These gifs are pretty much useless in showing the real destruction because they're only looking back 30 years and showing the changes of little plots of land here and there.
If you compare North America today with what it was before Europeans landed. You'd see a truly horrifying picture. Something like 70% of the forests of North America are gone. Just load up google maps in satellite mode and look at the USA. Farms and settlements are literally everywhere. Brazil too has lost a massive chunk. Entire forests along the ocean are gone. So has europe. And in Australia Koalas are becoming endangered because of the loss of their habitat. In Asia, rain forests are being cut down for palm oil plantations. And don't even get me started on the "Great African Land Grab" in which rich countries bought prime fertile African land for pennies per hectare.
This continues to this day: 6 percent of [the US lost it's] forest cover in just five years time, a total of 120,000 square kilometers (46,332 square miles)
And don't get me started on particles from the pollution in China crossing the Pacific Ocean and entering the US Eastern Coast. As well as residents living near highways have a 27% increase in Asthema. And the list goes on and on.
No, at the risk of "getting you started", I'm not "horrified" at the loss of 70% of the North American forest over the past 500+ years, if that is, in fact, the correct statistic. Try running the film in reverse, regrowing the lost forest at the cost of 95+% of the people. Would that be an absolute delight, the undoing of the horror, the horror?
Clearly it would be to some people, but not to me. I'm hardly arguing in favor of eliminating the remaining 30% of the forest and adding another billion or so North Americans. Being okay with some change doesn't mean I prefer the maximum amount of change. It's just that as I drive from coast to coast, as I have done more than once, I'm not overwhelmed with the horror of the landscape.
I am willing to work to clean up the mess we humans so often make and to take steps to avoid ruining things we can't fix. I don't want to live on a pile of garbage, and it does take constant effort to avoid letting garbage of various sorts (trash dumps, dirty water, smoggy air) get out of control. Sometimes we fail, and we need to do something about it. I'm especially worried about damage that is not obvious---the oceans come to mind.
But no, I'm not horrified at the thought of North America having 70% fewer trees than we had 500 years ago, if that's the real number. I want to take proper safeguards with respect to the environment, human health, human living standards, crime, political and economic freedoms, education, and numerous other important issues, but sometimes I think that some people get uncomfortably "religious" about the environment in particular. I'm not one of them.
As George Carlin said: "Stop talking about saving the Earth. The Earth is fine. We're fucked."
One of the things I hate about green ideology is that it frames this issue in selfless religious moralistic terms when it's really all about pure self-interest.
To what extent can we continue doing this? For how long? We depend on these ecological systems, and the economic cost of replacing them would be far beyond our capacity to invest (if it's even within our technical capability). We depend on many, many resources that are presently being extracted far faster than their rate of formation, with fossil fuels being chief among these. Couriscant in Star Wars is fiction, and is likely impossible even with imaginary post-singularity-level technology. Its climate would have little or nothing to regulate it, and its atmosphere would revert to pre-photosynthesis reducing composition.
Less than a thousand years after mass die-off and the collapse of global civilization into a new dark age, most of the "damage" will be gone. This is less than a microsecond on geological timescales. The planet will be fine.
Such brutal die-offs have occurred before many times in geological history, and it's absurdly naive to think that it couldn't happen to us. Nature doesn't care about us. It doesn't care how much we suffer or how many of us die. We have to worry about that, or nothing will.
And even if it doesn't happen suddenly, there's the whole quality of life issue. Do we really want to live in a b-grade cyberpunk dystopia of endless ugly sprawl, routine Fukushima/BP Macondo type industrial disasters, increasing pollution, commodity hyperinflation, and unattainably distant gaps between the rich and everyone else? Because that might be what an ecologically depleted world looks like: a few super-rich demigods presiding over massive seething ghettoes policed by drones. That would also be a new dark age.
Edit: it might help people understand if we tried to estimate the cost of replacing these ecological systems with artificial industrial replacements. I'm gonna guesstimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000X current world GDP.
You could probably arrive at an estimate by working backwards and assuming thermodynamic efficiencies at reconstructing the biosphere in the 10-15% neighborhood. So SUM(GDP,1012AD,2012AD) / 0.15?
> That is a nakedly emotionally manipulative reply with no substance.
That is the effect I wanted to achieve in order to better parody and criticize parent's own manipulative wording: "some" people, "sometimes", veiled attempt to accuse opponents of being "religious", etc. I thought it was more obvious, sorry.
Next time I'll just state it plainly like you did (no irony).
For what it's worth I couldn't find any numbers regarding the 70% loss and what it really refers to.
Heh, yes, that never works. To be clearly a parody one must post something that would "obviously" never be posted seriously by someone. This turns out to be a high bar. Especially in emotional areas like environmentalism.
