- TearsInTheRain 8y ago
  Is there any progress being made on carbon sequestration so that we dont have to revert to killing people?
- zackmorris 8y ago
  This is only true because the US didn't lead 40 years ago when environmental impacts were well-studied but conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan began doubling down on anti-environment policies. Then China and India cargo culted our "western" lifestyle and the rest is history. The only inspiration I find in all of this is that many developing countries are rejecting rat race capitalism for basic sustainability. Many of them have better/cheaper internet connectivity than we do, and are adopting solar and wind projects in place of coal power plants. If they invest in automated community gardens (similar to our lettuce greenhouses), there is a chance that they will go around us within a generation. I think that explains a lot of US interventionism in Africa and South America. They see this sort of futurism as socialism or communism and do everything possible to shut it down at every turn.
- perfunctory 8y ago
  > If everyone in the US and Europe dropped dead, that would be about a 24% decrease in global GHG emissions That's not quite right. A lot of that pollution by China and Other is due to exports for US and European consumption. We just outsourced our pollution. So it depends on how one does the accounting.
danaos 7y ago
The planet Earth has been evolving continuously for billions of years. Mass extinctions and non-anthropogenic climate changes are evident in the Earth's crust. We're not the only species that left its footprint. We should try to preserve biodiversity and prevent anthropogenic climate change but not at the expense of humanity's development. We are the dominant species because we deserve it.

548 points by uptown 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Here is the same story published in Nature (no paywall) - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01448-4

Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
There seems to be no paywall in WSJ for this article from where I read (India).

devmunchies 8y ago

Is a globalized, industrial economy is still considered “progress”? I haven’t seen the stars in over a decade. We’ve lost so much. > We need to link it to human well-being, that’s the crucial thing. Otherwise we’re going to look like a bunch of tree-huggers God forbid someone thinks you love nature.

crispinb 8y ago
> I haven’t seen the stars in over a decade I'm planning to get up in the wee hours tomorrow to check out the Eta Acquarids. We have a magnificent night sky on clear nights here, but there's always a creeping edge of sadness knowing half the world's human population is denied it, and that the cool starlight falls on a dying planet. > God forbid someone thinks you love nature. Yes wouldn't that be terrible. I wish though we could ditch the word 'nature' (as if there could be anything else). Similarly with 'the environment' (as if we had another home).
basetop 8y ago
The biggest cause for environmental destruction and species loss is globalization, habitat destruction and consumption/production. The UN along with every major political and business international organization has been the pimps of globalization since ww2 ended. The idea that the UN cares about the environment is laughable to me since they want more globalization. The UN is run by the US, China, Russia, Britain and France ( the 5 permanent security council members ). It's an institution that cares about the environment as much as it cares about human rights. But I'm sure they'll use the environmental destruction they helped create to argue for more centralized control and power in the name of "human well-being".
Freak_NL 8y ago
The current forms of government we have in most countries seem to reward only economical success. Any attempts to tackle any environmental issues are invariantly watered down, postponed, or downright dismissed because enacting them has consequences for the electorate, and a large part of the electorate is willing to vote for parties or people that don't quite feel the urgency, or even downright deny the need to act. Slowly, very slowly, society as a whole, worldwide, may move towards greener choices (eat less meat, improve home insulation, fly less, waste less, recycle more, consume less), but it's not fast enough is it?
- titzer 8y ago
  > The current forms of government It's not the form of government, it's not the form of society, it's a psychological vulnerability that has been exacerbated by the invention of agriculture, currency, paper money, and now digital money. It's about accumulation of goods as a hedge against future insecurity, when the irony is that the pursuit of the accumulation of goods and earthly wealth is exactly the thing that has given rise to constant change, from which insecurity arises. It's literally because we cannot collectively chill the fuck out. There's a game theoretic problem in that defectors from the "chill" have a leg up on the chillers and get more money, wealth, goods, social cred, sexual mates, etc. The more humans there are, the worse it all gets. And it will just go boom. Planet scale.
  - jlokier 8y ago
    I agree, and I think that was well articulated. Do you have any ideas for solving it?
    - titzer 8y ago
      Well, short of most humans becoming monks? :)

samdung 8y ago

Looks like HN has become a lucrative hunting ground for paying users for New York Times, Washington Post, and other news agencies. The number of paywalled articles hitting the front page is tmth.

