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I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of support

I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. The natural ecosystem adapts to ice ages, meteors, and other world altering events, and the planet without us would probably revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia. I still cannot explain why, but shifting the perspective in my mind from "Humanity is Earth's savior" to "Humanity is Earth's abusive consumer" was a humbling epiphany, and helped me learn to revere nature.

zpallin 7y ago
Yes, but the bigger question I think is if the majority of humans on earth will adapt and also "how well". A lot of environmentalists are misled by the promise to save endangered species: we won't. But can we save humanity from destroying our own habitats? That's why environmental measures for cleaner oceans, air, and living conditions matter. It's for us, and the other dying inhabitants of earth will benefit from this too. Edit: Okay, yes we've saved endangered species before. When I was growing up, Brown Pelicans were endangered along California's coast and we turned that around. But we won't save all the frogs, and we didn't save the northern white rhino. That's my point.
- alluro2 7y ago
  I don't think anything can speak favorably about our impact on endangered species... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recently_extinct_mammals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recently_extinct_mam... That first graph sure is dramatic....
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    The vast majority of that first graph happened more than 1000 to 10000 years ago. Attention to endangered species seems to have only started 50 to 100 years ago. But you are right that our impact on endangered species is poor; only 28 species have recovered out of ~2000 listed in the US (according to the Wikipedia page for the Endangered Species Act of 1973).
pojntfx 7y ago
We have found the Hegelian
pintxo 7y ago
While it makes no physical sense whatsoever, I like to see climate change as earth trying to raise its body temperature to get rid of an infection.
- rangibaby 7y ago
  If the Earth is middle-aged, we are the equivalent of a stomach ache it got from eating something expired for breakfast
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    I don't know why but your view and the gp commenter's view makes me more angry even than the deliberate liars on the other side of the climate change. It reduces us all to passive pawns in something beyond our control. It is not, and we are not. Human beings have all the technical ability to be the dominant species on Earth until the Sun transitions to a red giant - billions of years. Then we probably have what it takes to colonize within the solar system. We have that level of intelligence and capability. People just need to have some personal responsibility.
    - blix 7y ago
      Your view seems to be deeply human-centric, while the views you criticize are not. I wonder if this mismatch is the source of your anger. Climate deniers/liars primarily disregard the enviroment in favor of human impacts, which is shared among many threads of climate activism as well.
      - throwaway5752 7y ago
        I'm angry because I have visibility into this area and have kids, honestly. I can't afford to be philosophical about it.
        blix 7y ago
        For all your talk of the impacts of overpopulation... the reason for your belief system is that you have kids? It seems to me we can't afford to not think philosophically about it.
ashleyn 7y ago
Although the worst of the doomsday predictions are not scientific, it doesn't exactly mean we can continue to ignore carbon emissions.
- tpmx 7y ago
  Of course not. I'd think/hope most of us here are able to consider multiple, separate thoughts over something as complex as this.
- chapium 7y ago
  We also cannot ignore the scientific predictions as well.
  - justsubmit 7y ago
    A prediction that fails to materialize is not a scientific one.
codesnik 7y ago
Well, evolution is slightly slower than that. Try few hundred millenia.
- blix 7y ago
  Evolution is not slow and steady. If the conditions are right it can take hold very quickly. Most of evolutionary history is equilibirium with small bursts of rapid change when the environment shifts significantly. It didn't take us a few hundred millenia to turn grey wolves into chihuahuas, and with the right stimulus nature could do it too.
  - notthemessiah 7y ago
    How short do you think those "short bursts of rapid change" are? Even the wikipedia article has an section on how common your misconception is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium#Saltationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium#Saltati...
    - blix 7y ago
      I didn't say they couldn't be thousands of years, but suggesting hundreds of millenia ignores many observed events that have taken place on a much, much shorter time scale. The numbers referenced in the wikipedia article aren't even in their supposed citation, which is definitely not written by a supporter of the theory. I choose grey wolves into chihuahuas because it's an example of a complex mammal undergoing significant genetic change over a much shorter time period than 100ky. For less complex animals there are even more dramatic examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
      - notthemessiah 7y ago
        I'm talking about evolution of different species, a much more significant change than variation within a species. Despite morphological and behavioral differences, wolves and dogs are still the same species. It took millions of years for fungi to evolve into decomposing wood.
DeusExMachina 7y ago
I find it sad that the only two perspective seem to be the extreme ones: humans are either destroyers or saviors. How about the middle ground? We are part of nature and like any other animal we are trying to survive and make our life better. And it's not that other animals are perfectly respectful of nature either. Remove predators and herbivores will graze everything to the point of creating a wasteland and dying of starvation. Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. We are only conscious of what we are doing. It's not that nature is not tough on us. Everything out there is trying to kill us. Nature provides our sustaining, but it's also harsh, something we don't seem to appreciate from our lives in safer-than-normal cities, with always available food, heating, transportation, medicine. I think the best perspective is aknowledging that we can have an adverse impact on the environment, and try to address it, istead of hating our own species as if it was a disease.