Maybe because 5 billion years ago there wasn't anything life-like going on around these parts. Many changes have occurred since then, and many will occur yet again.
Not every genetic sequence is sacred, and the vast majority that modern taxonomy would consider "species" have come and gone without me shedding a tear.
That is correct, but which species before humans has caused so much change to the environment in such a short time?
Sure, there's the natural eb and flow of the environment. But that tends to happen over very long periods of time. When you're talking about 70% of forests being destroyed within 500 years though, that's something else entirely. Make no mistake: the change our planet has gone through over that short time period is unprecedented.
Do you live in the USA? Do you know how notorious we are for paving over land with strip mall parking lots that will never be anywhere near full? How we run from our problems rather than solving them? How we move further and further away from the city, create massive traffic from the long commutes, and in turn move further and further away again? How county folks strike down and red tape high density apartments anywhere near their neighborhood, even vote against light rail and trollies because they're afraid the overhead wires will "lower their property value". We create neighborhoods that require a 3 mile drive just to get to your neighbors house a few yards away: http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/10/the-great-cul-de-sac-pr... We're really bad at city planning.
500 years ago is a hugely artificial point to start your forest comparison. For a fair comparison, you need to go back far enough to reach the peak of pre-Columbian civilization in North America. That civilization was heavily agricultural and cut down plenty of trees to make farmland. Old World diseases subsequently wiped out nearly the entire population, and the subsequent reforestation sucked so much CO2 out of the atmosphere that it may have substantially contributed to the Little Ice Age.
For a proper comparison, you need to look at more like 600-1000 years ago. I don't know what the result of that comparison is, or how accurate it can be given how little is really known about pre-Columbian North America, but that's what you need to look at.
The standard picture of North America being virgin wilderness inhabited by scattered tribes until the arrival of the Europeans is dead wrong. That's how settlers found it, but only because roughly 90% of the population had been killed off by disease not long before.
I can't speak to the forest practices of S. America or other continents but regarding US and Canadian forest practices that article is complete FUD.
First, it equates 'forest loss' to legitimate forest management - grow, cut, replant. Second, there is more forests now than there were in 1930 (I'll find the source in the morning). Now that's a slightly dubious stat since post-railroad logging there was only natural regrowth but we manage our forests very, very well these days.
The last place for environmental concern in the US and Canada should be to the forests. It's in everyone's interest to have healthy forests - from the logger to the landowner to the mill worker to the multinational.
From disparate information I gathered it seems second growth forest don't come with the same ecology (animals, fungus, etc.) so the argument could be made that regrown managed forest don't equate primary forests. I am not sure I am proponent of this argument but it seems to make sense.
I have no problem with timber companies managing their tree farms, so long as they protect water ways (offsets), slopes (no clear cuts causing mud slides), etc. I also think we need new management practices (eg permit more smallers fires to reduce likelihood of huge fires).
My problem is when timber companies must extract every board foot from every acre, threatening critical habitat, from public forests. To add insult to injury, we (the public) build the roads, and sell the timber at a loss.
I wouldn't mind so much if the mythical "free market" was working, so that timber, mining, fishing, and ranching companies actually paid fair market price for the resources they're stealing.
My problem is when timber companies must extract every board foot from every acre, threatening critical habitat, from public forests. To add insult to injury, we (the public) build the roads, and sell the timber at a loss.
Lies, lies, and more lies. Have you even been to a cut down forest within the last 20 years? Streams have required easements, there are requirements for leaving a number of trees per acre and any logging roads are paid for by the landowner. The roads are a cost of the harvesting.
...actually paid fair market price for the resources they're stealing.
You act like it's a quick turn around. We are talking decades after replanting, there are very few industries that have to follow this. And then, after waiting all that time, you need to hope that the market isn't in the state that it's currently in. Domestic timber is in the dumpster right now due to foreign logs and a lack of new housing.
Did you not read the parent's comment? 40 year old forests are not habitat because they don't come with the same ecology. It takes a very, very long time for a proper ecosystem to establish in an area. 40 years is not enough for that.
I went camping in Holland ten years ago. Almost all the forests there are second growth forests. As we were setting up our tents, my buddy stopped in his tracks and motioned at me to hush. In the silence, do you know what we heard?
Absolutely nothing.
No birds, no insects, no forest animals or any kind. It was eerily quiet. It was a forest alright, but it had no ecosystem. It was the most bizarre camping experience I've ever had.
So obviously you didn't read my original post where I said I was talking about the US and Canada exclusively, which the parent comment was responding to.
Go into Canada and the US and camp. Railroad logged anywhere from 150 to 100 years ago, second growth logged from then on. Birds. Deer. Elk. Insects. Owls (even Spotted ones!). Fish in the streams.
