> So, yes, greening is complicated. It’s not inherently good. Sometimes it’s very bad. Context, it turns out, matters a lot.
The tone suggests they're afraid of the change, but the article can't articulate why since the reason for the change and result are both possibly good and bad, but we don't really know yet.
The NASA MODIS project is ongoing and produces data that people are using to measure "greenness" (which the article indirectly cites) and has been going for 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderate_Resolution_Imaging_Sp... - it's definitely an interesting dataset.
This winter in my neck of the woods I hear a lot of people saying "oh, what great weather this year", because it's warm and without snow.
If they had taken enough math to understand chaotic dynamic systems, they would need be as anxious as I am. It's less that I can tell you exactly what's going to happen, although there are definitely things that we are certain of, like riskier hurricanes.
What keeps me up at night is that farmers have no idea what the next season will look like because we have altered the conditions of the function of climate, and therefore will enter a new state. We do not know where it will land and what it will look like getting there, and that very likely means reduction in food production.
I think this is a funny attitude too, like personally, I don't know why people aren't upset about losing winter, it's a beautiful time of the year. Economically valuable too. Taking a walk on a snowy morning or doing some cross country skiing is completely beautiful. I feel like as a human, we're supposed to just accept more and more outrageous things. Loss of winter? Oh well...at least it's sunny.
To me personally the loss of the seasons is one of the most tragic things I've witnessed.We've had 1/10th of the snow we usually have, it's almost all melted already and everything looks kind of depressing. But I know the lack of snow melt will have an impact on farming too, all this for for what? So resources companies were able to profit a bit more?
In Kyoto, Japan last year year, which is famous for the "red leaves" in Autumn which attracts huge swathes of tourists, had no red leaves. To me the loss of the beautiful spectacle is one thing, like, but also concerning as you said, we've tipped some type of scales but who knows how far...maybe it will be ok, maybe it won't.
I'm working out how to grow food hydroponically because I'm concerned food prices will just keep getting more expensive as this worsens and don't want to be left relying on "global trade" for my sustenance.
I dairy farmed for 14 years, and my wife and I got out in the winter of 2023. We've seen ever increasing scarcity of water in our region, because the surrounding mountains don't get enough snow pack whose melt feeds the streams through spring and summer, and we don't see the spring rains nearly as much anymore either. We used to be able to irrigate our hay fields all summer long with no issues, until fall rains returned. Now the rains stop in April, we irrigate until the water runs out (which last year was in June), and then hope for the best. When we need to buy hay for our animals, prices have nearly tripled in the last 10 years.
So you live in a region that has significantly less snowfall than what can be expected based on the normal variation that occurred 25, 50, or 100 years ago?
I don’t know where parent commenter lives, but in Central Europe, this definitely happened in a radical way. There is basically no snow. A day, or if you’re lucky three days a year maximum. This is going on for the past 20-25 years continuously. This didn’t happen in the past millennia at all. In the mountain village where I lived is totally unimaginable the winter for kids nowadays, how was in the 90s for me. And that was normal for centuries.
Also 40 Celsius is the new 30 in the past 15 years. This didn’t happen since we measure temperature. And 10 degrees are a lot, and the change happened in a decade.
Also summer wind patterns completely changed in the past 5 years, due to the weakening currents in Atlantic Ocean. This is something which is also highly unusual the past millennia. We know this for sure, because all of our towns were built wind from West in mind. We have wind from that direction less and less.
This is way over normal variation.
But looking at other examples, for example Norway. Thawing permafrost bogs are not something which can be explained by normal variation.
Maybe be a bit more realistic about the situation. It's not that we should go around being depressed, but we should go around demanding more action. More solar, more nuclear, more forest rebuilding.
Not just accepting that it's 72 out and that it's nice, nothing to see here, move along.
Like you said, people aren't stupid and should be a bit more conscious of the actual implications of this.
I think what you're describing is actually denial because facing the reality is scary at first.
I think guilt and fear might be warranted as people have had a history of willingly being idiots regarding climate change. Best of a bad situation is one thing. Best of a bad situation which you are party to is another
Last few years hurricane seasons in the US have been less bad, because most really bad hurricanes have turned north further east than normal, avoiding coastal cities.
Must an observation have an easily digestible value judgement and tell you how you should think about it, or can it just be allowed to present the facts and list the pros and cons.
which one do you think leads to a healthier media environment
Did you yourself not also include a portion of your comment to respond to article based on its data with your own "it depends" based on other data?
> The tone suggests they're afraid of the change
What do you think they lay person would immediately think about 'the earth is greening' and would it be appropriate to address those initial perceptions.
The issue is just the opposite: the article is making a value judgment in the absence of objective data. I interpret the comment saying more info and less judgement please
All of the offered explanations still paint humans as the perpetrators of a crime against the environment.
Not once is a greening planet painted in a positive light in this article. Its as if the writer is afraid to say something positive about CO2 emissions.
Optimizing for "green" is not what we're trying to achieve here. Mountains get greener when the tree line climbs as a sign of it's ecological decline. Stable forest and weather systems, biodiversity, bioavailability of nutrients in the ground are things closer to the interest of ecological causes.
Before is was physically possible for humans to change the climate most of the northern hemisphere was covered in a 4km thick sheet of ice. Then it melted and now there are forests. This melting also happened completely naturally and wasn’t because the cave men were putting out too much CO2.
This was done by the natural processes of the Earth, so recently even humans were alive during the Ice Age. Some scientists even say that we are due for another ice age, that we may be otherwise avoiding due to climate change.
Humans were around for the ice age, but not any of the humans I know. That was about 4 degrees Celsius, right? Over thousands of years. Meanwhile, my mom has lived through about 1.5 already and will probably see 2 in her life. Hell, depending on the breaks, I might live to see 3. Compressing a geological age into a human lifetime is bound to have some wacky effects. I can’t imagine being a kid today and thinking how much they’ll live to see.