- nikofeyn 7y ago
  > Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. except we don’t really just maximize our survival. if we did or had the capacity to, we would do things much differently. instead we go well beyond just simply trying to survive. and yes, other ecosystems’ balance can be upset but that is usually due to human influence in the first place. we are different in our behavior.
  - jonfw 7y ago
    Maximizing survival goes beyond "simply just trying to survive" What we are trying to do is accomplish our goals we have for our short lifetime. We are certainly not the only species in the world who does things for pleasure that aren't neccessary for our survival. > but that is usually due to human influence in the first place That all depends on perspective. If you look at a big enough time frame- humans can be considered almost irrelevant.
    - nikofeyn 7y ago
headcanon 7y ago
It seems to me that the vast amount of water on Earth acts as an insulator against extreme temperature changes. I imagine that most of the issues surrounding climate change are going to be centered around us having to adapt to the new normal - costal cities flooded, mass migration across political boundaries, shifts in arability of land areas affecting food production, etc.
riffraff 7y ago
This is beautifully shown in a webcomic from some years back http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia
- schnevets 7y ago
  This summarizes what I was trying to say so brilliantly well, I can only assume I saw this at some point, forgot it, and stole the general message
  - jxramos 7y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia
nicoburns 7y ago
> I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life Why are you so sure about that? This is exactly what happened to Venus.
- carapace 7y ago
  "methane emissions almost definitely will transform Earth into a Venusian wasteland incapable of supporting life" But probably not really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
- bendbro 7y ago
  Climate science agrees with him. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming
yodsanklai 7y ago
I have the exact same feeling. I used to feel concerned and sad about the destruction of the environment. It takes place at such a rapid pace that we can witness it in our lifetime. There is something depressing about seeing things changing for the worse in a seemingly irreversible manner. The reality is that this is just very temporary. The next generations of humans won't have it as easy as those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world today. But it's not like the human fate has ever been really appealing. The depressing thought is our own mortality. That being said, I think it will take more than a few millennia to undo to the recent changes. For one things, exctinct species will not reappear so fast.
- RonaldDR 7y ago
  >The next generations of humans won't have it as easy as those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world today I find it an odd perspective to be both deterministic without realizing the cause of "not having it as easy", while at the same time being provably claiming it is luck to live in the developed world. This is not meant as a personal think, but it is a very schizophrenic or psychotic, inherently detached and disconnected perspective. The developed world is directly and provably a function of the cultures, values, people, and genetics of the particular group that produced its outcomes; built, iterated, and compounded advancements over many generations, which they passed on from generation to generation to the reborn embodiment of themselves that their children represented. Of course all of that has been utterly dismembered and deconstructed and been disassembled to possibly a mortal degree now, but luck had absolutely nothing to do with any of that; it was all deliberate and conscientious string of centuries and millennia old choices … all now being ruined by people who have been psychologically abused into self-destructive submission. On a related note, the only reason that "humans won't have it as easy" anymore, is solely due to both the above described psychological abuse that has triggered a self-destructive suicide that will end up destroying thousands of years of human progress, but the very reason people will not have it as good as in the past, is that they have been conned into destroying themselves and continuously making poor decisions that only compound the self-harming spiral. It is easy to make the mistake to claim that people are far better off today, but reality is that regardless of inevitable improvements that were within the outer bounds of the trajectory, the measure of how well a society is doing, has nothing to do with a quantitative temporal change ratio, but rather with the state of qualities of society, culture, family, relationships, community, and engagement with each; which are ALL majorly rotten and damaged, as essentially every single measure shows. All of that of course will only get worse, because as yet another team of researchers just showed out of a Danish university, that ALL … not some, not many, not most, but all research into social cohesion and trust shows that they are majorly damaged through multiculturalism and diversity; the very tyrannical imposition that is singularly being forced on only the white people of the developed world which leads to things like the subsequent generation being worse off than the previous. You know, reality is that in the past of western culture, actually not even that long ago, it was actually the now Christianity that has now been conditioned through pavlovian propaganda to be hated by probably most here, which provided people with a sense of foundation or guide rail so as to not get lost in the cavernous void that atheism leaves behind, which most humans are simply not strong or powerful enough to deal with. No Christian western white person was depressed into suicide before they started abandoning Christianity and the cardinal direction it provides in life.
jxramos 7y ago
"Life finds a way" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oijEsqT2QKQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oijEsqT2QKQ
impatientduck 7y ago
