Body size and metabolic rate are intertwined, a factor that is especially important to understand with regard to animals that live in aquatic environments, where heat loss is related to water temperature. Payne et al. developed a method to estimate routine metabolic rate based on measures from tagged fish, and combined the estimates with published respirometry rates to create a dataset spanning the entire body size range of extant fishes. Using these data, the authors found a scaling imbalance between heat production and loss that affects especially large, mesothermic fishes in warm waters. This imbalance both explains the distribution of these fish in cooler waters and suggests a special sensitivity to warming waters. —Sacha Vignieri
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Abstract:
Body size and temperature set metabolic rates and the pace of life, yet our understanding of the energetics of large fishes is uncertain, especially of warm-bodied mesotherms, which can heavily influence marine food webs. We developed an approach to estimate metabolic heat production in fishes, revealing how routine energy expenditure scales with size and temperature from 1-milligram larvae up to 3-tonne megaplanktivorous sharks. We found that mesotherms use approximately four times more energy than ectotherms use and identified a scaling mismatch in which rates of heat production increase faster than heat loss as body size increases, with larger fish becoming increasingly warm bodied. This scaling imbalance creates an overheating predicament for large mesotherms, helping to explain their cooler biogeographies. Contemporary mesotherms face high fuel demands and overheating risks, which is a concern given their disproportionate demise during prior climate shifts.
Is that sharks are an ancient species and they’ve survived way warmer oceans even relatively recently.
For example the Medieval Warm Period Sargasso Sea surface temperatures were 1°C warmer than 400 years ago, and Pacific Ocean water temperatures were 0.65°C warmer than the decades before.
Sharks are an ancient division of life, roughly 440 million years old, which has survived far warmer oceans.
There are ~500 living species of shark and likely tens of thousands extinct in their lineage.
We are perpetrating a mass extinction event that incorporates not just temperatures, but ocean acidification and trophic cascade for fisheries. In mass extinctions, enough things about the ecosystem change that specialists often go extinct. Great White Sharks are a specialist species in their extreme size; Most size specialists are in a precarious local maxima that disappears too quickly to adapt if conditions change drastically.
The warmer ocean thing seems to be blanketing over the real issue: we are overfishing.
Which is really heartening to me, because decreasing the temperature of the ocean seems daunting, but not dragging giant nets through the ocean nonstop seems pretty straightforward.
Younger Dryas, definitely. It very likely abruptly stopped progress in human agriculture, before allowing it to abruptly restart again. Makes the Medieval warm period and little ice age look like a joke. Two massive shifts that punctuate the timeline of early human prehistory.
> The Younger Dryas (YD, Greenland Stadial GS-1) was a period in Earth's geologic history that occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present (BP). It is primarily known for the sudden or "abrupt" cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, when the North Atlantic Ocean cooled and annual air temperatures decreased by ~3 °C (5 °F) over North America, 2–6 °C (4–11 °F) in Europe and up to 10 °C (18 °F) in Greenland, in a few decades
I presume it was due to the temperature gradient being extremely low, so they could gradually adapt to the change over hundreds of years. We're pulling the handbrake in geological terms.
(that chart was made in 2016, given that we were at +1.5C last year we're outdone even the most pessimistic scenario presented on that graph by quite a bit, the line is now almost horizontal)
Except you have no idea what the capability of sharks are to adapt to different ocean temperatures. As sharks swim across various parts of the ocean or at various depths in a single day, the temperatures change far quicker than ocean temperatures over the last 100 years. The idea that you could guess that sharks can't adapt to a wide range of temperatures is nothing but a wild guess on your part because it agrees with your biased belief that sharks are in danger due to climate change.
But sharks have been around for 400 million years, longer than trees have existed. The amount of change they have endured is far greater than that, and sharks are likely the most adept at climate change.
Carbon emissions from food production may go down about that much. However, those emissions are only about 30% of the total CO2 emissions humans are responsible for, if I recall correctly. So, total CO2 reduction would be about 18%.
and likely other un predictable knock on effects would reduce the benefit, like going vegan would mean more food is available overall, and population might rise in response.
Animals or humans don't cause any net emissions, because the same carbon was captured from the atmosphere in the first place. No new carbon is added. Also, the same amount of methane is broken down in the atmosphere as is created. Increasing co2 is only possible by burning fossil fuels.
Talking in terms of "carbon" is misleading. Methane is much more potent than CO2. I don't know why you think methane is broken down at the same rate as it is added.
- Cattle release methane
- Forests are burnt to make room for crops/grazing
- Fertilizer for crops for cattle produces nitrous oxide
I do not claim this adds up to 60%, but to suggest it is zero is incorrect.
Methane is broken down with a few years delay, but still the same amount is breaking down as is produced. Think of a long pipe which takes a few years to travel through and it's fed at a constant rate. Total methane in the atmosphere stays constant.
But that still means you have a couple of years with a higher concentration of methane, and given the higher impact this is obviously very relevant, no?
No new carbon would be added if we were talking about hunting buffalo on the great plains. But we're talking about industrial agriculture and each calorie produced does have associated fossil fuel emissions
No, because most of the estimates are wonky as hell. For one, calories from silage don't exactly translate directly to calories humans can make use of. Second, most estimates are worst case only and ignore the fact most animals are pastured for some/all of the year on marginal land. Some animals can survive entirely on foraging and waste from agriculture (pigs are a great example).
On the other side, not all climates can produce all the plants required for a balanced vegan diet. Here in Canada, nothing grows for 6 months and what does grow is relatively limited.
The lowest energy system would likely include a reduction in animal products but not a complete elimination, while keeping transportation to a minimum.
Also, just like with energy generation, there's the game theory aspect. If you reduce emissions, will everyone cooperate? What if you suffer only to have someone else increase their emissions anyway? We see this here... We limit our fisheries to try preserve ocean fish, only for Chinese vessels to sit on the edge of our borders hoovering up all the aquatic life...
Donald Trump has probably done more to halt CO2 production than any other president, by extending the COVID pandemic and closing the Straight of Hormuz.
That factoid always hides the real issue. The biggest reason that that factoid is true is that the 100 biggest companies includes a large amount of the fossil fuel industry, and that that industry produces most emissions in the world. A company like Saudi Aramco produce 4% of global emissions.
We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
For full clarity, it's also not the 100 biggest corporations that produce most emissions, but the 100 biggest companies. A massive amount of the global emissions are done by state-owned companies.
> We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
Unfortunately the United States is currently ruled by a death cult that sees any further push to renewables as capitulation to China and is dedicated to burning fossil fuels until they are fully gone.
And while this part is less explicitly stated, I'm convinced they aren't ignorant of the devastating results of this policy, they just intend to profit off it rather than mitigate the harms, thus the stated interest in taking Greenland, Canada, etc.
They know things are going to get really bad, but they also know their own wealth will at least in the short term shield them from much personal exposure to the harm that will increasingly immiserate everyone else.
That’s basically a different way of measuring the same thing. These corporations don’t just exist in a bubble, many of them are going to be behind the food production either directly or indirectly (e.g. energy companies providing fuel for machinery).
Food is responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions[1]. I agree that it’s not realistic to assume this will be solved individually, more pressure needs to be put on these large corporations from governments, but the quickest way you or I can make our own (individually small, collectively large) impact is by cutting out meat from our diet (specifically beef[2]). We are end-consumers of those 100 largest corporations one way or another.
(Not a vegetarian/vegan btw. I’m not trying to shame, I’m certainly not perfect! I just wanted to share the info that it’s not someone else’s problem. We’re all in this together)
The smaller ones are most likely less efficient (which blocked their growth). So it'd be a game of whack-a-mole where every hit makes everything worse...
We grow a lot of human-edible food for the sole purpose to feed it to livestock, who then spend most of those calories on existing and put a small portion into body mass that we eventually eat.