They do so because, just because something is greener does not make it better for humanity. For example, we can have "greener" algae blooms that nevertheless eat up the oxygen in a lake or ocean and then we have no fish to eat.
> which one do you think leads to a
healthier media environment
Hmm, apparently the answer depends!!!
What I believe is "healthier", e.g., for
(1) my being informed or (2) click-bait
headlines, eyeballs, ad revenue????
But, now, for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
there is a possibility, that is, from some
changes from the Internet:
First, the basic ideas of click-bait, etc.
go way back in the history of many decades
of journalism publishers. They needed a
lot of revenue: Printing plants, trucks
to deliver literally tons of news print or
magazines, ..., radio and TV studios, etc.
were expensive. The number of
publishers was constrained: Each
major city had just two main newspapers,
morning and evening. There were a few
national magazines. Then, the number of
large radio stations, TV stations, were
similarly limited. Un, click-bait that
works in one major city stands to work
everywhere which creates the constraints
on the number of national click-bait
publishers.
> easily digestible value judgment and
tell you how you should think
Well put. For the big publishers, that is
what dominated.
For a good review and explanation going
way back, see the ~1941 movie Meet John
Doe.
Second, now the decades, 100+ years, of
such journalism is also being attempted
on the Web sites of the Internet -- thus,
your well put objection.
BUT ...!!!! For an audience and a
publisher for
> the facts and list the pros and cons.
they no longer need be so expensive. A
single tower case computer can send, what,
100+ Web pages a second?
Sooo, now the mass audience can have
subsets.
Some simple arithmetic:
Assume 1 ad per Web page sent, revenue of
$1 per 1000 ads displayed, sending a 24 x
7 average of 50 Web pages a second.
Assume pre-tax earnings are 50% of
revenue.
Then annual earnings would be
50 * 3600 * 24 * 265 / ( 1000 * 2 ) =
572,400
dollars.
Assume the business is worth 100 times
annual earnings, and get
is the economy: A lot of data is
available. Could present it in largely
some simple X-Y graphs can do routinely
with, say, Excel in Microsoft's Office.
Another possibility: For COVID, start
with the crucial data in the report of the
Phase III trials in
> the change and result are both possibly good and bad, but we don't really know yet.
I'm no scientist, but I believe the current ecological disaster effecting the UK's largest lake may be an example of the type of bad outcome we could expect to see more of.
I can't find it now, but I do remember reading some theory that previous extinction events on earth were driven by large amounts of organic matter breaking down anaerobically (i.e. underwater) which leads to a huge increase in some pretty nasty gases in the atmosphere. There have (apparently) even been times when some of the world's oceans were effectively large swamps.
Edit: My mistake, I didn't read about what I mentioned in that last paragraph - I heard it on youtube.
Related study that blew my mind.. DOE & USDA funded a 2021 NBER study of CO₂ fertilization on US agriculture:
"we apply the CO₂ fertilization effect... backwards to 1940, and, assuming no other limiting factors, find that CO₂ was the dominant driver of yield growth
Seems that greenhouse experiments would allow us to get a pretty good estimate for the effect of CO2 on yields, so actually I wouldn't think we'd need to do that much assuming?
I think what they're getting at is the most common limiting factor for plant growth is almost never CO2. It's usually Nitrogen, or another two of the macro (P,K) or micronutrients.
"Increasing CO2 has driven global greening: over the last 40 years, half of the world’s vegetated area has undergone greening, of which 70% is attributed to elevated CO2 (Zhu et al. 2016)"
Right, but the study is titled "ENVIRONMENTAL DRIVERS OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH" and the OP comment included the word "agriculture" right before quoting the study.
Commercial greenhouse growers have been using CO2 supplementation for nearly a century. If CO2 is the limiting factor (which is not always the case), the difference in yield can be phenomenal.
I heard, the climate related "CO2 fertilization" leads to increased growth in trees. However, especially on mountain slopes, these trees have a lower strength and tend to break more easily in storms. The breakage in softer woods in turn promotes things like wind erosion and fires.
I think this is somewhat plausible, since the "winter side" of a wood ring is the harder bit and the ratio of hard to soft wood may change due to increased summer growth.
Iceland is the prime example of a place, which lost its trees a bit - and then lost its trees for real, as a consequence. That is, because of wind erosion after humans started cutting down most of the island's forests for lumber.
The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked.
The Earth has been far warmer with higher CO2 concentrations in its past and it was fine, but there were no humans then. It’s also been in an ice age fairly recently, but there was little civilization as far as we know and far fewer humans.
Environmental concerns are selfish. They’re about protecting our civilization and our quality of life. The Earth and its ecosystem will change and adapt as usual, but that doesn’t mean we will.
The biggest dangers I see from CO2 are ocean acidification leading to the collapse of ocean ecosystems that feed us, and insane heat waves causing crop failures or even deadly temperatures. Look up “wet bulb temperature limit.” There are heat conditions under which humans die without shelter and unlike cold you can’t fix it by bundling up and using simple tech. I could see heat waves where people without A/C die.
Yes, life will go on. But it's not only us that will die - as you say, much of the marine ecosystem will die off, we're not the only animal that has problems with wet bulb temperature (most don't even sweat), and humanity isn't going to die of starvation before we make everything remotely edible out there extinct first.
Life is going to look extremely different, it's not just us.
That’s still a shortsighted view, regardless of human activity or presence other species will continuously go extinct including mass extinctions. That’s the entire history of life, evolution and extinction. The only way to intentionally prevent extinctions is with human intervention but humanity has to be around and technologically advanced and rich enough to do such things. It’s one of those put your own oxygen mask on first situations.