Da fuck are you talking about? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti... The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/insect-apocalypse-under-way-toxic-pesticides-agriculture/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/insec... The study found that neonics accounted for 92 percent of this increased toxicity. Neonics are not only incredibly toxic to honeybees, they can remain toxic for more than 1,000 days in the environment, said Klein. https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero The Hebrew University/Mount Sinai paper was a meta-analysis by a team of epidemiologists, clinicians, and researchers that culled data from 185 studies, which examined semen from almost 43,000 men. It showed that the human race is apparently on a trend line toward becoming unable to reproduce itself. Sperm counts went from 99 million sperm per milliliter of semen in 1973 to 47 million per milliliter in 2011, and the decline has been accelerating. <...> When a chemical affects your hormones, it's called an endocrine disruptor. And it turns out that many of the compounds used to make plastic soft and flexible (like phthalates) or to make them harder and stronger (like Bisphenol A, or BPA) are consummate endocrine disruptors. Phthalates and BPA, for example, mimic estrogen in the bloodstream. If you're a man with a lot of phthalates in his system, you'll produce less testosterone and fewer sperm. If exposed to phthalates in utero, a male fetus's reproductive system itself will be altered: He will develop to be less male. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/plastics-have-entered-human-food-chain-study-shows https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/plastics-have-ente... Bits of plastic have been detected in the faeces of people in Europe, Russia and Japan, according to research claiming to show for the first time the widespread presence of plastics in the human food chain. This is all bad news if you enjoy eating food or reproducing. Geebus H. read a book.
sosuke 7y ago
I feel similarly. But I find that giving an inch means losing a mile. It is a terrible truth and it can make the argument for being better citizens of Earth feel hopeless at times.
LordFast 7y ago
When I take a step back and consider everything, I'd say there's a solid resemblance to an aggressive form of viral infection as well, in respect to planetary timescale.
- antepodius 7y ago
  You could day the same of the first life that arose in the seas. The flora of the planet are a planetary scale fungal infection.
notthemessiah 7y ago
You can't "revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia" when species go extinct, you need something more along a geological timescale to undo that damage. Previous extinction events have taken dozens of millions of years to reach a similar level of biodiversity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_biodiversity_blank_01.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_biodiversity_...
kypro 7y ago
> I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. Any good source for this? I must admit I don't know enough to know whether I should be terrified of a runaway green house effect or not.
kpennell 7y ago
I think this sort of thinking represents a sort of defeatism that frees the viewer from having to take any action to make things better (or less worse). Rebecca Solnit has a great quote on this about hope: "Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."
tathougies 7y ago
I mean, humans adapt too. A much larger percentage of us used to live on permanent glaciers.
gdubs 7y ago
Years ago I began meditating. I’m by no means an expert, nor would I identify as “religious”. But any deep meditation can result the sensation of loss of self. Or a change in perspective, in seeing the impermanence of things. The piece that only recently became clear to me, was the role of “compassion” in all of this. To me, yes, the universe in a sense goes on no matter what we do to the planet. Everything is impermanent. But is our current path the most compassionate one for all the various forms of life on earth? I don’t think it is. Perhaps some will find this too “out there” for a HN conversation. But I think it’s relevant when we consider the impermanence of things, and the... morality of our actions, for lack of a better word — it’s important we consider what the most compassionate path is we can take as a species.
- 0db532a0 7y ago
  Morality and compassion are purely subjective concepts. There is no natural importance in either. The universe exists independent of your subjective conception of morality and compassion.
GVIrish 7y ago
> I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. The natural ecosystem adapts to ice ages, meteors, and other world altering events, and the planet without us would probably revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia. No. Depending on how bad warming gets, it will take on the order of millions of years for biodiversity to recover. The worst mass extinction was the Permian-Triassic where something like 95% of aquatic species and over 75% of terrestrial species went extinct. That took a long, long time to recover from. You are correct that life will probably go on without us. But what I think a lot of people fail to realize is that we're looking at the collapse of human civilization somewhere on the horizon, and human extinction after that if we don't change course.
- bendbro 7y ago
  > collapse of human civilization somewhere on the horizon, and human extinction after that if we don't change course From what I have read, this is not true. Some humans will potentially suffer, but we are nowhere near mass extinctions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming
  - triceratops 7y ago
    "By 2050, between 350 million and 601 million people [in Africa] are projected to experience increased water stress due to climate change"[1] "Climate change is projected to decrease freshwater availability in central, south, east and southeast Asia, particularly in large river basins. With population growth and increasing demand from higher standards of living, this decrease could adversely affect more than a billion people by the 2050s."[2] I understand this may not affect you personally. But don't just dismiss it as "some humans will potentially suffer". Billions will suffer, most of whom (being from developing countries) aren't at all responsible for the catastrophe that will befall them. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_effects_of_global_warming#Impacts_on_Africa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_effects_of_global_w... 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_effects_of_global_warming#Impacts_on_Asia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_effects_of_global_w...

