> Sure it's a mix, but it seems predominantly left to me. I may be wrong, but I don't think it's possible to prove it either way.Personally, I think opinions that match ideologies you're really opposed to probably leave a bigger impression than the ones you agree with. It's easy to come to the conclusion that you're in the minority when you're really not. I believe there are a lot of social conservatives on HN, but the same people are not necessarily technologically or scientifically conservative. This doesn't fall cleanly into left and right by US standards, but I think it's a reasonable model of HN majority predisposition.
> No, you're (probably unintentionally) misrepresenting my point.
I thought I was taking it as literally as possible, and after reading the response I still believe I understood the core intent correctly. When you said "But now, when it supposedly happens for a sixth time, it's our fault.", I got the impression that you're asserting the only reason why we correlate extinctions with human activity is because we want to blame humans.
However, what's actually going on is more a collection of thousands of observations about these events, made on a case by case basis. For example, these are observations about human settlements impacting wildlife. In another area, they might be data about the results of us restructuring local flora and fauna. Or they might be analytical results pointing to correlations between human-induced contamination of water bodies and changes in the biome that characteristically follow it. It's literally a mass of thousands of data points.
> I disagree--evil is involved, at small and large scales. [...] they are not seeking the truth, but sticking with lies, which is evil.
You did originally use the word evil in an entirely different context, which I was responding to.
> And AGW/climate-change is a powerful vehicle to effect policy change for those in power to preserve and increase their power.
A lot of groups are proclaiming that the opposing organizations have money and power on their side. The environmental protection movement makes the same assertion, only about letting industry and agriculture go unchecked.
But let's move away from political formulas now. The reality of the fact is that it actually matters very little whether and how often the Anthropocene is publicly declared. We're going to continue on the path we're already on. There will be some continued wide-scale destruction, and a lot of it will not be happening in western countries. But we'll also ramp up initiatives to try and lessen our environmental impact, both to preserve biodiversity for its own sake, but also to improve our own quality of life.
You say that you believe any such efforts will harm people, but to be honest I find that line of reasoning difficult to follow, especially considering the fact that we're mortally dependent on the integrity of our biosphere and that the measures we're putting in place are generally very modest.
None of this will change because some scientists make sensationalistic claims in the media. The article we're talking about is a total yawner, to be honest. Most scientific people already know we're witnessing a huge extinction event, no matter how we actually label it. Talking about that label is the least interesting thing we can do with the observations we made.