I'm pretty sure they meant 'selfish' in a positive way, to emphasize that we are not aiming to 'save the planet', we should save ourselves. If we all die, the planet and its ecosystems will be fine eventually anyways, they still have about 4 billion years to restore itself.
I’d note that stellar output was significantly lower during the Carboniferous and there’s a lot of range between the Earth’s current climate and Venus that are still really bad.
I don’t entirely disagree with the religious thing, but what always struck me as the most bizarre belief was denial of the basic science of climate change; did people really believe that humanity could dump unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere with no consequence?
Who do you listen to speaking on the subject? It is brought up constantly. You can have a documentary on TV about climate change without bringing up Venus as a cautionary tale, for example. People who concern themselves with climate change genuinely think it will lead to mass human die offs, in my experience.
It could lead to mass die offs but due to starvation, extreme weather events, and most of all war.
If we reacted with calm rationality we’d probably adapt pretty well but we’re not likely to do that. One refugee crisis to Europe has just about brought on the return of fascism, and that’s minor compared to what major climate change might cause.
Climate change will be like AIDS or anaphylactic shock. You won’t die of it. You’ll die of the stuff it causes.
Yes, but it's not only climate change this time. We are also massively overusing every natural resource there is. We're in a mass extinction event and we would be in it even if there wasn't a CO2 problem at all.
There are effectively no limits to natural resources, as accessible resources are a function of technology and market price. And the solar system is vast.
Really, that is the worry, that "We are destroying the earth" as a metaphor? People are confused by this? If I said, "Be careful how you lift that heavy sack or you will destroy your back" would you complain that while you might suffer a debilitating injury, your back will not literally be destroyed?
Of course what people mean when they warn about the destruction of the earth is that it is going to have profound and unpleasant effects on the climate system, which in turn affects which parts of the world are favorable to human and animal life. Those changes will cause large scale economic changes, population dislocations, and thus political stability.
I do think a lot of people have a concept of “the environment” not so much as it being our singular shared home, but as some sort of vague notion of National Parks and sea turtles, that are nice to protect but not especially relevant to day-to-day life. Given the way many people treat their own private homes, however, I’m not entirely convinced that the distinction is relevant to behavior, though.
I don't see how this comment connects with what you're writing in your own comment. How is it selfish to want to avoid needlessly suffering, as you're describing yourself ("heat waves where people without A/C die")?
Obviously the earth as a habitable planet will be fine in the long run, and some people have said some exaggerated, even hysterical, things about this. But that doesn't mean the concerns aren't valid. And everything will be fine "in the long run", so it's also one of those discussion-stopper arguments you can apply to almost everything.
The point is that the environmental argument has been "Save the planet!", when the actual motive is "Save our civilization!" The planet will be fine, because as apex predators, humanity is going to be one of the first species to go extinct with a major environmental change, and then the rest of the biosphere will adapt to our disappearance. Hell, many individual humans will probably be fine, because the ability to run a complex environment-destroying civilization disappears well before all the individual humans do. However, that's cold comfort to people who depend on modern societal conveniences, or the many people who will die.
GP's point is more about intellectual honesty, but there's also a pragmatic bent to it. Many of the people who most reject climate change interventionism might be swayed by a line of argumentation that goes "You care more about the economy than the environment? You won't have an economy if the environment is disturbed enough."
Sure. The ones actually likely to happen on earth top out at about 5-10C warming above present. At that point negative feedback cycles (like the CO2 greening effect mentioned in the article) dominate positive feedback cycles (like release of methane from the arctic tundra, or lowered albedo from ice melting), and the Earth enters a new equilibrium.
The IPCC maintains that a runaway greenhouse effect which turns the earth into say Venus has basically nil chance of being caused by humans:
It basically comes down to long term pain vs short term pain. I don’t think many people would have a problem with improving our civilization’s quality of life in the long run if it didn’t cause any lifestyle changes in the present. That’s a reason why Tesla’s marketing has worked; you can not only be “green” but also drive one of the fastest cars on the planet.
If you submerge yourself in water, like elephants do in the hot of the day. you can survive really high wetbulb temps. It's the days of continuous hot nights that's the issue.
> The whole environmental movement made a mistake framing things as a moralistic struggle to “save the Earth, pandas and pinguins.” Like George Carlin famously said on this subject: “the Earth will be fine. We’re fucked.
I think the whole environmental movement have/had no power against the whole industry movement, and the "save the earth" call was the only accepted by the dominant class (aka industry and its leaders). Also Mr. Nobody don't wanted to give up his car, his investments, and his overall lifestyle for some pessimist hippies that love trees or scientist that don't know the real world.
Things are changing because of a single reason: industry and economy is affected a little bit by the climate change.
> Environmental concerns are selfish. They’re about protecting our civilization and our quality of life. The Earth and its ecosystem will change and adapt as usual, but that doesn’t mean we will.
This is stating the obvious. Of course we're concerned with our own survival and being able to live comfortably in it. I don't see much of a problem them.
As far as the ecosystem adapting, yeah, eventually, but at the cost of thousands/millions of species, as in the previous extinction events.
The moral failure of humanity is not really that we're harming the world, but that we are harming humans. Humans affected by climate change today, and the future humans elsewhere, who will also suffer.
In some way, one animal causing the extinction of others extracting resources and changing the environment is as long as evolutionary biology itself. This is what all animals do. We're just doing it at a much bigger scale.
Finding ways for humans to live well now without consuming their children’s ability to do the same in the future.
A good framing would also draw a link to fiscal responsibility. A renewable sustainable civilization is paying its bills fully. Fossil fuels and other non renewable processes are putting it on a credit card, and one with an unknown interest rate. Eventually you can’t do that anymore and the interest comes due. Right now humanity is still putting something like 75% of its primary energy use on credit.