zpallin 7y ago

Yes, but the bigger question I think is if the majority of humans on earth will adapt and also "how well". A lot of environmentalists are misled by the promise to save endangered species: we won't. But can we save humanity from destroying our own habitats? That's why environmental measures for cleaner oceans, air, and living conditions matter. It's for us, and the other dying inhabitants of earth will benefit from this too. Edit: Okay, yes we've saved endangered species before. When I was growing up, Brown Pelicans were endangered along California's coast and we turned that around. But we won't save all the frogs, and we didn't save the northern white rhino. That's my point.

alluro2 7y ago
I don't think anything can speak favorably about our impact on endangered species... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recently_extinct_mammals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recently_extinct_mam... That first graph sure is dramatic....
- nitrogen 7y ago
  The vast majority of that first graph happened more than 1000 to 10000 years ago. Attention to endangered species seems to have only started 50 to 100 years ago. But you are right that our impact on endangered species is poor; only 28 species have recovered out of ~2000 listed in the US (according to the Wikipedia page for the Endangered Species Act of 1973).

pojntfx 7y ago

We have found the Hegelian

pintxo 7y ago

While it makes no physical sense whatsoever, I like to see climate change as earth trying to raise its body temperature to get rid of an infection.

rangibaby 7y ago
If the Earth is middle-aged, we are the equivalent of a stomach ache it got from eating something expired for breakfast
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  I don't know why but your view and the gp commenter's view makes me more angry even than the deliberate liars on the other side of the climate change. It reduces us all to passive pawns in something beyond our control. It is not, and we are not. Human beings have all the technical ability to be the dominant species on Earth until the Sun transitions to a red giant - billions of years. Then we probably have what it takes to colonize within the solar system. We have that level of intelligence and capability. People just need to have some personal responsibility.
  - blix 7y ago
    Your view seems to be deeply human-centric, while the views you criticize are not. I wonder if this mismatch is the source of your anger. Climate deniers/liars primarily disregard the enviroment in favor of human impacts, which is shared among many threads of climate activism as well.
    - throwaway5752 7y ago
      I'm angry because I have visibility into this area and have kids, honestly. I can't afford to be philosophical about it.
      - blix 7y ago
        For all your talk of the impacts of overpopulation... the reason for your belief system is that you have kids? It seems to me we can't afford to not think philosophically about it.

