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The Earth is getting greener

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Re: The Earth is getting greener

#61

Post by lebean »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #49
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…

"The Earth is fine": of course, it's a giant ball of rock. A few degrees isn't going to affect it. "~90% of species are fucked": it's not the magnitude of the change, it's the speed. The climate is changing on a decades-long time scale, and that's too fast for most species and ecosystems to adapt. The corollary there is that ~10% of species will be fine, and thrive. Like every mass extinction event the world will loo…

As long as the top billion lets the bottom billion develop like they have and use cheap energy, humans will continue to be fine. Good, even.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#62

Post by jraph »

huqedato wrote: post #30

Finally, somebody is telling the truth about CO2. Not all is grim about climate. The things are in the middle, as always. Reality is neither black nor white. https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2023/

The truth? Because everything else is lies?

"'Everything is on fire, but at least this guy is not cold anymore!'; Cool, at least somebody is saying the truth, not everything is black".

There's no middle. There are projections, and there are what we are already seeing.

Of course reality is complex. Of course increasing CO2 levels might have some benefits. But there's no way, all things considered, it's a net benefit overall. Why would you need to point out that look, there are benefits? It doesn't matter. We still need to fix this and for that, we need more concern about climate change, not less (and above all, the relevant people to be concerned).

All this assuming that the planet going greener is a good thing at all. The second sentence of the linked article is literally "Scientists are worried".

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#63

Post by rich_sasha »

mylittlebrain wrote: post #20
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…

How should the environmental movement frame things?

The moral failure of humanity is not really that we're harming the world, but that we are harming humans. Humans affected by climate change today, and the future humans elsewhere, who will also suffer.

In some way, one animal causing the extinction of others extracting resources and changing the environment is as long as evolutionary biology itself. This is what all animals do. We're just doing it at a much bigger scale.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#64

Post by bryanlarsen »

lebean wrote: post #61
bryanlarsen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Earth is fine": of course, it's a giant ball of rock. A few degrees isn't going to affect it. "~90% of species are fucked": it's not the magnitude of the change, it's the speed. The climate is changing on a decades-long time scale, and that's too fast for most species and ecosystems to adapt. The corollary there is that ~10% of species will be fine, and thrive. Like every mass extinction event the world will loo…

As long as the top billion lets the bottom billion develop like they have and use cheap energy, humans will continue to be fine. Good, even.

The bottom billion lives on $2 a day. It doesn't matter how cheap energy is, they can't afford it.

OTOH your comment does apply to the second billion. There's no energy cheaper than solar power, and solar powered air conditioning is a great supply/demand match.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#65

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

api wrote: post #27
mylittlebrain wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should the environmental movement frame things?

Finding ways for humans to live well now without consuming their children’s ability to do the same in the future. A good framing would also draw a link to fiscal responsibility. A renewable sustainable civilization is paying its bills fully. Fossil fuels and other non renewable processes are putting it on a credit card, and one with an unknown interest rate. Eventually you can’t do that anymore and the interest comes…

>A good framing would also draw a link to fiscal responsibility

A good analogy with an under the table jab really. The worst of the ultra green policies are absolutely murder for financial responsibility.

There is no winning with the current “debate”, and double so with current “solutions”.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#66

Post by exoverito »

Scarblac wrote: post #45
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…

> 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…

[flagged]

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#67

Post by jijijijij »

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...

I heard, the climate related "CO2 fertilization" leads to increased growth in trees. However, especially on mountain slopes, these trees have a lower strength and tend to break more easily in storms. The breakage in softer woods in turn promotes things like wind erosion and fires.

I think this is somewhat plausible, since the "winter side" of a wood ring is the harder bit and the ratio of hard to soft wood may change due to increased summer growth.

Iceland is the prime example of a place, which lost its trees a bit - and then lost its trees for real, as a consequence. That is, because of wind erosion after humans started cutting down most of the island's forests for lumber.

Thanks, for coming to my TED talk.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#68

Post by photochemsyn »

It's difficult to get good estimates of biosphere uptake and release of atmospheric carbon by looking at satellite color data - those numbers involve a lot of modeling. Rough estimates are that the biosphere cycles 100 gigatons of carbon a year through the atmosphere (plants taking up CO2 to form biomass, fungi/insects/animals breaking down plant matter to CO2), while human fossil fuel emissions are on the order of 9 gigatons C per year at present, perhaps half of which stays in the atmosphere long-term.

There's little doubt that the planet is heading back to Pliocene conditions at a steady clip, and of course life was abundant back then - indeed without fossil fuels the planet would be on a steady cooling trend back to another ice age (it would take some 70,000 years though to reach another ice age maximum), so if you want to celebrate that achievement, go ahead - but note, you don't want to overshoot the target so immediate elimination of fossil fuel combustion as an energy source is the only rational conclusion.

Here's a paper on the issue of how to link satellite color data to photosynthetic production, see Figs 5 / 6/ 7 for estimates of very moderate increases from 1982-2017 (satellite collection only began c.1982) across the northern hemisphere (but steep declines in the Amazon):

"Improved estimate of global gross primary production for reproducing its long-term variation, 1982–2017", Zheng et. al 2020

Atmospheric CO2 accumulation increased from ~1.5 to ~2.5 ppm/year over that period, coinciding with a rough doubling in global fossil fuel consumption since 1980 (plus a lot of nitrogen fertilizers), along with a +0.2C per decade (5yr running avg) temperature increase.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#69

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

Solvency wrote: post #50
mateo1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Replace "climate change" with "vaccine safety", would you write that same response? Watch me get downvoted for even mentioning the word let alone express a dissenting opinion.

I don't think your statement is controversial at all, as I imagine climate change skeptics and vaccine safety skeptics to be largely overlapping sets of people.

The real issue in terms of rational decision making, in the US and elsewhere, is the formation of the correct group and the incorrect group for pretty much anything, and their corresponding echo chambers. It looks like this recommended book at least attempts to break away from this trend.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#70

Post by silverquiet »

exoverito wrote: post #66
Scarblac wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

[flagged]

I’d note that stellar output was significantly lower during the Carboniferous and there’s a lot of range between the Earth’s current climate and Venus that are still really bad.

I don’t entirely disagree with the religious thing, but what always struck me as the most bizarre belief was denial of the basic science of climate change; did people really believe that humanity could dump unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere with no consequence?

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