The Planetary Boundaries framework is so bad, I don’t understand why it’s so popular. Most of the "boundaries" are directly correlated. Most of them are fairly arbitrary.
It’s such an awful tool to discuss the actual very serious issue it underlines. I wish it would just disappear.
Just to be clear, there is nothing magical about most of these boundaries. The situation is not in any way suddenly worse today than yesterday. Some of the axis actually showcases issue which would be a problem at any level. Others are debatable. Thresholds are overall a bad way to think about dynamic systems.
You announce a set of boundaries, imply that crossing them shifts the system to some new, disastrous attractor state, and get a lot of media and donor attention. For a couple years you get lots of mileage out of it, until you need to come up with a new set, except this time it's For Real. Repeat.
It's counterproductive: once people see small violations of the boundaries result in only small changes, they start to tune them out. And, with global warming, the accumulated small changes will ultimately result in significant harm, so there's no need to invent fake boundaries.
It's useful for political and media purposes. Some might call it climate propaganda, such as when Al Gore claiming (based on what we was told by top climate scientists) that the arctic would be ice free in 5 years. It's used to make a point and to shock people. It does not appear that any of those same type of doomsday predictions (Gretta, etc.) ever came true. They really do a disservice to the underlining, and very important, issue.
Instead of trying to scare people with future predictions of doom, talk about what is happening right now, today, and what will continue to happen. Educate, stop trying to shock and manipulate.
We could define similar boundaries for humans: Wealth, education, health etc.
They are also directly correlated but still a indicator of a humans condition.
They love fancy titles - reading it I thought we got accepted into the intergalactic federation.
Never heard of planetary boundaries framework before but the way it’s discussed in this piece kind of immediately tripped my hippy pseudoscience alerts. TFA is actually a maddening read from beginning to end anyway.. lots of awkward phrasing, bad diction, weird punctuation.
The cynic in me sees people building careers off promotion of pseudo-science, and other on the creation of content around said pseudo-science. Reminds me of string theory for some reason.
"correlated" isn't an evil term, it doesn't mean there can't be useful observations in different domains.
To nit pick, since "correlation isn't causation" is often an internet meme to discredit any science.
if 7 of the 9 are highly correlated, then breaching all 7 isn't as bad as it sounds, it's just one boundary.
Are they thought?
Guess that is part of the meme, anybody can say "well correlation isn't causation" and sound kind of smart. Then the onus is on the other to go prove they aren't correlated, when they are not obviously correlated to begin with, so then need to devolve into a deep dive showing percentages of correlation. It's part of the 'easy to produce BS' type argument.
I'd push back and say. Ok, then show how 7 of 9 are highly correlated. Just saying 7 of 9 are obviously correlated so boom, who cares. Is just as invalid as someone saying there is no correlation.
You have to prove it either way. And there is no clear proof. And these aren't obvious.
Just everything going bad at once doesn't mean they are highly correlated thus we really don't have to care about any single item.
"The fire has spread to 50% of the house."
"Now the fire has spread to 90% of the house."
"Meh, the metrics are meaningless because they are correlated. The house is fine."
The issue is not the metrics. The boundaries are meaningless because the issue was that there was a fire from the start.
The correct analogy would be "Fire in the house boundary on the brink of being breached. We can confirm that 49% has already burned and the threshold of 50% will have burned in the next minute. This is the second catastrophic boundary to be crossed: the fume in the house boundary was breached five minutes ago." which is indeed a completely pointless way of looking at the issue.
“The health check will also serve as a “mission-control center” for decision-making, per the statement, by using satellite data, A.I. and multiple scientific disciplines—as well as the wisdom of Indigenous peoples, which is something the researchers hope to incorporate more of in following editions”
Just in case you were considering taking this seriously…
They are just looking for funding that's all.
Sounds like they’re using all available resources. What’s wrong?
Are they limiting the input to a 1% cap, then multiplying the difference from the actual model by 0.000000001?
If so it might not be too bad in practice, but it's still bad science. It's like someone today took planetary epicycles and copied them verbatim into their car physics simulator. Yeah, it probably won't be a material detriment, but why are they in there?
> Earth’s oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, providing a valuable carbon sink as humans burn fossil fuels. But this process also makes the oceans more acidic, which can disturb the formation of shells and coral skeletons and affect fish life cycles, per the report.
