3 ms·
Of course the earth wants to keep warming; the current climate is rare. It doesn't fall to the personification of the earth enacting a conspiracy, but things ca
by chasil 3y ago
Of course the earth wants to keep warming; the current climate is rare. It doesn't fall to the personification of the earth enacting a conspiracy, but things can and will return to [planetary] normal at some point.
"A 'greenhouse Earth' is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history... Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth
- ajross 3y agoThat's a weird use of "normal". The current ecosystems are fundamentally ice age ecosystems. Whether they count as "normal" to you personally isn't really material. They are the only ecosystems we have. You don't warm the earth rapidly (which at this point we undeniably are) and then magically get back "normal" fern forests and dinosaurs or whatnot. What you get is a mass extinction.
- angst_ridden 3y agoYes, but after mass extinction, stuff won't just stop. Eventually, things will evolve to forests or the equivalent. You'll be unlikely to have the same kinds of dinosaurs as before, but as the old saying goes, nature like carcination. There will probably be new variants of crabs.
- ajross 3y agoNo, but the stuff that is here now won't be there anymore. Traditional conservative (small-c) ethics generally says things like "don't throw stuff out or destroy things if we don't know what we'll get instead". You seem to be saying the equivalent of e.g. "It's OK to kill all the elephants because in a few million years something else will have filled the niche". That seems ridiculous to me. Does your logic extend to all species? All ecosystems? Our species?
- landemva 3y agoI had never before heard that description of 'traditional conservative ethics'. I thought free market conservatives think individual participants will make their own choices and increase the goods and services available, thus benefitting humanity.
- ajross 3y agoFWIW: the reference to "small C conservatism" was specifically to make clear that I was using the word in its traditional sense ("change is presumed bad absent evidence") and NOT referring to modern political divisions. In fact what you're describing is exactly the disconnect: libertarianism is very much not "conservative" by traditional standards. The fact that they live in the same party in the modern US is an accident; it doesn't follow from their philosophies at all.
- JuanPosadas 3y agoTechnically yes, but you know, millions of years is a long time.
- selimthegrim 3y agoThat’s interesting because I thought we were in an interglacial period long term