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I don't see what is the point to try to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. I don't even understand the fuss around global warming.Why is global warming a bad thing

I don't see what is the point to try to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. I don't even understand the fuss around global warming.Why is global warming a bad thing? The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the additional heat. There will be natural selection as usual. New variants of plants will evolve which can absorb more CO2. All species on earth will find a new equilibirum as they always had in the past. The fear of global warming is only a human concern. The planet and the animals don't give a crap - Each individual specimen just tries the best they can to adapt to whatever the universe morphs into. The problem with trying to manage global situations is that evolution is cleverer than you are. To quote George Carlin: “We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. 'Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.' And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet." "The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, 'Why are we here?'" Full quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so-self-important-everybody-s-going-to-save-something-now-save https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so-self-import...

GekkePrutser 6y ago
True. Some areas will become uninhabitable or flooded but others will become more habitable (like permafrost/tundra regions). Nature will indeed adapt though there will be reduced biodiversity for a while. Especially because this effect normally happens on a much longer timescale. I think the problem is more that the regions that will become uninhabitable are currently mostly inhabited by people. And often pretty poor ones. It will cause millions to billions of people having to be relocated, causing many societal issues on its own, with a serious potential of societal collapse or war. Especially because the source and destination of these mass-migrations will often lay in different countries. See how refugees from wars in e.g. Africa or Syria are currently not really welcome anywhere, and multiply their numbers by 1000. That's the kind of disruption we're talking. Migrants will get more desperate while on the other side of the fence anti-migrant feelings will grow more and you have an explosive situation just waiting for a spark. And war itself is a major destructor not just of humans but of the planet itself. Especially now that we have nuclear weapons.
- cryptica 6y ago
  Humans will use nuclear weapons eventually. They exist, so they will be used eventually. That cannot be stopped. "Monkey see, monkey do" principle. And the people in power seem to keep getting dumber so we are probably not far off.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  The climate will change slowly over centuries. People in certain countries won't wake up one morning in 2050 to unihabitable temps and 5 meters of water. It will happen gradually. Because of this, climate migration cannot be compared to wartime migration. But the key thing to note is that billions of people will move over the next century or two for reasons unrelated to climate. The global population distribution looked different one hundred years ago and it will look different one hundred years hence.
Jabbles 6y ago
"The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the additional heat" Evolution takes thousands of years. In that time species will go extinct, so there is no chance for them to evolve. For a simple demonstration of how fast we are changing the climate compared to other periods when ecosystems may have been able to adapt, see https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- cryptica 6y ago
  >> Evolution takes thousands of years Not true. Natural selection can work its magic in a single generation. For example, given any normal population, choose any trait and remove all individuals which have this trait from the population. The next generation will not have this trait. Specimens with the trait will become extremely rare depending on how accurate the selection process was. It can be quite radical. For example, if a law was introduced (with death penalty) which prevented all people of normal height and above from having children. In just one generation, all humans would become much shorter.
  - Aachen 6y ago
    Yeah, because there exist short humans and so their genes would indeed be passed on. Now check that for all organisms relevant to our food chain (assuming we even know which ones those are, and assuming we only care for ourselves and the rest can go extinct) there is a sufficient number of individuals in the relevant places able to cope with droughts, heat waves, flooding, storms, and other extreme weather introduced in the new climate. It doesn't magically just solve itself, even if that's the easiest thing to tell yourself and look for confirmation bias for.
  - Jabbles 6y ago
    That's not natural selection, that's artificial selection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding
    - cryptica 6y ago
      Your counter-argument is about semantics. Logically, it only reinforces my argument. Unless you're suggesting that global warming is natural and not caused by humans... If you agree that 'artificial selection' can work quickly (as scientific evidence suggests) and you believe that humans are the main driver of climate change (as is the consensus among climate scientists). Then my proposition that evolution can work very fast in the context of global warming (being an 'artificial', human-driven process) is a logical conclusion. QED.
quotemstr 6y ago
There are really two separate questions that we have to consider when talking about the climate: 1) "Do we as a species need to be able to control the composition of the atmosphere?", and 2) "What is the optimal composition of the atmosphere?". The answer to question #1 is pretty clearly "yes". We're well on our way to becoming a Kardashev type I civilization. At that planetary scale, humanity's inputs to various global systems will just swamp the natural feedbacks that kept things roughly stable before people, so if we don't exert some kind of stabilizing control ourselves, the system will break down. Are we on the verge of a breakdown right now? Maybe. Maybe not. It's complicated. But at some point, if humanity keeps growing, we will reach a point where active management of planetary systems becomes a necessity --- we're going to have to learn to terraform the Earth. And as for question #2? Maybe the optimal atmosphere has more carbon than it did in the pleistocene. Finding the right level of carbon in the atmosphere is a task that will depend on fancy modeling and careful experimentation. But it's hard to worry about question #2 when we haven't figured out #1; why worry about exactly the right position for a knob on a complex machine when the machine's knob is currently broken off?
- dagss 6y ago
  Question 2 cannot be answered without tying into history and politics.. Climate change trends will likely be negative for US food production and citied... but excellent to Russian food production and affect barely any Russian infrastructure. Climate change is objectively good for Russia; devastating for Bangladesh, probably very bad for US and Europe.. So question 2 is hard for that reason too.
phreeza 6y ago
I'm not saying it will come to it, but the worst case for global warming is not some jungle planet, it is earth turning into a planet like venus, which would probably sterilize earth if it happens faster than evolutionary timescales that are needed for nature to adapt as you suggest. The argument about us not being able to save ourselves is really a falacy, akin to whataboutism. It's the same as saying we shouldn't fly to the moon as long as there is famine on earth, or not try to cure cancer as long as we don't have a cure for the common cold.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

