I understand your mindset, what I can't understand is why you offer religion as solace. These very real world problems won't pray themselves out. With your approach we might as well just act as if nothing is happening and be happy. That's a solution that might work for old people on their way out, but it's absurdly inadequate and insensitive for the young generations.
>With your approach we might as well just act as if nothing is happening and be happy.
That's what we're already doing, only we're not happy and the panic is making us collectively fight and make worse decisions. Calm people make better decisions than panicked people staring in the face of existential evaporation.
Most environmentalists would argue that we've been far too calm, leading us to not take the issues seriously and not make the requisite drastic changes to our civilizations.
The anthropocene will be visible in every history of the planet as one of the most rapid changes in every geologically and archaeologically observable metric, on the scale of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
The asteroid may vanished in a massive conflagration, but people don't talk about it because that particular lump of space rock went extinct, they talk about all the other changes that came about as a result of its admittedly short time in our atmosphere and ecosystem.
Citation needed. It really depends on the geological time scale you're talking about. Geoscientists are still in debate of whether the Anthropocene should be added as it's epoch - yes, humans have had an impact, but it's hard to concretely state that the impact will be noticeable enough that another species would demarcate our existence as such.
No earth is, there are things on the planet besides us and inanimate objects. There is a whole biosphere that we are destroying for small incremental gains. this is a very human-centric viewpoint. So what if a particular action does not improves standard of living for humans if it impacts billions of other species and breaks delicate ecosystems. Honestly I am at a point where I dont care as much about human prosperity (think higher levels of maslow's hierarchy of needs) as about saving the biosphere.
> Our ability to change the earth for the worse exceeds our willingness to change ourselves for the better.
Jack up the cost of carbon so that willingness to change increases and the relative cost of lower carbon options becomes more attractive. Right now we are effectively subsidizing our collective suicide by not internalizing externalities. It’s nuts.
Someday, maybe we'll be able to bring back well-known extinct species like passenger pigeons where biological material may still exist in a museum somewhere. We're never going to bring back the thousands of arthropod species that have gone extinct since the industrial revolution[1] - many of which we never knew about in the first place.
> However, it is likely that insect extinctions since the industrial era are around 5 to 10%, i.e. 250,000 to 500,000 species, based on estimates of 7% extinctions for land snails (Régnier et al., 2015). In total at least one million species are facing extinction in the coming decades, half of them being insects (IPBES, 2019).
> Meh, our ability to change the earth grows every year sooner or later we'll fix it.
You are talking about geoengineering.
It would be way better not to have to do such things in the first place. This is like "meh, sooner or later we'll be able to grow entire organs, you can keep smoking". Sure. But is that day coming soon enough? And what are the drawbacks of such a large intervention?
Besides, species are going extinct every day. We can't get them back.
Technologically, we get closer to the ability to fix it.
BUT the fact that this kind of collapse keeps re-occurring means that humans are turning out to be collectively too stupid to actually fix such things until after a disaster happens.
The Tragedy Of The Commons has been known about for centuries. Yet it keeps happening again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, [ . . . ] etc., including in this very instance.
All humans need to do is adjust to the reality. Yet the fact that some of the adjustments will mean that some of the people will need to change how they make a living, causes too many humans to argue vociferously that the change will be delayed. Humans even start wars over this kind of stupidity. And then, THE EARTH SYSTEM COLLAPSES, and forces everyone to make the change.
The only question now is how big a disaster will happen and how recoverable it is. If we are lucky, the disaster will be just in the sweet spot of [bad enough to force the stupid mass of humanity to change it's ways], but not quite [bad enough that it cannot be recovered once those ways are changed].
That our ability to change the world is increasing? I mean we are clearly affecting it more then we ever had in the past. Or do you want a citation from the future?
But, we always affect it in negative ways. Our ability to change the world in negative ways says nothing about our ability to ever fix it since we have absolutely no experience doing that.
Not always. We mostly fixed the ozone hole. Acid rain is largely gone from North America. Rivers in much of the world are much cleaner than they were in the last half of the 20th century. Air quality has likewise improved in many places.
I think that as areas achieve a certain level of plenty, their focus shifts from shorter-term thinking to longer-term thinking. And most places around the world are reaching that tipping point.