The US and Canada isn't Europe. This continent has been largely undisturbed until about 300 years ago, and most of it untouched until the last 100 years. We've seen Europe's folly and fortunately didn't make the same mistakes or at least have had time to correct the problem. We also didn't have 2 world wars march across our lands, no trenches, no mustard gas.
Much of N. America from just east of the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean is amazing forests. We've made our mistakes with forestry but have atoned and things have healed up nicely. Now we manage the forests for the good of everybody - everyone can have what they want without sacrificing the quality of that resource.
Don't be so blind as to just blanket all logging in the world as 'logging bad'.
Domestic timber is in the dumpster right now due to foreign logs and a lack of new housing.
Um, no. Timber, pulp, paper are all cyclic. Always have been, always will be.
We are talking decades after replanting, there are very few industries that have to follow this. And then, after waiting all that time, you need to hope that the market isn't in the state that it's currently in.
We're talking about public lands. What are you talking about?
I care little what timber companies do with the land we gave them last century. But if they're cutting down OUR trees on OUR land, then they have to replant that acreage. If they can't do that profitably, then too bad. There is no right to profit.
Don't be so blind as to just blanket all logging in the world as 'logging bad'.
I care little what timber companies do with the land we gave them last century. But if they're cutting down OUR trees on OUR land, then they have to replant that acreage. If they can't do that profitably, then too bad. There is no right to profit.
You have shown you know very little of the timber industry. Private landowners are under the same laws with respect to replanting as the public lands are. Public lands are logged, sold, and the profits returned to the public in the same free market system. No matter, it ALL has to be replanted.
On what planet do you think someone is just letting perfectly good land that can support a forest just sit barren? Unless it's re-zoned into something else, that's not profitable nor sustainable. Our forests are very sustainable.
Timber, pulp, paper are all cyclic. Always have been, always will be.
If you think the pulp and paper industry will ever be what it once you are fooling yourself. In the electronic age paper is far down it's not even funny. I grew up in a pulp and paper town that is a shell of what it once was.
Snark aside, you are showing your spots and how little you know. Forks is not a pulp and paper town. It's a logging town. Thus, I didn't grow up in Forks.
You're just plain wrong about automation, that isn't what is killing the pulp and paper mills. If that were the case the mills and the companies associated with those mills would be doing fine - just with less people. No, the mills themselves are in decline due to a lack of use for their product.
E-books, electronic documents, decline of newspapers. This isn't the 70s, this is a paperless world and only going to get more so.
No contest the decline of print media is effecting the paper industry.
It's been a while since I've looked (or cared). I've long assumed growth in pulp tracked with the economy. I didn't consider increased recycling or the economic crash (2008). Either way, I couldn't quickly find info (e.g. Wolfram Alpha).
We're talking past each other. I really don't care about the fortunes of the timber, pulp, paper industries. They've been terrible stewards of the earth. You say they've improved. Sorry, I just can't imagine that.
It's possible that the "fallow" restored forests of the northeast (mentioned upthread) are the future for elsewhere. Maybe. I don't see it in the short term. Between the pine beetle and ever greater risk of forest fires (in hindsight the bad burn mgmt as well as drying due to climate change), our forests are in trouble. To say nothing of sprawl and over development in fire prone areas...
Any way.
You really need to cut out the ad hominen. You're convinced you're right and I'm a noob. Fine. I feel you're just repeating industry misinformation. Fine. But there's no discourse when you sink to throwing around insults.
I feel you're just repeating industry misinformation.
Industry misinformation or the actual laws for the states of Washington and Oregon, which follow countless other states and provinces in the Western US and Canada? You on the other hand are stuck repeating misinformation from the 80's anti-logging spotted owl rhetoric.
BTW, it's hardly an ad hominem. I'm not attacking you personally to discredit what you are saying - what you are saying is just factually wrong.
That's true, but you could also go with the notion that for every acre of managed timber land there could be an acre, if not more, of untouched primary forest.
The forest cover in New England is almost 80% - about what it was when the Pilgrims landed. Since hitting a low below 40% in 1830 it is now the most forested region in the US as well as one of the most densely populated.
How did this happen? People stopped trying to eke out a living farming the thin rocky soil during the short growing season and went to work at the mills and factories.
Yep, it's quite common in New England to find stone walls in the middle of a forest, that used to be on the edge of a field. Further, it's kind of amazing to think that the woods down the street had someone pull all the rocks out at some point... makes you reconsider what you consider "natural".
It also helps that we can transport food over longer distances, have working markets to facilitate this, and crop yields having tripled since the 60s, and if it wasn't for biofuels the US would have been reducing the amount of land for agriculture instead of increasing it.
People also stopped cutting down all the trees to heat their homes. Moving to fossil fuels for heating meant that people could reasonably keep trees on their property without needing to cut them down for firewood (and without neighbors cutting them down for the same reason).
