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Birds Are Vanishing from North America

nytimes.com

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Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#251

Post by okcando »

refurb wrote: post #150
amatecha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never use the phrase "ideal state", but rather "natural state". Though, even that is not quite accurate as humans are naturally-occurring too, but the things we do (and do to the planet) are not quite so "natural". While thinking that "the planet is worse off because of humans" is a judgement, I think it's not unreasonable to assert that innocent life forms all over the world suffer by our actions (more than…

A beaver dams a river, flooding the shores and killing off the ecosystem. That’s natural. A group of humans do it and it’s unnatural?

Yes.

It's just what the word means. It's fun as a philosophical exercise to consider humans as natural and so too their interventions but at the end of the day, "natural" is a word that in most cases means not caused or created by humans. It's relative to us.

That's without assessing the goodness or badness of it. Any interventions we pursue to correct climate change and restore biomes will be every bit as unnatural as the ones that caused those things but they can also be good.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#252

Post by ehnto »

bsmitty5000 wrote: post #2

This article doesn't mention the declining insect population at all but I would think it's clear that a quickly declining food source would be a major cause of population decline. I wonder if there's a similar decline in other animals that rely on insects, eg bats. Although, interestingly, the article does mention neonicotinoids as a direct reason for the decline in population. It's hard to imagine humans taking the…

> a la Trantor in Foundation, just one huge mega-city that fabricates all of its needs

If I am not mistaken, Trantor relied on an external supply chain from other planets in the empire in order to survive. It struck me as enormously brittle at the time and indeed in the books.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#253

Post by bikeshed »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41
jjuhl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. There are too many humans on the planet. Reducing the number would lead to a more sustainable situation. That's just basic logic.

"Reducing" (by means unspecified) sounds uncomfortably close to mass killing. Worse, the logic of the "climate action now" position is that we can't wait for 2050. That will be too late. Well, if you want to reduce the population by 2050, what concrete steps do you propose? (I know, you didn't say 2050. I think "action now" is inherent in the logic of your position, though.)

> "Reducing" (by means unspecified) sounds uncomfortably close to mass killing.

he's calling for basically this elsewhere in the thread.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#254

Post by StanislavPetrov »

bsmitty5000 wrote: post #2

This article doesn't mention the declining insect population at all but I would think it's clear that a quickly declining food source would be a major cause of population decline. I wonder if there's a similar decline in other animals that rely on insects, eg bats. Although, interestingly, the article does mention neonicotinoids as a direct reason for the decline in population. It's hard to imagine humans taking the…

>This article doesn't mention the declining insect population at all but I would think it's clear that a quickly declining food source would be a major cause of population decline.

If you cast a wider net you'll see that this mass extinction goes beyond birds and insects to all living creatures including plant life. Year after year we destroy more and more of the forests and other natural places while saturating the earth with more and more of our garbage and synthetic trash and plastic that will never decay but will serve to poison the ecosystem we all depend on to survive. The vast majority of public concern is focused on, "global warming" which is only a tiny part of the damage we are doing. Anyone who even attempts to raise the issue of our massive overpopulation, which causes and exacerbates all of our environmental issues (as well as many of our social ones) is instantly castigated and derided as a lunatic or a Malthusian, while we add another billion people to our already shattered ecosystem.

I pity the kids!

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#255

Post by chousuke »

refurb wrote: post #150
amatecha wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never use the phrase "ideal state", but rather "natural state". Though, even that is not quite accurate as humans are naturally-occurring too, but the things we do (and do to the planet) are not quite so "natural". While thinking that "the planet is worse off because of humans" is a judgement, I think it's not unreasonable to assert that innocent life forms all over the world suffer by our actions (more than…

A beaver dams a river, flooding the shores and killing off the ecosystem. That’s natural. A group of humans do it and it’s unnatural?

I think it has more to do with responsibility. Humans are capable of understanding the harm caused by our choices and that brings responsibility.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#256

Post by PeterStuer »

commandlinefan wrote: post #80
technothrasher wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or we die out and the planet recovers on its own. That makes it sound like there's some kind of natural 'ideal state' for the planet to recover to. Without us, the planet would just go on changing, without anything to judge the current environment at any point as good or bad to any particular standard. Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves. Nothing more, nothing less.