Sure, that stuff isn't of the same quality as food grown for human consumption, but putting livestock on a diet and diverting some of their food to human consumption would more than cover any shortfall from the missing meat
we don't have the distribution systems for it, I promise you it could not be reconfigured overnight (which is the specific thought exercise we were given)
I agree. I see climate engineering as the short term solution that will get us to the long term solution. Without commenting on this specific implementation, experiments could be done. Many of the aerosol-type ideas are not permanent and would not last (and neither would their impacts). Models are good enough to understand the impacts and if they are not now they can be improved through a cycle of experimentation and further modeling. Other solutions are decades away and they have been for decades. Time to take this seriously. We are already engineering the climate, just not one conducive to life.
This might be the worst idea I've ever seen. I'm glad they are so interested in reducing the effects of global warming - that's fantastic - but they are literally purposefully releasing a toxic, major air pollutant into the air to create in their own words "clouds of dust" for the purposes of reflecting sunlight. Sure, there might be a slight cooling effect but who in their right mind could possibly think this is a good idea?!
I understand they are deploying to the stratosphere and not the troposphere but I can't imagine there aren't any negative second-order effects.
As someone who lives in a city with a major PM2.5 problem that effects the millions here on the daily (near an active stratovolcano no less!), reading about what they are doing was somewhat infuriating.
I appreciate the link, however it should be noted that piece was written by the co-founder of that same company. They do seem to be evidence driven but let's not pretend there's not some degree of bias towards the solutions his company is proposing.
Additionally, that article focuses almost solely on the chances of producing acid rain, which actually is another issue and not the one I was first concerned with. That piece talks about "redistributing" SO2 from the troposphere to the stratosphere which is a neat concept but a.) that's purely theoretical, and b.) that's not what they are doing or trying to do anyway.
It could be argued that air pollution has a greater and more devastating effect on the everyday lives of people alive today then global warming does now or will in the foreseeable future. In my city it was estimated that more than 1 in every ~16 deaths is related to air pollution, and the air here isn't nearly as bad as it is in other cities. Worldwide, UNICEF estimates nearly 2,000 deaths under 5 years of age per day from air pollution [0]. Annual deaths worldwide are estimated at 8+ million yearly across all age groups. Making that problem worse by any measure in the hope of producing a cooling effect that is a fraction of a fraction of a degree is not worth it at all and at least in my opinion is a net-negative.
I want to ignore these articles as it is so painful to watch the beautiful clockwork of the natural world unravel. I hate facing the suffering, diminishment, and extinction of so much in the name of profiteering and ever-increasing growth.
But this is the world now, there will only be more stories like this, and so I'm not turning away from it any further. The world becomes less beautiful, less rich, less full every year.
I do volunteer, donate, and advocate and I won't use my extreme pessimism as an excuse not to engage. But in private, I mourn what is coming with little hope for substantial reduction in harm. If anything, those with power seem upset that we're not doing more to fasttrack catastrophe - if it's going to happen, may as well be the one to profit from it as much as possible before you're dead, the thinking seems to go.
It's hard when your job and even hobbies are intertwined with this destruction. I enjoy working with computers and industrial machinery - two giant sources of pollution and social disruption. I sometimes feel this existential crisis where I am part of the problem yet I have no way to escape and become filled with guilt. Yet without this technology our lives would be more difficult.
I sometimes think about a post-industrial fantasy world where technology still exists, though minimally, and carefully applied to solve real problems humanity faces instead of selling FOMO or millions of "shiny things" that wind up in land fills so you can sell the new FOMO/shinything so some numbers on a spread sheet goes up.
I agree. Like many here, my job is now in the service of an AI-first business and people are incentivized to make AI as central and routine a part of our operations as possible. AI usage is not included in corporate commitments to social responsibility or environmental stewardship are not.
All that said: you might enjoy the book Robot & Monk by Becky Chambers, if you're one to read fiction. It kind of depicts what you're describing as your fantasy.
This may upset some people, but I think you have to come up with mental demarcation for responsibility, or you’ll go nuts.
I simply cannot decide to avoid all the technology of my field because whoever designed the electrical infrastructure didn’t do it responsibly. Or because the handling of ewaste hasn’t been dealt with. Or because everyone sourced materials in unethical ways.
My responsibility for most of that kinda ends at my voting behavior or trying to make reasonable personal decisions that are well within my small sphere of influence. A problem domain that I can handle.
Anyone who watched The Good Place knows what I mean. It’s not absolution for my own behavior, it’s just not holding myself accountable for everything that everyone else does… badly.
Otherwise there’s just no sword to fall on that’s big enough to feel at peace with the world. (Think of the snails!)
You are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of your own actions.
I'm not going to point to a TV show about alcoholism to substantiate that. You don't need me to. It is also why manslaughter, though a lesser crime than murder, remains a crime.
You seem to have reduced the very thesis of what I was saying to the point where you excised it entirely.
“Don’t get shitty drunk and then drive” fits just fine.
“Be a technology person who doesn’t use technology because our power isn’t green.” potentially falls on the far side of that line of personal responsibility.
I hear a whole lot of "what I can't" and next to none of "what I can." Not where I'd want to be, but it's no skin off my nose, either. Good luck holding on to your soul - good luck, and I hope you end up not needing it.
what's to guilt? None of us asked to be born into this. Most of us are only on part of a bell curve and often nowhere near the top. I lived for a while with friends and their commendable eco-mindedness included ideas like not flushing the toilet when it was just piss. Meanwhile the neighbour down the street leaves their hose running while washing their car out back, while popping inside to answer their front door.
While Europe cycles, the US builds bigger and bigger cars requiring more and more fuel to push just to prop up its unimaginative auto industry. While an American drives, Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu or Donald Trump level cities of concrete that will need to be repoured one day, combined with all the wasted energy put into making the people who die in those attacks.
One cannot be responsible for this, for all these other people. There's no guilt, just existential angst as we watch ourselves doomspiral. Whenever climate change is discussed internationally the developed world point at current carbon emissions while the developing world points at historic carbon emissions which means no agreement can be made. Those that are made are just torn up at the earliest opportunity by political opponents seeking short term gains. Who could possibly be responsible for all of this?
The only hope is that this investments made through energy use will propel humanity to the point where it can survive the world it has ruined.
You will live to regret your moral cowardice. Specifically, you'll regret the wrong choices it leads you to make. The guilt you feel now is a warning. Don't stay lazy, or that guilt will eventually be augmented by shame.
All we can do is aim to be better, to aim to be perfect is putting obstacles in your own path for your own smug sense of satisfaction, while the world still burns the same.
Unless you can change the many, including those most intransigent, you have to respect that just changing yourself, is something you only do for yourself. I don't see how its "moral cowardice" for me to own a car so I can ferry around my 84 year old father, so he doesn't have to drive, or to flush my toilet after every time I piss.
I mean I don't use that car for any other purpose. My carbon footprint is probably around or below average for someone in Europe. I eat meat maybe with half of my meals and rarely eat beef or pork. The last time I got on a plane was in 2018 for work. Last holiday via a flight was I think in 2012 and was about 3 hours each way.
I think the average American or even maybe Chinese citizen has a much higher footprint than me these days. I could do better, but to do so would impact my life negatively, win me nothing but smug self-indulgence and change nothing in terms of the long term outcomes of this planet.
So yea, what guilt, what "moral cowardice"? I wouldn't sneer at someone with a higher footprint than me (outside of maybe SUV owners because srsly wtf is that shit) because its collectively where we're culpable, not individually.
Its 2026 and like 30% or more of the citizens of the global super power don't believe in global warming. We're fucked and nothing I do or you do is going to stop that outcome. We probably should start seriously thinking about geo-engineering instead of worrying about moral cowardice.
Moral odium inheres, if nowhere else, in that you insist upon the seductive counsel of despair. The more convincing you make that, the less our fellows will feel themselves able in any meaningful way to act at all. What should I call such encouragement to cowardice, if not culpable?