yupppppp 8y ago
Yeah, HN is over. For a number of reasons, but mostly a combination of shit moderation, laughable karma manipulation and heavy eternal september/bot influx. Most of the voting is probably bots operating the ranking model. Most of the moderation is pretty ineffective begging and blunt rule twisting by sctb, dang, et al.
robin_reala 8y ago
From the FAQ page: Are paywalls ok? It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
- samdung 8y ago
  It's just my observation. I did not say paywalls are 'not-ok'. The headlines make me want me to read but trying to by-pass paywalls make me feel like downloading a torrent.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

perfunctory 8y ago

We keep hearing that individual actions don't matter and that we need a system change instead. I used to hold the same opinion for the very long time. However, since recently I started to turn around. For the last 30 years governments and politicians have proven incapable to do anything about global heating. What makes us think it will be any different in the coming years. Scientists keep producing report after report after report. Every one grimmer then the preceding. And nothing happens. I begin to believe individual action is the only option left. I don't know the circumstances of every person on the planet and therefor don't know what they can do. But I think I know what HN crowd could do. - Stop flying to conferences. Go to a local meetup. It's fun. And cheaper. If you really need to get out of town, take a train. - Start working part time, and part of that part time remotely. Reduce your commute. If your boss won't let you, find a job that will. In the current job market you can negotiate almost anything, and remote work must be the easiest thing to negotiate. - Reduce your meat consumption as much as you can. Don't go all the way vegan, but make meat a special treat not a commodity. - If you have any investments shift them from fossil to green. - Don't upgrade your phone. Seriously.

crispinb 8y ago
"Individual actions don't matter" would be overdoing it, but spontaneous "lifestyle" change can never be more than a minor contribution to change. The reason people emphasize system transformation is because it really is needed. That it looks unlikely to happen doesn't alter that fact. I agree it's unlikely, but if it were to happen it obviously wouldn't be initiated by 'governments and politicians'. It would come from populations, or significant portions thereof, pushing them in the right direction. Hence Extinction Rebellion, the school strike etc. I suspect though that the last century or so of corporate propaganda has captured enough people to make it all too little too late.
c22 8y ago
If the system isn't working that implies that there aren't enough committed individuals to change it. If we can't get enough people to work on fixing our relatively simple human-built systems it seems unlikely that they will have sufficient impact on the much larger and more complex natural systems of global health. So while these suggestions are great, I do think we should continue to focus on, explore, and advocate for broader systemic change. If the politicians of the world wont take these problems seriously then we have to vote in new politicians that will or else our failure is ultimately assured.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

seahyc 8y ago

What would be the likeliest outcome in 2050?

matz1 8y ago

The article wasn't very clear, how does extinction of one million species affect my well being?

java_script 8y ago
They majorly buried the lede in this article and species #536,112 is "human".
- matz1 8y ago
  But referring from the title, human is not among the one million species.
  - alltakendamned 8y ago
    As humans, we are dependent on our ecosystem for e.g. food production. So a collapse of the ecosystem will lead to challenges for humans. You can't eat bitcoin once the bees are gone.
    - matz1 8y ago
      So bees are important, quick google search reveal the bee is important for pollination. So can't one of the solution be find alternative way for pollination. Maybe even robotic bees? With the advancement of robotic technology, its not far fetched to think that this is possible right ?
      - inflatableDodo 8y ago
        >quick google search reveal the bee is important for pollination. I suspect that you might not be the best informed person out there.
        matz1 8y ago
        Ok, can u elaborate ? you mention about bees. I response that bee might be able to be replaced by some other method.

discreteevent 8y ago

Two anecdotes: 1) There was an area of marshland close to where I live. A small part of it was drained for agriculture. Immediately after this, the insect population in the area went way down. You didn't have to measure it. We were swamped with insects, then there were virtually none. Habitat seems to be a big thing but I'm not sure how it compares with pesticides. 2) I saw a documentary once about a guy in India growing roses on an industrial scale. But he didn't use pesticides or herbicides. His roses were the best and he could command a high price. It took a lot of work, but more importantly, he emphasized, it took a lot of knowledge. Just listening to him your had no trouble appreciating his intelligence. Unfortunately this may not scale up that well as there are not enough people of his calibre in agriculture. It's just not as sexy as tech or finance or law or whatever.

legitster 8y ago
There was a Planet Money where they interviewed people about the Dicamba murder, and one of the farmers said something along the lines of "yeah, we can farm without pesticides. But it's a lot of work!" The future may be in de-automating farming. Food is already a negligible cost in the US (compared to housing and healthcare). Create job programs for the heartlands! How is this a not a huge political opportunity! Do farm owners have that much rent-seeking influence?
ddebernardy 8y ago
> there are not enough people of his calibre in agriculture. It's just not as sexy as tech or finance or law or whatever. You might be surprised by how much is going on in Ag tech.