Atmospheric CO2 levels are at historic lows.[1]
Bivalves have shells and evolved during the Cambrian Explosion. The Cambrian explosion took place around 540 to 520 million years ago (Mya)[2].
During the early history of bivalves atmospheric CO2 levels were around 4,000-5,000ppm. Current levels are around 400ppm.
References:
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo...
Definitely not historic lows. Perhaps it's been higher, but it's definitely been lower than now.
In the last 400,000 years the concentration has fluctuated from about 180ppm to about 300 many times.[1] My historical reference in the previous post was the last 500,000,000 years. In that context we are low.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo...
Since our species' collective life comprises the last 400,000 years, and we are 420ppm now, do you think it's also fair to say that we are historic highs?
Maybe ghastmaster is a super-intelligent bivalve.
It's time for the bivalves to rise again!
"Historic"?
I do not think it means what you think it means
500,000,000 years of my understanding of atmospheric CO2 concentration is what I was referring to as "Historic".
(Since there's no other definition of historic that I know of (500M years seems as arbitrary as any other number), I think the person was referring to the literal definition of historic, namely, written records. Not that I think this is a very fruitful argument to make, or whether weather recorded in shells could be considered written is perhaps also debatable)
Technically that's prehistoric. History conventionally starts with the invention of writing
Not sure that's conventional. Looking up the dictionary definition, it's clearly being used generally. It's the definition I was taught in school and probably it's used in this technical way in some fields or perhaps in science generally, but commenting on someone casually using "historic values" and going "I don't think you know what that means!" is the best way to help anyone get a better understanding of anything
("conventional" in meaning 1 of the word as per Wordnik, namely that it's in accordance with general practice, before we start another such discussion...)
You’re right that "history" starts with writing, but "prehistoric" refers to the human period before written records, starting with the use of stone tools around 2.5 million years ago.
The animals alive in it today aren't adapted to these Cambrian conditions though?
That's the $50,000,000,000,000 question.[1] Are they adapted? Will they adapt? Who knows?
1 - https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/cost-to-end-climate-chang...
Well yeah, of course it will... eventually
What we're going to extract value from in the meantime would be the question or, rather, problem
It's an interesting point to cherry-pick, and it's fair to question the affect of atmospheric CO2 on aquatic life, but you can't say that CO2 levels are at historic lows when they're up 30% in the past 60 years [1].
> but you can't say that CO2 levels are at historic lows when they're up 30% in the past 60 years
I thought I made it very clear the historic period I was referring to. Questioning the relevance is indeed apropos. However, the semantics, I do not understand.
Regarding the last 60 years, I think it is very unlikely that the earth has not had a period where atmospheric CO2 concentrations have not rose as quickly. The volcanism, planetary impacts, and die offs of the past had to have had similar impacts. Yet, shelled creatures survived to the extant that they are ubiquitous in the earth's waters today.
There indubitably have been extinction events and perhaps some of them have been caused by ocean acidification.
Completely irrelevant. Humans cannot survive in the conditions of the Cambrian. Merely going back to the Cambrian is enough to ensure our extinction. No one cares that the CO2 levels were higher then. What matters is that we will all be dead if we go anywhere near those levels.
It’s hard for me to read an article when the clickbait headline is completely walked back in the first paragraph.
How so? I didn’t see that it contradicts the headline
How so?
“These boundaries are not tipping points—it’s possible to recover from passing them”
Debatable whether that is completely walking back the headline, but the headline is clearly trying to give the impression it's irreversible without actually making a claim that could thereby be defeated: “brink”, “breaching”, “boundaries” “support life” are all very suggestive of irreversible doom, and yet…
that isn't walking back that we're on the brink of breaching the 7th boundary. it just adds more detail into what these boundaries are.
Ah. I see where you’re coming from but don’t really agree - I think you’re (understandably!) bringing in that assumption yourself from general climate worries. Countries have boundaries that you can come back from after crossing, as do people. I mean, they’re kinda describing the framework directly.
