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I really wish they hadn't framed it this way. They could have just said "Possible new historical mass extinction event discovered". See, because of the way the

I really wish they hadn't framed it this way. They could have just said "Possible new historical mass extinction event discovered". See, because of the way they have framed it we now have people in the comments arguing about global warming. While I certainly believe that we are doing a lot of damage to the planet right now, we dont need to incorporate every news article into the permacrisis narrative

NetOpWibby 4y ago
But how else will the site get clicks?
rob74 4y ago
It also sounds pretty strange to me to take the number of 5 previous mass extinctions as unshakable fact. I'm not a paleontologist, but in the several billions of years before living organisms evolved shells/skeletons that could be fossilized, there could have been any number of mass extinction events that we no longer have evidence of?
- zaarn 4y ago
  There is evidence of a lot of mass extinctions. The Big Five is just the biggest 5 we know off (all of them feature atleast 75% of all species becoming extinct on a relatively short timeframe, with the quickest being the KT which lasted at most a thousand years, the biggest of them, the PT event, making 95% of all species extinct). For smaller extinction events, Wikipedia lists about 30 of them. But those aren't nearly as interesting because they didn't have that much impact.
- javajosh 4y ago
  I agree with this. In fact - it's reasonable to take the same attitude toward these numbers as "age of the universe, in billions of years" type numbers: the error bars are pretty big! But the OOM is basically correct, and that's Good Enough (tm) for most people's purposes, including academics in far away fields like climatology.
actually_a_dog 4y ago
I love how you use the phrase "permacrisis narrative" as if climate change and its consequences are made up constructs. They are not. They are established science at this point. You are doing noone any service by claiming otherwise, even obliquely.
- edanm 4y ago
  I might be wrong, but I think you're reading things into that phrase that aren't there. Calling something a narrative doesn't imply something is made up.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Climate change is established science. Predictions that Earth will become Venus 2.0 is a non-productive nihilist fantasy.
- buran77 4y ago
  I read that as the well known fact that if you are constantly under pressure you will eventually just normalize it and soon it becomes "the way things are". And when things are "the way things are" there is no real push for change. If thieves trigger your car alarm once every year you'll jump to chase them away. If they trigger it once every minute you'll sell the car. You can't sell this car. We need some focus on which crisis is the priority but I'm less and less qualified to judge what deserves an air raid siren, and what deserves an alarm clock. All the issues mentioned by other comments below always existed in one form or another, almost exclusively worse than today (Extremist leaders? Countries on the brink of collapse? Society upheaval? Threat of invasion?). It wasn't much different some decades ago. The baseline was set differently but the same concerns were expressed since forever. We just had something like a Cold War, fear of nuclear attack, fear of invasion, etc. that topped the charts so hard (for a while) that everything else subsided. And then slowly things were normalized and we could start seeing the "day to day" crisis.
  - ngcc_hk 4y ago