Computers are not the problem, even the big data centers. The issue is carbon in the air. Fossil fuels. And it isnt really even about driving combustion cars. It is about industrial energy production. We need to stop burning tankers of oil to create bulk electricity. Replace all the coal/oil power plants with solar/wind/nuclear and the IC cars wont matter.
You have articulated my feelings, behavior, and outlook almost exactly. I feel so hopeless every time I read an article like this. I've joined climate activist groups and meetups, and I've donated to orgs and political candidates. But I just feel like there's so much more damage to be done before we get to substantial improvements, it's so disheartening
First off, I'm vegetarian and generally climate-conscious. I think we humans should do what we can in order to protect our planet. I think we can do a lot to keep the planet a good place for all living beings.
But to also say something unpopular, humans are part of the natural world. So these human driven changes to nature are just 'nature changing nature'. I understand that we are potentially causing mass extinctions, but this needs to be seen as natural unless you take for granted that humans are inherently 'special' which leads to speciesism. So, this might just be the way planets with intelligent species evolve, they outcompete the others and exploit natural resources to their benefit. It might just be a biological/evolutionary law.
Also, to be fair, _most_ of life on earth will survive this. Bacteria outnumber all other class of organisms IIRC, and they are shown to survive in truly challenging conditions.
> unless you take for granted that humans are inherently 'special' which leads to speciesism
It is true humans are part of nature, but we are unique in our capacity for causal understanding and foresight. We are the only species that can understand the long-term consequences of our actions and actively choose to change course. If our ability to exploit is natural, our ability to act with foresight and restraint is equally natural. Framing the present-day destruction as a natural consequence of some "evolutionary law" to me is an "appeal to nature" fallacy that can be used to absolve both individual and collective responsibility.
Yes, this is perhaps a way (it seems far too presumptive to say "the way") planets with intelligent species evolve. We are perhaps entering the Great Filter, or one of them.
> Also, to be fair, _most_ of life on earth will survive this
Literally true, but I'd argue a semantic deflection. It doesn't engage with the core idea of the destruction of complex ecosystems that we are witnessing and commenting on.
That said and to the point: I have tried to really focus on and take comfort in the idea "deep time", and the sincere belief that for as much destruction as we create, there will be more and different beauty in the far, far future. Yet where the Louvre to burn, how much comfort would it be to me that over the next 1000 years other artists will create yet more great works?
Blaming "profiteering and ever-increasing growth" is way too easy.
Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.
Why do you think that is? Hint: taxing people buying food, which is getting worse and worse, while the top 0.01% gets more and more rich and keeps making it worse, is maybe not the solution people should embrace that you think it is...
An easier path would be to stop subsidizing the core of what is making junk foods to begin with. For that matter, at least in the US, having individual states require limitations of importing pre-processed goods could help too.
I've thought that it might be an idea for more states to require at least half of all beef and chicken to be imported into the state in at least half-carcass form. This would incentivize local farming, and local processing, reducing the more centralized processing and the environmental impacts could be further reduced in a lot of ways. That's just for meat.
Forcing insurance company accounting to average to single-payer modals and limit coverage combinations to no more than 3 choices across the nation could help with another part. Refactoring all federally funded insurance (medicare/medicaid/va/federal-employees) into a non-profit insurance corp that does likewise and any private company can also buy policies from would help to. Finally, establish "part time" work as no more than 10 hours a week averaged per 4 week window. Then require all employers to provide medical insurance for all workers that meets what the npo insurance provides.
The recent changes to USDA food guidelines are a step in the right direction, mostly... but there's still room to improve. Education in and of itself should improve dramatically. For that matter, actually having schools "make" most of their food instead of relying on premade/packaged goods would be a massive step in a right direction. Have every student participate in meal preparation at least a few hours a week as part of school work would help a lot.
I'd like to see some incentivization for more companies returning to a dividends model that includes employee profit sharing as part of said formula. I think this would do a LOT to shore up the middle class again.
Sorry, just went off on a total tangent... hitting reply anyway, but don't take anything too serious/deep... these thoughts are kind of always lingering in the back of my mind... I've just never been in a position to actually act on any of them politically.
Thanks for a thoughtful and longer-form reply. All of these ideas absolutely make sense - and their challenges and compromises could be worked on, of course.
But, even starting to think about each of them, I can't escape the frame of the current socio-economic structure, where short-term profits currently trump all, and influence of the aforementioned "0.01%" (or whatever we call it) is direct, heavy and effective, and all of that brought us here to a large extent in the first place.
In such a reality of ours, these kinds of initiatives don't go far - and even if surfaced in the media, there is a significant portion of population who would be very strongly against them, due to how opinions have been shaped and polarised over past decades.
It does seem almost impossible from current perspective.
Cool, you can fix the wealth inequality. But you also need to fix the excessive consumption of beef, fuel, and every other CO2-emitting good, whether consumed by you or by the "top 0.001%". You can't use "wealth inequality" as an excuse to delay action on climate change. Those goods' consumption needs to go down.
Fuel is trickier and requires investments and a transition period, but a beef tax would be trivial, and there are infinite substitute goods available.
They’re blaming entities with power. E.g. 90% of the US have no impact on policy evidenced by there being no correlation between their policy preferences and real policy (2011 Princeton study).
> Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.
Is the idea to increase the VAT or something? The taxes on consumption?
Okay, so how would this work? You increase these taxes so that the bad consumers don’t travel for pleasure (just companies for business). Eventually people just buy what they need, like food which is presumably decently locally sourced, enough clothes to not freeze or be indecent. You’re still left with gas for commuting to job because people live an hour from work not out of choice but because of real estate prices. And what are in the stores are Made in China or Vietnam because that’s how the global market works; cheap shipping from cheap countries.
But these taxes would organically change all of that?
The usual narrative conveniently focuses on how Joe Beergut is causing problems by driving to work. And that this is how taxation should work; individual income, individual consumption, individual taxes. The more and more “libertarian”, the more the narrative slide towards taxes on income, taxes on consumption, and eventually just a flat tax because that is “fair”. But that seems to leave the big blindspot of corporations and individuals that might own fleets of trucks that of course tax the road infrastructure—no taxes for them?
But what headway could be made if the externalities were all caused by Joe Beergut. Libertarians and the environmental narrative might agree.
We've always consumed and extracted until we run out, but only very recently started actually tracking it and taking any preventative measures at all. Will take yet more time to gain momentum in that direction. The consequences will be too obvious and unavoidable for the next few generations to stagnate like we have.
No, we're very resilient bastards, we're going to let the huge majority of species go extinct before we go ourselves. We're already in a mass extinction event and we're just getting started.
Serious questions, how is this destruction and not just "change?" It seems throughout time the world has experienced acute shifts, dying offs and other events. In those transition periods many animals that you know and love today finally got a shot at main character roles. Heck the reduction of o2 in the air that killed/shrunk a lot of dinosaurs is basically the opening slave for you to be able to write this Hacker News comment.
None of this is to say don't mourn or long for any of this, but the show doesnt end, the charecters just change.
Well, it is change, but that doesn't mean it's not destruction. While the world has experienced mass die-offs before, the hallmark of the planet's current situation is distinguished by its unprecedented speed and the fact that it is being driven by a single species' behavior rather than geological cycles or cosmic externalities.
To repeat myself in another comment: I have tried to really focus on and take comfort in the idea "deep time", and the sincere belief that for as much destruction as we create, there will be more and different beauty in the far, far future. Yet where the Louvre to burn, how much comfort would it be to me that over the next 1000 years other artists will create yet more great works? In the same way, how long will it take the earth to return to such complexity and diversity of life? Many, many millenia.
> I do volunteer, donate, and advocate and I won't use my extreme pessimism as an excuse not to engage.
I think it is ok to not engage. The idea that you can impact the world is largely an artifact of modernity. In reality, capital is more than happy to let you take the blame for its own suicidal tendencies.