ashleyn 7y ago

Although the worst of the doomsday predictions are not scientific, it doesn't exactly mean we can continue to ignore carbon emissions.

tpmx 7y ago
Of course not. I'd think/hope most of us here are able to consider multiple, separate thoughts over something as complex as this.
chapium 7y ago
We also cannot ignore the scientific predictions as well.
- justsubmit 7y ago
  A prediction that fails to materialize is not a scientific one.

codesnik 7y ago

Well, evolution is slightly slower than that. Try few hundred millenia.

blix 7y ago
Evolution is not slow and steady. If the conditions are right it can take hold very quickly. Most of evolutionary history is equilibirium with small bursts of rapid change when the environment shifts significantly. It didn't take us a few hundred millenia to turn grey wolves into chihuahuas, and with the right stimulus nature could do it too.
- notthemessiah 7y ago
  How short do you think those "short bursts of rapid change" are? Even the wikipedia article has an section on how common your misconception is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium#Saltationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium#Saltati...
  - blix 7y ago
    I didn't say they couldn't be thousands of years, but suggesting hundreds of millenia ignores many observed events that have taken place on a much, much shorter time scale. The numbers referenced in the wikipedia article aren't even in their supposed citation, which is definitely not written by a supporter of the theory. I choose grey wolves into chihuahuas because it's an example of a complex mammal undergoing significant genetic change over a much shorter time period than 100ky. For less complex animals there are even more dramatic examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
    - notthemessiah 7y ago
      I'm talking about evolution of different species, a much more significant change than variation within a species. Despite morphological and behavioral differences, wolves and dogs are still the same species. It took millions of years for fungi to evolve into decomposing wood.

DeusExMachina 7y ago

I find it sad that the only two perspective seem to be the extreme ones: humans are either destroyers or saviors. How about the middle ground? We are part of nature and like any other animal we are trying to survive and make our life better. And it's not that other animals are perfectly respectful of nature either. Remove predators and herbivores will graze everything to the point of creating a wasteland and dying of starvation. Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. We are only conscious of what we are doing. It's not that nature is not tough on us. Everything out there is trying to kill us. Nature provides our sustaining, but it's also harsh, something we don't seem to appreciate from our lives in safer-than-normal cities, with always available food, heating, transportation, medicine. I think the best perspective is aknowledging that we can have an adverse impact on the environment, and try to address it, istead of hating our own species as if it was a disease.

nikofeyn 7y ago
> Nature, as a whole, is full of equilibrium, but single species try to maximize their survival in any way possible. We are not that different. except we don’t really just maximize our survival. if we did or had the capacity to, we would do things much differently. instead we go well beyond just simply trying to survive. and yes, other ecosystems’ balance can be upset but that is usually due to human influence in the first place. we are different in our behavior.
- jonfw 7y ago
  Maximizing survival goes beyond "simply just trying to survive" What we are trying to do is accomplish our goals we have for our short lifetime. We are certainly not the only species in the world who does things for pleasure that aren't neccessary for our survival. > but that is usually due to human influence in the first place That all depends on perspective. If you look at a big enough time frame- humans can be considered almost irrelevant.
  - nikofeyn 7y ago

headcanon 7y ago

It seems to me that the vast amount of water on Earth acts as an insulator against extreme temperature changes. I imagine that most of the issues surrounding climate change are going to be centered around us having to adapt to the new normal - costal cities flooded, mass migration across political boundaries, shifts in arability of land areas affecting food production, etc.

riffraff 7y ago

This is beautifully shown in a webcomic from some years back http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia

schnevets 7y ago
This summarizes what I was trying to say so brilliantly well, I can only assume I saw this at some point, forgot it, and stole the general message
- jxramos 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia

nicoburns 7y ago

> I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life Why are you so sure about that? This is exactly what happened to Venus.

