141–150 of 298 posts
Really sucks being young 20s. Between climate and the looming covid recession, is there even a point to planning for the future? Seems like the world will be trashed before I'm anywhere close to retirement anyway, almost like I might as well enjoy my money while I can do things with it.
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.
2. Habitat loss to humans
3. Climate change
4. Bugs have decreased, many birds rely on bugs
5. Pesticides and pollutants harm birds directly
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e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-019-0310-1 The IPCC report is rather out of date at this point.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 hous…
This article is describing a rise of 8C only in some specific areas. That's a very different thing; there are all sorts of localized rises of 8C, and most of them don't matter. We should definitely take existential threats seriously, but part of that seriousness requires us to be rigorous about what we call existential. If we go around calling things existential threats when they're merely bad, the truly existential…
"In addition to the warming from rising CO2 levels, this instability triggers a surface warming of about 8 K globally and 10 K in the subtropics. Once the stratocumulus decks have broken up, they only re-form once CO2 concentrations drop substantially below the level at which the instability first occurred."
edit: There are also a tremendous amount of problems with all proposed geoengineering solutions. They are uniformly an emergency backup, not something we should ever choose.
The most realistic option, sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, needs to be maintained continually to avoid a sudden onset of warming. It also does nothing for ocean acidification from CO2 or the cognitive problems higher concentrations cause.
Thinking that we can just tech-magic our way out of this is very dangerous. This will require hard choices. It would have been 100 times easier if we just started 30 years ago, but it will be 100 times harder if we wait another 10.
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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!
Also, why on earth they changed jihad to crusade in new movie?!
In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twil…
https://twitter.com/terrythethunder/status/13038804594498969...
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This article is describing a rise of 8C only in some specific areas. That's a very different thing; there are all sorts of localized rises of 8C, and most of them don't matter. We should definitely take existential threats seriously, but part of that seriousness requires us to be rigorous about what we call existential. If we go around calling things existential threats when they're merely bad, the truly existential…
It literally says 8C average surface warming globally in the abstract, just a few sentences in: "In addition to the warming from rising CO2 levels, this instability triggers a surface warming of about 8 K globally and 10 K in the subtropics. Once the stratocumulus decks have broken up, they only re-form once CO2 concentrations drop substantially below the level at which the instability first occurred." edit: There ar…
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>Speaking as a geologist your statement is dangerously naive. I'm skeptical of you being a working geologist because I haven't seen any credible claims that there is any reason to believe Earth could turn into Venus. But even outside of that, scaremongering with incredibly unlikely scenarios is also dangerous and detrimental to fighting climate change, because somebody is going to call bullshit on you and will result…
You should speak to some more Geologists then. We really don't understand the systems of our planet and we are currently sticking a big spanner into them. Many of us are more concerned than we can publish - precisely because we don't want to scaremonger. Will the Earth definitely turn into an out of control hothouse with a Venus - like climate? Very probably not there are many differences between Earth and Venus. Can…
There's a presumption that man is somehow an unnatural creature divorced from nature here.
If only we had multiple Earths to experiment with. One without humans as a control, another with humans as we are now and a third with humanity following whatever dictates the warmist technocrats prescribe.
Hypothetically speaking, I wonder how one would measure the utility of humanity existing at all? Some environmentalists may suggest that the Earth without humanity is the "best" of them all. There is a proximity between warmists and population control advocates.
Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury. From my perspective the "spanner in the works" analogy better fits with the economic centralization & suffering the warmist dictates may cause.
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I do agree that the removal of the extinction of animals theme, the removal of Deckard's wife, and to some extent the removal of mercerism detracts from the movie (or at least with the second two significantly alters bits), however not sure if the removal of the "it's difficult to kill someone when you've had sex with their double"-theme is really detrimental. the whole fake police precinct full of androids thing was…
> and to some extent the removal of mercerism Imagine how I feel!?
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I'm interested in the fact that almost every comment replied to your anecdotal comment with anecdotes of their own about how, in fact, there are so many more animals and the world is so much cleaner. Yet, clearly, the statistics in this article and elsewhere show that this is plainly not the case. We are killing off wildlife at an unprecedented speed. Why the disconnect? Are all our efforts really directed towards fe…
I guess it's a 1st World vs 3rd World thing. Also although larger animals seem to be doing better nowadays, insects are not. But those are much less visible.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1269-4
> Recent reports of dramatic declines in insect abundance suggest grave consequences for global ecosystems and human society. Most evidence comes from Europe, however, leaving uncertainty about insect population trends worldwide. We used >5,300 time series for insects and other arthropods, collected over 4–36 years at monitoring sites representing 68 different natural and managed areas, to search for evidence of declines across the United States. Some taxa and sites showed decreases in abundance and diversity while others increased or were unchanged, yielding net abundance and biodiversity trends generally indistinguishable from zero.
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.
I honestly feel that if I were to have grandchildren they would not believe me describing them or at the very least thing that I was greatly exaggerating.
I know they still exist but I haven't seen a yard filled with fireflies in a long time.