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Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

bbc.com

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Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#241

Post by runarberg »

feralimal wrote: post #228
tpnCC wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If U may tell, which specific imminent 'dangers' did not come to pass?

I'd have to watch the film again (no thanks!) to provide more detail, but it was a tirade of fear. Eg: No snow on Kilimanjaro? but: https://glacierhub.org/2018/04/04/greatest-snowfall-on-kilim... 20-foot rise in sea levels caused by melting ice caps? shutting down of the ocean conveyor? Hurricanes are getting stronger? Pacific Islands drowning?

You are missing the forest for the trees. This is 20 years ago, and Al Gore was (even then) not a leading climate activist nor a climate scientist. Our knowledge of both the nature and the scope of the climate disaster has change in the meantime. Heck, we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then. Since then we’ve gotten a better understanding and are able to make better predictions and construct better policy to tackle it. Saying: “Al Gore was wrong about prediction A and B”, reminds me of creationists saying: “Evolution is wrong because Charles Darwin said the origin of organism A was environmental condition B, when in fact it wasn’t”.

I really don’t even believe Al Gore would have saved us from the Climate Disaster. I’m guessing he would have had a similar success as Obama giving health care for all.

The point is that Al Gore could run on an anti-climate change platform with the Democratic party 20 years ago. Today even a train-loving Biden is hard against investing in the green infrastructure we needed 20 years ago, even though the majority of his voters desperately want it.

The crux of my frustration is that 20 years ago there was a political will to do something about this, while now—as the west coast is literally on fire, the gulf states are being bombarded with unprecedented hurricanes and the east coast just lived through horrible heat waves—solving the climate crisis is a hard problem because politicians are unwilling to take the necessary actions.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#242

Post by ncmncm »

acituan wrote: post #193
ncmncm wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just about everything humans do is an exogenous intervention on markets, one way or another. And markets respond to them, via the cited market forces . The notion of the "free market" is a toxic fiction. Any market that works for its participants is intricately curated.

> Just about everything humans do is an exogenous intervention on markets, one way or another Markets is simply the name for a particular collective of human interactions in response to pricing signals based on supply and demand, it is not a separate entity of its own. Taxes are exogenous in that they distort the equilibrous price points. That is not saying that it is always bad, because markets do fail. > The notion…

Yet people are continually intervening in markets, almost always without causing failure. An intervention that produces undesired results can be stopped or modified, provided it it not forced by legislation or biased perception, and something else tried. That is how most ongoing interventions have evolved.

In the US, the necessary flexibility is provided by agencies issuing regulations under statutory authority.

While lack of a carbon tax might not be the result of active evil -- throughout history it has been the result, instead, of garden variety ignorance and sloth -- evil can certainly play a role, and does.

In the US, failure ever to apply laws on the books enabling direct prosecution of corporate officers, or revoking corporate charters, or regulating behavior of monopolies, are indications of evil at work.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#243

Post by pvaldes »

ncmncm wrote: post #174
bamboozled wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Plants can provide every nutrient required for human survival save for vitamin B12.” Which is what’s interesting to me, you basically cannot actually be vegan without supplements. Maybe this is where we should go as a specifies for ethical reasons. But it’s a mental leap to rely on supplements for vital nutrients.

All of the B12 consumed anywhere in the world -- and all animals need it -- comes exclusively from bacteria. The bacteria in your colon produce thousands of times as much as you need, but you do not absorb so much as a nanogram of it. (Dogs and rabbits eat their own crap to get it.) The process for absorbing B12, in the upper intestine, is the most intricate of any vitamin, starting with saliva. Apparently the huge v…

> Homo erectus probably got enough from the dirt on everything, and grubs

And now they are extinct. It seems that the plan didn't worked very well.

The faster way to ingest lots and lots of bacteria so you don't die is a simple one: Carrion. Our ancestors ate as much as they could find. The other monkeys are dead (and our plant eaters relatives are almost extinct).

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#244

Post by feralimal »

runarberg wrote: post #241
feralimal wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to watch the film again (no thanks!) to provide more detail, but it was a tirade of fear. Eg: No snow on Kilimanjaro? but: https://glacierhub.org/2018/04/04/greatest-snowfall-on-kilim... 20-foot rise in sea levels caused by melting ice caps? shutting down of the ocean conveyor? Hurricanes are getting stronger? Pacific Islands drowning?