I understand what you're saying. I appreciate the thought behind it. But in the end, I do not agree. I cannot be certain where my actions will and won't ultimately help accrue to impact; the pebble knows not the impact that its ripples will have. If you care about something, I think you should be involved.
Certainty that your involvement is inconsequential requires too much intellectual hubris, it precludes the possibility that you may be wrong in your forecasts so you can let yourself off the hook for any effort. I get it, I do, but I think that's mind poison. Surprises to happen, the world is chaotic, yesterday's longshot becomes tomorrow's surprise.
And, if nothing else, many of the efforts you can contribute to can have a clear and demonstrable impact at a more local level, or for a more limited time, even if it doesn't solve or mitigate the larger issue in the long run. Is it a waste of time for me to get involved in river clean-ups, or to work with a crew to re-wild an abandoned golf course, or remove asur honeysuckle from nearby native forests? Maybe you'd say "yes" because we'll have to keep doing it again, but that's the work with most things that matter.
Sometimes those stories try too much to impress. I recorded a documentary series "How to kill a puppy and get rich" about street dogs in Romania and the business around them, and I had to stop it after 10 seconds, not exaggerating. Folks, I want to know the mafia and story, but I can't stand to see and hear that torture...
There was a Norwegian TV series called Catastrophe or something to educate the whole family about how insecure and bad the future is. What to do if a Russian van keeps driving through your neighorhood. What to do in a natural catastrophe.
How nice. Us adults who have ruined the planet[1][2] and now we are lecturing the youngins about how to deal with this suckage.
With a bizarrely cherry narration. Did you know things are about to suck for you? Just your usual shameless state TV programming.
But we, with our particular national programming, are just supposed to act like we were just spoiled brats that now have to live without dessert post-dinner. The “dessert generation” indeed.
[1] Um akshually, we haven’t ruined the planet—the planet is just minerals! It doesn’t care. We are just ruining the foundation for our own comfortable exi— yeah no kidding.
But on the plus side a few companies increased shareholder value. Can you imagine if we had fewer products, or didn't push the human population its theoretical maximum?
Who is we? Which we opted to push the planet to carrying capacity? Is it? What is the capacity? Are the decreasing birthrates across the world really the Earth's theoretical maximum? What does it mean to have fewer products, which things precisely should we not have? Who should be in charge of setting this?
As sad as these things are... one needs to also accept, that as capable as we are of changing our environments, from transportation, to air conditioning, we do not control all the things. We have and continue to over-fish in a lot of places, and I have deep concerns over farmed fish and the impact of less than natural foods on our own health.
A lot of the changes to the waters is well outside human control... there's a huge balance of factors at play from the earth, moon and sun. We don't control these things... and to what impact we can/do, I'm not sure that anything we might do may not have unintended consequences that are materially worse.
We can definitely do some things, but the level of internalized and externalized guilt that people in and outside these discussions seem to carry and put on others isn't at all healthy in and of itself.
This is a really strange, deterministic view on something we collectively have influence over. That thing about "unintended consequences that [may be] materially worse?" We've actually just quietly folded the materially worse consequences of our behavior into the cost of doing business. Hurricanes are stronger, flooding is worse in coastal cities, fires are worse in arid areas. Fish don't magically make mercury; a significant portion of that comes from burning coal and mining activities.
All of these things are firmly within our control.
So, do you propose we kill off a significant portion of humanity by lottery, war, or some other method of selection? Do we just stop all industry and let nature work itself out instead?
You're in control after all.
edit: sarcasm aside... my entire point is that the guilt itself isn't healthy and does no good for anyone. Yes, there are things that can probably be done, but alarmism, blame and guilt cycles do nothing to help anyone.
They aren't in "our" control, they are in the control of the very wealthy, who will not let the thought of natural disaster and mass extinctions affect their bottom line until there's no resource left for them to exploit.
Of course this is inside human control - we are directly responsible for what's happening! Unless you're one of the people who are willingly putting their head in the sand, I don't understand how it makes sense to act like this is still in question.
They will move to different locations like they always have been for the past 400 million years. Sharks are older than trees, they can adapt to climate change better than anything alive right now.
What an inane comment that shows how unqualified you are to talk about this.
Shark is a group, great white shark is a species. The fact that the group has been alive for 400M years has no bearing on whether the currently alive species can actually adapt and survive. Some very likely will, the great white might not, that’s what the article is about.
Another alarmist who believes "this time it's different!" with no knowledge about how climate has changed over the past 400 million years. You probably thought when Big Basin burned that it would never recover, meanwhile it started to recover in months. People who doubt nature's resilience are ALWAYS wrong.
> Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.
They are moving to cooler waters but the cooler waters won't have the food supplies they need. So it's either stay where the food is and overheat or go to cooler water and starve.
It’s a white noise so hard to notice, but our behavior is fundamentally driven by the design of our nervous system. Thus the more immediate the consequence, the better we link our behavior and can adjust. Since this is true at an individual level, the dynamic emerges from societies and populations as well, even large ones.
For example, something is red, you touch it, get burned. You won’t touch it again.
Environmental harm unfortunately is precisely the opposite. Consequences arise on a very long arc, in some cases beyond even our lifetimes. We register problems like this only intellectually, and even that becomes clouded with politics.
So the problem is kind of inevitable unfortunately.
for hn comment-only readers:
paper link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt2981
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Editor Summary:
Body size and metabolic rate are intertwined, a factor that is especially important to understand with regard to animals that live in aquatic environments, where heat loss is related to water temperature. Payne et al. developed a method to estimate routine metabolic rate based on measures from tagged fish, and combined the estimates with published respirometry rates to create a dataset spanning the entire body size range of extant fishes. Using these data, the authors found a scaling imbalance between heat production and loss that affects especially large, mesothermic fishes in warm waters. This imbalance both explains the distribution of these fish in cooler waters and suggests a special sensitivity to warming waters. —Sacha Vignieri
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Abstract:
Body size and temperature set metabolic rates and the pace of life, yet our understanding of the energetics of large fishes is uncertain, especially of warm-bodied mesotherms, which can heavily influence marine food webs. We developed an approach to estimate metabolic heat production in fishes, revealing how routine energy expenditure scales with size and temperature from 1-milligram larvae up to 3-tonne megaplanktivorous sharks. We found that mesotherms use approximately four times more energy than ectotherms use and identified a scaling mismatch in which rates of heat production increase faster than heat loss as body size increases, with larger fish becoming increasingly warm bodied. This scaling imbalance creates an overheating predicament for large mesotherms, helping to explain their cooler biogeographies. Contemporary mesotherms face high fuel demands and overheating risks, which is a concern given their disproportionate demise during prior climate shifts.
My main skepticism (Shark lover here btw!)
Is that sharks are an ancient species and they’ve survived way warmer oceans even relatively recently.
For example the Medieval Warm Period Sargasso Sea surface temperatures were 1°C warmer than 400 years ago, and Pacific Ocean water temperatures were 0.65°C warmer than the decades before.
Sharks are an ancient division of life, roughly 440 million years old, which has survived far warmer oceans.
There are ~500 living species of shark and likely tens of thousands extinct in their lineage.
We are perpetrating a mass extinction event that incorporates not just temperatures, but ocean acidification and trophic cascade for fisheries. In mass extinctions, enough things about the ecosystem change that specialists often go extinct. Great White Sharks are a specialist species in their extreme size; Most size specialists are in a precarious local maxima that disappears too quickly to adapt if conditions change drastically.
The warmer ocean thing seems to be blanketing over the real issue: we are overfishing.
Which is really heartening to me, because decreasing the temperature of the ocean seems daunting, but not dragging giant nets through the ocean nonstop seems pretty straightforward.
Were there any periods in which the rate of change in warming was the same or greater?
