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The Earth is getting greener

vox.com

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Re: The Earth is getting greener

#31

Post by zokier »

spacecadet wrote: post #19
api wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked. The Earth has been far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations in its past and it was fine, but there were no humans then. It’s also been in an ice age fairly recently, but there was little civilization as far as we know and…

Ive used the same quote. This is an unpopular opinion, but true.

Unpopular?

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#32

Post by hanniabu »

api wrote: post #25
nicklecompte wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Vox slightly screwed this up but it's an understandable mistake: the article[1] refers to CO2 equivalent of emissions, not literal CO2. In particular methane from fertilizers seems to have a more negative impact on overall greenhouse gases than whatever CO2 the plants are absorbing. [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acd5e8

It has a much shorter atmospheric half life though, on the order of a decade vs thousands of years for CO2. If we cut methane emissions this will have a near term impact whereas cutting CO2 emissions just stops things from getting worse as fast. It reverses nothing.

Atmospheric methane converts to co2

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#34

Post by DinaCoder99 »

Razengan wrote: post #29
DinaCoder99 wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

> we have a long ways to go before we hit a population issue. I wish people who say that would actually live in the overpopulated regions of the world for just 1 month.

> I wish people who say that would actually live in the overpopulated regions of the world for just 1 month.

People need to stop dragging 19th century nonsense into a globalized economy. Regional carrying capacity is certainly a thing, but the primary constraint in most areas today isn't food (which is, after all, rather easy to ship and process) but water. Anyway, you can apply the same reasoning to migration as I did to food. It's just not really an issue outside of political utility. The US alone could support literally billions of people if we gave a shit about anything other than money.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#35

Post by logicprog »

api wrote: post #16
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #13

England is very green at the moment. At least the areas that aren't flooded are. The issue for humans isn't the "amount of green", it's high quality crop yields. Increasing CO2 increases plant growth, but also lowers nutritional value. https://cupblog.org/2023/04/06/the-truth-about-rising-co2-an...

The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked. The Earth has been far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations in its past and it was fine, but there were no humans then. It’s also been in an ice age fairly recently, but there was little civilization as far as we know and…

I agree with this. It's very frustrating seeing environmentalists frame the struggle to reduce anthropogenic climate change and pollution and use sustainable renewable resources and so on as some kind of moralistic obligation to some sort of abstract concept of nature, which is due deference and submission as something morally "greater" than ourselves that demands service, and as some kind of struggle to project very weird and Christian notions of virginity and purity onto the environment. It makes the logic singularly unappealing to those who are not interested in subjecting themselves to sacred ideas and don't buy into the ideas of duty and obligation, much less to an abstract concept, and don't like the aesthetics of purity — and it is all the more infuriating because all that pseudoreligious stuff is built on a false premise anyway, as you point out. The "Earth mother" or whatever the fuck will be fine, we are doing all of this for ourselves and our own standards of living and aesthetic values and nothing more, so why pretend otherwise?

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#36

Post by mateo1 »

huqedato wrote: post #33

[flagged]

Thank you for posting this. I wanted to read a reasonable voice for a while, and I couldn't find anything. Search engines, traditional and LLM-based (ie ChatGPT) will actively censor all dissident voices, and it's just so tiring being unable to have a conversation with someone or read an article that's based on some common ground, some common assumptions between you and the writer.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#37

Post by gonzo41 »

api wrote: post #16
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #13

England is very green at the moment. At least the areas that aren't flooded are. The issue for humans isn't the "amount of green", it's high quality crop yields. Increasing CO2 increases plant growth, but also lowers nutritional value. https://cupblog.org/2023/04/06/the-truth-about-rising-co2-an...

The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked. The Earth has been far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations in its past and it was fine, but there were no humans then. It’s also been in an ice age fairly recently, but there was little civilization as far as we know and…

If you submerge yourself in water, like elephants do in the hot of the day. you can survive really high wetbulb temps. It's the days of continuous hot nights that's the issue.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#38

Post by silverquiet »

logicprog wrote: post #35
api wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked. The Earth has been far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations in its past and it was fine, but there were no humans then. It’s also been in an ice age fairly recently, but there was little civilization as far as we know and…

I agree with this. It's very frustrating seeing environmentalists frame the struggle to reduce anthropogenic climate change and pollution and use sustainable renewable resources and so on as some kind of moralistic obligation to some sort of abstract concept of nature, which is due deference and submission as something morally "greater" than ourselves that demands service, and as some kind of struggle to project very…

I guess that sort of response begs the question of if there is even anything greater to which humans owe some moral obligation; it sounds like you don't thing there is (though I apologize if this is reading more into your response than is actually there).

But I suppose it really depends on what you mean by the Earth being "fine" in the end. Obviously, as a large chunk of iron, silicates, oxygen, carbon, et al, the Earth will continue its journey through space for a long time to come. Some forms of life will certainly persist for a few hundred million years until such time as it becomes uninhabitable due to stellar evolution. But if we humans are to wreak our own destruction, we will be far from the first species we remove from this Earth; we've already set about a mass extinction that will register in the geographic record.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#39

Post by tasty_freeze »

api wrote: post #16
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #13

England is very green at the moment. At least the areas that aren't flooded are. The issue for humans isn't the "amount of green", it's high quality crop yields. Increasing CO2 increases plant growth, but also lowers nutritional value. https://cupblog.org/2023/04/06/the-truth-about-rising-co2-an...

The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked. The Earth has been far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations in its past and it was fine, but there were no humans then. It’s also been in an ice age fairly recently, but there was little civilization as far as we know and…

Really, that is the worry, that "We are destroying the earth" as a metaphor? People are confused by this? If I said, "Be careful how you lift that heavy sack or you will destroy your back" would you complain that while you might suffer a debilitating injury, your back will not literally be destroyed?

Of course what people mean when they warn about the destruction of the earth is that it is going to have profound and unpleasant effects on the climate system, which in turn affects which parts of the world are favorable to human and animal life. Those changes will cause large scale economic changes, population dislocations, and thus political stability.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#40

Post by platz »

BillFranklin wrote: post #17

The 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…

> The article is a bit all over the place.

Must an observation have an easily digestible value judgement and tell you how you should think about it, or can it just be allowed to present the facts and list the pros and cons.

which one do you think leads to a healthier media environment

Did you yourself not also include a portion of your comment to respond to article based on its data with your own "it depends" based on other data?

> The tone suggests they're afraid of the change

What do you think they lay person would immediately think about 'the earth is greening' and would it be appropriate to address those initial perceptions.

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