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The Earth is getting greener

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Re: The Earth is getting greener

#91

Post by brookst »

goatlover wrote: post #90
tasty_freeze wrote: post #47

Potholer54 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.

Pop media doesn’t really do nuance. If we have to frame climate change as good or bad, it’s clearly bad.

The fact that nuances make it good for some plants, for some people, is true and there for those who want details. The problem is that mitigating details are often used to rebut the first order problem. As the brilliant marketing people in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes put it, “giant tomatoes mean bigger pizzas!”

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#92

Post by goatlover »

silverquiet wrote: post #38
logicprog wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ea…

> 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.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#93

Post by brookst »

thfuran wrote: post #86
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>But isn’t that the most rational argument against the panic narrative? Not if the source material suggests that panic is warranted. And a lot of the science on climate change is pretty dire.

Yeah the whole “I know someone whose panic is not sufficiently data-based to satisfy me, therefore there is no reason to panic” is not a particularly strong (or data-backed) argument.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#94

Post by slibhb »

The 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".

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#95

Post by thelastgallon »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #47

Potholer54 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…

Insightful video. CO2 coalition (funded by Exxon) says 140-million year trend of dangerously decreasing CO2, with the implication that more CO2 is good. Potholer54 talks about this paper. Two insights:

a) CO2 levels have been below 200PPM for millions of years, and life on the planet was fine.

b) Over 140 million years, CO2 has been dropping 0.00001 ppm/year. We are adding 2 PPM/year now, 200,000x faster. This rate of change is unprecedented.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#96

Post by nostrademons »

arp242 wrote: post #84
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. 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 run a complex environment-destroying civilization disappears well before all the individual humans do. However, that's cold comfort to people who depend on modern societal conveniences, or the many people who will die.

GP's point is more about intellectual honesty, but there's also a pragmatic bent to it. Many of the people who most reject climate change interventionism might be swayed by a line of argumentation that goes "You care more about the economy than the environment? You won't have an economy if the environment is disturbed enough."

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#97

Post by moosey »

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…

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 is that farmers have no idea what the next season will look like because we have altered the conditions of the function of climate, and therefore will enter a new state. We do not know where it will land and what it will look like getting there, and that very likely means reduction in food production.

Sometimes fear is justified.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#98

Post by tasty_freeze »

brookst wrote: post #91
goatlover wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pop media doesn’t really do nuance. If we have to frame climate change as good or bad, it’s clearly bad. The fact that nuances make it good for some plants, for some people, is true and there for those who want details. The problem is that mitigating details are often used to rebut the first order problem. As the brilliant marketing people in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes put it, “giant tomatoes mean bigger pizzas!”

Another common refrain from Potholer54 is: don't listen to the media -- what are the climate scientists (the primary sources) saying?

But overall the picture is bad. There are regions where things will benefit, and climate research has said so for decades. But overall this rate of change is going to have bad long term consequences for the biosphere (including humans).

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#99

Post by silverquiet »

goatlover wrote: post #92
silverquiet wrote: post #38

Earlier 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; 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 Ea…

> 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.

Re: The Earth is getting greener

#100

Post by dkasper »

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…

It basically comes down to long term pain vs short term pain. I don’t think many people would have a problem with improving our civilization’s quality of life in the long run if it didn’t cause any lifestyle changes in the present. That’s a reason why Tesla’s marketing has worked; you can not only be “green” but also drive one of the fastest cars on the planet.
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