Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse • Hacker News Board

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#121

Post by cultus » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #105

cultus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a former geophysicist, and credibly we could see on the order of an 8C rise this century. It's much worse than the general public thinks, and the picture keeps worsening as understanding of the system and its feedbacks increase. A rise of 5-8C make large parts of the Earth uninhabitable and would collapse food production and global civilization. Billions dying is not scaremongering, but is a very probable outcom…

The IPCC says that the worst case scenario is a 5C rise, and their analysis of food production ( https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WGIIAR5-Chap... ) doesn't indicate any sort of catastrophic collapse. What source are you getting this information from?

e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0310-1

The IPCC report is rather out of date at this point.

There's a number of positive feedback mechanisms such as cloud cover and methane clathrates that are still poorly constrained and could credibly lead to a rise like that. It's not the most likely scenario, on the high end of current projections, but it should be planned for.

You buy fire insurance for your house even if you don't think it will catch on fire. I wear a seatbelt even though the vast majority of times I'm in a car, I don't get in a crash. We rationally prepare for unlikely but severe events all the time. With climate change, people have this blind spot with thinking about risk.

Here, it's the planet and our civilization. We should take existential threats very, very seriously.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#122

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

thecureforzits wrote: post #12

ximeng wrote: post #3

Not too long before it's man versus man rather than man versus nature.

Once the animals are gone, we won't last much longer. It is extremely naive to think we can engineer ourselves a new biome that can sustain anything even close to what we have now.

Don't people engineer new biomes pretty frequently? It seems pretty defeatist to look at a world where we regularly transform dirt fields into grassy plains into food and think that we'll never be able to sustain ourselves if the climate changes.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#123

Post by holografix » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:07 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #61

LandR wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this book on my shelf for a couple of years. I was put off it because I finally saw the film (and the remake) and didn't like them. Especially the remake, fell asleep trying to get through that film on three seperate occasions before giving up on it. But I need to give the book a chance if it's quite different to the film.

I think instead of "remake" you meant sequel, because there is no remake. If it's any consolation: I'm an absolute fan of Blade Runner but hated the sequel. In my opinion, it fails to capture the neo-noir feel of the original, has no interesting characters, Jared Leto's acting is distracting, and the villains/antiheroes... compare Roy Batty's "tears in rain" dying speech with Luv's "I'm the best!". It makes me cringe…

One of the biggest cinematographic disappointments I’ve ever witnessed.

Harrison Ford’s involvement in the movie was tragic. He acted lazily, his character had very little to add to the storyline. Inexplicably he was into Elvis can you imagine your grand children, when old, being huge Elvis fans? It was all so lazy.

The only saving grace was the concept that creation of life is a continuous, inescapable circle, that creates a hierarchy alongside the risk of oppression and servitude.

God created men, men is subservient and inferior. Men create replicants, same thing. Now replicants have “holograms”...

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#124

Post by angel_j » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

The only solution to is to live in harmony with more animals. People think wild animals can't be domesticated, but they are wrong. Living in the wild makes any animal wild, including humans, but raised from birth, generations of animals can learn to cohabit with humans. We could even train the more intelligence animals to assist us. Imagine local monkeys trained to collect trash and recyclables, rewarded with food to bring bottles and cans to a local depository.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#125

Post by holografix » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

ludocode wrote: post #73

wiredfool wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much was removed -- The movie is clearly based on the book, but only a quarter of the books themes end up in the movie. Isidore. Religion vs TV. Shared experiences. The movie is cut down, probably so it didn't turn a Novella into a trilogy. Dial 800, the desire to watch TV, no matter what's on.