The worst framing is the anti-human framing you see from radical greens or films like Avatar. If you really hate humans the logical thing would be to do nothing and let us crap where we eat until we render our environment inhospitable to us. If humans are the problem the activists should go home.
"The Earth is fine": of course, it's a giant ball of rock. A few degrees isn't going to affect it.
"~90% of species are fucked": it's not the magnitude of the change, it's the speed. The climate is changing on a decades-long time scale, and that's too fast for most species and ecosystems to adapt.
The corollary there is that ~10% of species will be fine, and thrive. Like every mass extinction event the world will look a lot different pre and post-extinction but it will "survive".
Humans aren't fucked. We had pre-industrial humans living in both the Arctic and the Sahara. We adapt the environment to us, and we migrate quickly. If we destroy the environment we can grow food in greenhouses. It'll be crazy expensive, but we'll survive. The speed at which India is currently adopting A/C shows how all but the bottom billion of humans are already adapting to climate change. The bottom billion is fucked, unless the top billion stops whining and starts doing something.
The status quo is fucked. We're a bunch of spoiled brats that think 10% inflation and the end of the world are calamities of similar magnitude. If you want to get a good handle on what true hardship is like, talk to a refugee or a member of the greatest generation. (Do it quick, that means somebody ~100 years old).
Is civilization fucked? It depends on how well it adapts, and what your definition of "fucked" is. (see above).
The bottom billion lives on $2 a day. It doesn't matter how cheap energy is, they can't afford it.
OTOH your comment does apply to the second billion. There's no energy cheaper than solar power, and solar powered air conditioning is a great supply/demand match.
I agree with this. It's very frustrating seeing environmentalists frame the struggle to reduce anthropogenic climate change and pollution and use sustainable renewable resources and so on as some kind of moralistic obligation to some sort of abstract concept of nature, which is due deference and submission as something morally "greater" than ourselves that demands service, and as some kind of struggle to project very weird and Christian notions of virginity and purity onto the environment. It makes the logic singularly unappealing to those who are not interested in subjecting themselves to sacred ideas and don't buy into the ideas of duty and obligation, much less to an abstract concept, and don't like the aesthetics of purity — and it is all the more infuriating because all that pseudoreligious stuff is built on a false premise anyway, as you point out. The "Earth mother" or whatever the fuck will be fine, we are doing all of this for ourselves and our own standards of living and aesthetic values and nothing more, so why pretend otherwise?
I guess that sort of response begs the question of if there is even anything greater to which humans owe some moral obligation; it sounds like you don't thing there is (though I apologize if this is reading more into your response than is actually there).
But I suppose it really depends on what you mean by the Earth being "fine" in the end. Obviously, as a large chunk of iron, silicates, oxygen, carbon, et al, the Earth will continue its journey through space for a long time to come. Some forms of life will certainly persist for a few hundred million years until such time as it becomes uninhabitable due to stellar evolution. But if we humans are to wreak our own destruction, we will be far from the first species we remove from this Earth; we've already set about a mass extinction that will register in the geographic record.
> I guess that sort of response begs the question of if there is even anything greater to which humans owe some moral obligation
Nobody can prove that there is. Lots of people have faith in a higher power of some kind, or objective morality. Nobody can provide scientific evidence for it. Far as a I can tell, natural is amoral and doesn't care. And humans have never agreed as a whole on what that something greater is.
I basically realized there was no god/religion was just wishful thinking at a very young age, but I sort of held onto the idea that we could all agree that keeping the Earth habitable for humans was a worthwhile endeavor (I mean, most people seem to want to have kids, right?). But in the last decade or so I’ve even lost that belief.
It's not so much people disagreeing about keeping the Earth habitable and more so disagreeing about what that means or entails. I don't see any realistic scenario where the planet is inhabitable for humans, but certainly things can make it less habitable for what will be 10 billion people and many other life forms.
> I guess that sort of response begs the question of if there is even anything greater to which humans owe some moral obligation; it sounds like you don't thing there is (though I apologize if this is reading more into your response than is actually there).
No worries, you did in fact read me correctly. I don't really think moral obligations exist at all, and I don't think anything has moral "authority" over anything else either. In my opinion we are all just acting on our own desires regarding ourselves and the state of the world in general, and any appeals to sacred ideas or abstract concepts or moral authorities or moral obligations is just an attempt to project our own desires out onto the world so we can pretend they are objective, to hide from ourselves the fact that everything we do and want is ultimately equally arbitrary and without justification or legitimation. E.g., I'm a moral nihilist, not even a moral relativist. So for me, it would be fine for environmentalists to say that they want to fight for environmental causes because they want to preserve humanity's standard of living and well-being, or because they want the environment to look and be treated a certain way because that's simply how they desire it and it makes them happy — and many environmentalists do phrase things in that way in which case I don't have a problem with them — but it annoys me when they try to project their desires outwards and pretend like they are objective.
> But I suppose it really depends on what you mean by the Earth being "fine" in the end. Obviously, as a large chunk of iron, silicates, oxygen, carbon, et al, the Earth will continue its journey through space for a long time to come. Some forms of life will certainly persist for a few hundred million years until such time as it becomes uninhabitable due to stellar evolution. But if we humans are to wreak our own destruction, we will be far from the first species we remove from this Earth; we've already set about a mass extinction that will register in the geographic record.