You are missing the forest for the trees. This is 20 years ago, and Al Gore was (even then) not a leading climate activist nor a climate scientist. Our knowledge of both the nature and the scope of the climate disaster has change in the meantime. Heck, we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then. Since then we’ve gotten a better understanding and are able to make better predictions and constr…

> we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then.

And before that we were going to have a mini ice age...

Also, can I say I find it odd when people talk using the pronoun 'we'. The Queen does that when she talks about her country. That's called the royal 'we'.

What global warming effect can you say you've witnessed? I don't think I can say I've noticed a single thing. Nothing. Some warm summers some cold winters - ie weather. As a cyclist it seems the quality of air has improved and I'm noticing more birds. So 20+ years of talk and fear, and there's nothing to see?

I'm at the point where I see that all that fear serves a purpose in its own right. I don't think the rhetoric matches the reality. But putting people in a state of fear that they are also powerless to address does serve a purpose. The purpose is that it supports government. It supports global governance too. Government plays up a problem that only it can solve, and it can only solve that problem by reducing the freedoms of the people it governs. So less freedom of travel, closer monitoring, etc. For me, it's one of the justifications given for what is shaping up to be a technocratic hell. And technologists are unwittingly building the infrastructure.

What I see with Al Gore is, on the one side - a self-serving politician, happy to talk up the importance of governance when he is a member of the governing class, and on the other - a salesman doing a sales job given he is invested in green energies.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#245

Post by acituan »

ncmncm wrote: post #242
acituan wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just about everything humans do is an exogenous intervention on markets, one way or another Markets is simply the name for a particular collective of human interactions in response to pricing signals based on supply and demand, it is not a separate entity of its own. Taxes are exogenous in that they distort the equilibrous price points. That is not saying that it is always bad, because markets do fail. > The notion…

Yet people are continually intervening in markets, almost always without causing failure. An intervention that produces undesired results can be stopped or modified, provided it it not forced by legislation or biased perception, and something else tried. That is how most ongoing interventions have evolved. In the US, the necessary flexibility is provided by agencies issuing regulations under statutory authority. Whil…

> Yet people are continually intervening in markets, almost always without causing failure. An intervention that produces undesired results can be stopped or modified, provided it it not forced by legislation or biased perception, and something else tried

I find that perspective very naive. Economy doesn't have an undo button. If that was the case we could have reverted all the financial crises, depressions etc before they spiraled out. History is full of such failures caused by or made worse with interventions. Economists get a lot of crap for not being a proper science or not being able to predict the future perfectly, but they are what stands between such failures and the impression of "almost always without causing failure". Economy is like a pool table, in which you might aim for your ball to one hole, but might inadvertently hit your opponent's ball into a hole or mess up the table otherwise. There is no undo once you make the hit. Job of the economists is to find the best angles.

> In the US, failure ever to apply laws on the books enabling direct prosecution of corporate officers, or revoking corporate charters, or regulating behavior of monopolies, are indications of evil at work.

Well good luck with that then, because I don't know any solution to solve "evil" other than calling the priests. When we turn these dynamics into conspiratorial archetypes, we shoot ourselves in the foot because it messes up with the framing of our agency. We either give up in resentment to the "evil", or we need to be a force of "good" and fight it, while forgetting that we are dealing with massively complex, dynamical, emergent systems with parameters too many and too big to optimize by a single person, ideology or solution. Just like we don't debug code by invoking "good and evil" because it is a stupid dichotomy that doesn't match the sophistication of the problem, we most likely can't debug society/economy/ecology with that either.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#246

Post by tuatoru »

mixedCase wrote: post #232
tuatoru wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual people chopping down rainforests for palm oil plantations are formerly impoverished farmers. The people chopping down rainforest and planting oil palms are dispossessed , former farmers. The people making them do it are wealthy and politically well connected who arrange to have their land confiscated.

Are you sure the word is dispossessed here? Were those farmers working on their own land, and then had it taken away from them by force without payment?

Yes.

Armed thugs, rape, fired crops, ... everything.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#247

Post by acituan »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #234
bodono wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google 'black market'.

