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> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more 99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge.

by roenxi 1y ago

> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more 99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Every species eventually goes extinct, species going extinct isn't much of a motivator to go around making humans suffer. We can't stop species going extinct but we can make people comfortable. And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.

reassess_blind 1y ago
Isn’t the issue species going extinct that are critical parts of larger food chains?
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  And don't forget the pollinators - without them, agriculture changes drastically.
Krssst 1y ago
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. There's a limited amount of fossil fuels on Earth. We definitely are going to stop using them as a major energy source at some point because of that, the question is if we get to get a choice as to how we reduce and stop using them or let the production curve peak and the economy collapse once that happens if nothing was anticipated. With additional climate change to deal with by that point.
- kriops 1y ago
  This particular argument is a complete non-issue if we just do “nothing” and let the price mechanism work in the energy markets. There might be a long-term and permanent contraction that reflects the physical reality of energy becoming less available, but there will not be a proper collapse unless some well-meaning central planner tries to avoid it.
  - Krssst 1y ago
    Except that by letting the market burn all available fossil fuels we'll get the worst possible case of climate change. And markets aren't known for thinking long-term; by the time we're going to be lacking fuels it will be a bit late to massively build nuclear power plants that takes years to build, massively install renewable and build / install massive storage, or adjust the entire world to less predictable electricity generation if using renewables without massive storage. France has been doing well with electricity, thanks to central planning that pushed for nuclear. The problem is bad planning, regardless of whether it's public sector or private sector.
roughly 1y ago
This is an absolutely unhinged take. We're facing civilizational collapse because we couldn't be arsed to stop burning fossil fuels, not because we didn't have other options. We've known how to do solar, wind, and nuclear for decades, we've known about anthropogenic climate change for decades, we've known the risks, and we've done absolutely nothing about it. This is a problem of will, not capacity. Edit, because I'm guessing the "civilizational collapse" line's going to catch the response, instead of the "will, not capacity" part: Pick any one of: * Sea levels rise by 2-3ft * The jet stream breaks down * The north atlantic current breaks down * Large swaths of the globe between, say, +/-33deg off the equator experience heat waves sufficient to make being outside more than ~30 or so minutes unprotected a life threatening event for normally healthy individuals multiple times per year (note these areas of the planet contain several billion people, and not the rich ones). * Climates change sufficient to move productive agricultural zones substantially outside of where they've been for roughly the entire industrial area, causing regular crop failures and unpredictable food prices * Large scale droughts and flooding become a regular event * Category 5 becomes the low side of what we'd expect a hurricane to hit And walk through the political, economic, and social ramifications of it, and then realize we're looking at all of them - and we're already seeing the beginnings of them _today_.
- jrowen 1y ago
  It's not clear to me how any of these lead to civilizational collapse. That's equally unhinged doom fetishization. There is an incredible amount of resiliency baked into our society, and resourcefulness baked into our biology. Pick any one of those and explain the steps to, and what exactly is meant by, "collapse." I'm not arguing against environmentalism. I'm arguing for humanity and against doom prophesies. We are the descendants of the survivors of the last cataclysmic instant-hellfire-and-brimstone extinction event, and we've only gotten more robust since.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    The biggest impact to consider is the disruption to food production. Predictable climate is key to keeping everyone fed. Random droughts, freezes, and unlivable temps will have pretty notable impacts on our ability to produce food. Will we continue to be able to produce enough food for the world? Who knows. But that's the thing that has me most concerned. If there's a doomsday related to climate it will be that.
thejohnconway 1y ago
Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year. Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.
- roenxi 1y ago
  > Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. That is just a mathematical truism. If all species died tomorrow and only humans were left we'd still hit an equilibrium where species were going extinct at the same rate new ones were appearing. The system moves quickly to an equilibrium where usually extinctions = new species. In practice ecosystems collapse fairly regularly. This stuff isn't planned and nature is messy. Every time something changes ecosystems might collapse. > Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year. Sure. Most people would make a show of moral objection to that. But if we look at what the humans actually do - they typically kill everything in sight that is larger than dog, concrete over what is left and poison any insects that made it through the slaughter. I dunno if anyone is tracking how many species we've wiped out on the road to apex predator, but there are going to be quite a few already. Cities are great for humans and not much else. In fact, we purposefully cause ecosystem collapses because it suits us. That argument is only going to get pushback from very argumentative people but it is actually unpersuasive in practice. A billion human deaths is a tragedy but extinct species seems like it would be acceptable for bettering the material comfort of humans. Humans have generally accepted that trade in the past and we're still purposefully trying to ... I dunno, specie-cide a few that we don't like.
  - xboxnolifes 1y ago
    If all species besides humans went extinct tomorrow, humans would also quickly go extinct. The equilibrium would be 0 extinctions and 0 new species. Maybe millions or billions of years years later that would increase to >0, but i think its fair to call that a total collapse of all life on Earth for those interim years.
irjustin 1y ago