How else would you phrase it? “About to cross a line indicating serious danger”? Maybe “approaching a scientific benchmark tied to catastrophic risk”?
that's not really walking it back... recovery is much more difficult than not causing the problem in the first place, and because it can be reversed doesn't mean it will be
Like I said, it's english prose and the applicability of “walking it back” is subject to debate. I'm not arguing the point, just pulling out the obvious triggering line and explaining where I think the sentiment is coming from.
but why
Do we trust the science on this one?
Looking forward to the when the next two are also taken care of...!
Seriously though, this is some really depressing stuff :/
if that's true, sea-food market will go up, esp. mussels will be more expensive. Any stock to look out for?
We are heading for Pliocene conditions and yes, the tipping point is in the past. Even complete cessation of fossil fuel use and zero net deforestation (growth of timber == harvest of timber) would not stop it at this point, as it would take ~100 years for the system to come to a new equilibrium, and even then, permafrost melt and methane/CO2 outgassing from permafrost would continue (with some offset from tree growth in northern polar regions as the permafrost retreats).
Thus continual sea level rise is going to be a fact of life, possibly for several thousand years, until sea levels are 10 to 25 meters higher than today. Average temperatures will be 2-3C higher than the preindustrial Holocene average, (currently ~1.2C higher) with significant regional variation. Many regions that support large human populations will become inhospitable on a decadal timeline (i.e. it takes about ten years for signal to emerge from noise at current warming rate).
As far as ocean acidification, this is probably the least of our worries, unlike ocean hypoxia and anoxia, which are steadily expanding due to all the organic matter and fertilizer dumped into the oceans by human civilization. Coral reefs were widespread in the Pliocene, and the acidification is just a surface water phenomenon and is fairly minimal - the buffering capacity of the ocean is vast, and it's just a mixing issue as surface water tends to sit on top of the deeper waters.
I don't want to write a whole big thing this morning but I feel it's important to point out that we already have all the solutions we need to integrate our economic systems with the global ecology. All the solutions were worked out decades ago, they are "off the shelf". E.g.: https://newalchemists.net/
We could do it rapidly and with very little inconvenience and everyone can have a nice standard of living while repairing the ecosystem.
We just have to notice this and get on with it.
Humanity needs to stop flying all the time.
"No vacations far away" or "No visiting distant family" are not winning rallying cries for climate change and will, in fact, doom any movement that tries to use them.
humanity is not flying.. a very, very small subset of humanity.. and "largest carbon footprint has most prestige" is a very real phenomenon among that set. Four times in the last month I have read bragging stories mentioning very privelaged and therefore "elite" individuals described, including extreme private airplane use. Watch for the kneejerk response, too. Anti-"climate protest" media commonly uses the "flying hypocrisy" attack against those who are actively agitating against Fossil Fuels.. it works!
Compare and contrast to "Climate Week New York City" this week and the passenger miles involved with that. Hint- there is no "truth" in the analysis.. it is reactive and exaggerated on all sides.
On that topic, I was recently very surprised to learn that only 3% of Indians were ever on a flight in their life. With the country being so geographically large and so many Indian people in workplaces and conferences and everything (as in, it's just normal to me), it blew my mind to realise that most of these are actually all among the top richest fraction
It's just crazy how well-off we are compared to so many people around the world in not just low- but also middle- income countries. We really could do well to take a small step back and get everyone onto some fair middle ground while we fix these emissions
Edit: found the source: Polymatter's video "Why there are no flights between India and China" from earlier this month, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuWAdYl5icY at 16:32
You'll have my unlimited consumption when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Never loved this framework because the arbitrary quantization can make things look better than they are (“sure temps are up 4° but we’re still banning aerosols, so drill baby drill!”) but it’s certainly a good starter framework for getting people’s attention.
And to those that read this and just give up: please don’t. We’ve done incredible things as a species, and today’s world is not based in unchangeable natural constants, but rather social constructs. We can win. And assuming we can’t is, frankly, immoral. What will you tell your grandchildren?
Some of us who give up won't have grandchildren because we're not having children either.
Every time I say the solution is to restrain those who callously and deliberately profit off climate damage, by force if necessary, people get upset and downvote me, metaphorically speaking. But all the 'yay humanity let's all cooperate in pursuit of a solution' thinkers are demonstrably failing, because selfish people make up the largest bloc (though still a minority) of humanity.