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago

So? Isn't this just evolution in action? Isn't this what's supposed to happen? We kill off 1M species, we eat the planet, humans eventually go through a winnowing process, from lack of resources, or nuclear war, or AI, and in a couple hundred million years, everything adapts to fill out the prevailing ecology again. What makes us think we're so special? I'm only being partly sarcastic here. With 500 MILLION years of change and adaptation -- to a climate we know to have been WILDLY different in times past -- through <checks watch for latest count> SEVEN mass extinction events -- why is RIGHT NOW the PERFECT moment in planetary evolution which must be preserved exactly, no matter the cost? To me, it's all Horizon Zero Dawn territory.

tehlike 8y ago
Because we like to believe we are intelligent animals that can prevent its own extinction.
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
  It's becoming increasingly clear that greed is beating intelligence. And, like, badly. Looks to me like nature will (eventually) have to balance the scales for us.
wongarsu 8y ago
Its perfectly normal for hunter and prey populations to oscillate. The hunters hunt a lot of prey, multiply, overhunt, prey population goes down, many hunters starve, prey population recovers and the cycle repeats. You see that a lot in animals, and humans are not immune to this. But as a species we might have overdone it, and nobody wants to see the crash as the ecosystems we rely on collapse. It won't be the end of the planet (whatever that even means), it won't be the end of life on earth's surface, it likely won't even be the end of humanity. But it might mean a lot of human death and suffering that could be avoided.
Tepix 8y ago
The speed of change and extinction is vastly different this time. We know that a massive loss of species also threatens ourselves. We know that a rapid climate change also threatens mankind. Sure, you could argue that we're not worth saving. The human will to survive and its adaptability means we might be able to hang on, miserably vegetating on a poisoned world.

apoph3nia 8y ago

Memories of http://ziron.extinct.ly http://ziron.extinct.ly

kilroy123 8y ago

I have a theory, and I have no evidence to back this theory up. The increases in anxiety in the general public over the last decade or so is in large part to people knowing we're on an unsustainable path. We're all collectively marching towards the edge of the cliff to jump off together. More people than ever have anxiety because we subconsciously (or consciously) know this. We're unsustainable with how we pollute and how we treat the environment. How we overfish the oceans. Income inequality rising. Political and cultural polarization widening. It's all so unsustainable.

samirm 8y ago
What's the theory? So far you just stated a premise...
- probably_wrong 8y ago
  > The increases in anxiety in the general public over the last decade or so is in large part to people knowing we're on an unsustainable path. That's the theory, or at least that's how I read it.
- bob_doggo 8y ago
  when someone on the internet says "theory", they usually mean it in the "everyday speak"-way, not in the "scientific definition of a theory"-way. But somehow I guess that you already know that?
  - samirm 8y ago
    regardless of what "definition" of theory I used, the post is still without conclusion. It started off somewhere and then never made a point.
C14L 8y ago
The "Club of Rome" report[1] was published in the early 1970s. We've known for a long time. Still, most people probably still don't know, because they are too busy shopping for the latest shoes or cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

ww520 8y ago

Is there a link to the actual paper for categorizing the number of species going extinct?

uptown 8y ago
A 40-page “Summary for Policy Makers” of the forthcoming full report (expected to exceed 1,500 pages) was released May 6 in Paris.
_rpd 8y ago
It is based on a report by this group: https://www.ipbes.net/ https://www.ipbes.net/ The report will be published "later this year." You can access a "summary for policy makers" from this press release: https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment Edit: The summary for policy makers indicates that species extinction estimates are based on data maintained here: https://www.iucnredlist.org/ https://www.iucnredlist.org/

kmlx 8y ago

Hopefully this will make us ditch the planet and finally look towards the stars. But I fear it will actually lead us towards an "Interstellar" future: where our inter-planetary progress is hampered by this single planet that we want to save.