This is certainly a very fair point, and a good response to what I was saying! However, I think the thing we have to remember is that mass extinctions have happened before, so if humanity wipes itself out and takes a huge amount of species with it, that's still well within the range of things the Earth has experienced before, even if it is happening faster than it would usually have done. After all, the actions of humans themselves are actions that are part of nature, and so we can consider ourselves fucking up the environment and extincting ourselves and a bunch of other animals as part of a natural cycle of adaptation just like any other species over hunting and starving itself to extinction or something. We just weren't fit to survive, in that case. Furthermore, independent of how we define earth being fine, I do think my point about moral obligations still stands from my perspective. I don't want people to stop caring about the environment, and I'll support that care, and honestly if some people even really want to enforce their Christian ideas of purity and virginity onto the environment then very well — they can continue fighting for that, and I'll just simply ignore them, but at least be truthful!
I just like people better when they're truthful. :D I wouldn't claim they have any sort of obligation to be, moral or otherwise. I was just describing my stance toward various positions in that sentence if you look at the context
> The "Earth mother" or whatever the fuck will be fine, we are doing all of this for ourselves and our own standards of living and aesthetic values and nothing more, so why pretend otherwise?
I consider myself very much on the side of "environmental protection", but it's always been clear to me that our goal is protect humanity, and secondarily, other animal species (and that means protecting the plant species). Why else would we be doing this? I don't think anyone is pretending otherwise other than a few fringe people (there are always some fringe people no matter which way you look).
I don't really understand this attitude either. "You're only pretending to care about the Earth, but you actually care about humans and society as we know it!" Right. Duh. So?
Some people are definitely weird about it. Others just enjoy fish, or snow, or living without paying for AC. I'd argue it's pretty illogical to equate these, and outright dishonest to dismiss the latter due to the former.
The statements: "we're hurting Mother Earth" and "hot rocks are still rocks" are both true and both useless, and dogmatic adherence to either can be shortsighted.
I'm not dismissing the latter due to the former at all, or saying they're the same — I point out in my original comment not all environmentalists do this. My goals actually align very much with most environmentalist so I'm not trying to say that because some people use weird rhetoric or justifications that we should just ignore the entire movement and the issues at stake. I'm just talking about a particular rhetorical move that I see occasionally that I find a bit annoying. It isn't very common here on hacker news, but in the circles I tend to run in, which are very leftist, you see it a lot more often.
We overproduce food for the human race by like 35% right now, we have a long ways to go before we hit a population issue. Regardless of all the hand-wringing certain rich people do about the birth rates in Africa. A much more pressing concern is our lack of any inclination to reasonably distribute it.
We produce ~77 million tonnes of beef, using (at the 1:25 ratio) 1925 million tonnes of feed.
Africa currently imports most of it's grains, let's take a generous estimate of ~75 million tonnes of grain. Add another 25 million tonnes for their local production.
And we're still off by a factor of 19x.
Food production capacity is a non-issue. Availability to the people who need it is the real problem, and that is primarily about our willingness to aid those who need it and make some personal sacrifices for the greater good.
> I wish people who say that would actually live in the overpopulated regions of the world for just 1 month.
People need to stop dragging 19th century nonsense into a globalized economy. Regional carrying capacity is certainly a thing, but the primary constraint in most areas today isn't food (which is, after all, rather easy to ship and process) but water. Anyway, you can apply the same reasoning to migration as I did to food. It's just not really an issue outside of political utility. The US alone could support literally billions of people if we gave a shit about anything other than money.
I’ve heard this argument before and it is insane to me. Re comment above have you been to an overpopulated region? It is not just about food. Logically movement becomes more limited and difficult with people literally in each others way. Regions become incredibly inefficient. We are independent beings not meant to live like sardines
Of the top ten on that list, at least 5 would be considered desirable places to live by most people. If the criterion is "better than most other countries in the region", it's more like 9 out of 10 (Gaza Strip is pretty bad).
By contrast, many of the lesser-populated regions/countries are considered to be horrible places to live.
As I scan down the list, it looks like there is only a very weak correlation, at best, between population density and "would I want to live there".
Obviously, your mileage is going to vary. Nonetheless, I bet you'd rather move to The Netherlands (#33) than Afghanistan (#153).
The Texas Sharpshooter fallacy is something we must be able to see. We get a lot of effects of a larger change, and pick the one that in a partial way, in a particular light, can be painted as positive.
There are a lot of "greener" things, the article talks only about a few of them, and some particular consequences. For example, greening in northern regions because losing permafrost is not positive, and lowering albedo (compared with not so dark colours) also increases warming. It is not something even across the whole planet or land regions, it may or not lead to sustainable CO2 level reductions, and when depleted water sources falls down, it could lead to more emissions.
It should be part of a bigger and complex process that is happening, it might slow down some bad trends in some particular regions, but the whole picture matters, and the trends of the big problem seem to not be affected, or at least seem to keep going strong(er) in the same bad direction.
But actually people predicted this positive effect of warming long ago. I believe the specific prediction was that global food production would increase as warming + co2 enrichment increased production in politically and economically stable and responsible nations (at the expense of... Less stable, less responsible nations). You can argue if the aggregate measure of production is more or less important than the distribution, but that prediction was made nonetheless.
Probably not what you’re looking for but it always makes me think of Jeffrey Jones’ “Wholly Holy” (1972), the penultimate story in this 1983 collection: https://www.zipcomic.com/ravens-and-rainbows-issue-full (not sure how to deep link to the exact page)
Also check out “Explored” and “Spirit of ‘76” before it, just because they’re cool :)
It's difficult to get good estimates of biosphere uptake and release of atmospheric carbon by looking at satellite color data - those numbers involve a lot of modeling. Rough estimates are that the biosphere cycles 100 gigatons of carbon a year through the atmosphere (plants taking up CO2 to form biomass, fungi/insects/animals breaking down plant matter to CO2), while human fossil fuel emissions are on the order of 9 gigatons C per year at present, perhaps half of which stays in the atmosphere long-term.