> 99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Ehhhhh this argument is hopeful at best. The problem is we're changing the temp faster than base keystone species' evolution can adapt. Without them it's super super unpredictable what'll actually happen. The worry being mass extinction because we lost plankton or similar. Huge amounts of oxygen production and co2 capacity disappears rapidly with that.
the__alchemist 1y ago
This is a horrifically dangerous attitude.
mapontosevenths 1y ago
> civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants. Solar is cheaper now. Has been for awhile.
- roenxi 1y ago
  Article says they're using coal to power the data centres. I've not yet heard of anyone going with coal for ideological reasons. Maybe we've entered an exciting new age for that, but the solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio so I'm going to go with coal being the better option here.
  - mapontosevenths 1y ago
    Reference: https://archive.ph/C0F33 https://archive.ph/C0F33 It is cheaper in this case because it's not a comparison of new solar versus new coal. They're spinning back up dirty old coal plants that they previously shut down because alternatives were cheaper/better. This means the upfront cost is lower for the power company but the long term costs to the environment and health of the public are compromised to allow them to put off building new infrastructure that would provide cleaner AND cheaper power in the long term. They're socializing the costs and privatizing the profits again. > solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio Are you sure that's the case and it's not that you are being lied to by the Republicans who take huge donations from the energy sector? Can you cite a study that isnt more than a decade old and hasn't been retracted? There have been numerous studies to the contrary and having priced home solar myself recently I can tell you firsthand that costs have only gone down significantly every single year for the last decade. The cost for new solar has never been lower and for new construction it's been beating coal for at least years already. Coal is expensive, despite what the coal industry tells you. If you read the linked article you'll note that even new solar and existing coal are competitive, despite it being an unfair comparison. If you add in storage costs it can leave renewables at a slight disadvantage, but in exchange people get to have healthy lungs and land that hasn't been permanently rendered unusable by strip mining and toxic runoff. It baffles me that Republicans would rather keep power costs high AND making the environment worse than use the free and inexhaustible power the sun provides. Hell, it's red states that would benefit the most from upgrading the grid. I saw one estimate that installing solar would generate nearly a trillion dollars in jobs for red states over the next decade. Our future should be solarpunk, not cyberpunk.
bryanlarsen 1y ago
Even during the worst collapses, massive species extinctions took centuries or milleniums. Doing it in a couple of decades instead is unprecedented. Species extinctions are insignificant if evolution and migration can allow other species to fill niches left behind. This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution. And while migration is significantly disrupted by infrastructure. As to your second comment, solar is the cheapest energy.
- jrowen 1y ago
  Check out the Cretaceous-Paleogene. Pretty important one.
  - oblio 1y ago
    Phew, you made me feel more optimistic about the world. Our current extinction event is comparable to one where a literal huge asteroid hit the planet :-)))
    - jrowen 1y ago
      I mean, I do actually find solace in the fact that extinction events in general can create new conditions for new forms of life, and that one in particular paved the way for mammals. But, my comment was only responding to the assertion that "This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution."
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    We have fossils of dinosaurs that existed 40,000 years after that one.
    - jrowen 1y ago
      Yes, and some dinosaurs are still alive today. We call them birds. The environment of the earth was still radically altered in an instant, and our ancestors were the winners.
shoo 1y ago
Anchoring against the cumulative number of species that have ever existed is a strange baseline, that's a metric that will emphasise "hey, life on earth is old" but makes it very hard to say if there's anything unusual or not about the current period. The more common baseline I've come across is comparing the estimated rate of species extinction from the last century or so versus the baseline historical extinction rate. To pick an arbitrary article about extinction rates with citations to published research: > But this estimated [background extinction] rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past. > In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming. > If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate. https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-are-we-in-one-now-122535 https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-ar...
- jrowen 1y ago
  This is an interesting analysis, but it does feel a bit apples-to-oranges. It is good to seek perspective on the impact we are having, but in terms of "are we in an extinction event" it feels woefully premature to me, perhaps even comically futile. 1. For all of the others, we are piecing together bits of evidence spanning eons. Can we really compare estimated background extinction rates over hundreds of millions of years to the by-comparison hyper-detailed and extensive data we have from the last 100? 2. This time it's different. Humans are categorically different from past drivers of extinction. I don't think there is a whole lot to extrapolate from. We can selectively preserve species we care about. We can run roughshod over others without even noticing. The impacts of our actions on the global ecosystem, from construction to medicine to pollution to deforestation, are unique. We could hold in a relative stasis where biodiversity continues declining but at too slow of a rate to really be considered a mass extinction. Or we could blow it all up tomorrow. Or we could unlock bioengineering and see an explosion unlike any before. By the criteria in the article it could be millions of years before we can say anything conclusively.
esafak 1y ago
The record shows that civilizations collapse when they deplete their resources or otherwise live out of balance with their environment. Which civilizations collapsed because they did not use enough resources?
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels I don't understand the reasoning behind that. Obtaining fossil fuels, refining and delivering them to where they are needed all requires a substantial number of systems working together. Disruption to e.g. refineries will stop people from being able to use fossil fuels. Meanwhile, alternate sources such as solar and wind are cheaper and require far less civilisation to make workable (e.g. setup your own solar cell and plug it into your isolated supply).