People who go to a museum and throw paint at a work of art (which is protected behind glass) are routinely condemned and sent to jail. But even if they were actually destroying art, their point is that many extractive industries are actually destroying the environment and killing off whole species, damaging human health etc., and not only does society tolerate this, in many cases it subsidizes it. We choose instead to condemn the people who draw attention to this.
> We choose instead to condemn the people who draw attention to this.
We condemn them because what they do is dumb not because they draw attention to climate change. It’s the same thing as glorifying a teenager skipping school. Climate activists are incredibly good at killing their own credibility. That’s why most people don’t bank on them to change anything.
> But all the 'yay humanity let's all cooperate in pursuit of a solution' thinkers are demonstrably failing, because selfish people make up the largest bloc (though still a minority) of humanity.
It’s a useless way of tackling the issue. You won’t magically convince the global population to have a worse life especially considering inequalities are so high. You go tell the Nigerian that they should accept to die of starvation (the country feeds itself through oil export and its population is booming) because sadly the USA polluted too much. It’s all for the greater good after all.
Meanwhile, people actually tackling the issue are making impressive strides in the right direction. You want to solve global warming? Go do research on cleaner tech. Throwing soup at paintings is a pointless waste of time.
> because selfish people make up the largest bloc (though still a minority) of humanity.
The noise a small group can make is not to be underestimated. Even though I have no idea what a largest bloc that is a minority means. Either they are the largest group or not. This I think is even more confused than minority majority which is absolutely an arrogant/racist way of thinking.
> But even if they were actually destroying art, their point is that many extractive industries are actually destroying the environment and killing off whole species...
How does trashing art actually solve the problem? It just makes people with normal level of concern who are actually trying to do something look as if they are in cahoots with people who are bonkers.
> People who go to a museum and throw paint at a work of art (which is protected behind glass) are routinely condemned and sent to jail.
They're condemned because their way of protesting is worthless. Protesting only works if it either inconveniences people enough to trigger action or if it targets the people actually responsible. If they truly believed that climate change was a critical issue, then they should take a page from how union strikes used to work.
The movement was characterized by nonviolent mass protests and civil disobedience following highly publicized events such as the lynching of Emmett Till. These included boycotts such as the Montgomery bus boycott, "sit-ins" in Greensboro and Nashville, a series of protests during the Birmingham campaign, and a march from Selma to Montgomery.
Re:JustStopOil, they also regularly target banks and private jets. It's just that those protests get much less attention in the press, and draw harsher criminal punishments. How else do you make progress on changing laws other than convincing voters that it's a problem?
Assuming we can't just do what the US did for civil rights and rely on an unusually powerful judiciary to save the day via anti-democratic fiat ;)
The Montgomery bus boycott specifically targeted racist laws on segregation on public buses. [0] I don't see how you can get much more specific than that.
I think there's a better argument around the approach of Act Up, which focused attention on AIDS. [1] Many people were offended by their tactics, which were directed (again) at specific people, organizations, and media who were relevant to the topic. They were very effective. They targeted the root cause.
[0] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/montgomery-bus-boycott
> Eh, none of that seems to fall into either of the buckets you describe, other than maybe sit-ins "targeting" racist owners of restaurants. Plus, I know this is annoying but... source? Any data backing that claim?
You do realize that said protest caused mass inconvenience, right? It was upending a lot of the racist norms at the time which in turn triggered waves of violence against black protesters which is what started the ball rolling. Said waves of violence also lead to the creation of the Black Panthers which actively scared many parts of the government at the time.
Nuclear war is a bit more urgent threat.
We've got about 6 billion adults. I think we can be concerned with and address multiple threats at the same time. It's not a zero sum game of risk avoidance.
there are many threats that can exist simutaneously
Planet Earth will be fine. It survived much worse than some little human emissions. The meteor and winter that followed that killed off the dinosaurs was much worse than some elevated CO2. Whether humanity survives this is another question. My bet is we will, since we are like roaches. But many will die for the sins of the few. Interestingly, these few who will survive are probably the ones who created this mess and can afford to. The many that will die are probably for the better anyway. The future of humanity is not yet decided, but it will take a great leap of tech to overcome this. One thing is for sure: we cant save the Planet by trying to "save the planet", meaning downsize, recycle, emit less etc. Exactly like one cannot become a millionaire by saving. We need to invest in our future and find efficient ways to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and convert it to power. Optimize and cheapen stuff like E-Diesel made from atmospheric CO2 and hydrogen from desalinated seawater using solar and wind. And stop giving space and time to idiots from Extinction Rebellion and The Last Generation. I hope not all here are brainwashed and understand what I'm saying.