There's little doubt that the planet is heading back to Pliocene conditions at a steady clip, and of course life was abundant back then - indeed without fossil fuels the planet would be on a steady cooling trend back to another ice age (it would take some 70,000 years though to reach another ice age maximum), so if you want to celebrate that achievement, go ahead - but note, you don't want to overshoot the target so immediate elimination of fossil fuel combustion as an energy source is the only rational conclusion.
Here's a paper on the issue of how to link satellite color data to photosynthetic production, see Figs 5 / 6/ 7 for estimates of very moderate increases from 1982-2017 (satellite collection only began c.1982) across the northern hemisphere (but steep declines in the Amazon):
"Improved estimate of global gross primary production for reproducing its long-term variation, 1982–2017", Zheng et. al 2020
Atmospheric CO2 accumulation increased from ~1.5 to ~2.5 ppm/year over that period, coinciding with a rough doubling in global fossil fuel consumption since 1980 (plus a lot of nitrogen fertilizers), along with a +0.2C per decade (5yr running avg) temperature increase.
I believe Vox slightly screwed this up but it's an understandable mistake: the article[1] refers to CO2 equivalent of emissions, not literal CO2. In particular methane from fertilizers seems to have a more negative impact on overall greenhouse gases than whatever CO2 the plants are absorbing.
It has a much shorter atmospheric half life though, on the order of a decade vs thousands of years for CO2. If we cut methane emissions this will have a near term impact whereas cutting CO2 emissions just stops things from getting worse as fast. It reverses nothing.
Methane’s greenhouse effect is 80 times more powerful than that of CO2, so cutting methane right now would have near-immediate effects as it would convert to less potent CO2 in a matter of years. Whereas cutting CO2 would stop things from getting worse, but wouldn’t have an immediate reversal effect like methane would.
It’s a one-off trick that would buy us some time (assuming we can implement it).
This thread is full of people performing a lot of gymnastics to explain how this is a bad thing.
I think it's rather beautiful that the earth is compensating and creating a reversing effect. It's like a scab over a wound to give us time to heal it.
I believe "the earth is compensating" to be a much stronger form of mental gymnastics than most other comments here.
For example, the permafrost thawing leads to a lot more greenery, but it would require willful ignorance to see this as a positive thing.
It's pretty much the same as the legion of people who say "the climate has always been changing", without looking at it in context (though a simplified graphic, which Randall probides here https://xkcd.com/1732/ should theoretically be able to show the problem to anyone willing to listen).
Well, let's say they do melt, vegetation takes over and removes more CO2, eventually everything will cool down. Nature balances. The earth will take care of itself. What happens to us during that process is the big worry.
Where do you get the confidence from that it will eventually cool down and self-correct, and everything will be all right? Surely you must be aware somewhere back in your mind, that this is merely wishful thinking?
Even if you ignore the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climat..., you must realise that climate change has already led to the extinction of a huge number of animal species, and that less biodiversity can lead to lasting problems in ecosystems, that take millennial to stabilise to a new equilibrium.
Not to mention the fact that it's kind of insane to kill of an absurd number of species, destroy a shitload of habitats, and then say "don't worry, some day this will be balanced again". Even if it did, that does not make it okay. If you say to someone "don't worry, your nose will heal" that doesn't mean it's acceptable for you to hit that person in the face.
Everything I've read shows that we're so far behind on correction and anything that will change it will completely upend our economy and society and would have to have happened 100 years ago. Basically hopeless. Might as well be the band playing on the sinking ship.
Alternatively and hopefully, we're wrong in our predictions and the earth will do something we don't expect.
The article reads like "yes the Earth is greening, yes this is probably mostly good, but it's not all good and besides we aren't allowed to say anything positive about the environment".
It’s the same reason a demonstrably racist person can’t make racists jokes, but a demonstrably not racist person can get away with racist jokes.
Where the statements are coming from makes a huge difference in their reception.
“The earth is greening” is a popular argument from climate change deniers as “proof” that we’re not currently living in a catastrophic upset of species diversity (we measurably are).
The problem with “the earth is greening” is that, while it is true that the earth is green for longer, and that the brown is around for less time, this is measurably not a good thing, and it also completely ignores that desertification is also measurably occurring at staggering rates.
The green parts are more green than brown, but they’re also shrinking. Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency.
That’s not what I said. I said they can get away with it.
“Getting away with it” for bigoted jokes has a lot of nuance and context sensitivity.
For comedians including bigoted jokes in their set, it’s usually surrounded with self deprecation, self awareness, not the whole set, and is extremely careful about how they go about crossing the line, they know that they crossed a line and bring it back.
This is contrary to bigoted people telling bigoted “jokes”. It’s usually their whole set. They keep the set over the line. There’s no self reflection. It is bigotry coming from a place of bigotry.
I know that you on the alt-right tend to lack the capability to process nuance, and that you’re going to completely latch on to that single byte. So further explanation of why there’s a difference means nothing to you, but hopefully others see that being able to get away with a bigoted joke now and again is absolutely not the same thing as it “being okay”.
Potholer54 posts well notated videos on youtube where he explains (among other things) climate science and mostly debunks false information. He is a geologist by degree, but has spent his career in science communication. Videos are infrequent but well done, and he makes no money from them. He sites his sources and does a great job of tracking down primary sources, all of which are linked.
One of his oft repeated ideas is: "Why should you believe what some guy on youtube is saying about climate change? You shouldn't! But if an idiot like me (potholer54) can read and understand the source material, you can too." Not only does he provide sources, he is very good about following up when people point out mistakes in his videos.
Anyway, here is a two parter where he responds to the attitude that CO2 is good for plant growth and so it is good for us.
