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The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

#101

Post by pdonis »

partialrecall wrote: post #92
pdonis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the temperature rose to those levels over millenia, not just hundreds of years We don't actually know that. The time resolution of the data is not good enough to tell us. It's quite possible that it happened faster in the past as well. > we might not survive long enough to witness the adaptation Quite honestly, I don't understand why people think our ability to adapt is so poor. We already have more than 5 C variat…

> "The time resolution of the data is not good enough to tell us." Is that actually true? What's the sampling rate and subsequent Nyquist frequency? It's my impression that the sampling rate given by ice core samples is surprisingly high (something in the neighborhood of year-by-year.)

> It's my impression that the sampling rate given by ice core samples is surprisingly high (something in the neighborhood of year-by-year.)

Ice cores only cover hundreds of thousands of years into the past (I think the oldest is about 800,000 years). I'm talking about times millions of years ago.

Re: The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

#102

Post by reb »

djsumdog wrote: post #58
partialrecall wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adherence to the truth is more important than adherence to a narrative. Promoting a good cause by allowing falsehoods to spread may seem helpful in the short term, but in doing so you're building a house on a foundation of sand. When you promote trivial falsehoods instead of calling them out, you allow your opposition to be the one who calls out those falsehoods, and thus undermine your cause. When somebody on your s…

Yea, you shouldn't deny a reality because you believe in the noble lie. And to be fair, climate change is turned into a crazy red hearing of a political issue. There are lakes of sludge outside factory cities in China, insane amounts of plastic particulates in the oceans, tons and tons of textile waste. There are so many many forms of pollution much worse than CO2, and when you focus on just CO2, you get carbon laws…

> the scale of our folly of consumerism and over-consumption

Consumerism, over-consumption, and the economic growth these behaviors drive are impossible to eliminate without crippling the global economy. But I think there actually is a way to have our unlimited cake without toasting the planet, it just requires us to divorce the concept of value from physical items (or increase the fidelity, and thus value, of digital items). This is already taking place, with the data economy being the obvious if controversial first step. Similarly, I see the explosion of digital marketplaces and microtransactions within social and mobile gaming platforms as another example of this concept.

There will inevitably be externalities to a shift toward primarily virtual consumption, but I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine compelling virtual products diminishing the draw of many physical item, along with the need for infrastructure to support their production and dissemination.

Re: The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

#103

Post by tomp »

input_sh wrote: post #28
ajmurmann wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read most of the agricultural production in Brazil goes directly or indirectly towards beef and biofuel. So cutting down on beef consumption seems like a great step. I personally have cut down my meat consumption dramatically, but how can we move that further as not only a society, but a species? If I stop eating beef, but nobody else does, nothing is won. If the US cuts down on beef consumption, other…

> ...but how can we move that further as not only a society, but a species? The answer is simple, the execution is hard and will piss a lot of people off: start treating red meat as a luxury item, and slowly introduce taxes on top of its price, like we do for alcohol and tobacco. Nothing drastic of course, just a few cents extra every half a year or so to make people reconsider their eating habits again and again. Bu…

The correct solution is, of course, to tax things according to their externalities. So beef produced with methods that result in less CH4 should be cheaper than more polluting beef.

Re: The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

#105

Post by jdashg »

ajmurmann wrote: post #21
chisleu wrote: post #12

This is a great point. An important aspect of this is that most of the Amazon's deforestation is land owners developing their land and adding to the agricultural sectors of South America. If we want to stop them, we need to stop the excessive consumption of these goods. This doesn't just mean stopping over eating, it means changing what you eat and paying more for goods sourced locally. Unfortunately, that means from…

From what I've read most of the agricultural production in Brazil goes directly or indirectly towards beef and biofuel. So cutting down on beef consumption seems like a great step. I personally have cut down my meat consumption dramatically, but how can we move that further as not only a society, but a species? If I stop eating beef, but nobody else does, nothing is won. If the US cuts down on beef consumption, other…

"If the US cuts down on beef consumption, other countries will be happy to buy the now cheaper beef." This only results in no change if there's an infinite demand for beef at the current market price. If the US reduces beef intake, world beef intake clearly goes down.

Re: The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

#107

Post by astine »

ineedasername wrote: post #68
partialrecall wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article contextualizes the truth in terms of the pro-climate narrative, > "Losing the Amazon, beyond representing a planetary historic tragedy beyond measure, would also make meeting the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement all but impossible. World leaders need to marshal all their political and diplomatic might to save it." So what exactly are you calling out? Better the Atlantic be the one to call ou…

Why does it matter who calls out the falsehood? Otherwise, while the article may come out acknowledging climate change, the headline comes across as click-bait that could easily be pushed into a climate-denier narrative. Better to have a more neutral title like "The Amazon's Role in Global Oxygen Production". That stops the facts from being decontextualized.