I read the book first and was deeply disappointed in the movie. They could have done so much more. Instead they spent like half an hour on dumb fight scenes which are only a couple pages in the book. I can't enjoy it just because of how much they cut out. For those that haven't read the book, here's an example: When Deckard Cain meets Rachael for the first time, she has an owl, and she claims it's real. He says "I th…

Woah. That’s not what happens in the movie. Rachael does indeed say the owl is fake. However she has no idea she is a replicant. If I remember correctly she’s a “different kind of replicants” more human like because she was given pre-canned memories.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#126

Post by reincarnate0x14 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

holografix wrote: post #123

the_af wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think instead of "remake" you meant sequel, because there is no remake. If it's any consolation: I'm an absolute fan of Blade Runner but hated the sequel. In my opinion, it fails to capture the neo-noir feel of the original, has no interesting characters, Jared Leto's acting is distracting, and the villains/antiheroes... compare Roy Batty's "tears in rain" dying speech with Luv's "I'm the best!". It makes me cringe…

One of the biggest cinematographic disappointments I’ve ever witnessed. Harrison Ford’s involvement in the movie was tragic. He acted lazily, his character had very little to add to the storyline. Inexplicably he was into Elvis can you imagine your grand children, when old, being huge Elvis fans? It was all so lazy. The only saving grace was the concept that creation of life is a continuous, inescapable circle, that…

The plodding and limp segment in the ruins of Las Vegas really killed the pace and punch of that whole film. Even assuming there was any point in having Deckard in it all, 15 minutes of that could have easily been cut out with almost no impact to the story.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#127

Post by HumblyTossed » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

alangibson wrote: post #41

Does anyone else > 40 years old remember there just being lots more animals around when you were a kid? I don't know if it's just age blinders or paranoia, but in particular I remember there being way more birds pretty much everywhere.

Yes. I definitely remember way more birds. Especially larger birds. When I see one in the sky now, I think, "oh, wow there's a bird." How sad is that?

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#128

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

hdjdbtbgwjsn wrote: post #119

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to defend the original commenter's tone, but you must understand how frustrating it is to ask for evidence and get only a confident declaration that there's secret evidence hidden where it can't be checked. We can't drive global policy based on unverifiable insinuations about what the worst case is.

Sorry I must be communicating really badly. I'll try to put it more clearly. 1. We don't really understand how these systems work. (The evidence for that is basically a lack of evidence and the type of thing we are still working on...) 2. Certain outcomes in the system could be very very very bad. 3. We are changing part of the system massively. 4. Because of (1) we don't know what (3) will do. I'm not alluding to an…

I'm sure you can see why "many of us are more concerned than we can publish" could be read as alluding to secret knowledge.

The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#129

Post by davexunit » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #18

I guess it was alluded to in the article but my main concern is the amount of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides we use. As we clear more land for Ag we are of course limiting habitat for animals but also zapping them constantly with these chemicals. Fertilizers get into water and decimate the life in there. Herbicides coupled with pesticides decimate insect ecosystems. The development of land gives larger anima…

It's a complete lie that industrial agriculture is the only effective way of feeding everyone. It seems to be that it produces the most yield of a crop, but therein lies the problem: The only metric that we look at is crop yield. Sure it yields a lot, but it's completely destroying the land in the process. If we continue to use industrial agriculture practices (which are completely dependent on oil) humanity will collectively starve when all the topsoil is dead and the water sufficiently poisoned.

We've created our own vicious feedback loop by planting massive areas with a single crop that has been bred for size and shelf life more so than disease/pest resistance and nutrition. The monoculture is ripe for attack by pests due to lack of biodiversity. Our response to this problem has been to double down by spraying the crop with herbicides and pesticides. The chemicals kill beneficial fungi, bacteria, and insects which leave the crop entirely defenseless against the pests unless it is sprayed again and again. The bacteria and fungi that make soil "soil" and not "dirt" also die, and the only way to grow the next crop in dead soil is to till it (which kills even more soil life) and dump synthetic fertilizers all over it. The fertilizer runoff pollutes water sources.

Much like how large centralized computer systems make everyone vulnerable to massive failures (think Cloudflare or AWS outages), large monoculture farming makes our food system very fragile and the resulting food isn't even particularly nutritious. We need to use regenerative farming practices, but that means defeating the oil industry, among others.

Re: Animal Populations Fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse

#130

Post by Cactus2018 » Thu, Sep 10, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

otachack wrote: post #109

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, think that the sequel is as good as the original. Cinematography was stunning and the world was a believable evolution of the world from the previous movie.

I agree and am ecstatic for Villeneuve's Dune!

Dune (2020) Official Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xhJrPXop4