Why is it that so many left-wing rants leave me with the unnerving impression that their authors care more about Koalas than humans? You created an impressive list of eco-complaints, but the simple fact is that human life expectancy - my primary concern as a human - has risen dramatically in the same 30 years. Perhaps a little more focus on humans and a little less on sad Koalas will keep us on track toward even higher life expectancy.
Human life expectancy rising over that period has nothing to do with the lost forest cover. Indeed, the vast majority of the increase is due to a few relatively low-tech advances targeted at reducing infant mortality.
That's hardly an iron-clad causal chain there. I'm pretty sure penicillin would have happened whether or not we deforested California and turned it into a giant collection of freeways and parking lots.
Yes, but the majority of the improvements stem from a handful of relatively low-tech things: antibiotics, clean water, improved nutrition, urbanization leading to most births happening in the presence of a medical professional, social changes reducing pregnancy among young teenagers, and a handful of key vaccines. Its not blockbuster cancer drags driving the increase.
Maybe because many "left-wing" people think it would actually be good to trade in a couple of years of life expectancy to make the world a better place for other living beings than just humans?
At least I think it would be a good thing to focus less on humans now that there's 6 billion of us.
> Left wing thought, in my world, is creating the maximum benefit for the maximum number of people. We against "robbing peter to pay paul".
But that's exactly what welfare is: robbing Peter to pay Paul!
(yes, I'm aware that folks claim stuff like, 'ah, but if we rob Peter nicely than there's less risk of Paul robbing and killing him, so really Peter's expected value is higher if we rob him')
I think your question is a philosophical one. What is the proper role of the human species in Earth's ecology? It sounds like you think "might makes right", and that any choice which maximizes human life expectancy is the right choice.
It saddens me to think that people are willing to push so many living organisms to extinction, just to make our lives a little more comfortable and last a little bit longer. I think it is important to protect life, in all its forms.
So, if human life expectancy went up doing X, we're guaranteed that it will still go up if we continue to do X? That's the same reasoning that caused so many bubbles.
I'm no tree-hugger, but also from a purely egoistical point of view I worry about the consequences of the very fast changes we're causing to the environment in which humans evolved and to which we are adapted. Nothing guarantees that the changes will lead to an environment that can sustain 6+B human beings, so trying to predict the consequences is a very wise thing to do.
Our life expectancy doesn't go up by fucking the place up and mismanaging sustainable living. Just because I care about other species and the planet that live on (you know, it's not easy to find a planet that can sustain life) doesn't mean I'm a left-wing liberal. FYI, I'm independent.
There's 7 billion of us and growing. We can take care of ourselves and our life spans are nearing 80-90 years, animals that took billions of years to evolve into their current species are being wiped out because we have selfish attitudes. We're draining the water tables and fucking over the oceans. Aside from the medical advances to help ourselves, we're screwing EVERYONE and EVERYTHING on this planet.
"But what about us humans?" What about us? Being on every continent other than Antarctica isn't enough?
Also, we lost 160 million people in wars just in the 20th century alone. At least Koalas & Gorillas won't send your family to a concentration camp, invade your country, slaughter your citizens, get drunk and slam into your family van, rape and kill, or fuck your children. Frankly, I'd rather help the animals keep their habitat than help humanity grow it's population. At least animals don't ask for taxes or welfare. Animals won't rob you at gun point. Leave them in their forest and they'll be happy and leave you alone.
Being a human and being more intelligent than other species doesn't entitle you to being a total dick and fucking the place up for everyone. There's more to life than cheap gas, car culture, and shopping malls.
Frankly, I'd rather help the animals keep their habitat than help humanity grow it's population.
That was the point of my comment - eco-ideologists generally hate humans, and given the chance are more than willing to inconvenience other humans (rarely themselves) in order to satisfy their world view. Fortunately for the rest of us, that opportunity rarely comes.
Ok then, what should the cut off be for making it acceptable to inconvenience other humans for the sake of sustainability? How many droughts should we go through? How low and polluted should the water supply get? How shitty does life have to get for all of us before it's ok to ask everyone to make some changes that may be "inconvenient". If you don't inconvenience 314 million Americans right now in 2013, you're going to screw 500 million Americans a few decades from now, and even more a few centuries from now.
I'm not asking for eugenics and one child policies. And no I'm not in favor of bio-fuels. They've done more environmental damage than they've helped, and they mess with the pricing of the food. It's not about ideas that sound nice and make people happy, it's about solutions that actually work and are realistic. I'm asking for common sense sustainable strategies. Rethinking water rights (just because you bought some land doesn't mean you own the ground water and can pump out massive amounts of water thus lowering the water table for everyone else), ending zoning policies that favor single family homes and push out apartment complexes, stop subsidizing home ownership, expand conservation areas and create new ones, investing in a smart grid, map out and setting cyclical conservation areas that are reserved for future use, filtering storm drains, allow cities to be able to mandate mpg policies (they currently cannot).