Younger Dryas, definitely. It very likely abruptly stopped progress in human agriculture, before allowing it to abruptly restart again. Makes the Medieval warm period and little ice age look like a joke. Two massive shifts that punctuate the timeline of early human prehistory.
> The Younger Dryas (YD, Greenland Stadial GS-1) was a period in Earth's geologic history that occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present (BP). It is primarily known for the sudden or "abrupt" cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, when the North Atlantic Ocean cooled and annual air temperatures decreased by ~3 °C (5 °F) over North America, 2–6 °C (4–11 °F) in Europe and up to 10 °C (18 °F) in Greenland, in a few decades
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
I think there’s debate on the current numbers but I’ve heard sea surface temperatures are currently about 0.5°C above the 1981-2010 average.
During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, the rate of change of CO2 concentration was 1/4 what we're at today
During mass extinction events.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
> Is that sharks are an ancient species
For a shark lover, you should know that shark is not a species, but a taxonomy group.
From there, everything else you assume is incorrect (ie: some species of sharks have definitely gone extinct)
I presume it was due to the temperature gradient being extremely low, so they could gradually adapt to the change over hundreds of years. We're pulling the handbrake in geological terms.
https://xkcd.com/1732
(that chart was made in 2016, given that we were at +1.5C last year we're outdone even the most pessimistic scenario presented on that graph by quite a bit, the line is now almost horizontal)
How are you in any way qualified to know that what you said is correct, besides that being a wild guess?
How are you qualified to know anything that you haven't personally witnessed, besides all of your "knowledge" being a wild guess?
https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2024-first-year-exc...
Reading a thermometer is not really an advanced skill.
Except you have no idea what the capability of sharks are to adapt to different ocean temperatures. As sharks swim across various parts of the ocean or at various depths in a single day, the temperatures change far quicker than ocean temperatures over the last 100 years. The idea that you could guess that sharks can't adapt to a wide range of temperatures is nothing but a wild guess on your part because it agrees with your biased belief that sharks are in danger due to climate change.
But sharks have been around for 400 million years, longer than trees have existed. The amount of change they have endured is far greater than that, and sharks are likely the most adept at climate change.
How are you in any way qualified to know that what you said is correct, besides that being a wild guess?
- stupid question
- if everyone on the entire planet went 100% vegan from tomorrow, will carbon emissions really go down by 60%?
Carbon emissions from food production may go down about that much. However, those emissions are only about 30% of the total CO2 emissions humans are responsible for, if I recall correctly. So, total CO2 reduction would be about 18%.
and likely other un predictable knock on effects would reduce the benefit, like going vegan would mean more food is available overall, and population might rise in response.
Maybe. Due to not just the caloric availability, but due to eating habits that may influence behavior.
Animals or humans don't cause any net emissions, because the same carbon was captured from the atmosphere in the first place. No new carbon is added. Also, the same amount of methane is broken down in the atmosphere as is created. Increasing co2 is only possible by burning fossil fuels.
Talking in terms of "carbon" is misleading. Methane is much more potent than CO2. I don't know why you think methane is broken down at the same rate as it is added.
- Cattle release methane
- Forests are burnt to make room for crops/grazing
- Fertilizer for crops for cattle produces nitrous oxide
I do not claim this adds up to 60%, but to suggest it is zero is incorrect.
Methane is broken down with a few years delay, but still the same amount is breaking down as is produced. Think of a long pipe which takes a few years to travel through and it's fed at a constant rate. Total methane in the atmosphere stays constant.
But that still means you have a couple of years with a higher concentration of methane, and given the higher impact this is obviously very relevant, no?
No new carbon would be added if we were talking about hunting buffalo on the great plains. But we're talking about industrial agriculture and each calorie produced does have associated fossil fuel emissions
No, because most of the estimates are wonky as hell. For one, calories from silage don't exactly translate directly to calories humans can make use of. Second, most estimates are worst case only and ignore the fact most animals are pastured for some/all of the year on marginal land. Some animals can survive entirely on foraging and waste from agriculture (pigs are a great example).
On the other side, not all climates can produce all the plants required for a balanced vegan diet. Here in Canada, nothing grows for 6 months and what does grow is relatively limited.
The lowest energy system would likely include a reduction in animal products but not a complete elimination, while keeping transportation to a minimum.
Also, just like with energy generation, there's the game theory aspect. If you reduce emissions, will everyone cooperate? What if you suffer only to have someone else increase their emissions anyway? We see this here... We limit our fisheries to try preserve ocean fish, only for Chinese vessels to sit on the edge of our borders hoovering up all the aquatic life...
Donald Trump has probably done more to halt CO2 production than any other president, by extending the COVID pandemic and closing the Straight of Hormuz.
Most of the emissions are done by the 100 biggest corporations. That's where I'd start fixing things.
That factoid always hides the real issue. The biggest reason that that factoid is true is that the 100 biggest companies includes a large amount of the fossil fuel industry, and that that industry produces most emissions in the world. A company like Saudi Aramco produce 4% of global emissions.
We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
For full clarity, it's also not the 100 biggest corporations that produce most emissions, but the 100 biggest companies. A massive amount of the global emissions are done by state-owned companies.
> We need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.
Unfortunately the United States is currently ruled by a death cult that sees any further push to renewables as capitulation to China and is dedicated to burning fossil fuels until they are fully gone.
See, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sbvp4ULD6GI
And while this part is less explicitly stated, I'm convinced they aren't ignorant of the devastating results of this policy, they just intend to profit off it rather than mitigate the harms, thus the stated interest in taking Greenland, Canada, etc.
They know things are going to get really bad, but they also know their own wealth will at least in the short term shield them from much personal exposure to the harm that will increasingly immiserate everyone else.
That’s basically a different way of measuring the same thing. These corporations don’t just exist in a bubble, many of them are going to be behind the food production either directly or indirectly (e.g. energy companies providing fuel for machinery).
Food is responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions[1]. I agree that it’s not realistic to assume this will be solved individually, more pressure needs to be put on these large corporations from governments, but the quickest way you or I can make our own (individually small, collectively large) impact is by cutting out meat from our diet (specifically beef[2]). We are end-consumers of those 100 largest corporations one way or another.
(Not a vegetarian/vegan btw. I’m not trying to shame, I’m certainly not perfect! I just wanted to share the info that it’s not someone else’s problem. We’re all in this together)
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions [2] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/food-footprints?Commodi...
Don't corporations just serve their patrons?
"just" is a weasel word there. Decisions are made and policies are enacted based on a number of factors.
And their investors.
No; patrons express demand for the product, but corporations obscure the negative externalities.
If patrons were shown the real price, we'd switch.
But we're being lied to.
The smaller ones are most likely less efficient (which blocked their growth). So it'd be a game of whack-a-mole where every hit makes everything worse...
maybe, but only because a lot of people would starve... that's a demand change our food supply isn't currently structured to handle
long term with a proper transition, probably not 60% but likely some lower double-digit percentage (maybe closer to 20?)
We grow a lot of human-edible food for the sole purpose to feed it to livestock, who then spend most of those calories on existing and put a small portion into body mass that we eventually eat.
Sure, that stuff isn't of the same quality as food grown for human consumption, but putting livestock on a diet and diverting some of their food to human consumption would more than cover any shortfall from the missing meat
Yes, only the rich should be allowed to eat the basic food group of natural meat.
That's how it worked for most of human history in most agricultural societies. It's a traditional value.
americans eat more meat than most other countries today, and most humans throughout history
we don't have the distribution systems for it, I promise you it could not be reconfigured overnight (which is the specific thought exercise we were given)
Time to make sunsets. https://makesunsets.com.
I don’t see a way out except for stratospheric aerosol injection.
I agree. I see climate engineering as the short term solution that will get us to the long term solution. Without commenting on this specific implementation, experiments could be done. Many of the aerosol-type ideas are not permanent and would not last (and neither would their impacts). Models are good enough to understand the impacts and if they are not now they can be improved through a cycle of experimentation and further modeling. Other solutions are decades away and they have been for decades. Time to take this seriously. We are already engineering the climate, just not one conducive to life.