True. Some areas will become uninhabitable or flooded but others will become more habitable (like permafrost/tundra regions). Nature will indeed adapt though there will be reduced biodiversity for a while. Especially because this effect normally happens on a much longer timescale. I think the problem is more that the regions that will become uninhabitable are currently mostly inhabited by people. And often pretty poor ones. It will cause millions to billions of people having to be relocated, causing many societal issues on its own, with a serious potential of societal collapse or war. Especially because the source and destination of these mass-migrations will often lay in different countries. See how refugees from wars in e.g. Africa or Syria are currently not really welcome anywhere, and multiply their numbers by 1000. That's the kind of disruption we're talking. Migrants will get more desperate while on the other side of the fence anti-migrant feelings will grow more and you have an explosive situation just waiting for a spark. And war itself is a major destructor not just of humans but of the planet itself. Especially now that we have nuclear weapons.

cryptica 6y ago
Humans will use nuclear weapons eventually. They exist, so they will be used eventually. That cannot be stopped. "Monkey see, monkey do" principle. And the people in power seem to keep getting dumber so we are probably not far off.
missedthecue 6y ago
The climate will change slowly over centuries. People in certain countries won't wake up one morning in 2050 to unihabitable temps and 5 meters of water. It will happen gradually. Because of this, climate migration cannot be compared to wartime migration. But the key thing to note is that billions of people will move over the next century or two for reasons unrelated to climate. The global population distribution looked different one hundred years ago and it will look different one hundred years hence.

Jabbles 6y ago

"The plants and animals will adapt and evolve to handle the additional heat" Evolution takes thousands of years. In that time species will go extinct, so there is no chance for them to evolve. For a simple demonstration of how fast we are changing the climate compared to other periods when ecosystems may have been able to adapt, see https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/

cryptica 6y ago
>> Evolution takes thousands of years Not true. Natural selection can work its magic in a single generation. For example, given any normal population, choose any trait and remove all individuals which have this trait from the population. The next generation will not have this trait. Specimens with the trait will become extremely rare depending on how accurate the selection process was. It can be quite radical. For example, if a law was introduced (with death penalty) which prevented all people of normal height and above from having children. In just one generation, all humans would become much shorter.
- Aachen 6y ago
  Yeah, because there exist short humans and so their genes would indeed be passed on. Now check that for all organisms relevant to our food chain (assuming we even know which ones those are, and assuming we only care for ourselves and the rest can go extinct) there is a sufficient number of individuals in the relevant places able to cope with droughts, heat waves, flooding, storms, and other extreme weather introduced in the new climate. It doesn't magically just solve itself, even if that's the easiest thing to tell yourself and look for confirmation bias for.
- Jabbles 6y ago
  That's not natural selection, that's artificial selection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_breeding
  - cryptica 6y ago
    Your counter-argument is about semantics. Logically, it only reinforces my argument. Unless you're suggesting that global warming is natural and not caused by humans... If you agree that 'artificial selection' can work quickly (as scientific evidence suggests) and you believe that humans are the main driver of climate change (as is the consensus among climate scientists). Then my proposition that evolution can work very fast in the context of global warming (being an 'artificial', human-driven process) is a logical conclusion. QED.

quotemstr 6y ago

There are really two separate questions that we have to consider when talking about the climate: 1) "Do we as a species need to be able to control the composition of the atmosphere?", and 2) "What is the optimal composition of the atmosphere?". The answer to question #1 is pretty clearly "yes". We're well on our way to becoming a Kardashev type I civilization. At that planetary scale, humanity's inputs to various global systems will just swamp the natural feedbacks that kept things roughly stable before people, so if we don't exert some kind of stabilizing control ourselves, the system will break down. Are we on the verge of a breakdown right now? Maybe. Maybe not. It's complicated. But at some point, if humanity keeps growing, we will reach a point where active management of planetary systems becomes a necessity --- we're going to have to learn to terraform the Earth. And as for question #2? Maybe the optimal atmosphere has more carbon than it did in the pleistocene. Finding the right level of carbon in the atmosphere is a task that will depend on fancy modeling and careful experimentation. But it's hard to worry about question #2 when we haven't figured out #1; why worry about exactly the right position for a knob on a complex machine when the machine's knob is currently broken off?

dagss 6y ago
Question 2 cannot be answered without tying into history and politics.. Climate change trends will likely be negative for US food production and citied... but excellent to Russian food production and affect barely any Russian infrastructure. Climate change is objectively good for Russia; devastating for Bangladesh, probably very bad for US and Europe.. So question 2 is hard for that reason too.

phreeza 6y ago

I'm not saying it will come to it, but the worst case for global warming is not some jungle planet, it is earth turning into a planet like venus, which would probably sterilize earth if it happens faster than evolutionary timescales that are needed for nature to adapt as you suggest. The argument about us not being able to save ourselves is really a falacy, akin to whataboutism. It's the same as saying we shouldn't fly to the moon as long as there is famine on earth, or not try to cure cancer as long as we don't have a cure for the common cold.