>I'm not asking for eugenics and one child policies.
These are the only proven solutions to population control.
You are either for allowing people to have kids as they decide, or you are not. There is no middle ground here. As a human I don't favor any type of population control of any type because denying people the right to reproduce is one of the cruelest things you can do.
The alternative is to just let the population ebb and flow naturally. It might double, it might halve, we don't know.
The truth is that quality of life has been improving for centuries and will probably continue to do so.
>These are the only proven solutions to population control.
NOT true. Statistically the more educated a group becomes + the higher the standard of living the lower the groups birth rate. Jews and Japanese are the prime example. Higher educatation alone correlates with lower birth rates. The birth rate for African American's alone has fallen 60% in 10 years. Much in part due to increased education in the form of college scholarships and grants.
Simply put. Educating humanity allows it to naturally direct itself back towards sustainable levels without drastic and extreme eugenics or one child policies.
I agree on one thing : increasing prosperity naturally reduces populations, but I don't class that as population control. Control means having a set target. Control is the Chinese one-child policy, which is a demographic disaster unfolding before our eyes.
Being wealthier generally means choosing to have less children as the cost of child rearing increases. But this isn't population control. That is letting the natural ebb and flow of populations come and go.
I'm against inconveniencing existing humans for the benefit of the environment, but arguing that trying to reduce human population increase is "hating humans" is like arguing that pro-choicers "hate babies".
I mean, sure, let's look out for the humans that are already around. But I don't feel much obligation to destroy huge swathes of beautiful landscapes just so we can have more people. Quality of life over quantity of life, etc.
As an extra note if we manage to make large portions of this planet unlivable then maybe through trying to alter them to be livable again we'll unlock techniques that we could use on other planets to make them livable as well.
The future is going to be awesome and horrifying and exciting. I'm so happy I get to live in this age, even if I do end up dying horribly it will probably be exciting.
OTOH, look at upstate New York, patrticularly adirondack park. They basically logged the whole place flat to build NYC but with careful stewardship, it is once again a beautiful forest wilderness. The point is that we can fix it if we want to.
The Amazon deforestation one and the Glacier retreat are pretty shocking and terrifying for me. Wish a scale was provided for the deforestation one though, since it's difficult to grasp the scope of its effects without one.
That being said I found the Dubai and Las Vegas ones fascinating.
Watch the Vegas time-lapse again, but look at Lake Mead, not Las Vegas.
EDIT: As for the scale of the Amazon deforestation, by zooming and scrolling the time-lapse map at the bottom of the article, I watched what looks like very nearly the entire Brazilian state of Rondônia go from rainforest to grassland in the 30-ish year period depicted. (Wikipedia says that 70k km² of its 200k km² of rainforest was cleared by 2003, while the map goes to to 2012.) [1]
Not a great indicator of environmental collapse, but a good one for a drought. I would imagine the people in charge of that artificial lake would love it if it would tide just a bit more at this point.
But I don't think they have as much control you suggest, I do believe they have obligations of letting amounts of water to go downriver for the farmers south of the dam.
I lived there for a number of years, the animated map does not do justice of showing how low the lake is, if you visit the dam you can see the water lines on the dam wall (hah!) and the shores around it. It's not just how much width the water has receded, but how deeply as well.
Ah great point. This will be really interesting to observe the changes in the water level over the next few years, since Las Vegas is now very efficient with its water usage and has some pretty hard limits on water usage, if I remember correctly.
I noticed that as well when I watched the Vegas timelapse. I wish there was an overlaying scale showing how much of the water receded, it looked like a significant amount.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you may be vastly overreacting.
Talking about what's happening in both the Atlantic ice sheets and the Antarctic ice shelves can become complicated, and as far as I can tell (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) not definitive by any means.
In fact, organisms like the prochlorococcus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prochlorococcus have been theorized to be responsible for at least 50% to 60% of the world's atmospheric oxygen (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v424/n6952/full/nature0... there's a paper in the references there which has that statistic, but I don't remember which). Today, these microbes are still hard at work, churning out oxygen and while some mistakes have been made (iron seeding, etc) they're still the most populous microbe on the planet.
I would also contest the point about human beings. (This is my opinion talking now). I will not disagree that the earth's climate is changing rather rapidly (relative to the measurable past). I will argue though that it is arrogant to presume that humans are the root cause. On a micro scale, humans have been rather destructive to specific ecosystems. However, I have yet to see convincing proof that humans can effect climate change to this magnitude on a macro scale.
Your argument is completely spurious - the relative weight of our emission is not what determines if we change the climate.
It would be like saying the average human weighs 70Kg so 500micrograms of LSD will do nothing as it is only 7.14^-7% of the body mass.