One of the key points is that yes: if you hold everything else equal and increase CO2, it does increase plant growth -- but in the real world, climate change isn't just increasing CO2, it affects temperatures and rainfall too. Also, some plants use "C3" photosynthesis and benefit significantly from increasing CO2 while "C4" photosynthesis crops (like corn) don't. But there is a lot more in there.
Insightful video. CO2 coalition (funded by Exxon) says 140-million year trend of dangerously decreasing CO2, with the implication that more CO2 is good. Potholer54 talks about this paper. Two insights:
a) CO2 levels have been below 200PPM for millions of years, and life on the planet was fine.
b) Over 140 million years, CO2 has been dropping 0.00001 ppm/year. We are adding 2 PPM/year now, 200,000x faster. This rate of change is unprecedented.
Yeah the whole “I know someone whose panic is not sufficiently data-based to satisfy me, therefore there is no reason to panic” is not a particularly strong (or data-backed) argument.
The problem seems to be the opposite. Climate scientists have been too conservative with their models and predictions, and we are hitting points that they thought would be years out.
So it's good and bad, whereas we only hear the bad part of climate change. As in there's nothing good coming from climate change. Which is a bit misleading. It is a big problem, but some good does come from it in terms of plant growth.
Pop media doesn’t really do nuance. If we have to frame climate change as good or bad, it’s clearly bad.
The fact that nuances make it good for some plants, for some people, is true and there for those who want details. The problem is that mitigating details are often used to rebut the first order problem. As the brilliant marketing people in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes put it, “giant tomatoes mean bigger pizzas!”
Another common refrain from Potholer54 is: don't listen to the media -- what are the climate scientists (the primary sources) saying?
But overall the picture is bad. There are regions where things will benefit, and climate research has said so for decades. But overall this rate of change is going to have bad long term consequences for the biosphere (including humans).
The IPCC FAQ [1] states that this was known for decades:
> For decades, about half of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that human activities have emitted to the atmosphere has been taken up by natural carbon sinks in vegetation, soils and oceans. [...] On land, it is mainly the vegetation that captures CO2 from the atmosphere through plant photosynthesis, which ultimately accumulates both in vegetation and soils. As more CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere, plant carbon capture increases through the CO2 fertilization effect in regions where plant growth is not limited by, for instance, nutrient availability. Climate change affects the processes responsible for the uptake and release of CO2 on land in multiple ways. Land CO2 uptake is generally increased by longer growing seasons due to global warming in cold regions and by nitrogen deposition in nitrogen-limited regions.
Bottom line: the Earth is getting greener, but not fast enough to keep up with our increased emissions.
Important to note is that there have been studies that ahow that the increase in growth due to CO2 in the atmosphere does not translate to an increase in nutritients.
I get that things are complicated, but I can't help but notice the inherent bias toward fear, present in the subtitile "scientists are worried." Or maybe it's a bias against change. What are the odds that the state without any human intervention is optimal?
A cultural bias against change seems most salient to me. Most of the change makers in superhero movies are villains while the heroes are meant to bring back the status quo.
Wow,I just don't know what to say to a piece like this.
First, to frame carbon dioxide as "a pollutant but also a fertilizer" is, it's fucking incredulous. You are made of carbon dioxide and water. You can classify it as a pollutant when it has negative impacts, but that is what is secondary on this planet. Are they being disingenuous, or do they expect that their readership is naive to this fact?
Then, to frame the obvious consequence of increased carbon dioxide being a greener world as potentially bad, and those negatives are things like ecosystem destruction, lack of biodiversity, that the plants decompose eventually (not a consideration when you're talking about greening in aggregate), runoff... I thought the big giant problem we need to be solving is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Will they address the negative impact of ocean greening, a far more consequential increase in biomass with regard to climate that they mention but don't address? Is there one?
All I see is a good thing dressed up as a bad thing because can't have good things happen to the planet as a result of human beings, ever.
> Environmentalism has the attributes of a new secular religion, one in which nature has become the new God, and unmitigated climate change will become the new Apocalypse. Thus, sins against God have been replaced with crimes against nature. And the priests of the new religion? Of course, they are the “97% of experts who agree on the anthropogenic global warming.”
Wow, truly incredible insight from a courageous heretic.
Thank you for posting this. I wanted to read a reasonable voice for a while, and I couldn't find anything. Search engines, traditional and LLM-based (ie ChatGPT) will actively censor all dissident voices, and it's just so tiring being unable to have a conversation with someone or read an article that's based on some common ground, some common assumptions between you and the writer.
A "reasonable voice" is a geology professor who works for the fossil fuel industry and has no background in environmental science?
What a giant surprise that someone like that is taking the position of "ignore all the trends in extreme weather events, changing weather patterns, unprecedented ocean warming, and mass extinction. It'll be fine, we just have to adjust to the warming."
Replace "climate change" with "vaccine safety", would you write that same response? Watch me get downvoted for even mentioning the word let alone express a dissenting opinion.
Well, I would, but there's not that many of us. By 'us' meaning people who are willing and able to leave emotional attachments out of the fact-seeking process.
I don't think your statement is controversial at all, as I imagine climate change skeptics and vaccine safety skeptics to be largely overlapping sets of people.
The real issue in terms of rational decision making, in the US and elsewhere, is the formation of the correct group and the incorrect group for pretty much anything, and their corresponding echo chambers. It looks like this recommended book at least attempts to break away from this trend.
Except the rate of change in CO2 is far exceeding the rate of change of any compensatory process, and the replacement of natural plant growth with crops leads to excess methane release that more than compensates for the reduced CO2, so yeah. It’s not surprising, but it’s also insufficient.
“””What’s more is that while plants absorb carbon, industrial cropland typically produces more carbon emissions than it absorbs over the long term. “””
> propagandists advancing world views detached from any empirical or rational belief
The linked article is entirely empirical, and frankly seems like a good explainer for the lay public to understand what's happening. Your post seems a little like a strawman. Are you arguing against anything in particular?