The_Stone 8y ago
You can't migrate every person on the planet to another one. And we still haven't found any planets remotely as habitable as our own, nor solved the problems related to long-term space travel or terraforming. And above all else, why the hell would you be content with throwing away Earth, the most livable planet we know of? The idea of saving the human race by just going somewhere else is laughable.
- inflatableDodo 8y ago
  >You can't migrate every person on the planet to another one. I completely agree, none of them are suitable. On the other hand, space habitats built from asteroids are a practical possibility. >"If the asteroids are ultimately used as the material resource for the building of new colonies, and if by constructing new colonies near asteroids relatively little reaction mass is wasted in transportation, the area of land that is made available on the space frontier can be estimated. Assuming 13 km of total area per person, it appears that space habitats might be constructed that would provide new lands with a total area some 3,000 times that of the Earth. For a very long time at least mankind can look toward resources so nearly inexhaustible that the current frustration of limits to growth can be replaced by a sense of openness and the absence of barriers to further human development." From the NASA report, 'Space Settlements: A Design Study' - https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Contents1.html https://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/Table_of_Conte...
  - kaybe 8y ago
    We cannot damage the Earth enough for it to be a worse option than space habitats. We simply can't, even if we bomb all of the surface to oblivion, triple the amount of CO2 or even add more toxic gases.

kzjwr 8y ago

Racism is natural and, most importantly, technically correct.

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
WTF happened to this thread?
- inflatableDodo 8y ago
  Well, you began by saying that this is all ok if we take a 100 million year longview. You might as well have sent out a personal invitation to the deranged.

mcdramamean 8y ago

We need to do something; and that's heal our psychology. We can't just save the planet because all the thing that are killing it are things that we make "to feel good". Most of our economy is based on consuming things we don't need. Most of the pollutions comes for the energy sector and all the containers that get shipped across the ocean. Ocean Cruises are pretty bad also. We need to focus on how to get the entire planet to execute on the same actions. That is our only hope. If 80% of the planet goes green, but 20% is still emitting pollutions, we are still in the same boat (just not sinking as fast). Getting individuals to do what is necessary will simply take pricing things correctly and making laws; most humans don't want any trouble and will easily be able to live a more sustainable life just through peer pressure. FOCUS ON INTERNATIONAL CONSENSUS. This will serve us in all problems, not just global warming. To put it another way, if you have a cold, you don't solely focus on making the cough go away. Just drinking cough syrup isn't going to fix it. Global warming is the "cough" to our "cold". If we just "fix" global warming, we still have soooooo many other psychological issues as a species that it's not going to "save the planet". We can't even agree if humans should live or die. There is so much nihilism that there are lots of people who are content on doing whatever; until they die. Lo, they prolly want death and are just to scared to do it themselves. This is a legit problem; that many humans (either through religion or personal belief) don't WANT humans to live; or don't think we deserve to live. How are you going to solve that by solving global warming? We can't even agree that, regardless of our impact on the climate, we should be as clean to our environment as we can. Half the population only cares about GDP. Go back to first principles and let's SOLVE THIS. We all watch the Avengers, but don't come out wanting to BE THE HERO. We can solve this. We can't save all the animals; but we can solve this. So stop bitching, let's come up with solutions. Until the last second on the game clock ticks, you are in the game. Make a friggin' play. (YES YOU!)

MiroF 8y ago
> If 80% of the planet goes green, but 20% is still emitting pollutions, we are still in the same boat (just not sinking as fast). I'm not sure this is actually representative of the facts. We don't need 100% of the planet to go green to stabilize our temperature below a threshold and there are negative feedbacks on carbon emissions.

wcoenen 8y ago

Someone else commented: > If you have any investments shift them from fossil to green. I'm interested in ideas about how to do this. There are some MSCI indices along these lines like the "low carbon" ones[1]. But these still include fossil fuel companies, just with a lower weight. There are also "ex fossil fuel" indices[2], but these only exclude companies that dig up the fossil fuels, and not necessarily those that emit. There is no weighting based on emissions in these. Are there any broad equity indices that exclude fossil fuel companies and heavy emitters entirely, and then weight-adjust the rest based on emissions? [1] https://www.msci.com/low-carbon-indexes https://www.msci.com/low-carbon-indexes [2] https://www.msci.com/eqb/methodology/meth_docs/MSCI_Global_Fossil_Fuels_Exclusion_Indexes_Methodology_May_2017.pdf https://www.msci.com/eqb/methodology/meth_docs/MSCI_Global_F...