by roenxi 1y ago

reassess_blind 1y ago

Isn’t the issue species going extinct that are critical parts of larger food chains?

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
And don't forget the pollinators - without them, agriculture changes drastically.

Krssst 1y ago

> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. There's a limited amount of fossil fuels on Earth. We definitely are going to stop using them as a major energy source at some point because of that, the question is if we get to get a choice as to how we reduce and stop using them or let the production curve peak and the economy collapse once that happens if nothing was anticipated. With additional climate change to deal with by that point.

kriops 1y ago
This particular argument is a complete non-issue if we just do “nothing” and let the price mechanism work in the energy markets. There might be a long-term and permanent contraction that reflects the physical reality of energy becoming less available, but there will not be a proper collapse unless some well-meaning central planner tries to avoid it.
- Krssst 1y ago
  Except that by letting the market burn all available fossil fuels we'll get the worst possible case of climate change. And markets aren't known for thinking long-term; by the time we're going to be lacking fuels it will be a bit late to massively build nuclear power plants that takes years to build, massively install renewable and build / install massive storage, or adjust the entire world to less predictable electricity generation if using renewables without massive storage. France has been doing well with electricity, thanks to central planning that pushed for nuclear. The problem is bad planning, regardless of whether it's public sector or private sector.

roughly 1y ago

This is an absolutely unhinged take. We're facing civilizational collapse because we couldn't be arsed to stop burning fossil fuels, not because we didn't have other options. We've known how to do solar, wind, and nuclear for decades, we've known about anthropogenic climate change for decades, we've known the risks, and we've done absolutely nothing about it. This is a problem of will, not capacity. Edit, because I'm guessing the "civilizational collapse" line's going to catch the response, instead of the "will, not capacity" part: Pick any one of: * Sea levels rise by 2-3ft * The jet stream breaks down * The north atlantic current breaks down * Large swaths of the globe between, say, +/-33deg off the equator experience heat waves sufficient to make being outside more than ~30 or so minutes unprotected a life threatening event for normally healthy individuals multiple times per year (note these areas of the planet contain several billion people, and not the rich ones). * Climates change sufficient to move productive agricultural zones substantially outside of where they've been for roughly the entire industrial area, causing regular crop failures and unpredictable food prices * Large scale droughts and flooding become a regular event * Category 5 becomes the low side of what we'd expect a hurricane to hit And walk through the political, economic, and social ramifications of it, and then realize we're looking at all of them - and we're already seeing the beginnings of them _today_.