I'm sorry you understood it that way. I wanted to point out that it is in fact a pretty big deal! Human produced CO2 (mainly from fossil fuel burning) is changing the global environment pretty dramatically. nathannecro wanted to see evidence that we're doing something on the macro scale, here it is.
> 97% of climate scientists agree that the current climate change is anthropogenic
No doubt something close to 100% of astrologers agree that the stars effect one's personality.
AFAICT, almost anyone educated in climate science over the last few decades has been taught to assume anthropogenic climate change as a given. Furthermore, both the folks whose research supports the anthropogenic hypothesis and those whose research refutes it have significant incentives (financial, social and religious) to so find. I don't trust the lot of 'em as far as I can throw 'em.
I'm fully aware of the PNAS paper (and others like it which have been published). Let me point out a few other times in history where scientists, without clear evidence for their beliefs, were wrong:
The idea of phlogiston was quite prevalent in the chemistry community for about a century before it was definitively proved to be a pile of combustible turds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phlogiston_theory
Even recently, in the early 20th century, physicists believed that:
a) The smallest particle of matter (the atom) had been quantified, measured, and fully explored.
b) There was no more to discover in the field of physics.
Clearly, they were wrong.
Let me rephrase my objection more clearly.
I believe that the Earth's climate (across all biomes) has been rapidly shifting over recent time.
I know that humans can impact local ecosystems and one of the results is a shift in local climate.
I have yet to see evidence for (cum hoc ergo propter hoc is a danger when looking at studies) humans causing climate change on a global scale.
This does not mean that we should stop our efforts to prevent deforestation. Nor does it mean we should ignore local environmental disasters, but linking local impact to global impact has not been done definitively yet, so as a scientist, I question that belief. It is not out of arrogance that I question, but out of the desire to be a better scientist. I am trained to base my beliefs in: Hypothesis -> Evidence -> Examination -> Belief. What we do have currently is a very good "guesstimate" hypothesis (we observe that humans can cause local ecosystem shifts). What we do not have is evidence. And thus, we do not have the opportunity for discussion or the transition to belief.
Even recently, in the early 20th century, physicists believed that: a) The smallest particle of matter (the atom) had been quantified, measured, and fully explored. b) There was no more to discover in the field of physics. Clearly, they were wrong.
"However, I have yet to see convincing proof that humans can effect climate change to this magnitude on a macro scale" Ok, let's start with something easier. Can we agree on the magnitude of the global changes that humans caused on the extension of forests and on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Depends on the soil. Rain forest soil is not very fertile, and the vegetation is quick to recycle - most nutrients are in the very top layer and in the plants at all times. Thus if you take away the trees without letting them rot and release the nutrients you could run into problems very soon.
In mid-latitudes, on the other hand, it's not as big a problem because the recycling is a lot slower and the reservoir is far greater.
> Actually, if (and I'm aware it's a big if) they cut down the rainforest and plant new trees there, it's actually a net win for carbon dioxide.
I believe it depends on what you do with those trees. A lot of the deforestation occurs through burning. An area is logged (bad for the ecosystem, not so bad for carbon), then its cleared by burning (bad for carbon) to make room for farmland.
The rainforest's use up almost all of the oxygen that they put out. As far as carbon dioxide they are pretty net zero in the end. It is the Algie blooms that produce the oxygen surplus. While fun to say, rainforest's are not the earth's lungs. But don't take my word for it, checkout either the very good video (or search the transcript for "lungs") http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/earth-from-space.html
Because we are in that remaining 10%, as are all of the species we rely on for food. Most people have an interest in the continuation of humanity, at least in theory.
Most people is interested in continuation of themselves and their close relatives. Seven billion of people, driven by this interest, form a hivemind that dictates their own fate. Should it be the extinction of 9.999% of species - so be it.
Ice sheets don't concern me one bit. Ice and cold is definitely one thing humanity can do with less of.
Felling of rainforest is more of a concern for me. Especially when it is for palm oil, soybean and sugar cane plantations to produce bio fuel. That one makes me quite concerned.
Too late to edit my comment but I should have emphasized "all". Meaning, yes, some are terrifying how natural resources are being lost but others are just amazing and impressive without being terrifying at all.
Amazing. This is the area where I grew up (in Australia). The area features 3 "open cut" coal mines. One of which has been going through a reforestation process over the past decade or so.
http://earthengine.google.org/#intro/v=-38.2235574,146.46468...
Does anyone have an authoritative, scientific resource that can quantify human impact on Earth in our presumably negative ways? I want to understand more about the issues as a whole but from a macro standpoint, ideally backed with numbers and science from a trusted third party.
You will never get an authoritative unbiased scientific resource.
There is no agreed measure on what 'impact' means, and whether that is positive or negative. One persons fantastic city is anothers urban blight on pristine wilderness.