I agree the Earth will survive even if it's not the same Earth we know and love today. Maybe we should all give a little extra appreciation for this specific time we live in - one of great technological advancement and one in which we still have much of the natural beauty we've come to take for granted. The future will be increasingly high tech, but those who live in it may not have untouched forests, coral reefs, or temperate weather in which to enjoy alongside it.
The planet itself (the rock) will of course be fine but the ecosystem has undergone and continues to undergo a massive extinction event caused by humans. This is an avoidable tragedy. I agree with some of your analysis but strongly disagree with your sentiment.
"Save the planet," isn't about saving the planet—it's about making people feel bigger than they are. People don't like the feeling of smallness that comes with the realization that nothing we do really matters.
There is no power to be extracted from CO2. It takes energy to break the C-O bonds.
I think you may need to review starvation events that humans and animals have had in history.
>> I hope not all here are brainwashed and understand what I'm saying.
So if someone doesn't agree with you, they are brainwashed?
When the food runs out, oligarchs bleed.
I think people are more concerned about the coral reefs than the humans
Any data to back up that extraordinary claim?
IMO. You’re brainwashed for thinking technology is going to save us from this tbh.
Climate already saw a lot of improvements during the 2020 lockdowns.
I think it's a combination of both technology and changes to our behavior. A cheap way to sequester CO2 and methane would be really helpful. The 2020 lockdowns showed us that slowing down on shipping and driving to work can make a measurable positive impact on our environment. But we'd have to get over our own ego and greed to do this full time.
We have regressed so far since 2020 imo.
2020 showed that we can have remote work as the primary method of work for a vast majority of jobs. The government could’ve mandated that if your company’s work could be done remotely, remote work has to be an option.
The amount of emissions to support daily commute of this many people (especially with commutes getting longer and longer) is insane.
We could use technology to implement more lockdowns :-)
Seven of nine. Proceed with Earth borgification.
Seven of Nine can borgify me.
I’ve kind of accepted we are screwed. Whether I am alive when shit hits the fan or not is another question. But seeing that people are trying to build satellite mirrors to put MORE solar energy into the planet without even thinking about it for more than a few minutes, I would say we are more screwed than we realize. The first law of stupidity applies.
Nah, this is just doom and gloom based on persistent and pervasive messaging. On large geological timescales, our temperatures are pretty close to the mean. Even given the last 500 million years, we're nowhere near the peak [1].
Will habitable zones change? Yes. Will migrations occur? Yes. Will there be unrest leading to disease, famine and death? Yes, for sure. And we could get all those things from war, a major natural disaster or an extraterrestrial event. Just take war for example. War promises to bring all of those changes too, that hasn't stopped human beings from fighting. If anything, destroying our economies to deal with the climate threat will inevitably lead to war, and then the resulting outcome will be the same: Death, famine, unrest, change/loss of habitable zones. What would we have gained?
Humans haven't lived on the planet on geological timescales. All of human civilization only became possible because 10k years ago the climate cooled and stabilized enough for there to be agriculture.
Without agriculture there is no human civilization, no nation states, no institutions. We go back to being hunter gathers.
With an unstable climate agriculture disappears. Billions will dies, life expediencies will crater, the modern world you know will no longer exist.
Yes, the planet will be fine, at one point it was a giant snowball, humans are fucked.
> Humans haven't lived on the planet on geological timescales. All of human civilization only became possible because 10k years ago the climate cooled and stabilized enough for there to be agriculture.
The average global temperature in the Jurassic era was 16.5C, which is 2.5C higher than the current average global temperature. Average CO2 levels in the atmosphere were as high as 2000 ppm. The planet was teeming with life, an abundance of flora and fauna. While dinosaurs were the apex predators, mammals flourished as well.
> Without agriculture there is no human civilization, no nation states, no institutions. We go back to being hunter gathers.