This might be the worst idea I've ever seen. I'm glad they are so interested in reducing the effects of global warming - that's fantastic - but they are literally purposefully releasing a toxic, major air pollutant into the air to create in their own words "clouds of dust" for the purposes of reflecting sunlight. Sure, there might be a slight cooling effect but who in their right mind could possibly think this is a good idea?!
I understand they are deploying to the stratosphere and not the troposphere but I can't imagine there aren't any negative second-order effects.
As someone who lives in a city with a major PM2.5 problem that effects the millions here on the daily (near an active stratovolcano no less!), reading about what they are doing was somewhat infuriating.
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/from-pollution-to-solution
I understand your concern but I don’t believe the impact is as severe as you think.
I appreciate the link, however it should be noted that piece was written by the co-founder of that same company. They do seem to be evidence driven but let's not pretend there's not some degree of bias towards the solutions his company is proposing.
Additionally, that article focuses almost solely on the chances of producing acid rain, which actually is another issue and not the one I was first concerned with. That piece talks about "redistributing" SO2 from the troposphere to the stratosphere which is a neat concept but a.) that's purely theoretical, and b.) that's not what they are doing or trying to do anyway.
It could be argued that air pollution has a greater and more devastating effect on the everyday lives of people alive today then global warming does now or will in the foreseeable future. In my city it was estimated that more than 1 in every ~16 deaths is related to air pollution, and the air here isn't nearly as bad as it is in other cities. Worldwide, UNICEF estimates nearly 2,000 deaths under 5 years of age per day from air pollution [0]. Annual deaths worldwide are estimated at 8+ million yearly across all age groups. Making that problem worse by any measure in the hope of producing a cooling effect that is a fraction of a fraction of a degree is not worth it at all and at least in my opinion is a net-negative.
[0]: https://ceh.unicef.org/spotlight-risk/air-pollution
I want to ignore these articles as it is so painful to watch the beautiful clockwork of the natural world unravel. I hate facing the suffering, diminishment, and extinction of so much in the name of profiteering and ever-increasing growth.
But this is the world now, there will only be more stories like this, and so I'm not turning away from it any further. The world becomes less beautiful, less rich, less full every year.
I do volunteer, donate, and advocate and I won't use my extreme pessimism as an excuse not to engage. But in private, I mourn what is coming with little hope for substantial reduction in harm. If anything, those with power seem upset that we're not doing more to fasttrack catastrophe - if it's going to happen, may as well be the one to profit from it as much as possible before you're dead, the thinking seems to go.
It's hard when your job and even hobbies are intertwined with this destruction. I enjoy working with computers and industrial machinery - two giant sources of pollution and social disruption. I sometimes feel this existential crisis where I am part of the problem yet I have no way to escape and become filled with guilt. Yet without this technology our lives would be more difficult.
I sometimes think about a post-industrial fantasy world where technology still exists, though minimally, and carefully applied to solve real problems humanity faces instead of selling FOMO or millions of "shiny things" that wind up in land fills so you can sell the new FOMO/shinything so some numbers on a spread sheet goes up.
It’s hard. But do what you can, it’s all you can do.
We got a solar array 10 years ago now. It’s small, but between 1000 to 3500 watts depending on the weather. It brings me some joy.
“Ones and zeros” by Jack Johnson is brutal lyrically. “A lot of traffic on the streets, so who's really doing all the drilling?”
It’s an unknown future and I’m glad that there are a lot thoughtful comments in this thread by people who care.
I agree. Like many here, my job is now in the service of an AI-first business and people are incentivized to make AI as central and routine a part of our operations as possible. AI usage is not included in corporate commitments to social responsibility or environmental stewardship are not.
All that said: you might enjoy the book Robot & Monk by Becky Chambers, if you're one to read fiction. It kind of depicts what you're describing as your fantasy.
This may upset some people, but I think you have to come up with mental demarcation for responsibility, or you’ll go nuts.
I simply cannot decide to avoid all the technology of my field because whoever designed the electrical infrastructure didn’t do it responsibly. Or because the handling of ewaste hasn’t been dealt with. Or because everyone sourced materials in unethical ways.
My responsibility for most of that kinda ends at my voting behavior or trying to make reasonable personal decisions that are well within my small sphere of influence. A problem domain that I can handle.
Anyone who watched The Good Place knows what I mean. It’s not absolution for my own behavior, it’s just not holding myself accountable for everything that everyone else does… badly.
Otherwise there’s just no sword to fall on that’s big enough to feel at peace with the world. (Think of the snails!)
You are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of your own actions.
I'm not going to point to a TV show about alcoholism to substantiate that. You don't need me to. It is also why manslaughter, though a lesser crime than murder, remains a crime.
You seem to have reduced the very thesis of what I was saying to the point where you excised it entirely.
“Don’t get shitty drunk and then drive” fits just fine.
“Be a technology person who doesn’t use technology because our power isn’t green.” potentially falls on the far side of that line of personal responsibility.
You don't sound too confident.
In what?
In your self-exculpation.
Depends on the subject. Some I’m at peace with (see my original post) and some I haven’t quite worked out to my own satisfaction.
The concept holds, in either case. It’s the only reasonable approach, imo.
I hear a whole lot of "what I can't" and next to none of "what I can." Not where I'd want to be, but it's no skin off my nose, either. Good luck holding on to your soul - good luck, and I hope you end up not needing it.
what's to guilt? None of us asked to be born into this. Most of us are only on part of a bell curve and often nowhere near the top. I lived for a while with friends and their commendable eco-mindedness included ideas like not flushing the toilet when it was just piss. Meanwhile the neighbour down the street leaves their hose running while washing their car out back, while popping inside to answer their front door.
While Europe cycles, the US builds bigger and bigger cars requiring more and more fuel to push just to prop up its unimaginative auto industry. While an American drives, Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu or Donald Trump level cities of concrete that will need to be repoured one day, combined with all the wasted energy put into making the people who die in those attacks.
One cannot be responsible for this, for all these other people. There's no guilt, just existential angst as we watch ourselves doomspiral. Whenever climate change is discussed internationally the developed world point at current carbon emissions while the developing world points at historic carbon emissions which means no agreement can be made. Those that are made are just torn up at the earliest opportunity by political opponents seeking short term gains. Who could possibly be responsible for all of this?
The only hope is that this investments made through energy use will propel humanity to the point where it can survive the world it has ruined.
You will live to regret your moral cowardice. Specifically, you'll regret the wrong choices it leads you to make. The guilt you feel now is a warning. Don't stay lazy, or that guilt will eventually be augmented by shame.
All we can do is aim to be better, to aim to be perfect is putting obstacles in your own path for your own smug sense of satisfaction, while the world still burns the same.
Unless you can change the many, including those most intransigent, you have to respect that just changing yourself, is something you only do for yourself. I don't see how its "moral cowardice" for me to own a car so I can ferry around my 84 year old father, so he doesn't have to drive, or to flush my toilet after every time I piss.
I really don't have to respect that.
If we're to talk about what you're ashamed of, why bring up the least blameworthy examples you can find? Do you want to be shriven, or enabled?
I mean I don't use that car for any other purpose. My carbon footprint is probably around or below average for someone in Europe. I eat meat maybe with half of my meals and rarely eat beef or pork. The last time I got on a plane was in 2018 for work. Last holiday via a flight was I think in 2012 and was about 3 hours each way.
I think the average American or even maybe Chinese citizen has a much higher footprint than me these days. I could do better, but to do so would impact my life negatively, win me nothing but smug self-indulgence and change nothing in terms of the long term outcomes of this planet.
So yea, what guilt, what "moral cowardice"? I wouldn't sneer at someone with a higher footprint than me (outside of maybe SUV owners because srsly wtf is that shit) because its collectively where we're culpable, not individually.