All published data are biased in some direction.
You can measure conversion of wilderness to farmland, farmland to cities, displacement of wildlife, and many other factors. Much of the data is modelled. All of it is produced to prove one point of the other. Even when people agree on the data, they will disagree on the positive or negative impacts.
The trusted third party is a mirage. All you can do is interpret the supplied data and arguments and make up your own mind.
^ About as scientific as it gets, attributing global climate change trends since the beginning of the 20th century to human beings with over 90% certainty.
I've been looking at the aftermath of the deforestation of Ireland for the past couple of weeks. The country was down to about .1% forest in 1900 due to: clearing forests to put down insurgency, building British navy, burning wood for fuel, clearing marginal land for potatoes (then abandoning it after a couple of years), sheep. After the wood was gone, people started burning the soil (peat) for heating.
Now, much of Ireland is a denuded landscape that may never recover. The scary thing is that this is now what people are used to and think is normal.
Reforestation has brought back the forest cover to 10%, but most of it seems to be non-native species and not the Oaks, Elms, etc that used to be here.
Pictures are certainly worth a certain number of words, but sometimes all you really need is the hook of an idea to really grasp a much larger concept. In this case, I've always been caught by something Jared Diamond wrote in "Germs, Guns, and Steel". (What do you mean you haven't read it? Drop everything and go read it now!)
I'm paraphrasing, but the gist was this: You know that war that the US has been fighting in Iraq? You know all the images of desert warfare from over there?
That's the "Fertile Crescent".
If it doesn't seem so fertile any longer, that's almost entirely due to human activity.
> If it doesn't seem so fertile any longer, that's almost entirely due to human activity.
Bullshit. The area was never fertile in the way it's understood by people used to temperate climates. There were never (during the course of human history) lush green forests covering everything.
The fertile areas were (and continue to be) only along rivers (Euphrat, Tigris, Jordan, Nile) and greatly extended through irrigation (i.e. human activity).
I am still amazed at how small the UK is (I think I read it was roughly the size of Florida).
Even though I knew the general area I had to zoom farther than I thought to see it.
On second look I think it's the type of map. It seems lower than I would recognize from other maps.
Wish this went back to the 60's. I have heard about how much of SV was farmland (orchards) when my parents first arrived, and would love to see a timelapse that visualizes the change over time here.
Wow. It is quite scary these pictures. I lived in Vegas for 10 years and personally saw Lake Mead slowly going away every year. I hope more people will take notice and help anyway they can.
The Earth is fine, people. One herd of farting cows diminishes all the human effort in CO emission decrease in nearby town. One volcano eruption diminishes it worldwide. One major earthquake contributes to Earth landscape change more than all the humanity did.
Claiming that human can change the Earth is like claiming that the single flea drives the whole elephant.
Earth is fine, people.
[citation needed]. Seriously, because there's a body of evidence [1] completely disagreeing with your assertions. You're directly going against the overwhelming majority [2] of scientific consensus with those statements.
How many times does it need to be stated that science does not advance by consensus. Science is not an exercise in democracy. Evidence, yes, but please don't talk about consensus.
I suggest you don't get your science from Discovery magazine or from the Washington Post. This link (from a sceptical website) cites innumerable original peer-reviewed papers showing that even the IPCC now retract on their earlier claims about an increase in extreme weather. You can find many more links to <evidence supported> data on the site.
That said, we should all bemoan the cutting down of forest and the pollution of the oceans to mention only two aspects of man's disastrous activities on our planet.
Why is it a problem to discuss consensus if the consensus is from educated parties and founded on empirical evidence supporting the consensus? Challenging the status quo is fine if you have data to back up your assertions but that isn't what happens in the most case. With the issue being so politicised, data is no longer the ultimate trump card. That's the problem.
Regarding the sources, they're simply the first that I find when I search for information I've previously read and want to reference. I applaud your effort to source thoroughly cited references on points you present, but unfortunately when I'm reading HN between my day job I don't have the same time to build an equally bulletproof case.
FWIW, I don't hold a particular view either way on what you cited. I haven't read it enough. I'm sorry that I can't comment specifically on it.
> Why is it a problem to discuss consensus if the consensus is from educated parties and founded on empirical evidence supporting the consensus?
When people talk about general relativity they don't refer to the scientific consensus behind the theory? It stands up to scrutiny because there are numerous reproducible experiments lending to its validity along with some very solid mathematics to back it up. The science behind climate change is very hard to create experiments for, however, and so we must lean heavily on computer simulated models (which, by the way, are rarely used to prove much of anything in the hard sciences). Thus, you hear a lot more about "consensus" than you would otherwise.