Since the first part is false, the second part is moot. It also supposes we would have trouble adapting whereas humans are ingenious at finding ways to survive.
> With an unstable climate agriculture disappears. Billions will dies, life expediencies will crater, the modern world you know will no longer exist.
See previous argument.
> Yes, the planet will be fine, at one point it was a giant snowball, humans are fucked.
Yet here we are. Our ancestors survived the Ice Age. Their distant ancestors survived the Jurassic era. My bet is on humans.
CO2 was at that level with an entire planet covered in a healthy ecosystem. If that happened now, we would probably witness the entire global collapse of the ecology. It took hundreds of millions of years to cool down that much, and we’ve turned it back up in a century. Animals (humans included) do not have the time to adapt.
Have you ever been in a stuffy meeting where brain fog sets in or you start to feel tired? That’s around 2k ppm where that sets in. Humans don’t like that much co2. No offense, but your argument doesn’t seem thought through.
The modern era of humans roughly coincides with Earth's coldest period over the last 485M years: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705
Even some of the worst predictions for where temperatures are headed before we get close to Net Zero emissions don't put us above historical averages.
To be clear, if the worst predictions come to light, that will be bad for people. But the planet will be fine.
I doubt some extra solar radiation will turn the Earth into Venus or Mars.
Afaik Earth turning into Mars would require shedding the magnetic field such that our atmosphere can be stripped by solar radiation
Venus seems more in reach but I don't know the specifics. Will continue researching in my evil scientist retreat
Venus atmosphere has a very different composition.
Am aware, but it seems to have come from a place that was more similar to earth than Mars'
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/venus-could-have-b... and other articles make that case. I don't know if that's still current information (heard it a while ago and just looked up a random article as reference now, so this might be akin to cherry picking or confirmation bias), I'm not an expert on this particular topic, but that claim is what I had in mind when saying Venus' conditions are more attainable for earth
Blurb from that article
> Venus was downright Earth-like for 2 to 3 billion years and didn't turn into the violent no-man's land we know today until 700 million years ago.
I used to joke that life actually started on Venus and we were the backup planet.
But seeing that people are trying to build satellite mirrors to put MORE solar energy into the planet without even thinking [...]
Like Reflect Orbital [1]? In which case do not worry, they did not think that through, the amount of energy they can deliver is noise compared to the noise in solar radiation.
I'm tired of hearing this idea that this is some binary phenomenon of either saving the world or dooming it.
Technological civilization is undergoing a chaotic growth and reshaping process that will end up thrashing the container it lives in to an unknown and catastrophic degree. There's no known ultimate boundary to this process. Or the only really known ultimate boundary, a completely dead planet, is very far away. We cannot know exactly what will happen but we have a lot of power to shape this process and limit the damages.
The process will continue. There's no going back. There's no stopping. Only a multitude of ways to affect the outcome. Some of those ways can limit the destruction. Some of those ways can shape the process to something that can live and let live.
Note that I mentioned nothing of saving it. We are well and fucked. How fucked? Couldn’t tell ya, what I can tell you, is that the river outside my house hasn’t frozen in nearly 20 years, and it had frozen every year before that in all of recorded history, some 900 or so years. There used to be annual ice skating races that now happen indoors.
I’m not worried about science boundaries and all that. I’m worried about civilization going tits-up once some places get too affected. For example, we are probably less than a decade or so away from certain places with lots and lots of people living there becoming inhospitable. Either they will die, or run into some other country/region that can’t support them, or disperse around the world (most unlikely).
Where is the assumption coming from that a “shit hits the fan” event will happen?
What if it is just a slow degradation in myriad aspects of quality of life only felt over the course of decades?
Because complex systems in general are known to enter critical transitions when pushed hard enough, and we do keep pushing.
Yep, multiple shits hitting multiple fans.
Ah yes, the myriad aspects of quality of life that has degraded over decades.
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-activists-disasters-fir...
Regarding the second link, it seems to put off climate issues as something we're mastering based on extreme weather events and other disasters like earthquakes resulting in fewer and fewer casualties despite having more and more humans on the planet to be potentially struck. They start the article with climate protests, but those protests are looking decades to centuries into the future; it's not about the type of events we've historically encountered. This amazingly positive trend is much less likely to continue if we go far beyond the Paris agreement's temperature, which we've just about started crossing afaik. That's what those protests are about, it's not about our own lives or lifetimes necessarily...