Its 2026 and like 30% or more of the citizens of the global super power don't believe in global warming. We're fucked and nothing I do or you do is going to stop that outcome. We probably should start seriously thinking about geo-engineering instead of worrying about moral cowardice.
Moral odium inheres, if nowhere else, in that you insist upon the seductive counsel of despair. The more convincing you make that, the less our fellows will feel themselves able in any meaningful way to act at all. What should I call such encouragement to cowardice, if not culpable?
Computers are not the problem, even the big data centers. The issue is carbon in the air. Fossil fuels. And it isnt really even about driving combustion cars. It is about industrial energy production. We need to stop burning tankers of oil to create bulk electricity. Replace all the coal/oil power plants with solar/wind/nuclear and the IC cars wont matter.
You have articulated my feelings, behavior, and outlook almost exactly. I feel so hopeless every time I read an article like this. I've joined climate activist groups and meetups, and I've donated to orgs and political candidates. But I just feel like there's so much more damage to be done before we get to substantial improvements, it's so disheartening
First off, I'm vegetarian and generally climate-conscious. I think we humans should do what we can in order to protect our planet. I think we can do a lot to keep the planet a good place for all living beings.
But to also say something unpopular, humans are part of the natural world. So these human driven changes to nature are just 'nature changing nature'. I understand that we are potentially causing mass extinctions, but this needs to be seen as natural unless you take for granted that humans are inherently 'special' which leads to speciesism. So, this might just be the way planets with intelligent species evolve, they outcompete the others and exploit natural resources to their benefit. It might just be a biological/evolutionary law.
Also, to be fair, _most_ of life on earth will survive this. Bacteria outnumber all other class of organisms IIRC, and they are shown to survive in truly challenging conditions.
> unless you take for granted that humans are inherently 'special' which leads to speciesism
It is true humans are part of nature, but we are unique in our capacity for causal understanding and foresight. We are the only species that can understand the long-term consequences of our actions and actively choose to change course. If our ability to exploit is natural, our ability to act with foresight and restraint is equally natural. Framing the present-day destruction as a natural consequence of some "evolutionary law" to me is an "appeal to nature" fallacy that can be used to absolve both individual and collective responsibility.
Yes, this is perhaps a way (it seems far too presumptive to say "the way") planets with intelligent species evolve. We are perhaps entering the Great Filter, or one of them.
> Also, to be fair, _most_ of life on earth will survive this
Literally true, but I'd argue a semantic deflection. It doesn't engage with the core idea of the destruction of complex ecosystems that we are witnessing and commenting on.
That said and to the point: I have tried to really focus on and take comfort in the idea "deep time", and the sincere belief that for as much destruction as we create, there will be more and different beauty in the far, far future. Yet where the Louvre to burn, how much comfort would it be to me that over the next 1000 years other artists will create yet more great works?
Yeah, but some of my favorite life forms are vertebrates. Would hate to see that branch go.
Haha, mine too, but I suppose we are biased!
Blaming "profiteering and ever-increasing growth" is way too easy.
Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.
Why do you think that is? Hint: taxing people buying food, which is getting worse and worse, while the top 0.01% gets more and more rich and keeps making it worse, is maybe not the solution people should embrace that you think it is...
An easier path would be to stop subsidizing the core of what is making junk foods to begin with. For that matter, at least in the US, having individual states require limitations of importing pre-processed goods could help too.
I've thought that it might be an idea for more states to require at least half of all beef and chicken to be imported into the state in at least half-carcass form. This would incentivize local farming, and local processing, reducing the more centralized processing and the environmental impacts could be further reduced in a lot of ways. That's just for meat.
Forcing insurance company accounting to average to single-payer modals and limit coverage combinations to no more than 3 choices across the nation could help with another part. Refactoring all federally funded insurance (medicare/medicaid/va/federal-employees) into a non-profit insurance corp that does likewise and any private company can also buy policies from would help to. Finally, establish "part time" work as no more than 10 hours a week averaged per 4 week window. Then require all employers to provide medical insurance for all workers that meets what the npo insurance provides.
The recent changes to USDA food guidelines are a step in the right direction, mostly... but there's still room to improve. Education in and of itself should improve dramatically. For that matter, actually having schools "make" most of their food instead of relying on premade/packaged goods would be a massive step in a right direction. Have every student participate in meal preparation at least a few hours a week as part of school work would help a lot.
I'd like to see some incentivization for more companies returning to a dividends model that includes employee profit sharing as part of said formula. I think this would do a LOT to shore up the middle class again.
Sorry, just went off on a total tangent... hitting reply anyway, but don't take anything too serious/deep... these thoughts are kind of always lingering in the back of my mind... I've just never been in a position to actually act on any of them politically.
Thanks for a thoughtful and longer-form reply. All of these ideas absolutely make sense - and their challenges and compromises could be worked on, of course.
But, even starting to think about each of them, I can't escape the frame of the current socio-economic structure, where short-term profits currently trump all, and influence of the aforementioned "0.01%" (or whatever we call it) is direct, heavy and effective, and all of that brought us here to a large extent in the first place.
In such a reality of ours, these kinds of initiatives don't go far - and even if surfaced in the media, there is a significant portion of population who would be very strongly against them, due to how opinions have been shaped and polarised over past decades.
It does seem almost impossible from current perspective.
Cool, you can fix the wealth inequality. But you also need to fix the excessive consumption of beef, fuel, and every other CO2-emitting good, whether consumed by you or by the "top 0.001%". You can't use "wealth inequality" as an excuse to delay action on climate change. Those goods' consumption needs to go down.
Fuel is trickier and requires investments and a transition period, but a beef tax would be trivial, and there are infinite substitute goods available.
Why do you present your second paragraph as if it were a reasonable solution to anything?
It's a kindergartners view on troubleshooting an unfathomably complex issue.
"Well just raise taxes and fix that!"
"Carbon Credits"??
Humans won't know if they don't try.
Here in the us, we could squeeze the rich and feed the whole world for many years. But we simply don't indicate basic survival instincts.
They’re blaming entities with power. E.g. 90% of the US have no impact on policy evidenced by there being no correlation between their policy preferences and real policy (2011 Princeton study).
> Can any legislature get away with dramatically increasing taxes on meat, fish, gas, and plane tickets, just at a level high enough to account for environmental externalities? Even dictatorships couldn't get away with it because it would cause too much unrest.
Is the idea to increase the VAT or something? The taxes on consumption?
Okay, so how would this work? You increase these taxes so that the bad consumers don’t travel for pleasure (just companies for business). Eventually people just buy what they need, like food which is presumably decently locally sourced, enough clothes to not freeze or be indecent. You’re still left with gas for commuting to job because people live an hour from work not out of choice but because of real estate prices. And what are in the stores are Made in China or Vietnam because that’s how the global market works; cheap shipping from cheap countries.
But these taxes would organically change all of that?
The usual narrative conveniently focuses on how Joe Beergut is causing problems by driving to work. And that this is how taxation should work; individual income, individual consumption, individual taxes. The more and more “libertarian”, the more the narrative slide towards taxes on income, taxes on consumption, and eventually just a flat tax because that is “fair”. But that seems to leave the big blindspot of corporations and individuals that might own fleets of trucks that of course tax the road infrastructure—no taxes for them?
But what headway could be made if the externalities were all caused by Joe Beergut. Libertarians and the environmental narrative might agree.
We've always consumed and extracted until we run out, but only very recently started actually tracking it and taking any preventative measures at all. Will take yet more time to gain momentum in that direction. The consequences will be too obvious and unavoidable for the next few generations to stagnate like we have.
>natural world unravel
Natural world would be mostly fine one way or other, human beings might not survive though...
No, we're very resilient bastards, we're going to let the huge majority of species go extinct before we go ourselves. We're already in a mass extinction event and we're just getting started.