> Saving the environment is simply saving ourselves I wonder, though... we know, for example, that bees pollinate plants, and that we need plants to be pollinated for our survival. But if the bees die out, we can figure out another technical way to pollinate plants - it might be a pain to carry out, and we might be kicking ourselves for not saving the bees before it got to that point, but it can be done. If it comes…

Given our extremely limited basic understanding of the interlinked systems that constitute this planet's ecosystem, any attempts at large scale geoengineering are as likely to be beneficial as a brainsurgeon going at it with a baseball bat.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#257

Post by rjf72 »

matt_j wrote: post #247
rjf72 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fun catch here though. Earth is going to face a natural destruction sooner or later. Be it by a gamma ray burst, a super-volcanic eruption, an asteroid impact, or any of other other practically infinite number of ways it can happen, has happened (multiple times), and will happen again soon or later. So we're all effectively living on borrowed time. You can't create a permanently sustainable Earth in a beaut…

Cataclysmic events occur on geological timescales. Historically no species survives more than some thousands or perhaps millions of years, timescales short enough to fit between unavoidable extinction events. Humanity is currently on a path to destroy the earth's capability to sustain us, on a timescale that is laughably small compared to geological timescales. If we behaved better, humanity could conceivably exist f…

Even with today's technology there's no real path to making earth literally inhospitable within the foreseeable future, sans an intentional act like somebody exploding a salted nuke in the atmosphere. But we can, and probably will, certainly make it less hospitable. More importantly though technology will continue to improve and, for events that happen on a slow time scale, we have a good chance of helping to mitigate the most catastrophic of effects. Even in the worst case though where we somehow remain stuck with 2020 tech for centuries, there's no species ending level scenario on the books.

The problem, by contrast, with the natural disasters is not only their effect but how incredibly rapid it happens. For instance we nearly caused a very gradual catastrophe with CFCs by gradually depleting the ozone layer over many decades. Something similar has been suggested as the cause for the Ordovician extinction. Except there what caused the destruction of the atmospheric layer was a gamma ray burst, and it only would have taken a few seconds. This is even more apparent with things like asteroid impacts. We've had an increasingly large number (or probably more accurately we can now actually 'see' them a bit more accurately) whiz by us at a tiny fraction of the distance to the moon. If a single one of these made impact you're looking at the equivalent of millions of WW2 scale nuclear weapons going off, at once. And of course it's not just the immediate impact, but then the massive cooling and darkening of Earth that would follow. If this happened over decades to centuries we could probably survive through technological means, but we wouldn't have that luxury. It would happen over a matter of seconds, and then days as the fallout embraced the Earth with its tainted touch.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#259

Post by isodude »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #143
isodude wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing could simple as not adding that many more all the time. Increasing the level of global education will have that effect in itself.

Sure, not adding will work... by 2200, maybe 2100. But, if you believe the current panic about the climate, that's far too late. So if you think that the population has to be reduced, and you think that we need action by 2050 at the latest, what is your proposal?

If there is no engineering solution coming soon, that is the only peaceful one. Either that or our hand will be forced by mother nature like whole countries start to get wiped off the face of the earth. I assume we will adapt if the change is not fast enough though.

So no proposal, just a dim view of our possible outcome if the overpopulation is not solved. The problem lies in how we view the earth as a personal resource instead of a shared habitat.

Re: Birds Are Vanishing from North America

#260

Post by PeterStuer »

JackRabbitSlim wrote: post #151
tylerpachal wrote: post #7

(serious) Is there any hope? Its just one problem after another (probably because everything is linked). What are the chances that we will get our act together or be able to engineer ourselves out of all of these problems?

No. John Forbs Nash did the math 40 years ago. Nothing changes until its profitable to change and it will only be profitable to change when its already to late.

It is far worse than that. Market capitalism can not move us from local maxima even when we know far higher maxima exist.
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