WhompingWindows 8y ago
It's been discussed elsewhere, it's hard to find indices that are fossil-free that are also performant in the market. A lot of these supposedly fossil-free indices have some sketchy companies in them as well. Probably the best way to invest in green companies would be buying stocks of single companies you believe are making a difference. Outside of that, supporting bonds that encourage low-carbon products/behaviors, or making personal changes in your energy use and lifestyle and taking the financial trade to lower your carbon footprint there. Things like buying an EV, lowering heating/cooling use, biking more, reducing waste, increasing efficiency, these may cost you in comfort or convenience but will pay the planet back.
kpennell 8y ago
SPYX was a simple one to get for me: https://us.spdrs.com/en/etf/spdr-sp-500-fossil-fuel-reserves-free-etf-SPYX https://us.spdrs.com/en/etf/spdr-sp-500-fossil-fuel-reserves...
- wcoenen 8y ago
  That's similar to the "ex fossil fuel" indices I mentioned. It does not eliminate or lower the weighting of big emitters. For example, airline companies are built around the burning of kerosene, but they don't own fossil fuel reserves so they will be fully present in that index.

dfilppi 8y ago

How many are on the verge of creation?

dkarbayev 8y ago

One thing that I fail to wrap my mind around: aren’t all those corporations executives, politicians, and poachers living on the same planet Earth as all of us? Don’t they ever think that they’re actually destroying our planet and there’s no other place to live? I can imagine that they don’t believe pro-climate change people, but they could simply hire an independent group of researchers, don’t they? And I mean actually independent researchers, not those who will produce any outcome you demand from them.

TheBeardKing 8y ago
All that matters is having enough money so that you end up better than everyone else. Environmentalists, social democrats, those people are concerned about the welfare of society and the world at large. Too many greedy capitalists care only about themselves and their own family and are unwilling to sacrifice their own comfort for the preservation or betterment of anything else. As long as you can bubble yourself off from the worst of it for a few generations, and afford the necessary survival solutions, things aren't that bad.
- DamnYuppie 8y ago
  It would be more accurate if you replaced "greedy capitalists" with "humanity". I have been all over the world and materialism that is so denounced as a US/capitalist vice is actually prevalent EVERYWHERE. The desire to improve ones life and acquire material is universal to all people regardless of the ruling structure of their country. It is my opinion that what we need to focus on is a reduction of consumerism that prioritizes short term gratification; the "greedy capitalist" can't make money if no one is buying.
  - TheBeardKing 8y ago
    Of course it's a spectrum, but on one end you have people with a sense of fairness, a social conscience, a conservationist attitude, and actually weigh the environmental impact of their decisions. On the other end, you have people who choose comfort, convenience, and greed in all aspects of their life. Capitalists who weigh profit over every other criteria in their decisions are the people who I'm talking about.

dingo_bat 8y ago

Let's face it, all this doesn't really matter to us. Some people will die earlier than normal. Others will survive. Life goes on. Change is inevitable.

cmurf 8y ago

The current U.S. administration is hostile to the environment in general. All Republican administrations are, but this one is notably much worse. It's rolled back nearly all the regulations that were intended to prevent another Deepwater Horizon incident. All those pesky regulations that cost corporations money! As if regulations do zero good. Well here's an example of where they do good and yes that absolutely costs corporations profits. That's the point. Quite a lot of those profits come from exploitation, and externalities. Inhibit them, and profits go down, not a surprise.

holoduke 8y ago

Unpopular to say, but people as a group will not change. it won't just happen. We will destroy part of earth and as a consequence we will engineer a fix for it. It is maybe an unfortunate thing. But that's how we people work. We mess up first and clean after. It's quite unrealistic to expect the world to look the same in 100 years from now. We will slowly take control over every single square feet on this planet. That goes not without troubles.

