Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 141 posts

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#81

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

paxys wrote: post #62
RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #3

The Planetary Boundaries framework is so bad, I don’t understand why it’s so popular. Most of the "boundaries" are directly correlated. Most of them are fairly arbitrary. It’s such an awful tool to discuss the actual very serious issue it underlines. I wish it would just disappear. Just to be clear, there is nothing magical about most of these boundaries. The situation is not in any way suddenly worse today than yest…

"The fire has spread to 50% of the house." "Now the fire has spread to 90% of the house." "Meh, the metrics are meaningless because they are correlated. The house is fine."

The issue is not the metrics. The boundaries are meaningless because the issue was that there was a fire from the start.

The correct analogy would be "Fire in the house boundary on the brink of being breached. We can confirm that 49% has already burned and the threshold of 50% will have burned in the next minute. This is the second catastrophic boundary to be crossed: the fume in the house boundary was breached five minutes ago." which is indeed a completely pointless way of looking at the issue.

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#82

Post by Aachen »

ghastmaster wrote: post #71
Aachen wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The animals alive in it today aren't adapted to these Cambrian conditions though?

That's the $50,000,000,000,000 question.[1] Are they adapted? Will they adapt? Who knows? 1 - https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/cost-to-end-climate-chang...

Well yeah, of course it will... eventually

What we're going to extract value from in the meantime would be the question or, rather, problem

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#83

Post by scarmig »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #3

The Planetary Boundaries framework is so bad, I don’t understand why it’s so popular. Most of the "boundaries" are directly correlated. Most of them are fairly arbitrary. It’s such an awful tool to discuss the actual very serious issue it underlines. I wish it would just disappear. Just to be clear, there is nothing magical about most of these boundaries. The situation is not in any way suddenly worse today than yest…

You announce a set of boundaries, imply that crossing them shifts the system to some new, disastrous attractor state, and get a lot of media and donor attention. For a couple years you get lots of mileage out of it, until you need to come up with a new set, except this time it's For Real. Repeat.

It's counterproductive: once people see small violations of the boundaries result in only small changes, they start to tune them out. And, with global warming, the accumulated small changes will ultimately result in significant harm, so there's no need to invent fake boundaries.

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#84

Post by redsunglasses »

ghastmaster wrote: post #66
BenjiWiebe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not historic lows. Perhaps it's been higher, but it's definitely been lower than now.

In the last 400,000 years the concentration has fluctuated from about 180ppm to about 300 many times.[1] My historical reference in the previous post was the last 500,000,000 years. In that context we are low. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo...

Since our species' collective life comprises the last 400,000 years, and we are 420ppm now, do you think it's also fair to say that we are historic highs?

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#85

Post by photochemsyn »

We are heading for Pliocene conditions and yes, the tipping point is in the past. Even complete cessation of fossil fuel use and zero net deforestation (growth of timber == harvest of timber) would not stop it at this point, as it would take ~100 years for the system to come to a new equilibrium, and even then, permafrost melt and methane/CO2 outgassing from permafrost would continue (with some offset from tree growth in northern polar regions as the permafrost retreats).

Thus continual sea level rise is going to be a fact of life, possibly for several thousand years, until sea levels are 10 to 25 meters higher than today. Average temperatures will be 2-3C higher than the preindustrial Holocene average, (currently ~1.2C higher) with significant regional variation. Many regions that support large human populations will become inhospitable on a decadal timeline (i.e. it takes about ten years for signal to emerge from noise at current warming rate).

As far as ocean acidification, this is probably the least of our worries, unlike ocean hypoxia and anoxia, which are steadily expanding due to all the organic matter and fertilizer dumped into the oceans by human civilization. Coral reefs were widespread in the Pliocene, and the acidification is just a surface water phenomenon and is fairly minimal - the buffering capacity of the ocean is vast, and it's just a mixing issue as surface water tends to sit on top of the deeper waters.

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#86

Post by photonthug »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #3

The Planetary Boundaries framework is so bad, I don’t understand why it’s so popular. Most of the "boundaries" are directly correlated. Most of them are fairly arbitrary. It’s such an awful tool to discuss the actual very serious issue it underlines. I wish it would just disappear. Just to be clear, there is nothing magical about most of these boundaries. The situation is not in any way suddenly worse today than yest…

Never heard of planetary boundaries framework before but the way it’s discussed in this piece kind of immediately tripped my hippy pseudoscience alerts. TFA is actually a maddening read from beginning to end anyway.. lots of awkward phrasing, bad diction, weird punctuation.

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#87

Post by Aachen »

ghastmaster wrote: post #73
circlefavshape wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Historic"? I do not think it means what you think it means

500,000,000 years of my understanding of atmospheric CO2 concentration is what I was referring to as "Historic".

(Since there's no other definition of historic that I know of (500M years seems as arbitrary as any other number), I think the person was referring to the literal definition of historic, namely, written records. Not that I think this is a very fruitful argument to make, or whether weather recorded in shells could be considered written is perhaps also debatable)

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#88

Post by lkrubner »

ghastmaster wrote: post #46

> 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…

Completely irrelevant. Humans cannot survive in the conditions of the Cambrian. Merely going back to the Cambrian is enough to ensure our extinction. No one cares that the CO2 levels were higher then. What matters is that we will all be dead if we go anywhere near those levels.

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#89

Post by sharpshadow »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #3

The Planetary Boundaries framework is so bad, I don’t understand why it’s so popular. Most of the "boundaries" are directly correlated. Most of them are fairly arbitrary. It’s such an awful tool to discuss the actual very serious issue it underlines. I wish it would just disappear. Just to be clear, there is nothing magical about most of these boundaries. The situation is not in any way suddenly worse today than yest…

They love fancy titles - reading it I thought we got accepted into the intergalactic federation.

Re: Earth Is on the Brink of Breaching a 7th of Nine 'Planetary Boundaries'

#90

Post by ghastmaster »

redsunglasses wrote: post #68
ghastmaster wrote: post #46

> 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 an interesting point to cherry-pick, and it's fair to question the affect of atmospheric CO2 on aquatic life, but you can't say that CO2 levels are at historic lows when they're up 30% in the past 60 years [1]. [1] - https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/

> but you can't say that CO2 levels are at historic lows when they're up 30% in the past 60 years

I thought I made it very clear the historic period I was referring to. Questioning the relevance is indeed apropos. However, the semantics, I do not understand.

Regarding the last 60 years, I think it is very unlikely that the earth has not had a period where atmospheric CO2 concentrations have not rose as quickly. The volcanism, planetary impacts, and die offs of the past had to have had similar impacts. Yet, shelled creatures survived to the extant that they are ubiquitous in the earth's waters today.

There indubitably have been extinction events and perhaps some of them have been caused by ocean acidification.

Post reply on HN