"Why does it matter who calls out the falsehood?"

Because facts aren't usually discussed in isolation. If a climate change denialist were the one to point out the fact, they would frame it with something like: 'Lies the climate establishment are telling you!' If it slows down the process of convincing people of the seriousness of climate change for The Atlantic to report a headline like this, it doesn't slow it down as much as a climate denialist group beating The Atlantic to the punch.

"Better to have a more neutral title like "The Amazon's Role in Global Oxygen Production". That stops the facts from being decontextualized."

Maybe. But the more direct headline helps with the issue listed above. Many (but not all) climate change denialists do not argue in good faith, and it's more important to head off any claim of a cover-up or bias that they might have than to keep the narrative pristine.

Realistically, the alternative to the OP's headline is not something more neutral, but something like this real headline from Forbes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/08/26...

Re: The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

#108

Post by dibujante »

djsumdog wrote: post #58
partialrecall wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adherence to the truth is more important than adherence to a narrative. Promoting a good cause by allowing falsehoods to spread may seem helpful in the short term, but in doing so you're building a house on a foundation of sand. When you promote trivial falsehoods instead of calling them out, you allow your opposition to be the one who calls out those falsehoods, and thus undermine your cause. When somebody on your s…

Yea, you shouldn't deny a reality because you believe in the noble lie. And to be fair, climate change is turned into a crazy red hearing of a political issue. There are lakes of sludge outside factory cities in China, insane amounts of plastic particulates in the oceans, tons and tons of textile waste. There are so many many forms of pollution much worse than CO2, and when you focus on just CO2, you get carbon laws…

> There are so many many forms of pollution much worse than CO2

CO2 will end life much faster than any of the other undesirable things you mentioned. It's objectively more dangerous.

Re: The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

#109

Post by wutbrodo »

obelos wrote: post #100
wutbrodo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been really interesting to me to see how the concept that lying in support of your preferred narrative is the correct way to engage publicly with a problem has evolved over the last few years. It seems like only a few years ago that people who admitted to this strategy were roundly condemned. Now, it's a completely normal view to go out of your way to openly endorse lying about eg science as a moral course of ac…

“Put simply, our first suggestion is _don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth_.”[1] Climate denialism is the proverbial firehose of lies. Finely parsing words to maintain some Panglossian notion of a market dominated by rational choice of information-rich actors is not going to turn us away from disaster. [1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE10...

Thank you, this is a thoughtful response. That being said, the argument you're linking to, while quite sound, doesn't disagree with me. It's saying that, when rebutting concerted propaganda, simply making the truth available in an undirected manner and hoping people will find it isn't enough: you have to make an effort to get it to the right places at the right time. There's no endorsement therein of suppressing or falsifying facts.

Slavish dedication to narrative over truth is putting the cart before the horse: any number of movements that we now remember as grotesque, "alternative facts"-driven impediments to society's progress started out on relatively sound epistemic footing and failed to adapt. The beauty of the scientific method (and the scientific establishment, when it's functioning well) is that it allows us to gracefully transition away from narratives that are increasingly anachronistic or incompatible with our observations.

To go back to your link, consider what defines "propaganda": is it disliking conclusions, or is it indifference towards truth? I'd argue that your link defines it as the latter. For many of us, the conflict isn't between the good set of lies and the bad set of lies, it's between those who intentionally embrace and propagate lies and those who strive for an accurate model of the world. Anyone who's skimmed a history book can tell you that the "good" and "bad" labels don't tend to be very persistent... (the 20th century and it's hundred million dead of utopianism is rich with examples of this).

Re: The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs

#110

Post by astine »

leephillips wrote: post #99
partialrecall wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article contextualizes the truth in terms of the pro-climate narrative, > "Losing the Amazon, beyond representing a planetary historic tragedy beyond measure, would also make meeting the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement all but impossible. World leaders need to marshal all their political and diplomatic might to save it." So what exactly are you calling out? Better the Atlantic be the one to call ou…

The article does not explain why losing the Amazon would have an large effect on global climate, it just makes this assertion. Why would it?

Because of the sequestration of carbon in the forest. If you burn the forest down, all of the carbon in the forest is released into the atmosphere in the form of smoke.
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