primroot 8y ago
I am not so sure about the "as a consequence" part. If people engineer a fix, it is because the problem is grave enough that it calls for a fix, on the other hand it might be so grave that engineering anything beyond simple stick and stone tools might become impossible. The problem we are talking about here is in the geologic scale of things (250 million years without a precedent perhaps, going back to the Permian-Triassic extinction event), which means our mental models and analogies become dubious. And as for people messing up first and cleaning after, I'm not so sure either. That's not the way things turned out to be with the Ozone Layer Hole.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  > And as for people messing up first and cleaning after, I'm not so sure either. That's not the way things turned out to be with the Ozone Layer Hole. I'm not sure what you mean? We switched from CFCs and the hole has been shrinking ever since.
  - primroot 7y ago
    I had in mind what you are saying re CFCs, and more specifically that the approach was not "messing up first and cleaning after." The harmful practice was discontinued early enough to allow natural recovery processes to take place. So this is a counterexample to the claim that people "mess up first clean after." I still agree that, unfortunately, Climate Change so far does not seem to provide such counterexample.
thangalin 8y ago

zuluwill 8y ago

serious question: what things should you work on that can have the greatest impact and compound positively (I.e go beyond changing just your personal habits)?

kmlx 8y ago
imo space tech. why? because we need space colonies and because there are currently nations which can’t wait for global warming to come soon enough (russia has a whole new income stream they plan, and starting to, exploit)
ddebernardy 8y ago
The flip question is interesting too. What should you not work on, or at the very least strive to not work on or use?

malcolmgreaves 8y ago

Isn't this an off-topic article for HN?

zuluwill 8y ago

Serious question: what things/science/technology should you work on that can impact this and compound positively over time (outside of just changing your own personal habits, but not to say you shouldn’t do this as well)?

tsuresh 8y ago
This has been mentioned on HN before and is a good place to start IMO - What can a technologist do about climate change? http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
This is an issue of politics, not technology. Same with climate change. It could become an issue of technology if we discover some breakthrough, but wishing for that to happen isn't enough. We need to make use of the tools we have available today. And it needs to be done via legal means, because individuals alone cannot fix The Tragedy of the Commons.
- option 8y ago
  Exactly. Global emission due to power generation can be cut by a lot (and become insignificant in long term) if we (planet) start switching to nuclear power instead of demonizing it for political gains.
pureliquidhw 8y ago
Gathering trash, and not participating in the creation of it, is a good place to start. Help this project or those in a similar vein: https://www.theoceancleanup.com https://www.theoceancleanup.com As much as I am against Zoo's, they do a lot of conservation work, as do many museums. They have boards you can serve on to help guide investments. Saving the rain forest. Engineer a disposable, insulating material that's actually biodegradable vs breaking down into microplastics to replace Styrofoam. Similar to the above, for forks/knives/spoons/plates/bowls. Support a healthy GMO movement that creates sustainable crops that use less acreage. Shorten your commute, plant trees, don't mow your lawn, turn your computer off at night, potty train kids ASAP, drink water, cut back meat, carpool, don't burn anything. Find ways to make the above easier for everyone and push for them. Acting locally will free up another motivated individual with better answers to act regionally, and that will trickle up. When the whole world is on fire, it's hard to focus on picking up that stray napkin. But if enough people pickup the coffee cups, we can focus on the next level up.

pvaldes 8y ago

To put things in context; If we wipe from the planet ALL vascular plants, all flowers and trees and ALL vertebrates, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, the full pack, plus SIX major phylums of invertebrates including all molluscs, snails, clams and squids, ALL corals and jellyfishes, ALL starfishes and sea urchins, ALL sponges, ALL flatworms, parasites and free living, and every one tunicate described by science... ... after killing all of those, we would have still to wipe 366.000 extra species to reach one million.

spurgu 8y ago
That's just... crazy.
- pvaldes 8y ago
  Can turn crazier. Selecting carefully and with "1 million of nethack scrolls of genocide" we could probably wipe all extant life beings known heavier than 1 Kg, except fungus, macroalgae... and not much more. I hope that this article is wrong. If not, one million of species is a lot of biodiversity about to jump by the clift in the next ten or twenty years.
  - CobrastanJorji 8y ago
    Not if you begin by blessing the scrolls.
  - crispinb 8y ago
    > I hope that this article is wrong Time (and further research) will tell, but truth be told nothing in it surprises people who have watched specific local nonurban areas for decent spans of time. Ecologies are collapsing. It's visible and obvious; scientific reports describe and quantify what we already see and experience daily.
njarboe 8y ago
Or about the estimated number of beetle species[1]. Not that I don't like beetles. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle#Distribution_and_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle#Distribution_and_divers... Edit:Link to the Assessment Reports this article discusses [2]. [2]https://www.ipbes.net/assessment-reports https://www.ipbes.net/assessment-reports

