Global heating is the only thing that will save our planet from ending up like Mars. Do you know why there are no dinosaurs? Because the atmosphere is literally too thin for them to breathe now. Every decade the atmosphere thins even more. The world has been dying slowly for hundreds of millions of years.
Humans with our vast knowledge of how the planet should be, gleaned from measurements taken over the last few hundred years interpreted through a lens of scientific hubris, have determined that artificial cooling, blackening the atmosphere and the continued decline of breathable oxygen is necessary to maintain an environmental “status quo” which definitely will put a stop to our current mass extinction event, and all future mass extinction events.
Humans know what is best for ecology. Like that one time the scientific community decided to put a stop to forest fires in Yosemite and accidentally fucked the park ecology in the process. Turns out those fires, which had been happening longer than even the residency of the native Americans who we stole Yosemite from, those fires served a useful ecological purpose for the reproduction of rainforest trees. But everyone makes mistakes. I’m sure blackening Earth’s atmosphere will be fine.
Or maybe, just maybe, the only way to prevent our planet from becoming the next Mars is to start terraforming the shit out of it right now. We should make it like it was when the dinosaurs thrived. More oxygen, more nitrogen, a lot more CO2 and giant plants.
We should start burning all the fossil fuels possible. Just burning them. Release quadrillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Green house to the max. Heat the earth. Plants will love it. The atmosphere will be thick with a beautiful cocktail of oxygen, nitrogen and diesel exhaust. Finally we can clone and rebirth all extinct species from the Jurassic age. We will bring back the dinosaurs! We will all drive around in supercharged V12 armored SUVs that get 20 gallons per mile! The Earth will be saved, at least until the sun fans into a red giant and engulfs us in flames in 800 million years.
Doesn't matter if he's kidding; address the people who will take it seriously. folks who think they're smart but lack systems thinking ability are capable of believing anything; they're like early socialist dictators without the power.. which makes sense given the commonality which is the failure of rationalism in the face of large unknowns
Agree he's kidding though; there's a zero percent chance we'll survive our AI oppressors. Also never listen to infrastructure talk from someone who can't keep their own website up
Venus is also a thing. But agreed, (intentional) terraforming will be a good idea at some point. Disagreed on CO2 being the right way to do it; the sun was dimmer 60 million years ago. You can't feel your way into a solution here, you have to do the research and the simulations. You also can't optimize for a genetic milieu that no longer exists. Think of the biosphere as a large and highly redundant CHON pump, where the redundancy is at the population (not individual) level. This pump can function under various climactic conditions but its capacity and robustness depend on the population genetics available on the ground (sea). So the important part of the system is made of information not matter. We literally do not have the information we need to replicate cretaceous conditions, nor do we have a way to get that info at present. Therefore we should continue to cultivate the interglacial genetic repertoire, which is still available to us. Large changes to the system should not be allowed when we do not understand systemic risks and do not have rollback ability-- this implies extreme measures should be pointed at maintaining stability rather than inducing phase change.
I don't know what primary production looks like under different climactic regimes so I can't speak potential to end states, but they all occur long after our deaths so our worst case will be bounded by short term inflection where risk beats adaptation and primary production "temporarily" crashes.
Also (and this should be obvious) our own ability to harness primary production is confined to a small number of species; backing these into an adaptive corner could play havoc with our large heterotrophic society, where calorie production from the CHON cycle has very little slack relative to our ability to keep adapting at pace (i.e. R&D doesn't like starvation)
It’s kind of funny, the stock market won’t react at all to global warming until the electrical grid of some major city collapses and people start dying of heatstroke. That’s the point where the cost of fossil fuels will suddenly start getting priced in. (Oopsy daisy!). The market is blind to anything happening farther away in time than next quarter’s earnings reports.
Exactly, relying on the stock market for any sort of prediction is silly. Markets are short lived, over react, and basically rely on the supply of cheap money and growth of money to keep going up.
I have had “Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations” by Brian Fagan (2009) on my bookshelf for a while but haven’t found the time to sit down and read it. Just noting the book here in case others are interested and want to look into it :-)
Beyond doing what I can at a personal level, I'm all spent on worrying about climate. Life goes on, or it won't, American politics has shown me that there is bugger-all I can do.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] threadHumans with our vast knowledge of how the planet should be, gleaned from measurements taken over the last few hundred years interpreted through a lens of scientific hubris, have determined that artificial cooling, blackening the atmosphere and the continued decline of breathable oxygen is necessary to maintain an environmental “status quo” which definitely will put a stop to our current mass extinction event, and all future mass extinction events.
Humans know what is best for ecology. Like that one time the scientific community decided to put a stop to forest fires in Yosemite and accidentally fucked the park ecology in the process. Turns out those fires, which had been happening longer than even the residency of the native Americans who we stole Yosemite from, those fires served a useful ecological purpose for the reproduction of rainforest trees. But everyone makes mistakes. I’m sure blackening Earth’s atmosphere will be fine.
Or maybe, just maybe, the only way to prevent our planet from becoming the next Mars is to start terraforming the shit out of it right now. We should make it like it was when the dinosaurs thrived. More oxygen, more nitrogen, a lot more CO2 and giant plants.
We should start burning all the fossil fuels possible. Just burning them. Release quadrillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Green house to the max. Heat the earth. Plants will love it. The atmosphere will be thick with a beautiful cocktail of oxygen, nitrogen and diesel exhaust. Finally we can clone and rebirth all extinct species from the Jurassic age. We will bring back the dinosaurs! We will all drive around in supercharged V12 armored SUVs that get 20 gallons per mile! The Earth will be saved, at least until the sun fans into a red giant and engulfs us in flames in 800 million years.
During the last ice age there was an abundance of mammalian megafauna as large as all but the largest dinosaurs.
What higher oxygen concentrations allowed was mosquitos the size of a DJI drone.
No thanks.
> You are incapable of understanding the genius of my plan because it is beyond the dimensionality of your easy-bake neural network.
I must admit, I took a moment to read this delectable bit.
Friendly note: if you’re verging towards believing it, take it easy. In general.
I don't know what primary production looks like under different climactic regimes so I can't speak potential to end states, but they all occur long after our deaths so our worst case will be bounded by short term inflection where risk beats adaptation and primary production "temporarily" crashes.
But exponential growth can only go for so long.