441–450 of 901 posts
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But we left them on top, right?
Materials yes, but easily accessible sources of large amounts of energy are mostly gone.
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I mean they will still have the sun.
Producing solar panels requires an advanced technical civilization being in place. You cannot jump from middle ages tech to producing solar panels with skipping dependence on fossil fuels in the intermediate steps.
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You can still use water and wind which are also powered by the sun.
We did that in preindustrial age. In total, it didn’t amount to that much energy.
One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning". Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy). What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of proble…
I know your intentions are good here, but honestly the less human interference the better. we didn't design their habitats, and i highly doubt we'd get it better than mother nature did. we humans are an self-excluding and blameless bunch. we constantly lust for providing solutions for ecology, but no matter how much "solutioning" we throw at it, the problem cannot, and will never be fixed by human involvement. the be…
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I disagree, you can’t tell how useful their model is for assessing impact on animal and plant species because they do not have any animal or plant data in their model. Maybe animals and plants can move faster than we thought so the current velocity doesn’t dictate local extinctions? Maybe temperature velocity is a bad measure of climate change rate with respect to ecosystems? My criticism is that the paper takes half…
> I disagree, you can’t tell how useful their model is for assessing impact on animal and plant species because they do not have any animal or plant data in their model. Maybe animals and plants can move faster than we thought so the current velocity doesn’t dictate local extinctions? Maybe temperature velocity is a bad measure of climate change rate with respect to ecosystems? Are they making any judgement on this?…
I had a quick look through the first half dozen citations on the paper, and it is a lot of stuff like this: “The effects of modern climate change are occurring more quickly in grasslands relative to many other ecosystems (Loarie et al. 2009;” This quote doesn’t really use any of the data/methods of the original paper, it just uses the paper to support the fairly obvious idea that climate change has variable effects that differ by environment.
Another: “ On the other hand, the climate is shifting rapidly (Loarie et al. 2009)” again nothing is the paper is used, and they claim the paper says change is rapid, but to determine what is “rapid” we would need to compare our velocity to a value we think is “not rabid”. This would provide us with some testable hypothesis (eg “2% of regions move velocity faster than the fastest moving population in the region”).
I don’t think my analogy was very good - I’m not critical because they didn’t look at my string, I’m critical because i don’t think their paper can truly help other teams measure their bits of string (or my piece).
I agree their method might be useful, but it seems pretty obvious and I don’t understand why they wouldn’t apply it to a scientific theory themselves. Currently they have a model looking for a theory to test, but without any indication that their model is useful for any particular hypothesis.
So many climate papers are just models with no link to any tangible hypothesis/predictions. This means they are unfalsifiable and so unscientific in Popper’s epistemology. I would even argue they are unscientific in terms of Lakatos’ Research Programmes because they are likely to be used to support auxiliary climate hypothesis in degenerating programs (since if they were part of a progressive program they would have explicit theory/predictions).
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But why is over-consumption even possible? It's the plentiful cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels that we figured out how to tap into. Once that is gone I am hopeful the next civilization cycle will be more temperate.
No it's not, go read the wealth of Nations to understand. The over production started before we adopted fossil fuels.
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My neighbor has an outdoor cat. This cat kills at least one bird a day according to their kids (the cat brings the corpse to their porch). So I think you're tremendously mistaken about "not at any great rate." Housecats are not native to most countries, and feral cat colonies are not healthy either (lots of disease). They are not part of "natures balance" and we're not eradicating them to extinction. That's just utte…
Before they were housecats fed from the grocery store, how many birds did they eat a day? A natural predator does not make their prey extinct.
"Our findings suggest that free-ranging cats cause substantially greater wildlife mortality than previously thought and are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals."[0] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380 Studies show that outdoor cats kill billions of birds annually. Anecdotally, posting anti cat studies on social media leads to real world threats and cat lovi…
It's crazy how fast cats can multiply. By the time we figured out there was stray in the barn, they would either be knocked up when they get there or get knocked up by the hordes of traveling Tom cats. We would give away what cats we could and got the rest fixed.
Some of the Tom cats would be violent as well. Not just cat fighting, straight up killing our cats. They definitely got put down when we saw them.
This is in the country, I could imagine the problem is much worse closer to big population centers with more food and fresh escapees.
By the way, you can get cats fixed for free at certain places. Just keep in mind they dock one of the ears so they can keep tabs on the cats. Can't share a link right now I'm on break.
I love cats by the way. Still trying to save up for a place of my own so I can own two. Unfortunately the housing market has been crazy and I probably missed my chance.
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Yeah when 99% of people don't care about this sort of issue or are unaware of it and keep cutting trees down it doesn't matter if a few people are doing all they can. I go home to my parents' neighborhood in Florida and more and more of the trees are disappearing in a 100-year-old neighborhood. It's not even new houses being built. These are 50-year old houses. There is 1 house in the entire neighborhood (has to be a…
The planet will bounce back one way or another, short of a global nuclear war I don't see how we can do more damage than the asteroid that took out the dinausaurs. Humans just may not be here to enjoy it if we can't get out of the way and stop consuming natural resources for the sake Of GDP growth.
I don't understand why someone always has to respond to climate apocalypse discussion with "but actually the planet will be fine."
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The article mentions habitat destruction and agriculture as the driving issue, not climate change. > The hardest hit were grassland birds, down by more than 50 percent, mostly due to the expansion of farms that turn a varied landscape into acres of neat, plowed rows.
pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change are not all different things. i guess you can blame all the above on a single root cause, though: human over-population. we just don't have plagues and famines like we used to; we're really good at killing everything that we don't like. i see my neighbors dousing their lawn with weed killer and pesticides every season, followed by grass nutrients! then burn 2gal of g…
I heard once in one of my classes that every 1 acre of farmland disrupts 24 acres of adjacent land, not just the surrounding acres but the ones surrounding that!
Meanwhile, global warming is terrible but the world being even 5 degrees hotter doesn’t kill most stuff, but 10b acres of farming can destroy entire continents