> Observations of biodiversity loss are, for me, sufficient to move beyond the debating and towards the changing phase. There's a lot wrong here. (a) Over the

> Observations of biodiversity loss are, for me, sufficient to move beyond the debating and towards the changing phase. There's a lot wrong here. (a) Over the past two centuries, we've been doing hundreds of crazy new things we've never done before. Correlation =/= causation: you can't just assume biodiversity loss is mostly caused by atmospheric carbon (btw: it's not) (b) You're painting me as a caricature that has no link to reality. I'm not "waiting for science to lock" and spending my time "debating" instead of taking action, I've been working on clean energy development&commercialization for almost my entire career, and it is my primary long term focus in life. That being said, I think there's very good reason for other people to spend time debating these issues instead of just rallying for radical political fixes to CO2 emissions. Like I've been trying to explain, the science is not at all settled on the subtleties of what we should do long term. - > Also greatly concerning, but elements of the same whole which needs to be addressed. I think we’re on the same page here - ... effects which cannot be foreseen. I completely agree with you here - you're absolutely right. You also bring up very good points about why increased CO2 is nasty - these are accurate and CO2 is fundamentally a toxic gas so of course I'm also leaning towards the "the ideal level is probably below today's level" side - but I don't know yet. With so many different factors to consider, we can't just look at any one thing like human cognition and ignore the other pros / cons. > That’s assuming we’re talking about humankind and society as the thing we’re really seeking to save here. I don't think we need to "save" humankind or society (or the planet) - all three of those things are extremely resilient. Some portion of humans will survive just about anything with maybe the exception of a nasty gamma ray blast. My concern is that GHG emissions will probably cause countless millions of avoidable deaths, negatively affect billions of human lives and cost us trillions of dollars long term in addition to ruining the natural environment and biodiversity. This is, however, a slow process compared to a human lifetime. It's a really slow, big problem that will do a lot of damage if we don't focus on solving it before it becomes even worse. > We could also talk about biodiversity I'm very unsure whether GHG emissions are a leading cause of biodiversity loss in recent years. We do so much other bullshit (global shipping alone basically destroyed the natural barriers between ecosystems) and have already plunged nature into a mass extinction before the industrial revolution even began iirc There's a lot of things humans do that cause extinctions. We should probably be addressing all of them.