return1 8y ago

Alarming articles like this raise more questions than answers. The number of species on earth apparently ranges from 2 million to 1 trillion (??). One question is whether this biodiversity is needed. Life on earth has survived significantly larger extinction events and in the grand scheme of things "preservation" is not an optimal condition for anything. It just feels good for humans to preserve the planet. More importantly however, evolution has found a clear winner in its path towards (whatever she was trying to do): humans. We are already beginning to alter evolutionary trends and this will only keep accelerating. It's worth considering whether evolution is now obsolete and whether indeed most species serve a purpose. With brains taking over, life is on transformative path which will lead to it becoming extraterrestial and generally way more transformative than evolution has ever been.

lorenzorhoades 8y ago

I'm confused on why people actually care about global warming. That planet is in whats called a 'glacial age' on the historic time table of the earth. Yeah, we are rapidly depleting the ice caps (So what?) Yeah, we are slowly warming the earth. (So what?) yeah places like south florida are going to be underwater, and will potentially cost hundreds of billions (So what?). The point is, growth sacraficed now will have tremendous impacts on the future, as the law of compounding returns rings true here. It's pretty obvious that electric cars are much better than internal combustion, oil is a finite resource with tremendous political turmoil and complications sourounding it, and not to mention the costs of logistics while renewables are getting cheaper and more efficient by the year. People in the future will laugh at what we debated as a non-issue. Also, to be honest who cares about all the other animals? The same people who complain about climate change killing the polar bears are the same people who eat other animals. It's all rather laughable.

EB66 8y ago
> I'm confused on why people actually care about global warming. If you accept the premise that biodiversity on Earth is intrinsically valuable, then one ought to care about global warming. > Also, to be honest who cares about all the other animals? The same people who complain about climate change killing the polar bears are the same people who eat other animals. If someone eats, for example, farm-raised chicken, it does not logically follow that they ought not to care for the well-being and survival of other animals.
mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
This reads like the most uneducated comment I could ever conceive. Do you honestly believe anything you just said? One simple google search will invalidate everything you say.
dean177 8y ago
We are not warming the earth slowly. We are heating the planet faster than it has been heated for as far back as we can measure. Rising sea levels will not only cause trillions in immediate damage, they will displace huge population centres. That will lead to poverty and ultimately war.

mooseburger 8y ago

The U.S. and Europe can't actually do much about this though. Look at this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_the_United_States#/media/File:CO2_emission_pie_chart.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_th... If everyone in the US and Europe dropped dead, that would be about a 24% decrease in global GHG emissions. Said emissions need to be 40% to 70% lower by 2050, according to the IPCC (https://www.climatecentral.org/news/major-greenhouse-gas-reductions-needed-to-curtail-climate-change-ipcc-17300 https://www.climatecentral.org/news/major-greenhouse-gas-red...). Bottom line, you're not getting anywhere without a truly formidable effort by China, and likely Central/South America and Africa as well.

TearsInTheRain 8y ago
Is there any progress being made on carbon sequestration so that we dont have to revert to killing people?
zackmorris 8y ago
This is only true because the US didn't lead 40 years ago when environmental impacts were well-studied but conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan began doubling down on anti-environment policies. Then China and India cargo culted our "western" lifestyle and the rest is history. The only inspiration I find in all of this is that many developing countries are rejecting rat race capitalism for basic sustainability. Many of them have better/cheaper internet connectivity than we do, and are adopting solar and wind projects in place of coal power plants. If they invest in automated community gardens (similar to our lettuce greenhouses), there is a chance that they will go around us within a generation. I think that explains a lot of US interventionism in Africa and South America. They see this sort of futurism as socialism or communism and do everything possible to shut it down at every turn.
perfunctory 8y ago
> If everyone in the US and Europe dropped dead, that would be about a 24% decrease in global GHG emissions That's not quite right. A lot of that pollution by China and Other is due to exports for US and European consumption. We just outsourced our pollution. So it depends on how one does the accounting.

danaos 7y ago

The planet Earth has been evolving continuously for billions of years. Mass extinctions and non-anthropogenic climate changes are evident in the Earth's crust. We're not the only species that left its footprint. We should try to preserve biodiversity and prevent anthropogenic climate change but not at the expense of humanity's development. We are the dominant species because we deserve it.