There has been about 69 per cent decline in the wildlife population of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish across the globe in the last 50 years. The highest decline, 94 per cent was in Latin America and Caribbean region. According to WWF report, Africa recorded 66 percent fall in wildlife population, the Asia Pacific 55 percent and population of freshwater species reduced by 83 percent globally.
The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation?
"Estimate that, since around AD 1500, possibly as many as 7.5–13% (150,000–260,000) of all ~2 million known species have already gone extinct, orders of magnitude greater than the 882 (0.04%) on the Red List."
We had a ~10C increase in temperature from 20000 YA - 13000 YA or so and then a yoyo jump back down ca. 6C and up again in a 1000 years, during the younger dryas.
While the 19th-21th century increase of 1-1.2C or so is a bit faster, it's not a magnitude faster.
Humans have definitely changed nature everywhere, and is probably responsible for many species dying. But blaming that on the climate change doesn't really make sense. Deforestation is much more likely to be the cause.
But deforestation and the following biodiversity loss is a completely different problem than reducing CO2. And in general, very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation (and contrary to popular opinion, even large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either).
> very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation
Reform of agriculture might be it. Agriculture is also the leading driver of deforestation (50% of pastures were forested in the past).
> large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either
But it could, it's probably the best tool in our arsenal. And it would not only affect CO2, but many of our other problems too (droughts, biodiversity, warming ...).
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century
Agricultural land use, particularly for animal feed, poses the biggest obstacle to ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration, hindering climate efforts. The potential for carbon sequestration is vast, with enough capacity to meet the entire 1.5°C carbon budget.
Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests. Better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows
Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock
If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).
> If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa).
No we wouldn't. Everybody gets cause and effect backwards on this one. They see that we're using essentially all of our arable land for food production and draw the conclusion that's how much is needed to produce the amount of food we currently produce.
But it's actually the other way around. We use all the land available because that's the cheapest way to produce the amount of food we need. If we had more land, we'd use it and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd produce the same amount of food, but it would be more expensive.
For an extreme example, we could probably feed 8 trillion people on the same amount of land by covering all of our arable land with greenhouses.
Moving towards a plant-based diet would mean needing less land as we wouldn't be raising as many animals for meat. The greenhouse idea is cool, but it'd be very resource intensive.
So, while we can definitely get creative with land use, we also need to consider the costs and environmental impacts.
No, it means that farmers will stop dumping so much fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides on their land chasing high yields. It means 30 bushel per acre crops instead of 100 bushel per acre crops. It means cheaper food. All good things, but land usage won't change significantly.
> means 30 bushel per acre crops instead of 100 bushel per acre crops
It would not be so bad, imho. Industrial ag might be effective (from the economic viewpoint, very destructive from the environmental one), but not as much as producers of that stuff would like us to beliveve. And if we manage to deplete our soils even further, then even industrial ag wouldn't be able to do much.
We could and should change the way we farm, while preserving comparable yields. It might be necessary to learn farming again, or invent new machinery. There are dozens of methods we could utilize (syntropic, natural, veganic farming, permaculture, food forests, nitrogen fixing plants / trees, companion planting, etc.), and new ones would be found.
"The analysis we present here offers a new perspective, based on organic yield data collected from over 10,000 organic farmers representing nearly 800,000 hectares of organic farmland. Averaged across all crops, organic yield averaged 80% of conventional yield. However, several crops had no significant difference in yields between organic and conventional production, and organic yields surpassed conventional yields for some hay crops."
We are witnessing the sixth mass extinction event. Defined as the loss of 75% of species, this process typically spans around 2.8 million years. However, we're on track to reach this milestone in just about 100 years.
The abstract question of whether a higher or lower temperature would result in more habitable land (assuming, say, a gradual change over a million years) is completely 100% irrelevant to the issue of climate change.
A fast enough change will:
- Make places where large numbers of people currently live uninhabitable due to temperature and sea levels
- Kill off most plants and animals because the ones in a given place won't be adapted to the new climate, even if theoretically the climate in other places would now be suited to them, in a way that will take millions of years to recover from.
Simply saying "warmer is better" is utterly missing the point.
Well, if the earths population was 2 million, 15000 years ago and Sudan's today is 50 million, I think it's quite clear that Sudan's population has gone up quite a bit also over 15000 years.
Several nation-states will be huge beneficiaries of a hotter world.
Russia's tundra becomes arable land, and their fossil fuels become more accessible. Their navy will be able to freely roam the seas when the polar ice caps melt.
Canada will receive the same benefits - enormous access to fresh water, ease of navigation, and agriculturally ideal conditions.
Greenland will have an increasingly large stake in geopolitics, trade, and energy.
China will be less existentially concerned about a blockade of the Strait of Malacca.
The Canadian Shield[1] is hard rock with a very thin layer of dirt. There's nothing remotely "agriculturally ideal" going on here. South and west of the Shield are peatlands[2] -- those are dessicating and deflagrating. As hot winds continue to blow across increasingly treeless land, thin topsoils will be stripped from the land. Saskatchewan is already facing a collapse due to farm practices, and a second "dust bowl" seems nigh inevitable. Do not look to Canada, we cannot feed billions in the decades to come.
Obviously, but you missed the point. The problem is competetion by increased polarity between the haves and have-nots. The latter aren't just going to roll over and die. They're going to go to war to survive because there's nothing to lose in not doing so and everything to gain.