jrowen 1y ago
It's not clear to me how any of these lead to civilizational collapse. That's equally unhinged doom fetishization. There is an incredible amount of resiliency baked into our society, and resourcefulness baked into our biology. Pick any one of those and explain the steps to, and what exactly is meant by, "collapse." I'm not arguing against environmentalism. I'm arguing for humanity and against doom prophesies. We are the descendants of the survivors of the last cataclysmic instant-hellfire-and-brimstone extinction event, and we've only gotten more robust since.
- cogman10 1y ago
  The biggest impact to consider is the disruption to food production. Predictable climate is key to keeping everyone fed. Random droughts, freezes, and unlivable temps will have pretty notable impacts on our ability to produce food. Will we continue to be able to produce enough food for the world? Who knows. But that's the thing that has me most concerned. If there's a doomsday related to climate it will be that.

thejohnconway 1y ago

Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year. Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.

roenxi 1y ago
> Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. That is just a mathematical truism. If all species died tomorrow and only humans were left we'd still hit an equilibrium where species were going extinct at the same rate new ones were appearing. The system moves quickly to an equilibrium where usually extinctions = new species. In practice ecosystems collapse fairly regularly. This stuff isn't planned and nature is messy. Every time something changes ecosystems might collapse. > Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year. Sure. Most people would make a show of moral objection to that. But if we look at what the humans actually do - they typically kill everything in sight that is larger than dog, concrete over what is left and poison any insects that made it through the slaughter. I dunno if anyone is tracking how many species we've wiped out on the road to apex predator, but there are going to be quite a few already. Cities are great for humans and not much else. In fact, we purposefully cause ecosystem collapses because it suits us. That argument is only going to get pushback from very argumentative people but it is actually unpersuasive in practice. A billion human deaths is a tragedy but extinct species seems like it would be acceptable for bettering the material comfort of humans. Humans have generally accepted that trade in the past and we're still purposefully trying to ... I dunno, specie-cide a few that we don't like.
- xboxnolifes 1y ago
  If all species besides humans went extinct tomorrow, humans would also quickly go extinct. The equilibrium would be 0 extinctions and 0 new species. Maybe millions or billions of years years later that would increase to >0, but i think its fair to call that a total collapse of all life on Earth for those interim years.

irjustin 1y ago

> 99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Ehhhhh this argument is hopeful at best. The problem is we're changing the temp faster than base keystone species' evolution can adapt. Without them it's super super unpredictable what'll actually happen. The worry being mass extinction because we lost plankton or similar. Huge amounts of oxygen production and co2 capacity disappears rapidly with that.

the__alchemist 1y ago

This is a horrifically dangerous attitude.

mapontosevenths 1y ago

> civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants. Solar is cheaper now. Has been for awhile.

