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Insect collapse

theguardian.com

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Re: Insect collapse

#211

Post by crispinb »

gerbilly wrote: post #67

Wendell Berry once wrote that we are at war with nature, and I think the metaphor is quite appropriate. This war, like most wars, has turned out to be a trickier business than we expected. We must now face two shocking surprises. The first surprise is that if we say and believe that we are at war with nature, then we are in the fullest sense at war: that is, we are both opposing and being opposed, and the costs to bo…

Though I sometimes enjoy Berry, he's wrong. We can't be 'at war' with nature. We are nature. Human destruction of ecosystems is a natural process - it's not fundamentally different from introduced flora & fauna overrunning island ecologies. It's just happening on a planetary scale.

The only 'unnatural' aspect of the picture is the common notion that humans (primates designed for small-scale tribal interactions) could somehow magically adapt to managing planetary-scale populations (let alone the vast network of ecologies hosting them).

The story of human 'progress' or 'destiny' is a religious myth. Amusingly, it is held with particular vehemence by many technologically-inclined atheists without a shred of irony.

Re: Insect collapse

#212

Post by jmcqk6 »

CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #205
ryanmercer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to accept the fact that we've already lost the game. I have a friend that is extremely optimistic and thinks we will figure things out, like fusion, 'because we need to' but I'm far more pessimistic. This year, based on previous years, we will probably hit 35 gigatons of carbon emissions and it won't be long before we hit 40 gigatons. Even if a fleet of alien ships appeared in orbit today and was like "we'r…

As an optimist I can just note that your, probably, fully accurate description is all artificial. Everything you mentioned are incidental issues we’ve created for our selves, and are trivially solvable from a pure technical perspective. Organizing people to that effect might look doomed to failure, but entire economies have been overturned in decades before.

>trivially solvable from a pure technical perspectiv

You have a trivial technical solution to removing gigatons of carbon from our atmosphere?

You have a trivial technical solution to cleaning up microplastics?

Please, would you kindly share this trivial technical solutions with the rest of us?

Re: Insect collapse

#213

Post by stouset »

shusson wrote: post #47
stouset wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, that’s the “our” in “our world”.

If life started on the Earth, then we are just part of a process of a particular rock floating in space. There is no 'our' world and it is not dying.

This is pointlessly pedantic. You know full well what the GP is trying to say, and you are being willfully obstinate by ignoring the obvious context. We are rendering the world uninhabitable for a frightening number of species—most likely including our own—through environmental collapse. Instead of bothering to discuss that point, you've decided to try and derail the conversation by playing semantics and arguing over the meaning of "destroy" and "our" and "planet".

If you're not willing to or capable of engaging in these types of discussions in good faith, maybe Hacker News isn't the site for you.

Re: Insect collapse

#214

Post by WhompingWindows »

petilon wrote: post #58
brazzy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When do we do something? When it significantly impacts the daily lives of a majority of people, and not a second earlier.

When it significantly impacts the daily lives of uneducated Americans . Educated people around the world already want to do something. Uneducated people outside America already want to do something (because their governments are on board.) It is uneducated Americans -- and their president -- that is going to do us all in. This means the survival of the planet depends on our ability to communicate with and convince un…

It's sort of delusional to say that un-educated people and Trump are the problem. Educated people have vastly huger carbon footprints than non-educated people, thinking globally. Is it the poor people in Africa and Southern/Southeastern Asia that are to blame, or is it the rich people who literally use 10X or 100X more carbon emission in their daily lives? What about the historical emissions of our ancestors - I know mine as an American/WASP are HUGE considering all the cars/planes/meat that have been consumed by my ancestors. Compare that to a line of subsistence farmers in other countries. While I believe in climate change, it doesn't matter, I'm still on the hook for FAR more historical emissions than those un-educated people.

Carbon emissions are going up globally, carbon emissions went up in the USA, slightly different political environments won't change the reality that the vast majority of people, societies, and companies have done far less than they need to already. We can't fool ourselves into thinking a democratic presidential win in 2020 will stop this crisis, it simply won't be enough by any rational view of the emissions already out and coming out every day. Even the favorite policy of democrats/progressives, the carbon tax, got voted down in multiple progressive-state reforanda.

In summary, it feels good to point the finger of blame at the current political regime, but the reality is very little is being done anywhere except for pockets of hope like Norway, California, Iceland, Hawaii, which are NOT enough to balance out historical emissions and rising emissions in China, India, etc.

Re: Insect collapse

#215

Post by toasterlovin »

ForHackernews wrote: post #195
toasterlovin wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I pointed out, children get their nature and their nurture from their parents. And I don't know how you can reconcile the success of the environmental movement in the developed world in the past 5 decades with your position that somehow people caring about the environment doesn't have any real world effects.