I'm not sure what point you're making. Even if the tax leads to a small black market for unregulated pollution, the legitimate market would remain regulated and thus our society would reap enormous environmental benefits. Moreover, the effort to thwart the tax constitutes a cost in and of itself, albeit the cost would necessarily be lower than the tax (to the extent that it's not lower, there is no incentive for a bl…

> Anyway, you don’t have a market at all without government

That is not true, in fact most of the markets in history operated either without currencies (e.g. barter, farm labor etc) or with currencies that have inherent value (e.g gold, silver). A switch to fiat money implies state backing indeed, but a) it doesn't have to be one particular state (e.g. can do business with US dollars in some 3rd world countries) and innovations like bitcoin enable markets without any centralized currency.

> If we decide we want to subsidize India’s pollution or whatever, we can still do that.

That is the crux of the criticism you say you find silly. How exactly? Please show your work, because I am curious how we can subsidize China or India's emissions resulting from their domestic economy.

> Europe already has its own carbon taxes

Again please pay attention to domestic vs imported carbon. Most of the claims of approximating carbon neutrality is much smaller than in reality, because of the increasing consumption of carbon positive goods from developing countries.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#248

Post by runarberg »

feralimal wrote: post #244
runarberg wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the forest for the trees. This is 20 years ago, and Al Gore was (even then) not a leading climate activist nor a climate scientist. Our knowledge of both the nature and the scope of the climate disaster has change in the meantime. Heck, we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then. Since then we’ve gotten a better understanding and are able to make better predictions and constr…

> we used to call it the greenhouse effect or global warming back then. And before that we were going to have a mini ice age... Also, can I say I find it odd when people talk using the pronoun 'we'. The Queen does that when she talks about her country. That's called the royal 'we'. What global warming effect can you say you've witnessed? I don't think I can say I've noticed a single thing. Nothing. Some warm summers…

Let me get this straight. Your saying there is a conspiracy to fear monger the population with prediction of climate disaster so that we will agree on mass surveillance and to losing other freedoms.

While at the same time we have already had mass surveillance and travel restrictions imposed on us from the global war on terror (started under George Bush a year after winning the election against Al Gore), while not having any enforced international carbon reduction treaty all the while global carbon emission keeps expanding out of control.

If this was a true conspiracy so far they’ve done a very poor job with it for the past 20 years, and I say you have nothing to worry about.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#249

Post by CamperBob2 »

seanwilson wrote: post #181
CamperBob2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"lab based meat will save us at some point in the future and then I'll probably switch if they're indistinguible from real meat" Why isn't that the answer? Nobody wants to be out of the animal husbandry business more than the meat producers do. Even if they haven't realized it yet.

> Why isn't that the answer? Nobody wants to be out of the animal husbandry business more than the meat producers do. Even if they haven't realized it yet. Because lab based meat isn't here yet: - You can't buy it in supermarkets or for cheap, and I haven't heard a realistic timeline for when this is going to change. - Is there going to be realistic lab based cuts of steak, duck, pork and chicken? Whole chickens? Lab…

We don't have time to wait when climate change is here now

Yes, we do, and we will. Everything you've said could apply equally to electric vehicles, which people like yourself said were never going to be "the answer" for a hundred different reasons, yet which are, nevertheless, happening.

Be patient. Failing that, deal with it.

Re: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

#250

Post by CamperBob2 »

atweiden wrote: post #223
toxik wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a ridiculous hot take. We buy meat to have a varied and healthy diet, and yes we like our food to taste good - as is that is something to be ashamed of? We don’t buy insects because last time I checked, supermarkets don’t sell them. Maybe you could look into why time and time again, insect food startups fail.

I'm not here to be your enemy, so please don't make me out to be one. I wasn't raised vegetarian by any means, and I know fully well meat tastes amazingly good, and that having a varied diet is important. But heart disease, diabetes and many types of cancers are worryingly linked with the consumption of meat, dairy and eggs. As the documentary Forks Over Knives [1] makes abundantly clear, a whole foods plant-based di…

But heart disease, diabetes and many types of cancers are diseases that you will get, regardless of diet or lifestyle, if nothing else kills you first.
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