carapace 7y ago
"methane emissions almost definitely will transform Earth into a Venusian wasteland incapable of supporting life" But probably not really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
bendbro 7y ago
Climate science agrees with him. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming

yodsanklai 7y ago

I have the exact same feeling. I used to feel concerned and sad about the destruction of the environment. It takes place at such a rapid pace that we can witness it in our lifetime. There is something depressing about seeing things changing for the worse in a seemingly irreversible manner. The reality is that this is just very temporary. The next generations of humans won't have it as easy as those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world today. But it's not like the human fate has ever been really appealing. The depressing thought is our own mortality. That being said, I think it will take more than a few millennia to undo to the recent changes. For one things, exctinct species will not reappear so fast.

RonaldDR 7y ago
>The next generations of humans won't have it as easy as those of us lucky enough to live in the developed world today I find it an odd perspective to be both deterministic without realizing the cause of "not having it as easy", while at the same time being provably claiming it is luck to live in the developed world. This is not meant as a personal think, but it is a very schizophrenic or psychotic, inherently detached and disconnected perspective. The developed world is directly and provably a function of the cultures, values, people, and genetics of the particular group that produced its outcomes; built, iterated, and compounded advancements over many generations, which they passed on from generation to generation to the reborn embodiment of themselves that their children represented. Of course all of that has been utterly dismembered and deconstructed and been disassembled to possibly a mortal degree now, but luck had absolutely nothing to do with any of that; it was all deliberate and conscientious string of centuries and millennia old choices … all now being ruined by people who have been psychologically abused into self-destructive submission. On a related note, the only reason that "humans won't have it as easy" anymore, is solely due to both the above described psychological abuse that has triggered a self-destructive suicide that will end up destroying thousands of years of human progress, but the very reason people will not have it as good as in the past, is that they have been conned into destroying themselves and continuously making poor decisions that only compound the self-harming spiral. It is easy to make the mistake to claim that people are far better off today, but reality is that regardless of inevitable improvements that were within the outer bounds of the trajectory, the measure of how well a society is doing, has nothing to do with a quantitative temporal change ratio, but rather with the state of qualities of society, culture, family, relationships, community, and engagement with each; which are ALL majorly rotten and damaged, as essentially every single measure shows. All of that of course will only get worse, because as yet another team of researchers just showed out of a Danish university, that ALL … not some, not many, not most, but all research into social cohesion and trust shows that they are majorly damaged through multiculturalism and diversity; the very tyrannical imposition that is singularly being forced on only the white people of the developed world which leads to things like the subsequent generation being worse off than the previous. You know, reality is that in the past of western culture, actually not even that long ago, it was actually the now Christianity that has now been conditioned through pavlovian propaganda to be hated by probably most here, which provided people with a sense of foundation or guide rail so as to not get lost in the cavernous void that atheism leaves behind, which most humans are simply not strong or powerful enough to deal with. No Christian western white person was depressed into suicide before they started abandoning Christianity and the cardinal direction it provides in life.

jxramos 7y ago

"Life finds a way" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oijEsqT2QKQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oijEsqT2QKQ

impatientduck 7y ago

Da fuck are you talking about? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti... The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/insect-apocalypse-under-way-toxic-pesticides-agriculture/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/insec... The study found that neonics accounted for 92 percent of this increased toxicity. Neonics are not only incredibly toxic to honeybees, they can remain toxic for more than 1,000 days in the environment, said Klein. https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero The Hebrew University/Mount Sinai paper was a meta-analysis by a team of epidemiologists, clinicians, and researchers that culled data from 185 studies, which examined semen from almost 43,000 men. It showed that the human race is apparently on a trend line toward becoming unable to reproduce itself. Sperm counts went from 99 million sperm per milliliter of semen in 1973 to 47 million per milliliter in 2011, and the decline has been accelerating. <...> When a chemical affects your hormones, it's called an endocrine disruptor. And it turns out that many of the compounds used to make plastic soft and flexible (like phthalates) or to make them harder and stronger (like Bisphenol A, or BPA) are consummate endocrine disruptors. Phthalates and BPA, for example, mimic estrogen in the bloodstream. If you're a man with a lot of phthalates in his system, you'll produce less testosterone and fewer sperm. If exposed to phthalates in utero, a male fetus's reproductive system itself will be altered: He will develop to be less male. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/plastics-have-entered-human-food-chain-study-shows https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/plastics-have-ente... Bits of plastic have been detected in the faeces of people in Europe, Russia and Japan, according to research claiming to show for the first time the widespread presence of plastics in the human food chain. This is all bad news if you enjoy eating food or reproducing. Geebus H. read a book.