> Despite this destruction, scientists keep coming to an odd conclusion: The Earth is growing greener. Not green in the metaphorical “sustainable” sense, but in the literal color green.
But this is something we knew two decades ago when I was a tween — not an “odd conclusion”. (The article implies four decades ago.)
The only way you’d find it “odd” is if you followed The Science(TM) rather than scientific investigation.
You're leaping from those two words[1] to a conspiracy around something you're calling "The Science(TM)"... Again, this seems like a very readable and worthwhile article to me. Explainer articles are Vox's specialty, and this frankly seems like a pretty good one. It's good you were paying attention four decades ago, not everyone was, and it's good that someone is trying to detail this for the people who weren't.
[1] Which can easily be interpreted as "surprising to the reader", which seems not at all controversial to me.
You will be downvoted to death, but whatever one thinks of climate change, the one you outlined is a very real effect and deserves to be considered seriously. Media sell what people get excited about; people get excited about bad news; media publish bad news; bad news become part of the society's worldview; society becomes focused on the issue and digs for more bad news.
My 86-year-old grandmother noticed no change in the climate over the course of her life. Meanwhile, we now have 15-year-old kids absolutely panicking over how much the climate has changed in the last 100 years, convinced their grandparents generation has doomed them to a heat death. It's bazar.
Finally, somebody is telling the truth about CO2. Not all is grim about climate. The things are in the middle, as always. Reality is neither black nor white.
"'Everything is on fire, but at least this guy is not cold anymore!'; Cool, at least somebody is saying the truth, not everything is black".
There's no middle. There are projections, and there are what we are already seeing.
Of course reality is complex. Of course increasing CO2 levels might have some benefits. But there's no way, all things considered, it's a net benefit overall. Why would you need to point out that look, there are benefits? It doesn't matter. We still need to fix this and for that, we need more concern about climate change, not less (and above all, the relevant people to be concerned).
All this assuming that the planet going greener is a good thing at all. The second sentence of the linked article is literally "Scientists are worried".
No, there's no always a middle. In any case, you are not pointing at a middle. You are just focusing on a(n additional) fact in an ocean of known facts. A fact that you seem to think changes the perspective one should have on the topic.
I didn't downvote, but I suspect you are downvoted because this is wrong and it doesn't help. We certainly don't need people to tame and water things down in this topic.
>But there's no way, all things considered, it's a net benefit overall.
This seems like a very dogmatic statement to make. Especially when weighed with benefits of cheap energy and economic growth. A wealthier world can build the infrastructure to handle potentially negative effects of climate change.
The more extreme environmentalists and marxists say we should be engaging in degrowth, which would just result in a kind of feudal and static society, even more vulnerable to climate change. It should also be noted that the Little Ice Age in Europe was associated with scarcity and famine, while the Roman Warm Period was associated with golden ages of several civilizations across the world.
>> But there's no way, all things considered, it's a net benefit overall.
> This seems like a very dogmatic statement to make
Do you think climate change could have a net benefit? I don't think that thinking that's false is dogmatic.
It's too late for "we'll manage". Time to go for "We need to manage now" because...
> A wealthier world can build the infrastructure to handle potentially negative effects of climate change.
... has not happened. The wealthy civilization needs to want it and make it a priority now.
Anyway, I'm replying to someone who speaks about potentially negative effects of climate change. Wake up! It's not "potentially" anymore, it's already started!
"Technology will save us" is a tired trope at this point.
I personally do think the net benefit is positive, for the biosphere, not necessarily for human beings, which is where our action comes in. We can benefit if we choose to benefit.
A wealthier world building the infrastructure to handle the negative effects does not look how you think it does. It doesn't look like a unified concerted effort to hold back the tide in a figurative sense. It looks like communities that live on shorelines building levees, to hold back the tide in a literal sense. What you want and what need to be done are not the same things. You can't say we have failed just because the solution isn't what you wish it were. The world is changing and people will manage.
Exactly to your point about wealthy civilizations needing to want to use their excesses for good... we had an agricultural revolution in the 70s and rather than feed the starving we just continued same old. Now we're losing topsoil, fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, stable climates to grow crops, pest/weather resistance, and nutrition. And we 4Xed the global population in the meantime.
Please, list all the advantages and nuance for leaded gasoline, paint, and other uses of lead. Or maybe all the nuanced advantageous effects that asbestos has on your lungs?
And if we move beyond environmental issues things get even more ridiculous, but let's not get too side-tracked.
Oddly enough, optimization theory says that almost always the best policy is as far away from the middle as possible, right at the boundaries, where physical constraints intersect to hold you back from taking any more extreme action.
I won't take a position on your intended point, but these are not good examples.
Leaded paint was better than non-leaded paint. Leaded solder also. Asbestos was the wonder material.
Yes, the negatives outweighed the positives. But the truth was absolutely in the middle in these cases.
The materials were great. The unintended/unexpected side effects were bad.
Leaded gasoline, leaded paint, leaded solder, and asbestos are all still used today where the conditions are suitable, because the material is superior for the application.
> So, yes, greening is complicated. It’s not inherently good. Sometimes it’s very bad. Context, it turns out, matters a lot.
The tone suggests they're afraid of the change, but the article can't articulate why since the reason for the change and result are both possibly good and bad, but we don't really know yet.
The NASA MODIS project is ongoing and produces data that people are using to measure "greenness" (which the article indirectly cites) and has been going for 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderate_Resolution_Imaging_Sp... - it's definitely an interesting dataset.
Didan seems to be leading the vegetation research for MODIS and the data set has been cited thousands of times (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TxQK6U8AAAAJ&hl=en...)