4 ms·
That argument is assuming nature is hospitable to human life by default and if we stop doing what we're doing everything will be fine... Droughts can still cau
by rubber_duck 6y ago
That argument is assuming nature is hospitable to human life by default and if we stop doing what we're doing everything will be fine...
Droughts can still cause famine and starvation in many parts of the world. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, vulcano eruptions, forest fires, localised disease (like lime disease) etc. all part of the natural disasters happening without human intervention. These are the small scale common occurrences that we still really don't have good ways of dealing with.
A lot of these are exacerbated by climate change - which is already in motion and there is very little proof that we can predict what will happen accurately, so even if we cut green house gas emissions to 0 - and that's not a realistic scenario - we're still going to have to deal with the consequences.
Then there are global outlier events that can be extinction level - meteor impact, deadly virus strains crossing from animals to humans and spread by animals (eg. bird flu - we're covering from COVID with IFR of sub 1% which is largely targeting old people past average age of death - bird flue IFR was close to 50% and spread by birds which aren't so easy to contain - imagine if the transmission was easier). Again 0 human intervention required, have historical precedent, just not frequent enough to worry about when you have more pressing issues.
In any realistic scenario we will be living in a world were local actions can have global impact - nuclear disaster can spread radiation between continents, virus originating in one place can spread globally and we have no containment units, climate change is going to make the weather more volatile and many natural disasters are going to become more frequent and it can destroy currently hospitable areas, etc.
Nature is not great by default, and we're already on a path that will make it less hospitable - the only realistic long term solution I see is learning to live in that environment.