Do we trust the science on this one?
Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
101–110 of 141 posts
Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
#102> Earth’s oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, providing a valuable carbon sink as humans burn fossil fuels. But this process also makes the oceans more acidic, which can disturb the formation of shells and coral skeletons and affect fish life cycles, per the report. Atmospheric CO2 levels are at historic lows.[1] Bivalves have shells and evolved during the Cambrian Explosion. The Cambrian explosion took…
It's time for the bivalves to rise again!
Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
#103Humanity needs to stop flying all the time.
You'll have my unlimited consumption when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does this argument always come up? We all know the planet won't die. Humans might though. That's why we're concerned. This is always presented as some "ackshully" very smart argument. Yeah, it's a big fuckin rock, of course it won't die. That's not the concern.
So what does it mean? A lead person with the project said it, and it was the only quote from that person that made it into the article. The boundaries are explicitly said to not be known tipping points, so we don't know that some new mechanisms become dominant outside of them. We're only told that leaving these bounds is "higher-risk" and that inside the bounds is some "safe zone" but the actual risk or the meaning o…
For example, if they had said, "given this trend in ocean acidification, we think the combined die-offs in coral reef ecosystems, kelp-forest areas and reduced reproduction rate of these family of plankton, the rate at which marine ecosystems sequester carbon will decrease by k% in 10 years, which would be equivalent in impact to abandoning their 2050 emissions targets" that would be a clear way to explain the scale of one dimension of the impact. Or "the decrease in marine biodiversity on over the next decade would be equivalent to k times the losses from commercial fishing over the past decade".
Or something more concrete than "we're headed to a bad state."
Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Afaik Earth turning into Mars would require shedding the magnetic field such that our atmosphere can be stripped by solar radiation Venus seems more in reach but I don't know the specifics. Will continue researching in my evil scientist retreat
Venus atmosphere has a very different composition.
Am aware, but it seems to have come from a place that was more similar to earth than Mars'
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/venus-could-have-b... and other articles make that case. I don't know if that's still current information (heard it a while ago and just looked up a random article as reference now, so this might be akin to cherry picking or confirmation bias), I'm not an expert on this particular topic, but that claim is what I had in mind when saying Venus' conditions are more attainable for earth
Blurb from that article
> Venus was downright Earth-like for 2 to 3 billion years and didn't turn into the violent no-man's land we know today until 700 million years ago.
Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, this is just doom and gloom based on persistent and pervasive messaging. On large geological timescales, our temperatures are pretty close to the mean. Even given the last 500 million years, we're nowhere near the peak [1]. Will habitable zones change? Yes. Will migrations occur? Yes. Will there be unrest leading to disease, famine and death? Yes, for sure. And we could get all those things from war, a major nat…
Humans haven't lived on the planet on geological timescales. All of human civilization only became possible because 10k years ago the climate cooled and stabilized enough for there to be agriculture. Without agriculture there is no human civilization, no nation states, no institutions. We go back to being hunter gathers. With an unstable climate agriculture disappears. Billions will dies, life expediencies will crate…
> Humans haven't lived on the planet on geological timescales. All of human civilization only became possible because 10k years ago the climate cooled and stabilized enough for there to be agriculture.
The average global temperature in the Jurassic era was 16.5C, which is 2.5C higher than the current average global temperature. Average CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as 2000 ppm. The planet was teeming with life, an abundance of flora and fauna. While dinosaurs were the apex predators, mammals flourished as well.
> Without agriculture there is no human civilization, no nation states, no institutions. We go back to being hunter gathers.
Since the first part is false, the second part is moot. It also supposes we would have trouble adapting whereas humans are ingenious at finding ways to survive.
> With an unstable climate agriculture disappears. Billions will dies, life expediencies will crater, the modern world you know will no longer exist.
See previous argument.
> Yes, the planet will be fine, at one point it was a giant snowball, humans are fucked.
Yet here we are. Our ancestors survived the Ice Age. Their distant ancestors survived the Jurassic era. My bet is on humans.
Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
#107I don't want to write a whole big thing this morning but I feel it's important to point out that we already have all the solutions we need to integrate our economic systems with the global ecology. All the solutions were worked out decades ago, they are "off the shelf". E.g.: https://newalchemists.net/
We could do it rapidly and with very little inconvenience and everyone can have a nice standard of living while repairing the ecosystem.
We just have to notice this and get on with it.
Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
500,000,000 years of my understanding of atmospheric CO2 concentration is what I was referring to as "Historic".
Technically that's prehistoric. History conventionally starts with the invention of writing
Not sure that's conventional. Looking up the dictionary definition, it's clearly being used generally. It's the definition I was taught in school and probably it's used in this technical way in some fields or perhaps in science generally, but commenting on someone casually using "historic values" and going "I don't think you know what that means!" is the best way to help anyone get a better understanding of anything
("conventional" in meaning 1 of the word as per Wordnik, namely that it's in accordance with general practice, before we start another such discussion...)
Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People who go to a museum and throw paint at a work of art (which is protected behind glass) are routinely condemned and sent to jail. They're condemned because their way of protesting is worthless. Protesting only works if it either inconveniences people enough to trigger action or if it targets the people actually responsible. If they truly believed that climate change was a critical issue, then they should take…
The movement was characterized by nonviolent mass protests and civil disobedience following highly publicized events such as the lynching of Emmett Till. These included boycotts such as the Montgomery bus boycott, "sit-ins" in Greensboro and Nashville, a series of protests during the Birmingham campaign, and a march from Selma to Montgomery. Eh, none of that seems to fall into either of the buckets you describe, othe…
The Montgomery bus boycott specifically targeted racist laws on segregation on public buses. [0] I don't see how you can get much more specific than that.
I think there's a better argument around the approach of Act Up, which focused attention on AIDS. [1] Many people were offended by their tactics, which were directed (again) at specific people, organizations, and media who were relevant to the topic. They were very effective. They targeted the root cause.
[0] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/montgomery-bus-boycott
Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'
#110Planet Earth will be fine. It survived much worse than some little human emissions. The meteor and winter that followed that killed off the dinosaurs was much worse than some elevated CO2. Whether humanity survives this is another question. My bet is we will, since we are like roaches. But many will die for the sins of the few. Interestingly, these few who will survive are probably the ones who created this mess and…
I think people are more concerned about the coral reefs than the humans
Any data to back up that extraordinary claim?