sosuke 7y ago

I feel similarly. But I find that giving an inch means losing a mile. It is a terrible truth and it can make the argument for being better citizens of Earth feel hopeless at times.

LordFast 7y ago

When I take a step back and consider everything, I'd say there's a solid resemblance to an aggressive form of viral infection as well, in respect to planetary timescale.

antepodius 7y ago
You could day the same of the first life that arose in the seas. The flora of the planet are a planetary scale fungal infection.

notthemessiah 7y ago

You can't "revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia" when species go extinct, you need something more along a geological timescale to undo that damage. Previous extinction events have taken dozens of millions of years to reach a similar level of biodiversity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_biodiversity_blank_01.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_biodiversity_...

kypro 7y ago

> I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. Any good source for this? I must admit I don't know enough to know whether I should be terrified of a runaway green house effect or not.

kpennell 7y ago

I think this sort of thinking represents a sort of defeatism that frees the viewer from having to take any action to make things better (or less worse). Rebecca Solnit has a great quote on this about hope: "Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."

tathougies 7y ago

I mean, humans adapt too. A much larger percentage of us used to live on permanent glaciers.

gdubs 7y ago

Years ago I began meditating. I’m by no means an expert, nor would I identify as “religious”. But any deep meditation can result the sensation of loss of self. Or a change in perspective, in seeing the impermanence of things. The piece that only recently became clear to me, was the role of “compassion” in all of this. To me, yes, the universe in a sense goes on no matter what we do to the planet. Everything is impermanent. But is our current path the most compassionate one for all the various forms of life on earth? I don’t think it is. Perhaps some will find this too “out there” for a HN conversation. But I think it’s relevant when we consider the impermanence of things, and the... morality of our actions, for lack of a better word — it’s important we consider what the most compassionate path is we can take as a species.

0db532a0 7y ago
Morality and compassion are purely subjective concepts. There is no natural importance in either. The universe exists independent of your subjective conception of morality and compassion.

GVIrish 7y ago

> I had a turning point with climate change when I realized carbon emissions almost definitely won't transform Earth into a martian wasteland incapable of supporting life. The natural ecosystem adapts to ice ages, meteors, and other world altering events, and the planet without us would probably revert to something lush and diverse in a few millennia. No. Depending on how bad warming gets, it will take on the order of millions of years for biodiversity to recover. The worst mass extinction was the Permian-Triassic where something like 95% of aquatic species and over 75% of terrestrial species went extinct. That took a long, long time to recover from. You are correct that life will probably go on without us. But what I think a lot of people fail to realize is that we're looking at the collapse of human civilization somewhere on the horizon, and human extinction after that if we don't change course.

bendbro 7y ago
> collapse of human civilization somewhere on the horizon, and human extinction after that if we don't change course From what I have read, this is not true. Some humans will potentially suffer, but we are nowhere near mass extinctions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming
- triceratops 7y ago
  "By 2050, between 350 million and 601 million people [in Africa] are projected to experience increased water stress due to climate change"[1] "Climate change is projected to decrease freshwater availability in central, south, east and southeast Asia, particularly in large river basins. With population growth and increasing demand from higher standards of living, this decrease could adversely affect more than a billion people by the 2050s."[2] I understand this may not affect you personally. But don't just dismiss it as "some humans will potentially suffer". Billions will suffer, most of whom (being from developing countries) aren't at all responsible for the catastrophe that will befall them. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_effects_of_global_warming#Impacts_on_Africa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_effects_of_global_w... 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_effects_of_global_warming#Impacts_on_Asia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_effects_of_global_w...