If the world were getting browner, they would panic. It's getting greener, so they have to try a bit harder, but they still manage to panic.
Panic --> Clickbait --> Ads --> Money
The Earth is getting greener
101–110 of 180 posts
Re: The Earth is getting greener
#102If the world were getting browner, they would panic. It's getting greener, so they have to try a bit harder, but they still manage to panic. Panic --> Clickbait --> Ads --> Money
Someday our descendants (if any) will wonder how stupid we had to be to allow large scale psychological poisoning for profit.
Re: The Earth is getting greener
#103The article reads like "yes the Earth is greening, yes this is probably mostly good, but it's not all good and besides we aren't allowed to say anything positive about the environment".
It’s the same reason a demonstrably racist person can’t make racists jokes, but a demonstrably not racist person can get away with racist jokes.
Where the statements are coming from makes a huge difference in their reception.
“The earth is greening” is a popular argument from climate change deniers as “proof” that we’re not currently living in a catastrophic upset of species diversity (we measurably are).
The problem with “the earth is greening” is that, while it is true that the earth is green for longer, and that the brown is around for less time, this is measurably not a good thing, and it also completely ignores that desertification is also measurably occurring at staggering rates.
The green parts are more green than brown, but they’re also shrinking. Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency.
Re: The Earth is getting greener
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Environmental concerns are selfish. That's overstating it. Yes, life will go on. But it's not only us that will die - as you say, much of the marine ecosystem will die off, we're not the only animal that has problems with wet bulb temperature (most don't even sweat), and humanity isn't going to die of starvation before we make everything remotely edible out there extinct first. Life is going to look extremely diffe…
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Yes, but it's not only climate change this time. We are also massively overusing every natural resource there is. We're in a mass extinction event and we would be in it even if there wasn't a CO2 problem at all.
Re: The Earth is getting greener
#105Related study that blew my mind.. DOE & USDA funded a 2021 NBER study of CO₂ fertilization on US agriculture: "we apply the CO₂ fertilization effect... backwards to 1940, and, assuming no other limiting factors, find that CO₂ was the dominant driver of yield growth https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29320/w293...
In an industrial greenhouse setting sometimes CO2 is pumped in for yields.
Re: The Earth is getting greener
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
We overproduce food for the human race by like 35% right now, we have a long ways to go before we hit a population issue. Regardless of all the hand-wringing certain rich people do about the birth rates in Africa. A much more pressing concern is our lack of any inclination to reasonably distribute it.
Just the inefficiencies in beef yields alone could probably feed half of Africa. We've got a long, long, long way to go before half the world is starving to death.
It's so much more than that.
We produce ~77 million tonnes of beef, using (at the 1:25 ratio) 1925 million tonnes of feed.
Africa currently imports most of it's grains, let's take a generous estimate of ~75 million tonnes of grain. Add another 25 million tonnes for their local production.
And we're still off by a factor of 19x.
Food production capacity is a non-issue. Availability to the people who need it is the real problem, and that is primarily about our willingness to aid those who need it and make some personal sacrifices for the greater good.
Re: The Earth is getting greener
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Environmental concerns are selfish. I don't see how this comment connects with what you're writing in your own comment. How is it selfish to want to avoid needlessly suffering, as you're describing yourself ("heat waves where people without A/C die")? Obviously the earth as a habitable planet will be fine in the long run, and some people have said some exaggerated, even hysterical, things about this. But that doesn…
The point is that the environmental argument has been "Save the planet!", when the actual motive is "Save our civilization!" The planet will be fine, because as apex predators, humanity is going to be one of the first species to go extinct with a major environmental change, and then the rest of the biosphere will adapt to our disappearance. Hell, many individual humans will probably be fine, because the ability to ru…
> the ability to run a complex environment-destroying civilization disappears well before all the individual humans do
There are self-reinforcing loops of climate change that can cause runaway warming.
Re: The Earth is getting greener
#108The article is a bit all over the place. > So, yes, greening is complicated. It’s not inherently good. Sometimes it’s very bad. Context, it turns out, matters a lot. The tone suggests they're afraid of the change, but the article can't articulate why since the reason for the change and result are both possibly good and bad, but we don't really know yet. The NASA MODIS project is ongoing and produces data that people…
This winter in my neck of the woods I hear a lot of people saying "oh, what great weather this year", because it's warm and without snow. If they had taken enough math to understand chaotic dynamic systems, they would need be as anxious as I am. It's less that I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, although there are definitely things that we are certain of, like riskier hurricanes. What keeps me up at night…
Last few years hurricane seasons in the US have been less bad, because most really bad hurricanes have turned north further east than normal, avoiding coastal cities.
Re: The Earth is getting greener
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess that sort of response begs the question of if there is even anything greater to which humans owe some moral obligation Nobody can prove that there is. Lots of people have faith in a higher power of some kind, or objective morality. Nobody can provide scientific evidence for it. Far as a I can tell, natural is amoral and doesn't care. And humans have never agreed as a whole on what that something greater is.
I basically realized there was no god/religion was just wishful thinking at a very young age, but I sort of held onto the idea that we could all agree that keeping the Earth habitable for humans was a worthwhile endeavor (I mean, most people seem to want to have kids, right?). But in the last decade or so I’ve even lost that belief.
It's not so much people disagreeing about keeping the Earth habitable and more so disagreeing about what that means or entails. I don't see any realistic scenario where the planet is inhabitable for humans, but certainly things can make it less habitable for what will be 10 billion people and many other life forms.
Re: The Earth is getting greener
#110Potholer54 posts well notated videos on youtube where he explains (among other things) climate science and mostly debunks false information. He is a geologist by degree, but has spent his career in science communication. Videos are infrequent but well done, and he makes no money from them. He sites his sources and does a great job of tracking down primary sources, all of which are linked. One of his oft repeated idea…
So it's good and bad, whereas we only hear the bad part of climate change. As in there's nothing good coming from climate change. Which is a bit misleading. It is a big problem, but some good does come from it in terms of plant growth.
The problem is that it is 5% good and 95% bad.