    You are overwhelmed by crisis, sort of future or crisis shock. But some event which may not even be crisis affect many and with hindsight actually is the crisis. How about letting china into wto and beginning by kicking out Taiwan from UN (or they gave up). The whole series of event of key china out and not balance with in will be one of the major disaster of humanity … but is it? That is the big question. I think it is. But without hindsight you do not know. Hence we have to work on. But ignoring key event (and just crisis) will doom humanity. After all, most species died why not human.
mschuster91 4y ago
> While I certainly believe that we are doing a lot of damage to the planet right now, we dont need to incorporate every news article into the permacrisis narrative The fact is we are in a permacrisis situation: - climate change is accelerating, scenarios expected in decades are reality now (e.g. ice shelf melting, the drought that has hit Europe last summer) - the invasion of Russia in Ukraine and all of the associated fallout (risk of a nuclear catastrophe at Zaporizhzhia NPP, delivery chains based e.g. on steel of Mariupol or of Ukrainian grain straining and breaking) - wealth and income inequality tearing apart both Western societies in itself as well as the "Global South" from Western societies - record inflation without corresponding wage rises accelerating the above, helped by many decades of effective wage stagnation - multiple Western societies taking a sharp turn towards the right wing, authoritarianism and (e.g. in Italy) towards outright fascism - large parts of Africa collapsing or nearing collapse from a variety of factors (climate change rendering territories uninhabitable, dictators/kings/warlords/corrupt elites looting their countries, China behaving just as bad as the late European colonialists), threatening mass migration events - China's internal economy collapsing due to Covid (shoddy vaccine leaving no other containment option than brutal lockdowns), financial mismanagement (e.g. Evergrande) and governmental incompetence - China increasingly threatening Taiwan with an invasion, an event that would instantly both trigger a China-USA war and, assuming that TSMC is rigged with explosives for a "leave nothing but scorched earth" scenario, many years of a complete shortage of chips, leading to an unprecedented world-wide economic crash - regional powerhouses in the Middle East (Turkey, Iran) are getting into problems or collapsing, threatening further instability in an already explosive region Out of all the crises I mentioned, the only one where improvement is in sight is the Russian invasion, given just how hard Ukraine kicks Russia's behind currently - but even with all the progress Ukraine is making, it may very well take a year or more until all of Ukraine is free of Russian invaders again. Journalists are well advised to point out that humanity is in a state of long-term multiple crises, and that action needs to be taken instead of letting more Conservatives or the far-right into power.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  It may appear that right now, a lot of things are going the wrong way simultaneously and that that somehow is an unique point in history. But it's not. Several large-scale events with potentially horrific outcomes have happened simultaneously for centuries. There were plague epidemics during the Thirty-Years War. Conflicts in faraway lands did influence trade at home. Political turmoil happened during economic collapse. Animals went extinct in the medieval age, at some point we (Europeans) managed to essentially raze most of our forests, continent-wide, for construction and shipbuilding (just ask Iceland...). This is the human normal. Hell, for decades, we stared death in it's nuclear eye constantly. What is different today: You can now watch all of these events unfold in real-time, and have journalists who no longer are out to tell stories, but to foster your fear so that you create more ad clicks. But fear and dread are bad advisors. Let's not buy into them, and see the problems as what they are: challenges to solve. Because, just like any of the crisis' of the past, if we don't solve them, they will blow up in our faces.