> The latter aren't just going to roll over and die. They're going to go to war to survive because there's nothing to lose in not doing so and everything to gain.
And they'll lose.
If you look at the distribution of power, it's not predicted to change all that much. The superpowers are enormously capable of maintaining their grip.
The complaints of poor nations will be met with meager welfare packages and mostly tuned out by the working class of weather nations. It's how the world already operates.
I figured you would say that but your hubris is entirely unwarranted. The Taliban just handed the most powerful military on the planet their ass. They beat the USSR too. The Veitcong did it before them. Look at how badly the barefoot Houthis beat the shit out of KSA even with direct US support. Look at Russia being sent packing. Don't gamble on these things. It's foolish to expose yourself to those kinds of risks if you don't need to.
I'm not sure this is a good stick to measure. The American voting public didn't have an appetite for those fights.
Put the American economy at risk and you get the Gulf War. Attack America directly and you get the Pacific theater.
In any case, none of those particular points matter. No poor country is going to be able to resource starve the wealthiest nations. If they try to invade or block trade, they'll find out the limits of their power.
It's irrelevant what appetite they had because they lost abd they were losing long before they left both Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Several of the countires made "poor" by climate change will have nuclear weapons: Indian, Pakistan, France, Israel, North Korea. You're living in a fantasy. Time to wake up.
And a lot less population density. People in low-lying areas aren't going to be able to move to higher ground, because someone else already owns that ground.
There's a key difference; territorial animals are owner-occupiers. If a bear loses a territorial fight, it dies or moves. It doesn't call in the forest police. Also, bears want to keep other bears out. They don't much care about smaller animals, or try to restructure the entire landscape in the name of bear commerce.
"Earth has experienced cold periods (informally referred to as “ice ages,” or "glacials") and warm periods (“interglacials”) on roughly 100,000-year cycles for at least the last 1 million years. The last of these ice age glaciations peaked* around 20,000 years ago."
"The causes of ice ages are not fully understood for either the large-scale ice age periods or the smaller ebb and flow of glacial–interglacial periods within an ice age."
It is just part of the Silicon Valley lore. You know how all those successful start-ups were all started in big office complexes. It is just more creative that way.
It has been obvious for a while now that the optimal workplace was designed in the 18th century.
Just like it was obvious in the 18th century, the optimal loom (the Jacquard) was invented, and no possible improvements to textile manufacture could be made.
It’s not just lore though. Harvard and others have done extensive research and found 100% remote is less effect for most organizations. Is office work the only solution here, no. Is some work cultures work better with remote, sure. However most companies benefit from in person work.
This is silly, unless you think the earth will turn into Venus.
The majority of time earth has had no ice caps. Primates evolved when the polars where covered in trees, not ice. A warmer planet will support more biodiversity not less.
It’s not about the lack of ice, dingus. the danger is in climate change shocking ecosystems such that they trigger a systemic collapse that we can’t contain or manage. there’s basically no timeline where food supply wont be impacted and I’d like to hear your cavalier attitude about climate change then.
There is zero evidence that a warming planet would case a systemic collapse in biodiversity. In fact, 500 millions of planetary history shows the opposite. As the planet warms, biodiversity increases. There is nothing to argue about here.
And again, you are confused about timeframes. Geologic time vs human time.
Sure, over a period of millions of years, everything evolves and adapts. But in shorter periods of time, before adaptation, there is enormous disruption and entire ecosystems go extinct. Taking countless species down with it.
Human civilization has been around for only a few thousand years. You do the math. As you say, nothing to argue about here.
sans-humans, maybe. But we /are/ causing the Holocene extinction, which is essentially defined by the last two centuries of accelerated biodiversity loss. Climate change will only further stress already fundamentally strained ecosystems. It’s happening right now, at all of our literal doorsteps.
You're not considering timescales. True, the earth has seen all sorts of climates .. over slow-moving gradual timeframes of 100k to millions of years. And in none of those situations did human civilization exist - relying on specific climatic conditions for food, water and so on.
But now, climate is changing 1000x as fast. And we have civilization of 8 billion people, many of them living on the margins in areas that will soon became less habitable.
So you don't need Venus. Just a few degrees means hundreds of millions of refugees, food shortages, water shortages, and no doubt mass conflict as a result.
A 2c rise in temperature is insignificant compared to seasonal variation. There is no evidence that this change would decrease biodiversity on earth. All the evidence points the other way.
Climate change will be a humanitarian issue. People claiming that it will lead to ecosystem collapse and a loss of biodiversity are just a distraction. They are taking time and resources away from the real issues.
A warmer planet will have more biodiversity, not less. It will be easier to support 8 billion humans with a warmer, more productive planet.
It is clear that the tax system does not work properly for work from home. All those office expenses are pre-tax for the employer but post-tax for the employee. Makes no sense, they are the same expenses for the same purpose.
This is also why I’ve been advocating for more companies to take the google approach to perks - instead of more salary, provide a good lunch. A $10 lunch to me costs $18 pre tax to the company via salary (in CA). But that also includes profit margin on the lunch provider, so might only cost the company $8 to provide.
This is also why I have advocated for a “net worth” tax (kinda like property tax but for all net worth) instead of income tax. If you spend money on an experience or disposable item (good for the economy) you aren’t taxed on that money.
There should be a tax form you can get from your employer that states you work primarily from home, and then home office items/broadband costs should be deductible on it.
Except nothing is deductible if you don't surpass the standard deduction, so unless you can find $12k of other various deductions, nothing is ever deductible for the individual player.