"IPCC AR5 draft leaked, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing – as well as a lack of warming to match model projections, and reversal on ‘extreme weather’"
Looks like you haven't kept up with the publications except those posted by the conservative foes of climate science like Alex Rawls. There have been many rebuttals of the claim that there is a "game-changing admission" in the leaked document, here's a good one: http://skepticalscience.com/ipcc-draft-leak-global-warming-n...
"Rawls has completely misrepresented the IPCC report."
I don't trust scientific documents being "leaked" - this isn't politics where leaking information does the public a service. This is science, where it's advantageous to wait until the data matures, not spill it immediately. When it's ready for publication and is done so through official, peer vetted channels, I'll consider it authentic.
So, actually, yes, I have kept up with my publications. Furthermore, the person who leaked that has a well known bias against climate change. Coupled with my earlier statement, this holds no scientific weight against what I cited.
You are the reason that reason has such a hard time in politics. You've made up your mind about something that evidence and facts overwhelmingly disagree with you on.
You know, when local rednecks witness slight daily weather change, they proudly attribute it to 'global warming'.
I mean, we track the weather for at most a hundred year. We tend to see any several-year trend as an alarming global tendency. Weather change periods definitely have very low-frequency components, so it's unwise to declare any locality as a global tendency.
You're right. For ordinary people around me malaria is not a problem. And yes, here people die in road accidents and should it happen that one side of the accident is a local government/enforcement member friend or relative means that they'd escape justice. And this is the problem. And problems must be solved from largest to smallest, as the cut tree is worked by the big axe first and by the tiny needle last.
The biggest lapse in understanding is that people cannot deal with the order of magnitude differences in numbers involved. Humans are sometimes "the flea" and other times "the elephant". It is difficult to decide intuitively which we are at any particular point. This table[1] demonstrates this point quite well. Humans interact with the environment in ways that are orders of magnitude different in terms of impact, but it is hard to conceptualize that fact.
Actually, it's methane from cow burps that gets people worried, not farts.
You're right about geological and astronomical events having much more importance on the Earth than an insignificant mammal.
Earth will always be fine. The Earth doesn't care whether it is Mars or Venus. Only people care. If your species isn't winning, it's losing. Change is inevitable.
The only way we're going to truly minimize human impact is by forcing developing nations like China and India to dramatically change the way they are growing their economies, which frankly, doesn't seem very fair. They have as much right as the rest of the 1st world to develop their country and nobody is going to be able to tell them otherwise. The only real way out of this mess is a mass exodus away from fossil fuels over to nuclear power or the discovery of some sort of new abundant power source like fusion (solar and wind aren't going to cut it).
>The only way we're going to truly minimize human impact is by forcing developing nations like China and India to dramatically change the way they are growing their economies
Firstly, the US and EU combined output more CO2 than China and India combined, so we can make a substantial contribution to reducing CO2 emissions.
Why? One would probably tend to keep the impact tolerable enough for themself, but you're not going to find enough people except green fanatics to be motivated to minimize it.
Because the impact is difficult to appreciate at a personal level over the short (years to decades) timeframe. As a result, individual humans struggle to realise it in their daily interactions. Nevertheless, the damage accumulates and causes significant negative results for future generations.
Your logic assumes a feedback loop that shows the person the results of their actions. Like the Crypto article yesterday [1] touched on, if you lack that feedback loop you won't know the negative consequences of your actions.
We owe it to our offspring that we leave them with an environment that's not beyond recovery from the actions we take by the time they're in a position to affect change. Anything else is purely selfish.
To put it in the Hacker News analogy, if I corrupt one bit of your system's RAM, you'll rarely notice the effects and will probably use your PC for its functional life without realising your RAM even has a fault. If I corrupt a significant percentage of it, you'll be crying murder when you get hourly system crashes.
If you compare North America today with what it was before Europeans landed. You'd see a truly horrifying picture. Something like 70% of the forests of North America are gone. Just load up google maps in satellite mode and look at the USA. Farms and settlements are literally everywhere. Brazil too has lost a massive chunk. Entire forests along the ocean are gone. So has europe. And in Australia Koalas are becoming endangered because of the loss of their habitat. In Asia, rain forests are being cut down for palm oil plantations. And don't even get me started on the "Great African Land Grab" in which rich countries bought prime fertile African land for pennies per hectare.
This continues to this day: 6 percent of [the US lost it's] forest cover in just five years time, a total of 120,000 square kilometers (46,332 square miles)
( http://news.mongabay.com/2010/0427-hance_forestloss.html#PuE... )
Let's not forget the enormous swaths of plastic swimming around in all the major oceans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
The fact that more than half of all the streams in the USA are too polluted to support normal life: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300022/More-HALF-U-...
And don't get me started on particles from the pollution in China crossing the Pacific Ocean and entering the US Eastern Coast. As well as residents living near highways have a 27% increase in Asthema. And the list goes on and on.