roenxi 1y ago
Article says they're using coal to power the data centres. I've not yet heard of anyone going with coal for ideological reasons. Maybe we've entered an exciting new age for that, but the solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio so I'm going to go with coal being the better option here.
- mapontosevenths 1y ago
  Reference: https://archive.ph/C0F33 https://archive.ph/C0F33 It is cheaper in this case because it's not a comparison of new solar versus new coal. They're spinning back up dirty old coal plants that they previously shut down because alternatives were cheaper/better. This means the upfront cost is lower for the power company but the long term costs to the environment and health of the public are compromised to allow them to put off building new infrastructure that would provide cleaner AND cheaper power in the long term. They're socializing the costs and privatizing the profits again. > solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio Are you sure that's the case and it's not that you are being lied to by the Republicans who take huge donations from the energy sector? Can you cite a study that isnt more than a decade old and hasn't been retracted? There have been numerous studies to the contrary and having priced home solar myself recently I can tell you firsthand that costs have only gone down significantly every single year for the last decade. The cost for new solar has never been lower and for new construction it's been beating coal for at least years already. Coal is expensive, despite what the coal industry tells you. If you read the linked article you'll note that even new solar and existing coal are competitive, despite it being an unfair comparison. If you add in storage costs it can leave renewables at a slight disadvantage, but in exchange people get to have healthy lungs and land that hasn't been permanently rendered unusable by strip mining and toxic runoff. It baffles me that Republicans would rather keep power costs high AND making the environment worse than use the free and inexhaustible power the sun provides. Hell, it's red states that would benefit the most from upgrading the grid. I saw one estimate that installing solar would generate nearly a trillion dollars in jobs for red states over the next decade. Our future should be solarpunk, not cyberpunk.

bryanlarsen 1y ago

Even during the worst collapses, massive species extinctions took centuries or milleniums. Doing it in a couple of decades instead is unprecedented. Species extinctions are insignificant if evolution and migration can allow other species to fill niches left behind. This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution. And while migration is significantly disrupted by infrastructure. As to your second comment, solar is the cheapest energy.

jrowen 1y ago
Check out the Cretaceous-Paleogene. Pretty important one.
- oblio 1y ago
  Phew, you made me feel more optimistic about the world. Our current extinction event is comparable to one where a literal huge asteroid hit the planet :-)))
  - jrowen 1y ago
    I mean, I do actually find solace in the fact that extinction events in general can create new conditions for new forms of life, and that one in particular paved the way for mammals. But, my comment was only responding to the assertion that "This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution."
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  We have fossils of dinosaurs that existed 40,000 years after that one.
  - jrowen 1y ago
    Yes, and some dinosaurs are still alive today. We call them birds. The environment of the earth was still radically altered in an instant, and our ancestors were the winners.

shoo 1y ago

Anchoring against the cumulative number of species that have ever existed is a strange baseline, that's a metric that will emphasise "hey, life on earth is old" but makes it very hard to say if there's anything unusual or not about the current period. The more common baseline I've come across is comparing the estimated rate of species extinction from the last century or so versus the baseline historical extinction rate. To pick an arbitrary article about extinction rates with citations to published research: > But this estimated [background extinction] rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past. > In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming. > If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate. https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-are-we-in-one-now-122535 https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-ar...

jrowen 1y ago
This is an interesting analysis, but it does feel a bit apples-to-oranges. It is good to seek perspective on the impact we are having, but in terms of "are we in an extinction event" it feels woefully premature to me, perhaps even comically futile. 1. For all of the others, we are piecing together bits of evidence spanning eons. Can we really compare estimated background extinction rates over hundreds of millions of years to the by-comparison hyper-detailed and extensive data we have from the last 100? 2. This time it's different. Humans are categorically different from past drivers of extinction. I don't think there is a whole lot to extrapolate from. We can selectively preserve species we care about. We can run roughshod over others without even noticing. The impacts of our actions on the global ecosystem, from construction to medicine to pollution to deforestation, are unique. We could hold in a relative stasis where biodiversity continues declining but at too slow of a rate to really be considered a mass extinction. Or we could blow it all up tomorrow. Or we could unlock bioengineering and see an explosion unlike any before. By the criteria in the article it could be millions of years before we can say anything conclusively.

esafak 1y ago

The record shows that civilizations collapse when they deplete their resources or otherwise live out of balance with their environment. Which civilizations collapsed because they did not use enough resources?

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago

> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels I don't understand the reasoning behind that. Obtaining fossil fuels, refining and delivering them to where they are needed all requires a substantial number of systems working together. Disruption to e.g. refineries will stop people from being able to use fossil fuels. Meanwhile, alternate sources such as solar and wind are cheaper and require far less civilisation to make workable (e.g. setup your own solar cell and plug it into your isolated supply).