Serious questions, how is this destruction and not just "change?" It seems throughout time the world has experienced acute shifts, dying offs and other events. In those transition periods many animals that you know and love today finally got a shot at main character roles. Heck the reduction of o2 in the air that killed/shrunk a lot of dinosaurs is basically the opening slave for you to be able to write this Hacker News comment.
None of this is to say don't mourn or long for any of this, but the show doesnt end, the charecters just change.
Well, it is change, but that doesn't mean it's not destruction. While the world has experienced mass die-offs before, the hallmark of the planet's current situation is distinguished by its unprecedented speed and the fact that it is being driven by a single species' behavior rather than geological cycles or cosmic externalities.
To repeat myself in another comment: I have tried to really focus on and take comfort in the idea "deep time", and the sincere belief that for as much destruction as we create, there will be more and different beauty in the far, far future. Yet where the Louvre to burn, how much comfort would it be to me that over the next 1000 years other artists will create yet more great works? In the same way, how long will it take the earth to return to such complexity and diversity of life? Many, many millenia.
> I do volunteer, donate, and advocate and I won't use my extreme pessimism as an excuse not to engage.
I think it is ok to not engage. The idea that you can impact the world is largely an artifact of modernity. In reality, capital is more than happy to let you take the blame for its own suicidal tendencies.
> I think it is ok to not engage.
I understand what you're saying. I appreciate the thought behind it. But in the end, I do not agree. I cannot be certain where my actions will and won't ultimately help accrue to impact; the pebble knows not the impact that its ripples will have. If you care about something, I think you should be involved.
> If you care about something, I think you should be involved.
You're free to overthrow your government and instate humanitarian policies, but a pebble is not inclined to roll uphill.
Certainty that your involvement is inconsequential requires too much intellectual hubris, it precludes the possibility that you may be wrong in your forecasts so you can let yourself off the hook for any effort. I get it, I do, but I think that's mind poison. Surprises to happen, the world is chaotic, yesterday's longshot becomes tomorrow's surprise.
And, if nothing else, many of the efforts you can contribute to can have a clear and demonstrable impact at a more local level, or for a more limited time, even if it doesn't solve or mitigate the larger issue in the long run. Is it a waste of time for me to get involved in river clean-ups, or to work with a crew to re-wild an abandoned golf course, or remove asur honeysuckle from nearby native forests? Maybe you'd say "yes" because we'll have to keep doing it again, but that's the work with most things that matter.
Yes. I agree you should vote in your local elections, if only for your own sanity.
Get out there now while it is all still alive and record it, in whatever means you can, for the future.
There will be a shark in someones mind in a 100 years time - if its not a real one, let it be the one you shared with your mind, here and now.
Sometimes those stories try too much to impress. I recorded a documentary series "How to kill a puppy and get rich" about street dogs in Romania and the business around them, and I had to stop it after 10 seconds, not exaggerating. Folks, I want to know the mafia and story, but I can't stand to see and hear that torture...
There was a Norwegian TV series called Catastrophe or something to educate the whole family about how insecure and bad the future is. What to do if a Russian van keeps driving through your neighorhood. What to do in a natural catastrophe.
How nice. Us adults who have ruined the planet[1][2] and now we are lecturing the youngins about how to deal with this suckage.
With a bizarrely cherry narration. Did you know things are about to suck for you? Just your usual shameless state TV programming.
But we, with our particular national programming, are just supposed to act like we were just spoiled brats that now have to live without dessert post-dinner. The “dessert generation” indeed.
[1] Um akshually, we haven’t ruined the planet—the planet is just minerals! It doesn’t care. We are just ruining the foundation for our own comfortable exi— yeah no kidding.
[2] Like with Norwegian oil/gas extraction
I wonder how much Claude Code were cost if we were to take the cost of environmental destruction from its energy consumption into account.
But on the plus side a few companies increased shareholder value. Can you imagine if we had fewer products, or didn't push the human population its theoretical maximum?
Who is we? Which we opted to push the planet to carrying capacity? Is it? What is the capacity? Are the decreasing birthrates across the world really the Earth's theoretical maximum? What does it mean to have fewer products, which things precisely should we not have? Who should be in charge of setting this?
What the hell does "fewer products" even mean?
As sad as these things are... one needs to also accept, that as capable as we are of changing our environments, from transportation, to air conditioning, we do not control all the things. We have and continue to over-fish in a lot of places, and I have deep concerns over farmed fish and the impact of less than natural foods on our own health.
A lot of the changes to the waters is well outside human control... there's a huge balance of factors at play from the earth, moon and sun. We don't control these things... and to what impact we can/do, I'm not sure that anything we might do may not have unintended consequences that are materially worse.
We can definitely do some things, but the level of internalized and externalized guilt that people in and outside these discussions seem to carry and put on others isn't at all healthy in and of itself.
This is a really strange, deterministic view on something we collectively have influence over. That thing about "unintended consequences that [may be] materially worse?" We've actually just quietly folded the materially worse consequences of our behavior into the cost of doing business. Hurricanes are stronger, flooding is worse in coastal cities, fires are worse in arid areas. Fish don't magically make mercury; a significant portion of that comes from burning coal and mining activities.
All of these things are firmly within our control.
So, do you propose we kill off a significant portion of humanity by lottery, war, or some other method of selection? Do we just stop all industry and let nature work itself out instead?
You're in control after all.
edit: sarcasm aside... my entire point is that the guilt itself isn't healthy and does no good for anyone. Yes, there are things that can probably be done, but alarmism, blame and guilt cycles do nothing to help anyone.
They aren't in "our" control, they are in the control of the very wealthy, who will not let the thought of natural disaster and mass extinctions affect their bottom line until there's no resource left for them to exploit.
Of course this is inside human control - we are directly responsible for what's happening! Unless you're one of the people who are willingly putting their head in the sand, I don't understand how it makes sense to act like this is still in question.
Okay, you're responsible... why haven't you stopped it?
I'm not sure if you thought this would come across as clever, or whatever else - but feel free to try again with an actual response to my point.
No they aren't.
They will move to different locations like they always have been for the past 400 million years. Sharks are older than trees, they can adapt to climate change better than anything alive right now.
What an inane comment that shows how unqualified you are to talk about this.
Shark is a group, great white shark is a species. The fact that the group has been alive for 400M years has no bearing on whether the currently alive species can actually adapt and survive. Some very likely will, the great white might not, that’s what the article is about.
Another alarmist who believes "this time it's different!" with no knowledge about how climate has changed over the past 400 million years. You probably thought when Big Basin burned that it would never recover, meanwhile it started to recover in months. People who doubt nature's resilience are ALWAYS wrong.
I wonder what would happen if we started measuring the carbon emissions for multinational supply chains..
How come the sharks don’t migrate toward colder water?
> Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.
They are moving to cooler waters but the cooler waters won't have the food supplies they need. So it's either stay where the food is and overheat or go to cooler water and starve.
Whites do dive deep as they age, and feed on giant squid and elephant seals that dive deep as well.
Whites migrate long distances including deep waters when they age
It’s a white noise so hard to notice, but our behavior is fundamentally driven by the design of our nervous system. Thus the more immediate the consequence, the better we link our behavior and can adjust. Since this is true at an individual level, the dynamic emerges from societies and populations as well, even large ones.
For example, something is red, you touch it, get burned. You won’t touch it again.
Environmental harm unfortunately is precisely the opposite. Consequences arise on a very long arc, in some cases beyond even our lifetimes. We register problems like this only intellectually, and even that becomes clouded with politics.
So the problem is kind of inevitable unfortunately.
So much bullshit, no wonder people are fed up with this whole “climate crisis” narrative.
reminder - there's tech out there capable of reading your mind remotely
It's strange they haven't considered diving an extra couple of inches to compensate (if it is even required)
Warmer water also means less oxygen, thus fish have to swim closer to the surface to get enough oxygen.