NetOpWibby 4y ago

But how else will the site get clicks?

rob74 4y ago

It also sounds pretty strange to me to take the number of 5 previous mass extinctions as unshakable fact. I'm not a paleontologist, but in the several billions of years before living organisms evolved shells/skeletons that could be fossilized, there could have been any number of mass extinction events that we no longer have evidence of?

zaarn 4y ago
There is evidence of a lot of mass extinctions. The Big Five is just the biggest 5 we know off (all of them feature atleast 75% of all species becoming extinct on a relatively short timeframe, with the quickest being the KT which lasted at most a thousand years, the biggest of them, the PT event, making 95% of all species extinct). For smaller extinction events, Wikipedia lists about 30 of them. But those aren't nearly as interesting because they didn't have that much impact.
javajosh 4y ago
I agree with this. In fact - it's reasonable to take the same attitude toward these numbers as "age of the universe, in billions of years" type numbers: the error bars are pretty big! But the OOM is basically correct, and that's Good Enough (tm) for most people's purposes, including academics in far away fields like climatology.

actually_a_dog 4y ago

I love how you use the phrase "permacrisis narrative" as if climate change and its consequences are made up constructs. They are not. They are established science at this point. You are doing noone any service by claiming otherwise, even obliquely.

edanm 4y ago
I might be wrong, but I think you're reading things into that phrase that aren't there. Calling something a narrative doesn't imply something is made up.
osigurdson 4y ago
Climate change is established science. Predictions that Earth will become Venus 2.0 is a non-productive nihilist fantasy.
buran77 4y ago
I read that as the well known fact that if you are constantly under pressure you will eventually just normalize it and soon it becomes "the way things are". And when things are "the way things are" there is no real push for change. If thieves trigger your car alarm once every year you'll jump to chase them away. If they trigger it once every minute you'll sell the car. You can't sell this car. We need some focus on which crisis is the priority but I'm less and less qualified to judge what deserves an air raid siren, and what deserves an alarm clock. All the issues mentioned by other comments below always existed in one form or another, almost exclusively worse than today (Extremist leaders? Countries on the brink of collapse? Society upheaval? Threat of invasion?). It wasn't much different some decades ago. The baseline was set differently but the same concerns were expressed since forever. We just had something like a Cold War, fear of nuclear attack, fear of invasion, etc. that topped the charts so hard (for a while) that everything else subsided. And then slowly things were normalized and we could start seeing the "day to day" crisis.
- ngcc_hk 4y ago
  You are overwhelmed by crisis, sort of future or crisis shock. But some event which may not even be crisis affect many and with hindsight actually is the crisis. How about letting china into wto and beginning by kicking out Taiwan from UN (or they gave up). The whole series of event of key china out and not balance with in will be one of the major disaster of humanity … but is it? That is the big question. I think it is. But without hindsight you do not know. Hence we have to work on. But ignoring key event (and just crisis) will doom humanity. After all, most species died why not human.

mschuster91 4y ago

> While I certainly believe that we are doing a lot of damage to the planet right now, we dont need to incorporate every news article into the permacrisis narrative The fact is we are in a permacrisis situation: - climate change is accelerating, scenarios expected in decades are reality now (e.g. ice shelf melting, the drought that has hit Europe last summer) - the invasion of Russia in Ukraine and all of the associated fallout (risk of a nuclear catastrophe at Zaporizhzhia NPP, delivery chains based e.g. on steel of Mariupol or of Ukrainian grain straining and breaking) - wealth and income inequality tearing apart both Western societies in itself as well as the "Global South" from Western societies - record inflation without corresponding wage rises accelerating the above, helped by many decades of effective wage stagnation - multiple Western societies taking a sharp turn towards the right wing, authoritarianism and (e.g. in Italy) towards outright fascism - large parts of Africa collapsing or nearing collapse from a variety of factors (climate change rendering territories uninhabitable, dictators/kings/warlords/corrupt elites looting their countries, China behaving just as bad as the late European colonialists), threatening mass migration events - China's internal economy collapsing due to Covid (shoddy vaccine leaving no other containment option than brutal lockdowns), financial mismanagement (e.g. Evergrande) and governmental incompetence - China increasingly threatening Taiwan with an invasion, an event that would instantly both trigger a China-USA war and, assuming that TSMC is rigged with explosives for a "leave nothing but scorched earth" scenario, many years of a complete shortage of chips, leading to an unprecedented world-wide economic crash - regional powerhouses in the Middle East (Turkey, Iran) are getting into problems or collapsing, threatening further instability in an already explosive region Out of all the crises I mentioned, the only one where improvement is in sight is the Russian invasion, given just how hard Ukraine kicks Russia's behind currently - but even with all the progress Ukraine is making, it may very well take a year or more until all of Ukraine is free of Russian invaders again. Journalists are well advised to point out that humanity is in a state of long-term multiple crises, and that action needs to be taken instead of letting more Conservatives or the far-right into power.

DocTomoe 4y ago
It may appear that right now, a lot of things are going the wrong way simultaneously and that that somehow is an unique point in history. But it's not. Several large-scale events with potentially horrific outcomes have happened simultaneously for centuries. There were plague epidemics during the Thirty-Years War. Conflicts in faraway lands did influence trade at home. Political turmoil happened during economic collapse. Animals went extinct in the medieval age, at some point we (Europeans) managed to essentially raze most of our forests, continent-wide, for construction and shipbuilding (just ask Iceland...). This is the human normal. Hell, for decades, we stared death in it's nuclear eye constantly. What is different today: You can now watch all of these events unfold in real-time, and have journalists who no longer are out to tell stories, but to foster your fear so that you create more ad clicks. But fear and dread are bad advisors. Let's not buy into them, and see the problems as what they are: challenges to solve. Because, just like any of the crisis' of the past, if we don't solve them, they will blow up in our faces.