CO2 emissions are not just rising but rising faster. We haven't even gotten the second derivative pointed in the necessary direction.

But you and your significant other are not the only players in the game. There are other people who will have children, regardless of what you do. So your choice is between a future that contains your children, who share your disposition and are indoctrinated by you into a specific worldview, or a world that does not contain them.

How does your side win if it promotes a strategy of not even showing up to the game?

Re: Insect collapse

#216

Post by toasterlovin »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #200
toasterlovin wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You reconcile it by reading some history books and realizing that life has always been tough and that the future probably won't be any tougher than the past.

I mean, you are absolutely, 100% incorrect. It's textbook fallacy. X is tough, Y was tough, we survived Y, and therefore we can survive X. The planet has never been through warming as rapid as what we are going through in known geological (not human) history. There was a paper hosted and copublished by NASA to that effect in the last month. It's literally unknown how much life can survive the velocity of the change t…

Climate change has caused famine and strife for humans in the past. It's one of the more common reasons for civilizational decline. Sure, this round of climate change is worse. But our ability to fend for ourselves is better.

Re: Insect collapse

#217

Post by rollo »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #208
rollo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a modern compiled language and without using ten layers of abstraction. It is very feasible and does not require significantly more development effort, at least not compared to the energy and material savings.

If it "would require less than a tenth of processing power" while being "very feasible and does not require significantly more development effort" I think you should get in touch with Google or Facebook with your suggestion. You can solve two problems at once - you will lower their carbon footprint to 1/10 of their current one, and become a multi-millionaire or even billionaire. Sounds like a double win to me.

That's the problem we're talking about. It is very feasible but only if performance and energy use is something you want to focus on, while accepting the economic penalty of not prioritizing time-to-market. This is just yet another case of unchecked capitalism and free market destroying the planet. Focusing on energy and resource conservation may be more important as well as feasible, but it's not quite as economically competitive. Unless the industry as a whole decide to do what's morally right, or it is regulated and mandated by the government.

Re: Insect collapse

#218

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #212
CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an optimist I can just note that your, probably, fully accurate description is all artificial. Everything you mentioned are incidental issues we’ve created for our selves, and are trivially solvable from a pure technical perspective. Organizing people to that effect might look doomed to failure, but entire economies have been overturned in decades before.

>trivially solvable from a pure technical perspectiv You have a trivial technical solution to removing gigatons of carbon from our atmosphere? You have a trivial technical solution to cleaning up microplastics? Please, would you kindly share this trivial technical solutions with the rest of us?

Reallocating wealth to free up resources to focus on the challenges would be pretty straight forward. The IPCC report had a few figures on various techniques we could explore which to me looks “trivial” given the resources we have at our disposal.

My point: it’s mostly a political issue.

Re: Insect collapse

#219

Post by gerbilly »

crispinb wrote: post #211
gerbilly wrote: post #67

Wendell Berry once wrote that we are at war with nature, and I think the metaphor is quite appropriate. This war, like most wars, has turned out to be a trickier business than we expected. We must now face two shocking surprises. The first surprise is that if we say and believe that we are at war with nature, then we are in the fullest sense at war: that is, we are both opposing and being opposed, and the costs to bo…

Though I sometimes enjoy Berry, he's wrong. We can't be 'at war' with nature. We are nature. Human destruction of ecosystems is a natural process - it's not fundamentally different from introduced flora & fauna overrunning island ecologies. It's just happening on a planetary scale. The only 'unnatural' aspect of the picture is the common notion that humans (primates designed for small-scale tribal interactions) could…

I read it more allegorically than that.

Being at war with nature is a good metaphor for our behaviour, because we seem determined to completely vanquish it and bend it to our will.

Of course it's a bitter irony that if we are at war with nature, we are at war with ourselves (because as you say we come from nature). I think that's implied by the passage.

The way we interact with nature is different in kind from other species, not just in scope.

For humans, it's not enough to take , say, just the fish that we need. Because of money we take _all_ the fish we can get and then sell them. What doesn't sell is thrown out.

Re: Insect collapse

#220

Post by ForHackernews »

toasterlovin wrote: post #215
ForHackernews wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CO2 emissions are not just rising but rising faster. We haven't even gotten the second derivative pointed in the necessary direction.

But you and your significant other are not the only players in the game. There are other people who will have children, regardless of what you do. So your choice is between a future that contains your children, who share your disposition and are indoctrinated by you into a specific worldview, or a world that does not contain them. How does your side win if it promotes a strategy of not even showing up to the game?

My "side" "wins" in that my [non-existent] children and grandchildren will not suffer and starve on a famine-stricken planet burning itself to death.
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