Did upvote your comments btw because your general point about the world not having been going to shit is underrepresented and was, to me, very important to learn about (about five years ago now)
Not sure how this is relevant given it's the effects of a future climate catastrophe being discussed, not something that has already happened.
I thought it was clear that the person you responded to (as well as the grandparent comment) was talking about the future. No one is denying that we are much better off right now as a species than we ever have been. The point is that we can't safely assume that that trend will continue in the next 25, 50, or 100 years.
> “The overall diagnostic is that the patient, Planet Earth, is in critical condition,” says Johan Rockström
The planet as a patient is a problematic metaphor. What does this mean? A human patient in critical condition is at risk of dying. But the planet is not going to "die", though many species will.
We need better ways of talking clearly (not with hyperbole) about the current situation and the stakes. Even with serious and aggressive policy changes, we'd still be on a track for key measures to get worse for some time, and we're bad at discussing "under costly policy A, X will be k% worse than today with expected outcome Y, but without adopting policy A, X with be (k+l)% worse than today expected outcome Z." So people end up saying "we're doomed regardless, so why should I have to pay/change/act?"
Why does this argument always come up? We all know the planet won't die. Humans might though. That's why we're concerned. This is always presented as some "ackshully" very smart argument. Yeah, it's a big fuckin rock, of course it won't die. That's not the concern.
So what does it mean? A lead person with the project said it, and it was the only quote from that person that made it into the article. The boundaries are explicitly said to not be known tipping points, so we don't know that some new mechanisms become dominant outside of them. We're only told that leaving these bounds is "higher-risk" and that inside the bounds is some "safe zone" but the actual risk or the meaning of "safety" in this context are not communicated.
This is a leading science publication reporting on an apparently notable finding about how serious the current situation is, but the actual information presented is either vague or hyperbolic.
Note, I'm not saying the situation isn't serious, or that drastic action isn't warranted. I'm saying this piece, discussing this work, is at minimum sloppy and unclear, and I think this is at the level of being counter-productive. When the situation is serious, try speaking clearly rather than in shrill metaphor.
For example, if they had said, "given this trend in ocean acidification, we think the combined die-offs in coral reef ecosystems, kelp-forest areas and reduced reproduction rate of these family of plankton, the rate at which marine ecosystems sequester carbon will decrease by k% in 10 years, which would be equivalent in impact to <list of countries> abandoning their 2050 emissions targets" that would be a clear way to explain the scale of one dimension of the impact. Or "the decrease in marine biodiversity on <whatever measure> over the next decade would be equivalent to k times the losses from commercial fishing over the past decade".
Or something more concrete than "we're headed to a bad state."
It will probably take a lot to make humans die out at this point. Humans will die, but not humanity. Technological society might collapse, although I think our adaptability will ultimately save it. And it will continue to destroy the conditions for other species to survive, as we collapse and then grow again - until we figure out how to not do that.
There only one resolution to this big conundrum and that is to make technological society to not compete with the biological ecosystem of earth.
only poorer humans will suffer and die. the rich will be fine.
Way back in the SimEarth days I got introduced to the Gaia concept, which at the time seemed a little hokey, but as time goes on seems more and more apt. Not trying to sound like Agent Smith, but sure seems like the earth is treating humans like a virus and is warming itself up to get rid of us. We had a long time to see it coming, but it's not politically popular to acknowledge it, and here in the U.S. you can signal your affiliation by dismissing it publicly (Huckabee-Sanders).
But mother nature always wins in the end regardless of your politics, and now mother nature wants you dead.
The earth is not warming itself, WE are warming the earth
Well, no.
Primarily, the sun warms the surface of the Earth, and the Earth itself generates heat.
What WE are doing is reducing the amount of heat radiated from the surface of the Earth until atmospheric expansions reaches a new equilibrium. In other words, we're affecting the radiative cooling equilibrium of the Earth. We are not heating it in any way.
Why are WE distinct from Earth?
If Mother Nature wanted to roll us up as a failed experiment she could eliminate us overnight with one virus. Lighten up.